“I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. ...You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But I forgive you.”
Those words of accountability and forgiveness were spoken to Dylann Roof at his bond hearing by the family of one of his victims.
How are we to understand such radical forgiveness?
Many white Americans interpret black forgiveness as absolution for the racist attitudes that led to the attack. We distort that forgiveness in a way that doesn’t hold us accountable for changing the racist political, economic, and educational structures that infect our country.
When we celebrate black forgiveness but refuse to be accountable to that very forgiveness then we are doing nothing more than creating an aura of deniability. By celebrating black forgiveness of those persecutors like Dylann Roof, we can safely deny that we participate in and benefit from racist structures that persecute black people. In other words, we can so twist the blessed act of forgiveness that we manipulate it to deny that we are persecutors, too.
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