In America, we seem to have a limitless fascination with watching miserable people forgive their oppressors: We fetishize endurance, the survival of injustice. When I see this fascination trained on marginalized people who have survived violence enacted on them by someone in power, I often wonder what the point is. When the grieving survivors forgave a remorseless Dylann Roof, days after he walked into their church and murdered nine people, much was made of their forgiveness; it was written about extensively, praised and dissected. But what is there to gain when a family pauses from mourning a dead child to grant immediate forgiveness to the killer? Whom or what is that meant to satisfy, beyond placating a country increasingly obsessed with civility at all costs?
I've been wondering these things while watching recent incidents where white people call the police on black people for doing mundane things. (The existence of these videos is telling in its own right: They're a social product of people being on guard and consistently filming the sorts of situations that they've learned can escalate.) In one of the latest incidents, a black man, D'Arreion Toles, attempts to get past a white woman who is blocking the door of the apartment building they share. He explains to her that he lives there, and that he's simply trying to enter the building after a long day of work. The white woman, Hilary Brooke Mueller, continues to block him from entering, insisting that she's never seen him before. At one point, she demands to see his key fob as proof that he has a right to enter the building. Toles shows her, and Mueller remains obstinately in his path.
Throughout the exchange, Toles is polite and soft-spoken, even through his evident exhaustion and rising frustration. He uses words like "ma'am" and "please," despite the absurdity of the situation. Eventually, he pushes past Mueller and enters the building. She follows him to his apartment, where he enters with his key, a further proof that he lives there. Nonetheless, Mueller then calls the police on him.
[For more on this story by HANIF ABDURRAQIB, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...of-racism-to-forgive]
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