Both reasons for denial allow the cancer to continue to metastasize, eating away at the very soul of this nation and its people.

Certainly, any process leading to healing is unpleasant. Both my parents died of cancer but went through chemotherapy in their search and desire for healing. Lance Armstrong talks about how horrible was his treatment to rid himself of his cancer, and how he wanted to just give up at times. But he didn’t give up. He lived. My parents didn’t give up but their cancer had metastasized by the time they sought treatment, and it was too late. They, at least, however, confronted their illness head on.

Not long ago I read book by Robert Schmidt called “Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.” It was a novel based on the true story of a group of white people, led by and sanctioned by the local church, who orchestrated the removal of an entire population of African Americans from an island of Malaga, off the coast of Maine, they had lived on for years.

They were asked to leave, but when they didn’t, the town, well, helped them by burning down their dilapidated shacks and moving those who protested to an asylum. Many who died while in that asylum, died shortly thereafter and were buried in a common grave adjacent to the facility.

That’s ethnic cleansing, isn’t it?

Stuff like that hurts. Images of mothers yelling “nigger” at little black kids trying to integrate public schools hurts. Fighting for your country and then not being allowed to get a loan to buy a house or start a business when you get back from active duty hurts.

I imagine that the journey in the bowels of slave ships from Africa to this America did worse than hurt. It’s called the African American Holocaust, our Maafa. And watching this high-tech lynching of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright—really hurts.

Hearing Sen. Barack Obama denouncing his pastor had to hurt him, his pastor and those who love both men.

Confronting the disease, calling it by name, being willing to go through whatever it takes to lose the denial of whites and blacks, whites due to guilt and blacks due to shame, is the only way to get to the healing.

Well, that’s the all too important first step. There must also be education. Too many people in America do not know the story. Both whites and blacks are able to live in denial due to their guilt and shame because neither group know the history of being African American in this country.

Knowing the history jolts ignorance and pushes it away, because the history is so sordid. The more whites and blacks know, the more one group understands the anger and the more the other group understands who they really are.

If we do not confront the disease, we as a nation will never heal. Blacks and whites will continue to circle each other, each eyeing the other as “the enemy.” We are not each other’s enemy; the forgotten, denied and ignored past is the enemy. Knowing the history, owning it, and then working to make an authentic present is the only way to stop the metastasis.

It is the only way there will ever be a healing in this land.

I think Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it best: “Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the degradation, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing. Spurious reconciliation can bring only spurious healing.”

The Rev. Dr. Susan A. Smith is author of “Forgive Who?” and senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio.