As conveyed by this series, part of the proposed protocol involves the proposition of Black conditional absolution of whites. In general, I am not recommending that all Blacks adopt actions similar to Sheila Walker’s exceptional manner of forgiving my grandfather, Lonnie, for his participation in the white attacks against Black sharecroppers and their families at the Elaine Race Massacre. Through her own unreserved and magnanimous act, Sheila freely forgave him without condition, as he had already departed this life many decades before Sheila and I entered into our racial healing and friendship. Nonetheless, a normalized, but not unconditional process for Black forgiveness of whites seems most appropriate for most circumstances.
Whites do not rely much on forgiveness, even the acceptance of forgiveness. At the same time, we whites always knew within ourselves that we could only be cleansed by those we had made our victims: Black brothers and sisters among us. By so many measures, we whites must depend on Blacks to help guide us in a direction that will also allow us to understand the effectiveness of forgiveness. More particularly, the use of forgiveness elevates Blacks and, at the same time, releases whites, through acceptance of forgiveness, to be free of traditional acts of racism and to turn whites from historical participation in evil. But as I explain, this forgiveness of whites should not be unconditional.
A principal contributor to the racial healing, known by Sheila and me, was the public and private espousal by her of forgiveness for Lonnie Birch. I have acknowledged the special value of that gift, which was generously conferred and which removed any pall that otherwise could have interfered with the prospects for our healing, friendship, love, and allyship. The forgiveness of Lonnie was all Sheila’s doing, based heavily on her judgment that Lonnie constituted a good and compassionate man, evidenced, according to her, by my obvious love for him as my grandfather and principal caretaker during the first few years of my life. During the time I knew her, Sheila’s continuing mantra about the right for forgiveness, undoubtedly leading to Sheila’s forgiveness of Lonnie, consisted of this line: “Bad circumstances make good people do bad things”.
I’m constantly reminded that Sheila forgave Lonnie more than I possibly could, for Lonnie continued to be for me a bifurcated person. He was, of course, that loving and present grandfather, who looked after me as his own during the earliest and most vulnerable years of my life; according to family legend, I was Lonnie’s 24-hour a day project for a sizeable portion of his retirement. At the same time, Lonnie would be for me that abhorrent gunman who contributed to the Massacre.
For years, Sheila exhibited irritation, complaining that my reluctance to forgive Lonnie did not reflect well on personal qualities I apparently possess that she admired and appreciated. Still, try as I might, forgiveness of Lonnie eluded me. As a result of Lonnie’s unique visibility in racial family history caused by his membership in the Ku Klux Klan, but mainly for his role in the Massacre’s white onslaughts, he had evolved for me into the family’s face for racism. While I desired a path to forgive him, hoping that a certain level of freedom would be attached to this act of forgiveness, it had not happened. I read suitable literature, such as Judeo-Christian scriptures; speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Gandhi, and pieces of the Gita; and other sources to arrive at a place that would permit me to forgive Lonnie. Not quite yet, but I keep getting closer, feeling Sheila at my back encouraging me all the way.
I submit that we whites have generally had a reduced capability to empathize with forgiveness, either the giving or receiving of it, for we’ve had less reason to feel a necessity for it. I suspect this diminishment in the perceived effect of forgiveness is a result of the repetitive exercise and accumulated advantage of naked power we whites have been able to employ, especially through the long-term subjugation of Blacks. As an indication of this arrogance of power and an insensibility by numerous whites to feel a need to be forgiven or to express remorse or empathy toward Blacks for the multi-generational presence of white racism and white subjugation of Blacks, it is not unusual to witness some whites actually mocking other whites for the demonstration of “white guilt” toward one or more Blacks. It should not be surprising that certain members of the white community have anesthetized themselves into believing – and acting on the belief – that white guilt is bad, somehow a false or weak expression, something to be scorned or mocked, and surely something to be demeaned.
Even now, for every act of white empathy toward a Black life, some other white may, in turn, respond contemptuously to such an act as evidence of personal weakness, fueled by white guilt. So, what if the act is a reflection of white guilt? It is much better from a humanitarian and compassionate perspective to act on that white guilt than not to recognize the insensitivity and brutality for what they are that gave rise to white guilt in the first place. At the same time, I’m long past the time that derisively saying my feelings for the Black condition are merely a function of white guilt would have any adverse impact on me at all.
For another case in point that exhibits the great distance at which forgiveness is frequently held by many white folks, I have heard whites mention that they could not readily comprehend the sentiments of a Black man, Anthony Ray Hinton, who had been unjustly and mistakenly found guilty of murder and who spent nearly thirty years in an Alabama prison before being released in 2015. Hinton has said after being freed that he did not wish to be imprisoned again by his anger from the loss of those thirty years so that it became vital for him to forgive those who incarcerated and kept him immured for so long.
Reflective of our long-lasting arrogance of power, many whites require a formidable riposte to their not so surprising questions: why do I need to be forgiven at all, and for what am I being forgiven? We carry and have carried for generations and centuries a legacy of white privilege and pure white racism that we do not immediately and consciously apprehend since it has been with us so long, so very long that we simply do not see it nor wish to see it. The consequences of white privilege seem to preclude acknowledgment of the natural vulnerabilities associated with the giving and receiving of forgiveness. Apparently, it seems only those who have absorbed pervasive degradation and the pain of aggressively codified and institutional inferiority can so fully appreciate the power of renewal and rebirth available through the generosity of forgiveness.
In my presentations, I regularly need to expand the explanation for Black forgiveness of whites, and I immediately understand the obligation to provide greater background for my position. Of course, Blacks have shown a special and remarkable capability to forgive, even outside the contours that I outline here, which are meant to apply in Black-white allyships. To introduce a gravid and potentially controversial concept for such allyships, I have made it clear to audiences that a white person is not entitled to forgiveness from a Black person, in racial terms, without an indication that the particular white has wrestled with and is on course, if not already there, to achieve two principal goals.
First, the white individual must demonstrate a sincere acceptance of unvarnished racial history without any deflective antidote of filiopietism. We whites know what occurred under our legacy-bound, racial tyranny, and we have no legitimate reason to excuse such subjugation through mythologies or endless genealogies. Of course, for Sheila Walker and me, the catalyst for virtually all factors associated with our racial healing began with the Elaine Race Massacre, but members of my audiences normally do not have such a locus for concentration and exploration, leading to truth and racial healing. Without an actual racial event around which these discussions and clarifications of white attitude and approach can emerge, the appropriate white response can simply be a truthful and demonstrable acknowledgment of the historical, illegitimate, and evil American white domination of Blacks. In other words, the white response can be the recognition and acknowledgment of the definition of damaged heritage, which I have previously supplied as the representative essence of American white racism.
A second step American whites must take to garner forgiveness from Blacks is a public and genuine affirmation of authentic passion by whites for our Black brothers and sisters. There can be no reservation about this belief in and commitment to authentic passion by whites in advance of being forgiven. We whites have to learn ever anew for ourselves authentic passion that serves as a fundamental replacement for any reliance on the filiopietism-damaged heritage axis.
As a result of Sheila’s regular discussion, even near her death, of the importance that forgiveness represented for the resolution of my attitude and feelings toward Lonnie, I continued to struggle to explain both to her and to myself the obstacle I faced about my forgiveness of Lonnie for his participation in the Elaine white onslaughts. If I had known that Lonnie could have responded affirmatively to the above two steps and standards preceding Black forgiveness, my inability to absolve Lonnie could have possibly changed. Yet, I realized that while the more generalized white impediment to apply forgiveness may have played a role in my great difficulty to forgive Lonnie, much more imperative and consuming – as I learned over months and even years – had been the realization that Lonnie reflected the terrible and undeniable face of racism, including especially my childhood family’s history. Through this inability to forgive Lonnie, I could finally acknowledge how intense my anger formed, over the years, at the existence of racism, that pervasive disease, which had consumed my own family.
Was this anger partially created as a consequence of the rejection of my views on race by the family of my youth and by the wider world in which I had been born and had personally occupied, or was it the result of the actual, diabolical exercise of racism I had come to know, reflected in various relatives, friends, and neighbors, especially those who too easily relied on the “n” word, gravitated to extreme and pejorative descriptions of Blacks, and filled pregnant pauses in conversations with invectives against those persons who, by accident of birth, bore darker skin – all of these exhibitions of racist behavior and attitude I could not easily absolve! Based on this understanding, I came to pose a meaningful question to myself: how do I ever forgive those among my family members and others who were devoted racists? My inability to forgive Lonnie was also integrally related to my inability to forgive those other family members, friends, and neighbors and their racist acts and pronouncements I witnessed and remembered from earlier days.
Next Time: Four, Long, One-To-One Lunches with Dr. James H. Cone, Father of Black Liberation Theology