Part 2: The Ghosts in the Room

Reckoning with Race, Power, and America’s Half-Finished Peace

Photo by tom coe on Unsplash

In Part 1, I shared my reflections on reconciliation—why it matters, why it’s holy work, and why we can’t rush into it before acknowledging the harm that’s been done.

If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there.

In it I argued that before any genuine reconciliation can take place, we have to get everyone to safety. That safety is not only physical, but emotional, spiritual, and communal, that work will take some time. And yet, there is another layer we must now confront, one far older and deeper than partisan politics. It is the unresolved racial history of this country, and the power structures that continue to shape how we live, how we relate, and how we heal, or fail to.

In this post, we go deeper into the roots of the divide—specifically, its racial roots—and ask what true collective liberation really demands of us.

You see, reconciliation is not neutral, and the territory is leads us to intersects with our racial history as a country.

If we are to find this utopian dreamland where we embrace our neighbors who voted differently than us, then we have to face some hard truths.

The hurdle which says that there is a diversity of ideas and ideologies in America is not a hard one to overcome. That’s easy. The hard work is in both sides taking time to understand that the choices MAGA republicans make over and over again, regardless of what they think their real motivation is (family values, religious, cultural, etc) put black and brown bodies and LGBTQAI+ bodies in harms way. In doing so, they choose their own comfort (or perception thereof), power and privilege over the safety and dignity of the very people we are asking to come to the table for reconciliation. That’s hard work.

And without authentic acknowledgment of the pain inflicted, its harmful and abusive work.

The Hard Truth About the Divide

It is a reckoning that is being called forth. And reckonings, if they are to mean anything, must include an honest confrontation with what has been done and what is still being done—especially to Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, and other historically marginalized communities. We are not just healing personal relationships here. We are being called to confront generations of political, spiritual, and institutional trauma that have never been fully accounted for.

There has always been a thread running through American life, a persistent current of ideology and practice, that privileges domination over democracy. It is a thread that shows up in economic policy that guts public support systems while enriching private wealth. It’s visible in the legislative assaults on voting rights, in the demonization of immigrants and the poor, and in the ways white grievance politics are platformed as “mainstream concern.”

This is not a hypothetical struggle. It is a deeply material one. The fact that a sitting U.S. Senator recently justified massive cuts to Medicaid with the cold phrase, “well, we are all going to die,” should stop us in our tracks.

I mean really. Let that sink in.

A sitting US Senator.

This is not mere partisanship.

This is the casual acceptance of preventable death as a policy stance.

This is a nation where some lives are counted—and others are counted out.

It is not merely a lapse in compassion. It is a declaration of moral values, values rooted in exclusion, scarcity, and disregard for the vulnerable.

I invite you to read for yourself the moral impact of the current proposed budget in Washington DC - https://breachrepairers.org/uploads/Appendix-3-House-Republican-Proposals-for-Budget-Reconciliation.pdf

Meanwhile, the US President recently said of former President Joe Biden’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis, “If you feel sorry for him, don’t feel sorry for him, because he’s vicious.” Who says something like that? Who says that and still has a political future?

If we are really honest about what is before us we will see that calls for compassion and reconciliation will expose hard and ugly truths about who we have been and who we are.

Not Everyone Wants Peace

“The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tells us who we can be, so, we hide the poor and kill the prophets” - Phillip Berrigan

We must be honest about this: not everyone wants the same kind of America. Some would be content with an America that functions as a gated community—high walls, controlled access, and resources hoarded by a self-proclaimed deserving few. Others of us, however, are working toward an America that resembles a true commons, where dignity is non-negotiable, where resources are shared for the collective good, and where inclusion is not a threat but a sacred imperative.

This is not merely a divide between left and right, red and blue. It is a divide between those who believe this nation belongs to all of us—and those who believe it never should have.

“If you didn’t really want me here, you should have picked your own cotton, raised your own kids, washed your own clothes and cooked your own food.” - Bishop Yvette Flunder

We’ve Been Here Before

We’ve already fought one Civil War over race, freedom, and equality.

What followed that war has haunted our national consciousness ever since, not as a ghost of the past but as an unfinished chapter we keep trying to skip.

When the Civil War ended, Abraham Lincoln and others, in an effort to reunify the country, extended reentry to the former Confederate states under terms that required only 5% of a state’s voters to swear loyalty to the Union. Just five percent. That meant the vast majority of those who had waged war to defend white supremacy, human enslavement, and oligarchic power were welcomed back into full political and social participation without any meaningful repudiation of their cause. The Confederacy may have surrendered on the battlefield, but its ideology was left to fester—and in many ways, flourish.

For a brief moment during Reconstruction, the nation witnessed a glimpse of what could have been:

• Black leaders in Congress and local governments

• Schools, banks, and entire communities built by freed people

• A fragile vision of a multiracial democracy emerging from the ashes of slavery

They cast a vision of a multiracial democracy that was not only possible but was being lived in real time. It was one of the most profound experiments in freedom this country had ever seen.

But progress without power is always vulnerable. The backlash was swift and merciless.

Jim Crow laws re-entrenched white dominance. Economic sabotage targeted Black enterprise. Racial terror, lynchings, massacres, and state-sanctioned violence was deployed to crush hope and enforce submission. And all the while, white resentment reassembled itself with terrifying efficiency: through legislation, custom, theology, and narrative.

This, too, is what happens when reconciliation is rushed. This is what happens when grace is offered without accountability, when calls for unity outpace the work of justice.

We didn’t finish the work then—and we are paying for it now.

Today’s Divide Is Yesterday’s Echo

Today’s divides—about “big government,” “entitlements,” “voter fraud,” or “critical race theory”—are not new.

They are echoes. Often direct descendants of that first unfinished conflict.

So when we’re invited to “find common ground” or “just hear the other side,” we must ask:

• What values are we being asked to meet halfway on?

• What histories are we being asked to forget?

• What violence are we being asked to tolerate in the name of civility?

To engage in true reconciliation, we must name the hard truths: that some Americans do not want this country to be shared equally. That some fear a future in which power is redistributed, even if only slightly. That some have built their identity around the belief that equality for others means loss for themselves—and they are willing to sacrifice democracy to preserve that belief.

“I fear I may have integrated my people into a burning house.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.

This is not said in bitterness. It is said in truth. And truth, my friends, is the beginning of all liberation.

As spiritual practitioners, whatever your path, we affirm that healing is possible. We believe in transformation. We pray and work for peace. But let us not confuse spiritual bypass with actual liberation. Let us not allow our yearning for harmony to become a cover for our unwillingness to confront the deep roots of racialized power. We are not here to perform reconciliation. We are here to co-create it.

Because without truth, reconciliation is just performance.

And without justice, reconciliation is just surrender.

The Work Ahead: Truth, Boundaries, and Vision

True reconciliation demands that we:

• Name the past—not sanitize it

• Confront the present—not bypass it

• Prepare for the future—not fantasize about it

Some Americans still want this country only for themselves.

Some believe shared power is loss rather than possibility.

And some are working—right now—to ensure that justice is delayed until it dies quietly in the dark.

But here’s what I know, as a spiritual practitioner and a citizen:

Transformation is real.

Healing is possible.

Liberation is coming.

But we cannot get there by skipping steps. We cannot get there by forgetting the price others have paid. We cannot get there by pretending we’re all on the same page when we’re not even in the same book.

This Is Not Over

The ghosts are still in the room.

But so are we.

And we are not powerless.

We are witnesses.

We are builders.

We are bearers of truth and midwives of a new world.

So yes, let us talk.

Let us listen.

Let us stay human in divided times.

But let us not pretend that unity comes before truth.

Let us not confuse politeness with peace.

Let us not build bridges over fault lines that haven’t been repaired.

Let us remember:

We’ve been here before.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

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Rev. David Alexander D.D. is the spiritual director of the of Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta, author of Freedom from Discord: The Promise of New Thought Liberation Theology and Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness. David writes a monthly column, Philosophy In Action in Science of Mind Magazine.

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