“Black people, when they experience injustice, there’s almost an expectation that we will immediately forgive and therefore can sort of move on,” Jemar Tisby, an African American historian and writer, told The Washington Post. “So I think a lot of people are reacting — that we have a right to be angry, a right to grieve, and a right to want justice.”
It’s an attitude he sees in Fannie Lou Hamer, the black civil rights activist who once said, “Ain’t no such a thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face”
“There has been such a long history of injustice perpetrated against black people in the United States that if we didn’t forgive, we run the risk of being consumed by bitterness,” Tisby said.
“White 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,” she wrote.
“Did Crystal Mason get a hug when she was sent to jail for voting?” one critic asked on Twitter, referencing a black mother in the same state of Texas who was infamously sentenced to five years in prison for casting a ballot illegally.
“I think black people are legitimately upset when we extend grace in the face of clear and blatant injustices, but we’re never extended that same grace in the public mind,” Tisby said.
“...But this judge choosing to hug this woman is unacceptable,” tweeted Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, telling people to remember that “this convicted murderer is the same one who laughed about Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.”
“She has indicated an affinity or sympathy for the defendant,” he said, suggesting the case might have to go to another judge.
Andra Gillespie saw grace in the Jean family’s response to 26-year-old Botham Jean’s killer: It was “their way of trying to fulfill their Christian obligation to forgive her in spite of everything that happened,”...“Why do people kill black people before they ask questions they might ask of other people?”
“My problem is when outsiders look at that situation and they get touched by the forgiveness and then they get lulled into thinking we don’t have to do anything else for that situation. … We don’t take the lessons from it that we should,” Gillespie said.
Amber Guyger Was Hugged by Botham’s Brother and a Judge Igniting a Debate About Forgiveness and Race
