Abstract

American media is very quick to ask victims of anti-Black violence if they forgive their victimizers. The media’s nearly reflexive framing is a symptom of the broader, cultural demand that Black victims grant forgiveness for racist violence. Reading Juliet Hooker and Myisha Cherry, this paper links the current preponderance of such demand for forgiveness to a demand for apology in America’s lynching tradition. Drawing from Sonya Renee Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, I give a history to both kinds of normative demands and show how, though they appear as seem­ing contraries, demands for forgiveness and apology function together as methods of anti-Black violence. I then draw from work in transformative justice to differentiate the perspectives of asking, giving, and demanding forgiveness. When understood through the perspective of victims, a certain kind of embodied forgiveness can have liberatory potential. However, observers’ demands for forgiveness too often function as a method of racial oppression.