Sixty Minutes documented in a recent segment what appears to be the most egregious, murderous sins of Bashar Al-Assad’s autocratic Syrian regime. These crimes include using poison gases on Syrian citizens in areas controlled by his opponents, slaughtering thousands of individuals including children and babies. The program also showed photographs of brutally tortured and murdered Syrian prisoners, including teenagers dragged off buses and killed in the darkest of Gestapo-like prisons.

As part of the segment, the narrator interviewed an American representative to the international court charged with bringing such political criminals to justice. He referred to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi regime and the trials of Serbian leaders and military responsible for Bosnian and other Balkan genocides. The purpose of the Syrian documentation described in Sixty Minutes is to preserve the images and reports of the Al-Assad regime as criminal evidence so perpetrators can be brought to justice and their acts retained in the historical record.

Anyone who saw this program had to be stirred by the atrocities and the lack of fear of Al-Assad and his cronies that justice for victims would ever be served. Some Nazi criminals, well into their late years when finally brought to trial, must have felt the same after World War II when they slipped out of Germany, or didn’t, and carried on with their lives. Even so, it was the United States’ responsibility to document as much as possible of Nazi horrors so they would be acknowledged and never forgotten.

These examples of documenting history accurately, without obfuscating, illustrate why such examinations are a critical task of humanity. These explorations into the darkness of human behavior shed light into our negative potential just as analysis of our best acts offer insight into our positive potential.

Race theory digs into the many iterations of discrimination and profound crimes committed against individuals because of their skin color and, more broadly, ethnic backgrounds. This history began in North America with the Spaniards in Florida and was furthered in 1619 when twenty Africans from Luanda, now Angola, arrived on Virginia’s shores. English settlers in and around Jamestown also enslaved people from the Pamunkey tribe. These were the beginnings of the European race/slavery history brought to the Americas.

From there, the history grew more complicated. Despite the Declaration of Independence statement that “all men are created equal,” race burrowed into the American constitution in the form of the 3/5 population rule. Despite the idealism of the 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments, race’s ugly footprints continued during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.

There’s no getting around it. It’s the intersection of the negative impacts of racism and discrimination and the positive ideals of freedom and equality that makes our history exceptional. After all, this nation declares that we seek to form a more perfect union.

Some choose to deny this complexity. They distort our nation’s truths. It’s difficult, but not impossible, to strive for equality and a more perfect union. But these ideals cannot be accomplished without a clear eye on what is not equal and what is not perfect.

Not so long ago, an exhibit of lynching postcards circulated across the country picturing the fate of thousands of individuals, mostly Black, who received one form of this country’s justice between 1880 and 1968. Emmett Till, fourteen years old, was lynched in 1955 when baby boomers were in elementary school, and in 1964, when the first baby boomers entered college, three voting and civil rights activists, James Chaney, a Black man from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman from New York, were brutally murdered in Mississippi. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972, applied illegal means to smear civil rights leaders and opponents of lynching. He kept illegal and secret files on politicians, dissenters, and even presidents. His was an enormous, long-standing abuse of power tolerated by the political world.

These are just a few prominent examples of how negative history juxtaposes with positive achievements, such as the revised American Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Every nation has an inextricable weaving of historical good and bad to be reckoned with. It’s in that recognition that progress toward the good side occurs.