Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor, called for a “truth and reconciliation commission” to rid the divide in the United States.
Allen argued such a commission, a response to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6., would give people an “understanding” of how worldviews got so far apart to help “knit communities back together.”
“You’ve got to get people at the table for a conversation,” Allen stated. “You’ve got to find that first ally, and then once you do, you’ve got to start snowballing it and trying to build out those circles of conversation, rebuild, again, that commitment to the use of evidence as people are working to decide together, and then keep bringing more people into it.”
“It’s labor-intensive,” she replied. “It’s slow-moving. There is no silver bullet. We’re not going to cure ourselves overnight. But, again, that’s why I would come back to that select committee. I do think the work of the commission is fundamental for giving us an understanding of how our worldviews came so far apart that they could even sustain violence. We need that understanding in order to see what the right pathways forward are.”
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