General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBlack America owes no forgiveness: How Christianity hinders racial justice
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/23/the_hypocrisy_of_black_forgiveness_partner/Her response is unusual. Its candor is refreshing. Lezley McSpaddens truth-telling reveals the full humanity and emotions of black folks, and by doing so defies the norms which demand that when Black Americans suffer they do so stoically, and always in such a way where forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America....
The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness for the historic and contemporary suffering visited upon the black community by White America reflects the complexities of the color line.
Black Americans may publiclyand this says nothing of just and righteous private anger, upset, and desire for justice and revengebe so quick to forgive white violence and injustice because it a tactic and strategy for coping with life in a historically white supremacist society. If black folks publicly expressed their anger and lack of forgiveness at centuries of white transgressions they could and were beaten, raped, murdered, shot, stabbed, burned alive, run out of town, hung, put in prisons, locked up in insane asylums, fired from their jobs, their land stolen from them, and kicked out of schools. Even in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama, being branded with the veritable scarlet letter of being an angry black man or angry black woman, can result in their life opportunities being significantly reduced.
Chitown Kev
(2,197 posts)I think of forgiveness as being a very intimate and personal act taken when the wrong cuts to the bone...but whether I forgive or not for whatever is a deeply personal decision.
And I don't forget. Which, IMO, is what a lot of white people seem to expect.
And I'm sorry, but white people, generally, are not expected to make public spectacles of forgiveness that African Americans do.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Ex-Chicagoan here myself (mid-'80s).
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)So is guilt.
kwassa
(23,340 posts)and what does it have to do with this topic?
Chitown Kev
(2,197 posts)POC because they are POC and for no other reason ever feel guilty about doing the deed.
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)Most prefer to rationalize their evil to make themselves appear justified.
Igel
(35,356 posts)Not from me, at least.
Usually I've considered them rather irrelevant, just the media trying to say something good about the parent(s) during an obligatory media blitz.
White-on-white killings don't typically get the same amount of coverage, but I know I've seen some of the same kind of parents-of-killer remorse and parents-of-killed forgiveness. I suspect it has to do with the amount of coverage. No great interest = no press conference, no press releases, no great scenes of grief and repentance/forgiveness.
Black-on-black and black-on-white killings typically don't get even that degree of coverage unless there's something particularly heinous about them.
Chitown Kev
(2,197 posts)AnPak
(31 posts)... Or is more of a conglomeration of everything put together?