"This is a definition of living like Christ would like you to,"
Willy Orji said in reply to a widely watched video on Twitter. He added, "Vengeance is not ours. What a great gesture by Brandt."
"I'm proud of you my son, Brandt. Your load is lighter," Allison Jean
wrote on her Facebook page Thursday. She added, "Regardless of the views of the spectators, walk with God always. Forgiveness is for the forgiver and it doesn't matter what the forgiven does with it."
"How Botham Jean's brother chooses to grieve is his business,"
Atlantic writer Jemele Hill wrote. "He's entitled to that. But this judge choosing to hug this woman is unacceptable."
"I have preached forgiveness for 25 years, BUT using the willingness of Black people to forgive as an excuse to further victimize Black people is SINFUL," former NAACP President Cornell Brooks
said in a tweet. Brooks, who's also an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, continued, "America should ask Black people forgiveness for serially asking African Americans to forgive sanctioned Police Brutality."
"Black people forgive because we need to survive," Gay wrote in 2015. "We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive."
In that essay, Gay said that for her, the problem is when forgiveness is taken as absolution. And she concluded, "I, for one, am done forgiving."
"God bless
#BothamJean's brother,"
wrote Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. "But don't confuse his forgiveness with absolving this nation for its gross, bitter discrimination against Black people in a myriad of its systems and policies. Racism and white supremacist ideology can't be 'hugged out.' "
"I understood what that young man was doing. He did that statement for him, not for her, to show that he was a real Christian," Sharpton
said on MSNBC.
"I hate that I have to live with this every single day of my life and I ask God for forgiveness, and I hate myself every single day," Guyger said in her testimony. "I never wanted to take an innocent person's life. And I'm so sorry."
Brandt Jean's Act Of Grace Toward His Brother's Killer Sparks A Debate Over Forgiving