In instances like this, forgiveness by black victims enables white impunity, says Ebrahim Fakir.
Johannesburg - I think I now know why whites take blacks for granted. I think I understand why whites treat blacks with disdain and contempt. I’m starting to fathom why slavery took so long to be abolished, why apartheid in South Africa spanned a whole five decades and colonialism a lot longer. I’ve gone some way to unravelling the riddle of why blacks are ill-served by bad government, why Mugabe could execute a Gukurahundi in Matabeleland, and al-Bashir preside over a massacre of black bodies in Darfur – both killing thousands of blacks with absolute impunity. Whether perpetrated by whites or other blacks, blacks facilitate and become complicit in their own victimisation,
Whites justifiably twitch at these atrocities. But it’s a hypocritical twitch, a white hate of contemporary black fates that obscure the fact that for almost all of history, whites have held a monopoly on perpetrating hate and violence upon blacks. This has come to be so, because blacks have allowed it. Repeatedly.
Consider for a moment the massacre committed by Dylann Roof at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The blood of Roof’s victims had hardly dried when, within hours of his apprehension, he was reputedly allowed to sup on a super-sized helping of a beef burger and fries. After being apprehended while on the run, Roof expressed hunger and was reportedly taken to a local Burger King. This is a callous and tragic farce in the administration of justice, enabled by law enforcement officers sympathetic to his hunger, aided by a sanitising anti-black media and abetted by an unreflective black forgiveness,
The American media is notorious for dishing up the most delicious ironies, but did black congregants of the Emanuel AME Church have to join them in search of extenuating circumstances and explanations for Roof’s hate-filled act of terror?
The American media have a habit of regularly serving up either salacious nonsense or dumbing down serious issues of consequence to nothing. Frequently, they seek rationalising explanations for white terror, or they pathologise it as illness, or situate it as an instance of tragic and mistaken circumstance, as they did in the case of the killing of Travyon Martin. The rest of the world’s media joins them to boot.
When it comes to black and Muslim perpetrators of violence, however, no individual moral agency or rationalisation is sought, nor is a reasoning ascribed. In those instances, entire groups are tarnished with immoral agency – ascribed to the gangsterism and criminality we are told are ingrained in black communities, and the bogey of endemic Islamism and terror in the case of Arabs and Muslims.
In Dylann Roof’s case, however, the media has sought to portray him as a victim dressed in a variety of different guises - a broken boy, child of a broken family, the product of a broken society, disturbed, drug-addled, deluded. Irrational. Idiosyncratic. Atypical. Without agency. Without motive. In fact, even his hate-filled website, which is now widely published, according to the white American establishment still needs to be verified and “authenticated”. Blacks, alas! buy this Kool-Aid. Worse, they drink it.
It is in the American media’s interest to create projections of white violence as atypical, irrational, idiosyncratic - the product of sickness and madness. They do so in service of a white master narrative, a whitewashed world view in which an elite in the media, the academy and business conspire to explain and excuse what they consider to be the cruder idiosyncrasies of their violent white-supremacist lesser cousins.
The white elite considers their lesser cousins to be on the fringes of society. Roof, they say is one of these. His heinous crimes are framed and excused on his behalf by his more genteel cousins in the mainstream media. Altogether more sophisticated, though still soaked in bigotry and prejudice, these mainstream cousins of the fringe lunatics express their bigotry under cover of the veneer of “education”.
But in reality, they are together the executors of a depraved white supremacy. The one serves as the ideologue which expresses the poisonous, but polite sophistry that patronises and belittles blacks, operating in the sophisticated mainstream of the media and popular culture. The other, cruder cousin acts as the jackbooted foot soldier in service of white supremacy through active acts of hate and violence. These are in reality two sides of the same dirty coin operating in tandem, in two different spheres, through two different but complementary modes. And blacks have allowed this, given it purchase even.
This is precisely what has repeatedly happened in every instance in which blacks have been victims of white violence. Blacks tend to avoid extracting restorative justice and reparations. In doing so, they abstract forgiveness from justice and invert the relationship between justice and forgiveness. Blacks have tended to privilege forgiveness over justice, perpetually enabling white impunity for the way in which whites continue to treat blacks as humans of a lesser kind and children of a lesser god.
Universally, all religions contrary to what the “clash of civilisations” theorists suggest, premise forgiveness on three key attributes. First, that the perpetrator recognises his offence. Second, that the perpetrator expresses some remorse, apologises for and sincerely seeks repentance for his acts, and then asks for forgiveness from those whom they offended. Thirdly, that they offer some recompense, which can be forgone by those offended should they so choose.
Even if that last condition of recompense is conceded by its victims, the first two conditions remain. They are the fundamental prerequisites that make forgiveness possible. Especially a forgiveness that facilitates justice.
Apology and forgiveness requires the willingness of the guilty to accept responsibility, show remorse, repent and apologise. It is only then, that an offender rehabilitates himself as a moral subject, a moral agent that can potentially immunise himself from prosecution and punishment. This is only possible through a disclosure that allows for the probity of his (mis)conduct.
But Roof’s conduct appears inscrutable. Made opaque by the system of structural white supremacy that seeks to explain and excuse his conduct in sophisticated and scientific ways, his behaviour is lost in the mists of madness, mental illness, social breakdown, drug abuse and emotional manipulation.
In a monumental misinterpretation of faith ignoring justice and privileging forgiveness, Roof’s murders were hastily forgiven in an act of religious Christian charity by the families of his victims and those who survived his murderous spree. But religion should be facilitating justice for his victims, not hasty forgiveness for its racist perpetrator.
When blacks forgive in this baseless way, forgiveness depletes faith, rather than sustains it. Roof doesn’t at bare minimum appear to recognise his evil, nor do his sophisticated cousins in the mainstream media. Recognition is the first precondition that needs to be satisfied for repentance to effectively take place. Repentance is a necessary condition for forgiveness. But here was Roof being forgiven when he does not even recognise the wrong he has done, reportedly remaining emotionless and cold throughout his first court appearance while being showered with the warmth of black people’s prayers and a black God’s mercy.
Roof’s surviving victims have chosen to voluntarily forgive him, without his seeking it. This undermines at once both black bodies and blacks’ own precepts of their faith and forgiveness, consequently compromising justice.
In instances like this, baseless forgiveness by blacks enables white impunity. #BlackLivesMatter. They should matter most to blacks. Why should black humanity matter to whites if they don’t matter to blacks themselves? Blacks’ hasty and misplaced abstraction of forgiveness from justice allows white crackers to continue to break black skull with impunity.
Forgiveness is a religious virtue. But it cannot be abstracted from justice. When it is, it turns religious virtue into religious vice.
* Ebrahim Fakir is a South African political commentator.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.