Bridging Peace Across Continents: Rwanda’s Peace and Values Curriculum Comes to Milwaukee
This is the sixth and final in an occasional series of blog posts occasioned by a visit I made to Rwanda in the summer of 2024. The first, second, third, fourth and fifth can be found at the included links.
The Roots of Violence: From Rwanda to Milwaukee
In my second blog post, Putting a Face to the Harm—Commemorating Lives, I wrote about the Kigali Genocide Memorial and how violence rarely erupts suddenly. It builds slowly through layers of conflict, division, and systemic inequity. In Rwanda, colonial rule imposed rigid racial hierarchies, embedding discrimination deep within institutions. Over time, these injustices intensified, leading to devastating violence and, ultimately, genocide.
While the scale and circumstances differ, aspects of this pattern are tragically familiar. In cities such as Milwaukee, cycles of community violence—especially gun violence—continue to disproportionately impact Black communities. Each act of harm, beyond its own wrongfulness, reinforces historical trauma and inequity, mistrust, and disconnection. In 2022, according to the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Wisconsin ranked second in the nation for Black homicide victimization—a sobering statistic that reflects both the depth of harm and the urgency of response.
In Ethics and Infinity, philosopher and Nazi prison survivor Emmanuel Levinas is asked about responsibility for “the Other” and says, “You know that sentence of Dostoyevsky: ‘We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others’. This is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others.”