What makes a good (Civic) apology
As I predicted last week, I wrote about apologies this week. In the communications world, this is one of the hardest moves to pull off. Not only how to do it, but especially when you need to do it. Because an apology is only necessary (from the giver’s point of view) when they admit they did something wrong. That takes humility and perspective.
I didn’t point to it in the post, but one of the most challenging books I’ve read this year on the general topic of civic apologies is Wilmington’s Lie. Like the Whitman Myth in Cascadia, the Wilmington Massacre is one of the enduring myths of the post-Reconstruction South. It shows how even framing up a half or third apology is sometimes wrenchingly difficult.
Also, we’re deep in the campaign interviews at the podcast. There should be two episodes next week and a round-up the week after as ballots are dropping!
Civic apologies and understanding you have a problem
Move your feet
When you're playing defense in soccer and find yourself reaching to poke the ball away from an attacker, it's a good sign you’re standing in the wrong spot. It’s time to move your feet.
A few years back, I was reminded of the three parts of a good apology because of the falling down the stairs act Lakefair was performing.
It basically goes like this:
Acknowledge and express your feelings: State what you did and how you feel about it. Go beyond a simple “I’m sorry” to show that you’re truly sorry, horrified, or disappointed in yourself.
Validate the harm you caused: Name the damage and explain how you understand it affected the other person. This shows you were listening and gives them a chance to correct your understanding. Don’t police their reaction.
Offer a plan for change: Explain how you’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again with real, concrete steps. Instead of saying, “It won’t happen again,” say what you’ll do differently next time.
The Capital Lakefair organization was stuck at Step 1 of a true apology because their public defenses focused on rules and blame-shifting, not on acknowledging the public’s pain or anger.
For this situation to turn around, the leadership needed first to listen, not just to those who were “yelling,” but to the broader perspectives around them. They needed to realize this was about what they did, not how they were being talked about. To quote Aaron Sorkin in The Newsroom, they had a PR problem because they had a real problem.
As predicted by the “Markets are Conversations” principle, public outrage demands a two-way dialogue. If everyone is yelling, the organization is in the wrong place in that conversation and needs to move its stance (and its actions) to move forward.
I was reminded again of these principles when I read “The Ritual of Civic Apology.”
It’s a great read. In short, Beth Lew-Williams explores the recent trend of Western U.S. cities offering belated formal apologies for the historical expulsion and mistreatment of their Chinese residents. She questions the sincerity, effectiveness, and intended audience of these gestures. After visiting Tacoma and a couple of California cities, she concludes that these civic apologies don’t reach full reconciliation. Whatever wound was left hasn’t been healed by performative apologies. Most barely make it past Step 1 (acknowledging the wrongdoing) without fully naming the harm or committing to real repair.
And what are reparations, if not repair work?
That’s why I’m glad the City of Olympia is studying reparations. I sat down with Mayor Dontae Payne recently to talk about the work Olympia is exploring. One of the things we discussed was the basis of Washington’s Covenant Homeownership Program.
Washington State, like many places, used racially restrictive covenants to exclude nonwhite residents from certain neighborhoods well into the 1960s. Even after they were ruled unenforceable in the late 1940s, new covenants were still being filed in Thurston County right up until open housing laws were passed following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. According to the University of Washington, covenants in Thurston County featured harsher-than-normal language, seemingly to make a point.
The Washington Covenant Homeownership Program was created to help repair the damage caused by decades of racist housing policies like restrictive covenants. It helps first-time homebuyers from communities historically shut out of homeownership by offering zero-interest loans for down payments and closing costs. To qualify, buyers must have moderate incomes and be descendants of people who lived in Washington before 1968 and were harmed by those racist housing rules.
Unsurprisingly, a lawsuit was filed to overturn the program by a conservative organization arguing that it’s discriminatory because it limits eligibility by race, calling it “using racism to fix racism.”
And this is where the ritual of civic apology meets the real world of government finance, legal interpretation, and political will. The harm caused by restrictive covenants (and by zoning choices, biased policing, and other forms of institutional racism) continues to ripple outward. Acknowledging the harm is only the first step. We still struggle to unpack and address the deep, systemic causes.
We always have to be ready to move our feet. Because even as Lew-Williams rightly wonders who these civic apologies are really for, it’s clear to me who should be doing the Sisyphean work of building complete ones. It’s us, those of us here now, who benefited from decades of racist systems.
A framework for approaching racial reparations here should begin with the commitment to give people what they are due and to repair harm done to the broader human community. Justice, rightly understood, is not about assigning guilt to individuals but about restoring balance where it has been lost. The frame for us should be, when one part of the community suffers, the whole is diminished. Addressing historical wrongs, then, is not an act of division but of maintenance.
Sound policy must be grounded in reason and clear-eyed understanding. This is why the work Lew-Williams describes is important, but incomplete. Repairing deep, generational harm isn’t about emotional performance or political convenience. It needs patient study, honesty about causes, and deliberate, thoughtful action. The goal is to act rightly moving forward. To understand we're in the wrong spot and move our feet.
The Olympia Standard: Stang v. Vanderpool
Daniel Garcia from the Heal Olympia project is back on the podcast, this time sitting down with Robert Vanderpool and Justin Stang, who are competing for the Position 6 seat on the Olympia City Council.
Like I said above, we have two more episodes in the can. One if finishing out the candidate interviews between Paul Berandt and Caleb Geiger, the last one is a Proposition 1 (Workers Bill of Rights) conversation between the pro and con campaigns.
I am going to try to hurry these next two episodes out, forgoing our usual Saturday morning posting to whenever they’re available since ballots are dropping next week.
What else you should be reading or listening to this week
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed the first season of Hush in preparation for the next season dropping this last week. I am optimistic about the entire narrative and how it unravels our regional culture. One of the aspects I really appreciated about the first episode was the treatment of the victim’s family. They had moved to the rural corner of Oregon from Portland to raise their kids, and ended up homeschooling them. Their descriptions of how homeschool kids are reminded me of a very particular kind of urban refugee in rural Cascadia.
This recent episode of Mossback is an anti-recommendation. Bluntly, Cascade PBS (in part) killed a newsroom so they could save this kind of content. We don’t learn anything new in this episode about the mystery of the Mima Mounds. And yes, I admit that I am extra judgmental about local history content. If you’re just repeating what has already been written about, but using extra effects, b-roll and background music to create emotion, I am usually super disappointed. Add on the mental math I was doing to figure out how much actual journalism could have been done with the budget of filming Knute Berger’s backside through the woods, and I was really super disappointed.
This is sort of kicking a dead horse, but I love when I see pieces that put to death the idea of sprawl as being a solution to the housing crisis. Strong Towns did a great job showing how the West Coast has show this model to be a death trap. This new piece from High Country News on water and the Arizona suburbs is yet another example.
Thank you for reading! If you want to get in touch with me, feel free to email me at emmettoconnell at gmail dot com