A strong line of argument in the Black community calls for more anger at the shootings in Charleston, and less forgiveness. (For example, Stacy Patton in the Washington Post, Roxane Gay in the New York Times).
Why refuse to forgive? What that does is to sharpen lines between communities, and thus increases the ability to fight. By refusing to forgive, you mobilize your own anger and that of your band. You assert your moral goodness along with the badness of your enemies. You feel good about yourself, and ready to act. If you’re going into battle, you certainly don’t want to forgive.
But this seems a particularly inopportune moment for such a position. This is a moment when an extraordinary number of Whites who have been hostile or ambivalent -- holding onto the Confederate flag as a symbol of their heritage -- are suddenly understanding what the blacks have been saying, and are ready to take some action. There is the widest opening of the door to communication that we have seen in many decades. Something might actually get done.
The willingness of many blacks, especially those in the Emanuel Church, to offer forgiveness has been an important factor in this shift. Whites have been astonished at this reaction, and ashamed. It has led them to try to understand more deeply the feelings and experiences of the black community, to empathize in a way they have not before. That is the kind of alchemy called out, at certain moments of crisis, by great leaders like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. As Abraham Lincoln (may have) said, “Do I not defeat my enemy by making him my friend?”
If you refuse to forgive, you may strengthen your own resolve, but you also strengthen the resolve of your opponents. When you draw the lines more sharply, you make it clearer to yourself why you are good and they are not; but you also reinforce their own sense of right. There are times when that is necessary. This isn’t one of them.
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