America,
There’s a powerful parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 18 where a master is settling his accounts with his servants. One owes a great debt, cannot repay it and is ordered to jail. He begs forgiveness and the master releases him, debt-free. Upon his release, the servant has someone who owes him and instead of showing the same grace he was given, he is harsh and unforgiving. The master hears of his unforgiveness and has him tossed into jail for not showing the same grace he was shown. We are told that God will deal with our unforgiveness with that same karmic response. As you reap, so you will sow.
Being a person of strong faith, this particular parable, with emphasis on the scripture where Peter queries “how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who has wronged against me? Seven times?” and the reply from Jesus is “Not only 7 times, but 77 times” warrants particular spotlighting.
The worth of that powerful grace seems to weigh heavier on the shoulders of Blacks in America than anywhere else I can envision in history. A young Black girl named Mo’ne Davis, instead of being able to enjoy the honor of a movie being made of her baseball legend, has to ask forgiveness for the young adult white male who calls her “slut” because he is jealous of her notoriety. An uncommon brother named Common, the Oscar Award-winning rapper and great Spirit I met when he was Common Sense, suggests that in 2015, it is Black folks’ duty to extend the olive branch and “a hand of love” to white people who apparently have no rule in healing the relations of their seats of privilege and any people hurt by their actions or lack thereof. White folks who I guess are somehow afraid or aghast at the rage of response from people who are beaten while handcuffed or standing or playing in a public store with the same guns that others get to buy en masse or selling cigarettes on the street or walking down the street. Somehow, forgiveness must always remain at the forefront of the lips and on the tips of tongues of Blacks in America because Paula Deen is old and Southern and doesn’t know any better to change or for Levi Pettit, the 20-year SAE frat member because he is too young to have known the weight of his words and the history of hate behind the chant he chanted while smiling.
I am exhausted, America.
Our young sons are told and taught about how to walk, talk, stand up straight, don’t resist and be articulate in order to avoid conflict and yet, Martese Johnson—honor student, community and campus leader, smart, warm, well-loved and respected and yes, articulate—is beaten and bloodied for trying to enter a bar with a fake ID, which was never produced mind you, when young white college students perform the actual act and are often supported, rarely stopped and whose parents sometimes laugh off the gesture. Martese is beaten like he stole something, as if that is the appropriate reply to theft, which according to the law it is not, and Michael Brown is killed for it, even though the shop owner staunchly declared that the police were never called by them.
We are killed over cigarettes. Michael Brown, after purchasing them, and Eric Garner, who was selling “loosies” on the street, but almost a half dozen officers are engaged in his takedown. We are murdered over toy guns. Both Tamir Rice and John Crawford were killed in the great state of Ohio. One for being 12-years-old and distraught on a playground where no one was in danger. The other in a Walmart store where the very gun he was holding was for sale in the store. But his picking it up “alarmed” two white people who called the police. They shot him down, apparently never taking the time to note that he was in the gun section of the store. We are killed while cuffed like Oscar Grant and killed by celebrating, like New Yorkers Sean Bell before his wedding. And Danroy Henry who was leaving a party and told to move out of a fire lane by one officer and then deemed attempting to run over another officer, who was screaming “Stop!” Neither of whom took responsibility for their miscommunication.
Time and again, Black people in America are told to forgive as though it is the beginning of the end of hatred in this country and the journey to healing. But that is called reconciliation and in order to reconcile, there must be some sense of common ground and a mutual desire to see things become something new. That is where I struggle, America.
How do you ask white parents and parents of all races to raise children who understand race as irrelevant if those same children build a community of friends that are multiracial and they still see the “black kid” get called out when they were all performing the same action? Or when white teens know that the best way to shoplift in a store is to go in after a Black guy because the store’s staff will be so busy watching him that they will pay no attention to anyone else.
I am in constant prayer about forgiveness. It is a daily grace that I walk in and work from in order to remain a peaceful big Black man in America. But it is hard.
I just saw actor Keith Hamilton Cobb’s amazing “AMERICAN MOOR,” a one-man show, art imitating life. It portrays an “intelligent, intuitive, indomitable, large, Black male actor” who explores race, Shakespeare and the telling of a story so poignant that it brought me to tears. As a large, Black, baritone-voiced, dreadlocked wordsmith who never backs away from words, except when they are so powerful that I must bow, as with the words of Maya Angelou and Jane Austen, James Baldwin and Sterling A. Brown, Toni Morrison and noted others, I am floored at the times that I am made to feel responsible for someone else’s discomfort with my voice, my size, my words or my wit.
I am exhausted, America.
The weight of forgiveness lies heavily on the shoulders of Black folks in America, through the space of grace of religion, and in lieu of the apathy of Americans who don’t want to deal with the fact that young white fraternity members are taught songs of hate and old white women steal the recipes of the staff in their kitchens and make millions and they never really have to work on forgiveness. They simply have to ask for it and then somehow, the rest of the work is on us to work it out and get over it.
No more.
My forgiveness will not be pimped or prostituted, begged for and then prosecuted so that you may sleep well at night. I will, in fact, forgive your ignorance because it is in the soil of this country and everything you eat is grown in the dirt of difficult truths. Yes, you are responsible for your offspring and your neighbors and your family and their mouths and their hatred and if you are doing nothing, you are guilty as well. The perception that white folks aren’t like they used to be may in fact be true. But someone is killing Black men in the streets and beating them like they are not human and those folks happen to wear the same skin as you and you are responsible for reconciling that truth, not me.
Martese Johnson is everything we have been told to be in order to put white people at ease and he was doing what so many college students do that it has become a rite of passage. Yet he is the only one who ended up on the ground, bloodied and broadcast around the globe. “Why did this happen?” He cried that question handcuffed and hobbled to the ground. He did what society told him he ought. He did what parents and protectors told him he needed to do in order to survive in Virginia. He did what he could to make his community proud of him. And yet, he is still known to me through blood stained screams for help and through a wound that only grace and gracefulness stitched back together. The kind that is internal that may never heal because it can never be undone.
Martese is angry and so am I because forgiveness is supposedly a Christian edict in a supposedly Christian nation, a human kindness, a mutual understanding that America continues to desire from the families of the dead and the hearts of the assailed and yet there are no real repercussions to the institutions that cause the affronts. The master put the servant in jail who had shown no kindness, especially after he had been given grace. The SAE frat member stood before a cadre of Black folks who stood with him as he offered forgiveness for his stupidity. Yet, he didn’t declare that he would do better, make things better, join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has members of every race and creed. He even suggested that he had learned the song but didn’t take responsibility for the fact that he led the song. While we are still wiping tears in Madison, Wisconsin over the death of Anthony “Tony” Robinson just steps from the sanctuary of his own home. We must ask yet again, how we will handle the cancer of racism in America.
The first step is to stop being so quick to declare that it is in remission and then we can treat it like the vile sickness that it is. Instead of suggesting that a few snips at the source will make it unhappen. We must go into a full treatment mode in order to deal with this cancerous state of racism run amok in America.
So I have written until I have made a new peace. I don’t have to forgive white folks in America. I don’t have to forgive someone for being sick and spewing vomit and vile history on me. I have to rush them into care in order to see them be better. America, I want you to get better and I don’t have to do that by trying to make you feel better. I do that by acknowledging that I see your sickness and that you need help to get better. No longer will I wear the weight of forgiving you in order to make you better because your illness is hereditary. You have it because it’s in your gene pool. But it can be healed if we call out the accurate diagnosis and use the correct salve on the sickness.
Your sickness doesn’t need my forgiveness. Your sickness needs healing and that’s the spiritual truth of why Black folks have offered forgiveness for so many generations. We thought that with all of your direct access to better care and brighter days, you’d simply do better, get better and then act better. But the jumpy trigger fingers of trained police officers and the panicked responses of men who shoot young Black women like Renisha McBride, 19, seeking refuge in the dark of night after a car accident, or baby girl Aiyana Jones, 7, who was simply asleep when an officer wildly fired through smoke that he caused, tell another story and are all yours to bear.
You and your sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, judges and juries must have conversations that don’t include the victims of your hereditary illness and its repugnant behaviors because all we can see is that you are sick and the healing of that sickness is not in our forgiveness but rather in your acknowledgement of the illness and your willingness to draw blood from each other, to be tested and examined, purified and transfused so that the source of the sick can be removed, and we can all begin a true healing.
Until then, I will continue to hold up Black folks whose shoulders are strained by the weight of forgiveness we must carry in our eyes and hearts because some white folks don’t know that they have been bitten by a bug that has transported the infected blood of bigotry to them through bloodlines of hate and heredity. I will lift up folks whose skin doesn’t look like mind and brown in the same the same ways, but who have a presence of mind to speak and seek change in our country. Yes, ours. We.
The doctor will see you now.
–kevin e. taylor
Kevin E. Taylor is the host of #NowWhatwithKevinETaylor; an author, empowerment coach, teacher/reacher, TV writer, music aficionado, change agent and joy grabber.
