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The Anti-Forgiveness Mantra

Does forgiveness really need to be part of our lives?

TaLynn Kel
AfroSapiophile
6 min readNov 23, 2021

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Young Black woman with large afro backlit by the sun. | Photo credit: suteishi viz Canva

Repeat after me:

I don’t owe anyone forgiveness.

No one has the right to demand my forgiveness.

I do not need to forgive anyone for a damn thing.

Demands for forgiveness disrespect my autonomy.

Requests for forgiveness are attempts at manipulation.

Forgiveness is not required. Ever.

I am anti-forgiveness. Forgiveness was not a core concept in my upbringing, so everything I knew came from the societal narrative. I learned about it by watching other families, friends, classmates with the occasional performative apology and forgiveness forced by relatives. It wasn’t something I began interrogating until I was navigating my own interpersonal relationships as an adult when the choice of whether or not to grant it was fully mine.

I chose to be unforgiving.

It wasn’t a difficult choice for me. I’d been aware of the bullshit nature of apologies since childhood and was capable of discerning whether an apology was sincere or just a tool to shame me into silence. Who hasn’t had someone say that once you forgave them, you had to let the incident go? Who hasn’t been chastised for…

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AfroSapiophile
AfroSapiophile

Published in AfroSapiophile

AfroSapiophile is a hub for critical thinking and analysis pertaining to civil rights, human rights, systemic racism and sexism across politics, entertainment, and history.

TaLynn Kel
TaLynn Kel

Written by TaLynn Kel

Fat, Black, Femme Geek. I’m a writer & cosplayer. My blog is www.talynnkel.com. My books: Breaking Normal& Still Breaking Normal http://amzn.to/2FW5kl3

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