Earlier: The Murder Of Mollie Tibbetts: A Perfect Storm
Forgiving murderers has become a public spectacle these days. But a peculiar dynamic is at play when the families of white victims swiftly or unconditionally forgive non-white murderers or other attackers. Indeed, Western whites now accept levels of criminality no other well-established people in the world would tolerate and would have been unthinkable in the U.S., for instance, just a half century ago. And Christian moral teaching aren’t the reasons. Rather, a kind of mind virus has infected brainwashed whites desperate to avoid placing blame where it belongs. The consequences are self-destructive and anarchic.
Consider the following cases:
DeWitt’s father, as well as [girlfriend Bailey] Reidling, have expressed their desire to forgive the suspects.
“Just like his dad said, you don’t really know. You don’t know how those kids were raised — you know, what they were going through,” Reidling told Fox News Digital. “It’s not right. It never will be right. But you know…this is not the only crime, this is everywhere. And it’s horrible.”
[Georgia high-school football star Elijah DeWitt's murder suspects to appear in court for preliminary hearing, by Danielle Wallace, Fox5 Atlanta, November 18, 2022]
But Hoffman forgave Aranda because “it’s a decision that you have to make so that God can do what he needs to do in your life … and that was to save Landon” [‘Angels caught him’: Mom recalls moment son was thrown off Mall of America balcony, by Isabel Keane, New York Post, December 14, 2022].
“At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas, he wrote. “We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.”
But “others have ignored our request” he continued:
They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. …
The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.
To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.
[From Mollie Tibbetts’ father: Don't distort her death to advance racist views, Des Moines Register, September 1, 2018]
I do not question the sincerity of these acts of forgiveness.
Nor shall I address in detail whether one ought to forgive the unrepentant, although forgiveness toward the unrepentant is not morally necessary (Luke 17:3).
Instead, I shall address what appears to be an engineered instinct among whites that directs them to act a certain way under these conditions. I submit that white forgiveness toward non-whites arises from an induced psychological need for whites to have only positive sentiments toward non-white groups, even after non-whites harm them.
Put differently, whites repeatedly exhibit a proclivity to extinguish any negative sentiments toward non-whites. For cognitive tranquility, whites must ascribe inherent goodness to non-whites, effectively placing them on a pedestal. That requires treating criminal non-whites as disconnected individuals, as representative of the human race and its general condition.
Thus when a non-white group exhibits unignorable crimes or other bad behavior that can be empirically observed and statistically quantified—such as a murder rate out of proportion with their share of the population—whites blame the “legacy” of racism, colonialism, or white supremacy. Non-whites are accordingly pure; bad behavior—whether from individuals or groups—is excused. Bad behavior is either individualized or attributed to something outside the group.
In expiating non-white guilt, whites scapegoat themselves for non-white crime and other bad behavior to alleviate their own mental turmoil. Forgiveness extinguishes that distress, especially when the forgiver expresses anxiety, for instance, about a murderer’s race and “background.”
Of course, this tendentious reasoning does not apply to white offenders. In their case, its logic is reversed, again in the pursuit of tranquility.
Compare whites’ forgiveness of blacks with the forgiveness of blacks towards whites.
Here let the record show: in 2015, after Dylann Roof murdered nine black people at a church in Charleston SC, Felicia Sanders, the mother of one of his victims, did say I forgive you” to Roof [Charleston Victim’s Mother Tells Dylann Roof: ‘I Forgive You’, by Emily Shapiro, 9ABC KCRG, June 11, 2017]
So, subsequently, did some relatives of George Floyd[George Floyd’s uncle says former police officer's sentence ‘sends a message’, by Bryan Mims, WRAL, June 25, 2021].
But, in stark contrast, other blacks saw no need to expunge responsibility from white America in general. Indeed, the “conversations” that arose were quite the opposite. The men and their alleged crimes became thoroughly racialized, lenses through which we were to analyze “whiteness” and to relitigate America’s past and present racism.
“When black forgiveness is the means for white atonement, it enables white denial about the harms that racist violence creates,” black commentator and “decolonizer” Stacey Patton [Tweet her]wrote:
When black redemption of white America is prioritized over justice and accountability, there is no chance of truth and reconciliation. It trivializes real black suffering, grief, and the heavy lifting required for any possibility of societal progress.
[Black America Should Stop Forgiving White Racists, The Washington Post, June 22, 2015]
Ebony magazine editors offered this headline and subhead: Why We Shouldn’t Be So Quick To Forgive Racists—Black America should stop forgiving white racists [June 23, 2015].
Asking blacks to forgive is among the “unrealistic expectations” society place upon blacks, so “no one should expect Black people to forgive the unrepentant,” another black writer explained [Why Do White People Expect Black People to Forgive Them? by Allison Wiltz. Medium.com, August 27, 2022].
Unsurprisingly, that message is spreading, particularly among younger blacks.
“Black forgiveness [is] an excuse to forget the racist history of this country and negate the racism that persists today,” wrote Josie Schuman, managing editor of The Carroll News at John Carroll University a few months after George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose:
Breaking news: White people are not off the hook.
Forgiveness breeds forgetting, as the adage goes. Differentiating religious forgiveness from what she calls “racial forgiveness,” associate professor of Religion and Africana Studies Anthea Butler told The Guardian, “In a culture of ritual forgiveness and forgetfulness, no one is called to account for historic deeds done against others, and history is viewed as a malleable story to support the forgetting.”
[Black forgiveness is not for white people, October 21, 2020]
This psychology is also manifest among West Europeans. “Migrants” from Africa and the Middle East are committing unprecedented levels of rape and other sex assaults upon local women, which police and the Main Stream Media have of course either ignored or covered up. Pattern recognition has been deemed racist.
Despite his (disastrous in my opinion) neoconservatism, Douglas Murray deserves recognition for documenting this phenomenon in his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Repeatedly across Europe, law enforcement and political authorities concealed the race of the perpetrators or even the assaults themselves. After 1,200 women were assaulted in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, Murray says, the police “strenuously attempted to conceal the identities of the culprits…In Germany in 2016 as in Britain in the early 2000s, a fear of the consequences of identifying the racial origins of the assailants took priority over the police force’s commitment to doing their job,” Murray wrote.
We should not rebuke every act of “forgiveness.” It can be sincere and proper—and yet still motivated at least in part by destructive tendencies. Bad actions can come from good motivations.
My concern here is not forgiveness per se, but the deeper mental tendencies that cause it and much more. They are leading the West to its suicide.
John Hays (email him) is a writer from the American South.
