“KING: Stop asking black victims of white violence if they forgive their victimizers”

Jess Brooks
On Race — isms
1 min readOct 1, 2016

“Has that man asked to be forgiven? Has he admitted that what he did was wrong? Has he repented and accepted some form of justice? Has he been arrested or charged with a crime? Has he reached out to the family to communicate his feelings about their unimaginable loss?…

Do you think any family members of the slain police officers in Dallas were asked this weekend if they forgive Micah Johnson?”

White culture sometimes seem so obsessed with being forgiven by black people. It is not, however, obsessed with creating a world where it is easy to forgive. And it’s something that gets internalized, at least in my experience, that you can’t keep on blaming a white person for something they did wrong, as a black person your job is to be the bigger person and just absorb your hurt and then also become closer with the white person who had harmed you and slowly and lovingly convert them into someone tolerant and peace loving.

Feminism had brought female emotional labor into mainstream conversation, we really need to pull POC emotional labor in here too.

--

--

Jess Brooks
On Race — isms

A collection blog of all the things I am reading and thinking about; OR, my attempt to answer my internal FAQs.