( CNN ) Truth and reconciliation . As we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year , it 's worth asking : Can America handle either one ? When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after the end of apartheid he had two choices . He could have gone down a path of confrontation and retribution against the white Afrikaners who had ruled so oppressively . Or he could have skipped quickly past the history and reality of apartheid and pardoned all its perpetrators in the interests of maintaining order . He did neither . In one of his many acts of civic genius , he chose a path for his country that exposed the ugliness of the past and only then invited forgiveness . His government launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission , led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu . The commission gathered public testimony across the land , naming the institutional structures and individual acts that had brutalized blacks . No perpetrator was granted amnesty without a candid accounting of his or her deeds . The opportunity for restorative justice gave every participant a sense of heightened responsibility -- a chance to be bigger citizens , together . Only then could reconciliation begin . And though the commission was not sufficient to `` solve race '' in post-apartheid South Africa , it was still necessary . Without such an attempt at formal accounting , without such an opportunity for oppressed and oppressor to face one another , that nation 's challenges would be even greater today . For proof , consider our own nation 150 years post-slavery . For a fleeting while after the Civil War , we tried Reconstruction . Freedmen could earn wages and vote freely and claim an equal place in politics . Then we gave up on Reconstruction . And Jim Crow came along to make black citizens second-class and to ensure that neither truth-telling nor reconciliation would be on the agenda . Consider our nation 50 years post-civil rights movement . That movement is sometimes called the Second Reconstruction . It sought to finish the fight to make truly equal citizens out of the descendants of slaves . But here we are today , still plagued post-Ferguson and post-Staten Island by divisions of color and caste -- and by an inability to talk about them without angry defensiveness . That 's why it 's worth asking whether the United States today could take a page from South Africa 's script . Fania Davis , a civil rights attorney and restorative justice activist in Oakland , California , has proposed just that . In a widely circulated essay in Yes ! Magazine , Davis argues that Ferguson , Missouri , needs a truth and reconciliation commission on extrajudicial violence against African-Americans -- and that America does , too . You can hear the objections already . For instance : Wo n't cataloging acts of racism from the past just make it harder for us all to get along ? But of course , racism is not only in the past . It did not end with the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 or with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 . It is present in the acts and attitudes of many today . It is present in the institutional residue of past choices . That the phrase # BlackLivesMatter must be said says it all . The criminal justice system , the education system , the economic system and ( as this year 's so-white Oscars remind us ) the pop culture system -- all of them value black lives , black voices and black experience less than fully . We must all face that fact . There 's also this objection to a commission : that by racializing everything it would basically be racist . Consider the words of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts , who , arguing against affirmative action , once wrote that `` [ t ] he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race . '' This tidy tautology flattens out history . It obliterates the difference between injury and remedy . It wants to rush us along to a `` colorblindness '' that our society has n't yet earned and perhaps should n't even seek as an ideal . As a Chinese American , I am an inheritor of what white people wrote in the Constitution and what they did to subvert it . I am the beneficiary of what black people and people of every color have done to redeem the Constitution . I am sometimes the object of a presumption that yellow people are presumed foreign until proven otherwise . I own the good , the bad and the ugly of this country . None of this is neat . None of it is colorblind either . Ultimately the deepest objection to a racial truth and reconciliation process in America is that it would be hard . Hard to start and to finish . We Americans can be a bit lazy when it comes to messy civic and historical truths . We want our stories -- and our Story -- to have happy endings . We want reconciliation on the cheap . But the point of MLK Day , and of MLK 's entire life , is that true redemption is never cheap or easy . So to honor him truly , let 's commit to what 's hard . Whether through official commissions or citizen conversations , let 's face ourselves .
Eric Liu : MLK lesson for all of us is that true redemption is never cheap or easy . Liu : Post-Ferguson , we 're still divided by color ; it 's time for reconciliation .