Pocket Truth Commission: A Book of Futures is a book-length truth commission that imagines the US, and white people, after the reign of white supremacism.
Many white people perceive anti-racist work as a path that leads only to negative futures, digging up the past only for retribution, and not to transform each of our lives and communities. Truth commissions, used internationally as part of state-level reconstruction, aim more explicitly at creating a path forward—- for groups who’ve been aggressed, but also for the aggressor group. Using the frameworks of conflict transformation, adaptive social change, and transitional justice, the Pocket Truth Commission facilitates white people’s imagining of what might seem impossible: a society in which racism has become an extinct social problem, and white people have repurposed its legacies as part of a just and peaceable society. Blending speculative nonfiction with historical case studies of other societies’ widescale adaptations, it presents exercises and scenarios so that white people can move past feelings of futility, reconnect with our longing for what lies on the other side of protracted, exhausting wariness and conflict.
The intention of the Pocket Truth Commission is to offer ideas and activities for people to create collective public learning. To move past white people playing “gotcha” with other white people, and past an identity politics that obscures, rather than expands, our understanding of the function of race and racism, and undermines even sincere (and well-funded) attempts at building justice.
The project seeks to visit the seams of history, community, and family where small acts have handed down larger structures—— in some cases oppressive, and in other cases supportive—— and perform acts of repair and re-imagining.
The book and project are by poet and artist Ailish Hopper, building on many collaborations and apprenticeships (see Lineages page).
(Image to left: Map of the areas set aside by General Sherman for freedmen under Special Field Order #15, by Claude F. Oubre, from his book, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Land Ownership, 2012).