About those hugs in Dallas

About those hugs in Dallas
I can only quote 4 paragraphs from 2 articles I read this weekend.

https://www.theroot.com/botham-jean-amber-guyger-and-the-delusion-of-forgivene-1838740376


Snip-TITLE --Botham Jean, Amber Guyger and the Delusion of Forgiveness


snip--..."
Video of the embrace immediately caused waves online. Some people, many of them white, valorized it, calling Jean’s act “inspirational.” Some, many of whom were black, were confused or disheartened by it. Others tried to pull from that hug some sort of instruction for how we, collectively, should feel about Guyger and what she did."

snip--"Then, as now, many correctly pointed out the complications with glorifying that act of forgiveness: That it shouldn’t invalidate the value and necessity of black rage. That it shouldn’t be taken as representative of what an entire race of people feels or ought to feel. That their act of forgiveness did not then and does not now absolve the country from dealing with white supremacy or systemic racism.

“What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small,” Roxane Gay wrote in the New York Times. “I, for one, am done forgiving.”


snip--..."What is delusional is to think reconciliation or forgiveness is the point, as Guyger’s attorney implied. Brandt Jean’s hug was not a political statement but a personal one, and it’s a distinction we need to make if we want to live in a world where his older brother is still alive. Because getting caught up in cheap absolution—an “inspiring” hug between a victim and a killer, meant to teach us how we ought to feel about cops who accidentally (or intentionally) kill the people they’re charged with protecting—is both dangerous and immoral. It distracts us from reckoning with the idea that a white police officer’s murder conviction came, in large part, because her victim was “perfect”: Jean was, quite literally, a choir boy. That the circumstances of his murder were so heinous—sudden and senseless, in his own home, eating a bowl of ice cream—that acquitting her would be a crime.





Washington Post Article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/10/03/white-christians-do-not-cheapen-hug-message-forgiveness-botham-jeans-brother/


snip--..."What is lost in the tearful embrace between a murdered man’s brother and the killer are the words of Botham’s mother"



snip-..."








A society built around white superiority is also built around white innocence — an assumption of the intrinsic moral virtue of all white people and the purity of their intentions regardless of impact. White innocence assumes black forgiveness.








snip--“There is much to be done by the city of Dallas,” she said. “The corruption that we saw during this process must stop.”




smip--"Black forgiveness as a response to white racism is an act of faith in God and of self-preservation. With all that black people have endured over four centuries of racial oppression, forgiveness protects the heart from the consuming heat of hatred. It ensures that people who have been wounded don’t have to constantly relive the injury. The act of forgiveness honors God, who forgives undeserving people, when someone extends it to someone else who is similarly undeserving."



I'll be thinking on this over the next weeks


And the murder of Joshua Brown, as well