I have written several posts about forgiveness where the victim, who happened to be black, has publicly forgiven the offender, who happened to be white. I thought it was especially impressive because black people in America have more to forgive.<\/p>\n
After reading Isabel Wilkerson\u2019s powerful book, Caste<\/em> (Random House: 2020), I see another dimension to these stories, and I see how I, as a white person, was at best na\u00efve about the deeper dynamic at play in these incidents.<\/p>\n These cases included the 2019 sentencing of the (white) Dallas police officer who killed a (black) man eating dinner in his apartment because she thought he had invaded her own apartment; not only did the victim\u2019s brother forgive the officer, even the judge forgave her. (\u201cForgiving a Killer”<\/a>) Another was the Grand Rapids case of the four white boys who brutally killed Willie Jones, a black man unknown to them, where his brother, and later his nephew, publicly forgave them. \u201cThe Reverend Charlie Jones,\u201d<\/a>; Forgiving a Murderer<\/a>. \u00a0There was also the 2016 hearing for Dylann Roof, the (white) killer of nine (black) Charleston church members, where the daughter of one of his murder victims publicly forgave him<\/a>, spurring other family members to forgive.<\/p>\n The \u201cforgivers\u201d in these stories acknowledged the role that their Christian faith played in their decision to forgive. That\u2019s what attracted me to these stories.<\/p>\n But Wilkerson points out that, in the United States, forgiving white people is not an option for black people; it\u2019s a survival tool. When viewed against the backdrop of the American white supremacy caste system, these acts are not surprising but expected. She quotes Roxane Gay, who wrote an article about the Dylan Roof incident: \u201cWhite people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.\u201d (Caste<\/em>, Ch. 22, pp. 287-88) Gay notes that black people \u201chave to forgive time and time again while racism, or white silence in the face of racism, continues to thrive.\u201d There is, as author Brandon Tensley observes<\/a>, an expectation from white citizens that black outrage will be tamed.\u00a0 Indeed, racism was involved, to some extent, in each of the cases noted above, where white people murdered black people.<\/p>\n