I first joined the EMU learning community as an undergraduate student in the fall of 1996. As I look to conclude my time as an EMU staff member at the end of this calendar year, I am filled with many thoughts and emotions when I reflect on my years as a student and then 22 years working at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Last week I tuned into Convocation and tears flowed as I listened to the song Draw the Circle for the first time. On the one hand I was so very grateful to hear the words “draw the circle wide, draw it wider still” being sung at EMU’s Opening Convocation, and I also grieved for the many ways that EMU has participated in drawing very tiny and exclusionary circles in its history. 

I was excited to see that Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is this year’s Common Read. I thought a lot about EMU when I listened to the Ezra Klein show where he reflected on how America can heal. I shared that episode with some EMU administration at the time, wondering about how EMU would want to respond to his challenge. He believes that “if you don’t know your history, you can’t really begin to understand what your obligations are, what your responsibilities are, what you should fear, what you should celebrate, what’s honorable and what’s not honorable.” He goes on to say, “…We have committed ourselves in this country to silence about our history, to ignorance about our history, to denying our history. And that’s the first part of this relationship that has to be repaired. We’ve got to be willing now to talk honestly about who we are and how we got here….I believe colleges and universities need to have their own truth-telling process to document the ways in which they contributed to the history of racial inequality, the history of white supremacy…You don’t have to go outside of your own institutions. You can begin with your own truth-telling. You can tell your own story about the ways in which you are complicit. For me, that’s got to be the way it works…But until we tell the truth, we deny ourselves the opportunity for beauty. Justice can be beautiful. Reconciliation can be beautiful. Repair can be beautiful. It’s powerful to actually experience redemption. And we deny ourselves that when we insist on denying our broken past, our ugly past, our racist past, when we insist on avoiding the truth.”

As EMU continues to live into what it means to “draw the circle wide, draw it wider still,” I wonder how truth-telling about our history fits in. Just as Jackie Font-Guzmán said in her recent newsletter from the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, I want EMU to celebrate the hard work that many are doing to move EMU in the direction of greater inclusion, and I hope we add expansion to that. I am so excited about many of the things I’m reading and hearing (e.g. the gender-inclusive language initiative). And mixed with my excitement is grief and anger. Sometimes the words feel hollow when I think about dearly loved ones that have been so hurt by EMU’s drawing of very tiny circles in the past. I wonder if EMU will have the courage to engage in a truth-telling process and one seeking forgiveness for the harms caused by those tiny circles?