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Abstract
Requests for forgiveness can effectively silence and delegitimize anger, and requests to publicly perform emotional labor can effectively make that labor both required and undervalued. I focus on interviews and press conferences between 2014 and 2016 with police shooting mourners Esaw Garner, Lesley McSpadden, Samaria Rice, Audrey DuBose, and Valerie Castile. I show how these Black women resist racist calls to deprive them of their anger and right to seek justice, refusing to suture the social crisis of police violence with their emotional labor. On television, the news context obscures the entertainment value of anger and grief that partly motivates these requests. I argue that speakers are well aware of the way supposedly angry, supposedly violent affect gets judged on the Black body in the public sphere. Family members resist the pressure to forgive—a form of resistance that insists on the right to anger in the public sphere—while strategically maintaining a reasonable demeanor.
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Rachel Stonecipher and Megan Genovese in the preparation of this article, as well as the comments of the two anonymous reviews and the editor of this journal, all of which have much enriched this essay. I have also benefited from feedback from audience members at the Ethnicity and Race in Communication division at the International Communication Association.
Notes
1 Devega (Citation2015) and King (Citation2016) include lists of corresponding acts of violence against White people for which corresponding forgiveness requests were not made. For a take that explicitly explores the role of religion, Stacey Patton (Citation2015) discusses Black families, religion, and forgiveness. It is also important to note that Valerie Castile was in fact not asked the question about forgiveness by the CNN anchor. Rather, the interviewer introduced the notion of peaceful protest, and Valerie Castile responded that she did not condone violence but also would neither forgive nor forget the perpetrator.
2 Interviewer forgiveness requests are likely highly geographically specific. Given both the racialized context and the influence of confession models, this particular phenomenon may be limited to the United States.
3 For a personal example of this phenomenon, see John L. Jackson (Citation2015).
4 I refer here to sexual violence in particular.
5 There are numerous studies documenting that women apologize more than men. The blame effect becomes even more pronounced among low socioeconomic status women. For more, see Bettina Spencer (Citation2016).
6 Responses on the part of the individual shooter and/or the police express condolences or regret without actually apologizing.
7 These requests are another act in the social drama/apology discourse: the directive speech act that is made after a transgression (requests for apology) or reparation (requests for forgiveness).
8 For a humorous take on the phenomenon of women apologizing, see Comedy Central (Citation2015).
9 Journalists may intervene in social dramas to elicit apologies in order to turn bad news into good, thereby participating in the maintenance of the social order and legitimizing the work of journalism in enforcement of social norms. Forgiveness requests do similar work in orchestrating reconciliation and harmony, though in these cases of racialized forgiveness the attempts always failed.
10 The Garners eventually won their civil suit out of court for an award of $5.9 million.
11 This is very much in keeping with true live television.
12 Press conference questions can also be highly aggressive.
13 This is a classic nonapology, blurring the identity of the wrongdoer, the transgression, and the victim.
14 While children are familiar with the denial of responsibility when they apologize to adults, peer-to-peer apology interactions among children differ significantly than those between adults or between adults and children.
15 Benjamin Disraeli was an early endorser of the institutional #sorrynotsorry with his famous statement, “Never explain, never complain.” He acknowledged that mistakes will always be made in the execution of public duties, but apologies would compromise future actions in that role.
16 This conflict is particularly acute in cases of litigation or claims for material compensation.
17 The family later settled a $6 million lawsuit with the city.
18 Religious and particularly Christian convictions play a strong role in forgiveness narratives.
19 Tensing’s first trial ended with a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury.
20 In this case, jail could serve as revenge and/or justice.
21 This is likely the quote to which King was referring earlier. There is strong resonance here with the well-known Holocaust idiom “Never forget, never forgive,” coined by Abba Kovner.