Reconstruction failed for many reasons. But it might have succeeded in delivering on the idea of equal citizenship had it had more conflict and less consensus. What that means for today is that Americans should be clear-eyed about who wants reunion and why.

For people of widely divergent political stances right now—Trump supporters who feel left behind by a changing economy and culture; Black Lives Matter activists who fundamentally mistrust establishment politics and institutions; passionate Sanders supporters wary of elite neoliberal conspiracy—for all these people, there is good reason not to sign on too soon to reunion and reconciliation. All of them want to disrupt the status quo. None of them is going to pledge civility or bipartisanship if doing so might mean forfeiting the necessary exercise of civic power. And that’s proper.

But maybe you’re not one of those citizens. Maybe you are more of a concerned bystander, someone who has watched in horror as the coarse incivility of Internet comments sections came to life during this campaign. Maybe you just want peace and respect and a civic culture you don’t have to shield your kids from.

If that’s the case, it’s all the more important to understand the difference between reckoning and reconciliation.

Reckoning—“facing history and ourselves,” to use the name of a well-regarded educational nonprofit—means naming the inherited power inequities that have brought us our contemporary conflicts. This is the “truth” part of “truth and reconciliation,” the phrase made famous by the process South Africa undertook after apartheid to reckon with its past. Truth is the hard part because it’s about accepting responsibility.

In South Africa, the truth-telling, though painful and courageous, was in one sense simple. The system of apartheid was fresh in the memory, it had been created by the state, and it was dismantled by the state. Its victims and its perpetrators alike could unburden themselves of the moral and psychic costs of their roles.

In the United States, reckoning is by orders of magnitude more complex. There are no clean breaks in recent American history between good and evil, no single line of culpability that leads to a single large group of living Americans being called perpetrators. This is true of the legacy of African American enslavement. It is also true of all the power imbalances now creating tectonic pressures in our politics: the squeezing of local labor by global capital, the formation of a meritocratic elite detached from everyday Americans, the rigging of public policy to benefit that elite, the depopulation of the middle class, the relative decline of whites and the rise of the rest.

You can’t easily get to reconciliation without truth. But in America you can’t easily get to truth. A South African-style process here would only amplify our divisions. That’s why I propose a different way forward. It involves three steps: more listening, more serving, and—perhaps counterintuitively—more arguing.