Don't tell me forgiving Amber Guyger is 'beautiful' and 'powerful' if you won't listen to what Botham Jean's mother has to say

When black lives are seen as disposable, forgiveness can (and often does) function as a tool of psychological pressure

Five years after South Africa elected Nelson Mandela president, effectively writing the first chapter of the post-apartheid era, Archbishop Desmond Tutu penned his own seminal work, No Future Without Forgiveness. In explaining the political utility of forgiveness, Tutu critiqued the punitive structure of the Nuremberg trials, as well as the suggestion of general amnesty for crimes against humanity committed by the South African government and its institutions during the apartheid regime.

The crucial step to finding that third way, Tutu suggested, was to for both the subjugated and the oppressor to find common humanity in one another. “When we want to give high praise to someone,” wrote Tutu, we say, ‘Yu, u nobuntu’…It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life.” In order for that common humanity to be recognized, and for a new political environment to be formed, forgiveness was a prerequisite. From Tutu’s perspective, hatred and the desire for vengeance was a burdensome obstacle to this goal, but forgiveness released the burden to God. In his own words, “Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim.”

While Tutu’s logic held value from a philosophical perspective, and perhaps a personalized spiritual one, his logic has rather unfortunate effects once folded into the bolus of white supremacy, or prescribed as an antidote in the aftermath of another white person killing a black person. See, for example, the trial of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, recently convicted for the murder of Botham Jean.

Guyger, a white woman who made headlines for entering Jean’s apartment (alleging she mistakenly believed she’d entered her own), shooting him in the chest, and texting a partner on the force while Jean lay dying on the floor, was sentenced by Judge Tammy Kemp to 10 years in prison (with the possibility of parole after five).

After the verdict was rendered, something strange began to happen. First, there came the image of one of the court bailiffs stroking Guyger’s hair, a sight completely alien to black defendants convicted of even minor crimes. Then Brandt Jean, brother of the deceased Botham Jean, gave a victim impact statement in which he asked to hug the woman who killed his brother. The request was granted, and the two raced to embrace one another.

Then — perhaps most shocking of all — Judge Tammy Kemp descended from the judge’s bench, handed Guyger a Bible, and wrapped the convicted murderer in her arms. It’s unclear whether Judge Kemp has ever done the same for any other murderer convicted in her courtroom.

The peculiar nature of this spectacle was immediately reframed as a radical act of love and Christian faith, echoing the public forgiveness offered by bereaved family members to mass murderer and white supremacist Dylann Roof, who was convicted of shooting and killing nine worshippers at Emanuel AME church in South Carolina. Superhero film icon Chris Evans called Jean’s embrace of Guyger “easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) described it as “a beautiful, powerful example of Christian love [and] forgiveness,” and Trump-appointed former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley hailed the display as “an amazing example of faith, love, and forgiveness.”

While the celebration of this display echoed across the cybersphere, no such attention was paid to the exhortations of Allison Jean, Botham Jean’s mother, who accused the City of Dallas of corrupting the justice process, and called for police to receive more rigorous training. No movie star called that statement “beautiful.” No politician called her pleas “powerful” or “amazing.”

And this is, ultimately, the landscape where the fool’s gold of forgiveness is found. When black lives are seen as disposable, forgiveness can (and often does) function as a tool of psychological pressure — not only for victims and their family members at the hands of the state (and of white supremacist violence), but for black Americans as a whole.

The celebration of forgiveness is a subtle message that not only absolves perpetrators of their sins, but demands victims let go of the anger and frustration born out of a system where a white police officer kills a black man in his own home and is treated far less harshly than, say, a black woman who fires a warning shot in self-defense.

If forgiveness were such a powerful and necessary thing, where were was this widespread display when black spree killers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were convicted for their crimes?

Tutu may have been correct that forgiveness is an effective personal means of releasing trauma inflicted by people and by systems. But when it comes to the matter of liberation, the man was dead wrong. When a Ted Cruz or a Nikki Haley publicly celebrates black forgiveness this way, the memo to black Americans is not only to follow suit in forgiveness of the systems that oppress them. It is a subtle message that they ought to forget.