Melissa Nobles's Book:The Politics of Official Apologies (Essay Sample)

Book Review – The Politics of Official Apologies
Author
Melissa Nobles, author of The Politics of Official Apologies (Nobles, 2008), is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the Department Head of the Faculty of Political Science and also the Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. Prof. Nobles is presently working on “constructing a database of racial murders in the American South, 1930-1954” (MIT, 2014), and she also works in the area of restorative justice at Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic (MIT, 2014). She has written a number of books, besides the text of this review, and is working on another text provisionally entitled ‘The End of Law’.  She graduated with a BA in History from Browns University. In an interview, she noted that she became interested in official apologies when heard about “…the Canadian government’s apology to indigenous Canadians … [she thought it was] interesting and unusual, because governments don’t usually apologize” (Mouradian, 2008). Prof. Nobles’ curiosity led her to investigate other apologies, or lack thereof, such as the US government apologizing to interred Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, the genocide of the Armenian people that the Turkish government has not apologized for, and the other non-apologies, i.e., to African-Americans and Native Americans for their treatment in the past.
The interview with Prof. Nobles is insightful, as it informally discusses many of the points made in her text. For example, Prof. Nobles speaks of the difference in apologies given by a government vs. a head of state. She notes that government apologies are typically followed by reparations (Mouradian, 2008), whereas an apology by a head of state is generally “more unpredictable and don’t usually come with any kind of compensation. The complicated example cited is Australia, where the government, at the time of the interview, was resisting making an apology, while “at the same time they’re saying, We are going to change Aboriginal policy-making…” (Mouradian, 2008; Nobles, 2008, 36). In Australia, the government had taken Aboriginal children away from their parents.
Bibliography
CBC. (1988). 1988: Government apologizes to Japanese Canadians. Retri