I’ve sat through far too many seminars where academics and activists use increasingly dense, polished language to signal their virtue, as if a more complex vocabulary could somehow mask the hollowness of their conclusions. There is a certain kind of performance art currently surrounding colonialism and honest reckoning—a way of speaking that feels very expensive and very loud, yet manages to say almost nothing about the actual, aching reality of the people left in the wake of empire. We have become experts at the theatre of apology, crafting slogans that look wonderful on a placard but crumble the moment they are asked to account for the quiet, generational grief that still sits in the rooms of the dispossessed.
I have no interest in providing you with a roadmap to moral perfection or a list of easy slogans to recite at your next meeting. Instead, I want to offer something a bit more uncomfortable and useful. Drawing on my years listening to people navigate the wreckage of broken systems, I intend to look at where our current attempts at atonement fail, and where a truly honest reckoning might actually begin. I cannot offer you a tidy solution, but I can offer you an account of what happens when we stop performing and start actually listening.
Where Decolonization Processes and Social Justice Often Run Dry
I’ve sat in many rooms where the language of progress felt remarkably polished, yet strangely hollow. We often see these grand, sweeping declarations about decolonization processes and social justice that look magnificent on a printed manifesto, but they tend to falter when they encounter the messy, unwashed reality of human grief. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when a movement prioritizes the correctness of its vocabulary over the actual, slow work of mending what was broken. We mistake the adoption of new terms for the resolution of old wounds, forgetting that a change in lexicon does not, by itself, heal a fractured soul.
The trouble is that most institutional efforts focus on the mechanics of policy rather than the depth of the damage. We talk about frameworks and committees, yet we rarely pause to consider the sheer, heavy weight of addressing systemic colonial trauma in a way that doesn’t feel like a mere bureaucratic exercise. True reckoning isn’t found in a checklist or a well-timed press release; it is found in the quiet, often uncomfortable spaces where we acknowledge that some things cannot be simply “fixed” or “repaired” with a new set of rules.
Revisiting Colonial History Narratives Beyond the Comfort of Myths
We often treat history like a tidy ledger, something that can be balanced if we simply find the right accounting method. But when we begin revisiting colonial history narratives, we quickly find that the ink is still wet and the pages are far from straight. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of believing that a well-worded apology or a museum plaque constitutes a completed task. In my years in the chaplaincy, I learned that grief doesn’t follow a syllabus; it doesn’t care about our desire for closure or our need to feel that we have “done the work.”
The danger lies in the myths we construct to make ourselves feel better about the present. We tell ourselves that the era is over, yet we ignore how the impact of imperialist legacies continues to shape the very architecture of our institutions and the quiet anxieties of our neighbors. True reckoning isn’t about reaching a comfortable conclusion; it is about sitting in the discomfort of realizing that the past isn’t behind us—it is underneath us, supporting the ground we walk on, often in ways we are still too frightened to name.
The Weight of the Unspoken
We often mistake the act of renaming a street or updating a textbook for the heavy, quiet work of reckoning; but true atonement isn’t found in the polished gestures of a committee, it is found in the uncomfortable, unhurried willingness to sit with the ghosts of what we cannot undo.
Alasdair Renwick-Hale
The Long Walk Toward Truth
We have seen, quite clearly, that a true reckoning cannot be found in the tidy language of policy papers or the performative gestures of modern institutions. If we are to move beyond the hollowed-out versions of social justice that often fail when they encounter real power, we must be willing to sit in the uncomfortable quiet of our own histories. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that the past was unjust; we must confront the ways in which those old structures have calcified into our present, shaping the very air we breathe and the ways we value one another. To settle for easy slogans is to do a disservice to those who still carry the weight of what was taken.
In my years sitting by hospital beds, I learned that healing rarely begins with a grand declaration, but rather with the slow, often painful work of being present to the truth. A reckoning is not a destination we reach and then check off a list; it is a way of walking. It requires a certain kind of stamina—the ability to look at the wreckage of empire without turning away, and to listen to the voices that have been muffled for centuries. It will be slow, and it will likely be messy, but there is a profound dignity in refusing to look away. That is where the real work begins.
