After the Charleston mass murder, the media has mixed everything up. The media is focusing on the Black victims and not on the white murderer or the act of killing. The victims and their words of forgiveness and love have usurped the spotlight. Meanwhile, the killer’s words of hate for Black men and women exited the stage. Why has this switch happened?
The switch is of convenience. After every incident of white-on-Black violence, by no coincidence, Black Christians are always the Black voice that dominates the mainstream media discourse. The Black Christian message is music the ears of white people who do not want the message of white hate, spewed by the words of 21-year-old Dylann Roof, to dominate the airwaves. White media correspondents were delivered a precious gift when the relatives of victims spoke kind words to forgive and love.
Unfortunately, these words of Black Christians obscure the nuanced voices of a truly diverse Black America. So many Black people do not agree with the passive love-pray-forgive-hope doctrines of a few.
For a wounded person to forgive her attacker, it is a process that takes place primarily behind closed doors. The wounded person does not need to announce her forgiveness in a public forum. She did nothing wrong. It is not her burden to forgive.
Instead, it is the attacker’s responsibility to forgive. That person should come forth in a public manner and address the nation, the community, or the social world of his wrongdoing. That person has the burden to forgive.
Amenuti Narmer of the Volta Times eloquently pointed this out.
There is perhaps very little debate on this issue. Generally, Christians around the globe are resolute in the belief that a person must first ask for forgiveness otherwise he remains unforgiven…Let us for argument sake pretend that Dylann Roof, the animal who killed 9 African Americans at the AME Church believes in the same nonsense. Wouldn’t he have to repent and ask God for forgiveness before that salvation can be granted?
But why do we now speak of forgiveness and the victims? What about the attacker and his act? What about the attacker and his motives? What about the attacker and his burden to repent and ask for forgiveness?
Why these things have been confused is beyond me. After the Charleston shootings, the relatives of the victims took it upon themselves to be the ones who decide to forgive. But it is not their burden. They do not need to reconcile the event for the killer. It is solely the killer’s responsibility to explain, take his punishment—whether life imprisonment or death—and to ask for forgiveness.
Why these things have become the center of the dialogue is important. The motive for white media is always to remove the discussion away from actions—from ending white oppression of African Americans. White media correspondents will take anything you give them so that they do not have to talk about white racism. This is why they have taken the words of forgiveness from the relatives of victims and run with them.
Even in discussing forgiveness, which seems to be the talk of the times, we can still talk about white racism and oppression. We can still illuminate white racism as the eye of the torrential hurricane.
The problem with the pacifist approach is exactly in the words: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.”
Now this is, without a doubt, false. They know exactly what they do.
These killers are not lost and in need of salvation. They are not ignorant and in need of wisdom. They are not misguided and in need of the way. They are terrorists.
When Dylann Roof accused Black people of raping white women and trying to take over America, he knew exactly what he was saying. Indeed, he believes this with a fierce passion, so much that he will kill to defend his convictions.
When a hawk removes a baby bird from a mother’s nest, the mother bird doesn’t say she loves the hawk or that she forgives the hawk, for the hawk doesn’t know what it did.
And even with the hawk, it is killing for food, for survival. However, a white man killing 9 Black people just because… for fun… is… I don’t know… barbaric?
I don’t know why people can in the same breath say Black Lives Matter and also I Love The People Who End Black Lives. That doesn’t make any sense.
That cannot make any sense. Really it doesn’t.
If you love the people who kill Black people, then why should they or society have any incentive to stop these horrific acts? Won’t you love them all the same?
It’s unnatural to love one’s killer. It is quite natural to hate one’s killer. The gut response to violence against you, harming you, is to protect yourself by any method. When someone pours bullets into your relatives with the barrel of a gun, when law enforcement commits similar acts, it is quite normal to feel rage. Indeed, outrage is expected!
But from what I understand, Christianity turns normalcy on its head.
The doctrine of the religion tells its followers that what is normal is actually abnormal. It tells its followers that even before your relatives’ bodies are laid to rest, even before a funeral service is held in honor of their lives, even before you celebrate their memory, you should forgive their killer. There is something quite unnatural about that order of things. With rash words of forgiveness far too premature in their formation, the absurdity of it all is starting to unravel.
I admit: I don’t understand the totality of Christianity. But I do understand that some things don’t make any sense!
If we really want to end this nonsensical white-on-Black violence, we really have to look at what makes sense and what doesn’t and start from there.
When Black people in America were African slaves under the thumb of white European immigrants, they were given this version of Christianity to practice and cherish.
Remember the slave owners who regularly held public lynchings for merrymaking in white communities—these same lynchings that were festivities during Jim Crow? These white killers are the ones who gave Black people this version of Christianity—their version—that African Americans still practice today.
Can any Black Christian disagree with this? Wasn’t this version of Christianity—where white slave owners told Black people to love and forgive their killers—handed down to Black Christians from white killers?
It becomes abundantly clear why the Black Christian doctrine doesn’t make sense for the community to overcome white oppression; The How To Overcome Oppression Manual was written by the oppressor!
It’s like how the healthcare bills are written by the insurance companies. Does anyone expect this to be fair? Can this be fair?
While it is always hard to look in the mirror, question yourself, question everything you’ve ever believed in, it is necessary for Black Christians to do this with the white Christianity that they were brought and with that idol of white Jesus that hangs in these churches.
Black Christians have to ask themselves: why do I worship a white Jesus? Why am I constantly told to love my killers when they have been killing people in my community for more than 400 years? Maybe the love doesn’t work? Are these messages appropriate for me or are they what my oppressor uses to control me?
Why do my brothers and sisters get incarcerated for thirty years to life while those people who look like white Jesus get vacations, yachts, and mansions? But I am told to look for pleasure not in this life but in an after life. Is this message appropriate for me? Or is it what my oppressor uses to control me?
I am not saying that Black Christians have to do any research. It’s all about asking what makes sense and what is absolute irrationality.
I would like to hear more voices in the mainstream media from Black people who believe in other things besides a white Jesus. People who hope and have faith and love but do not get their final approval from some white God.
This is probably how people felt when Martin Luther King’s Christian message dominated the media airwaves during the Civil Rights era. They probably felt that this Christianity Ain’t Black. It can’t be. Gimme something else.
Where are the Black perspectives?
It’s time for Black people who call themselves Christians to do that painful work and discard the doctrines of your oppressor. Whether that is the entire religion or only parts, you be the judge. But if you’re looking to only revise, I’d have a stack of red pens handy.
I’m afraid that Christian doctrines of love and forgive white killers is obscuring that message. Let’s focus on Black Lives, not on Black Killers.
That will take focusing our mainstream media on discussions that center around Black lives from texts that have origins of Black doctrines.
We know now the truth – that Jesus the Christ was African and his teachings are African too. When some Black Christians of today hang a white idol in their churches for the Christ they do it because they are mentally and spiritually enslaved.
This is apparent even in the interpretation of the Bible. No sane person can link the message of the Christ to the Old Testament – The Judaic Scripts. But Christians, and Black Christians themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated.
When Christ said ‘and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us,’ he was asking God for forgiveness in the same way as people who trespass against us must plead for our forgiveness. The relatives of the Charleston massacre have it both wrong and foolish. But that is understandable sibce they worship a white idol for the Christ.
I wonder what the forgiveness trope is supposed to accomplish. Why forgive your oppressor? The last time I checked, the Jews did not forgive Germany until the Germans paid huge sums of money in addition to their plea for forgiveness.
African Americans have received $0.00 yet they forgive and love their oppressor. It is weird! All the sense I can make of this is that they are afraid – terribly afraid of white Americans and their Federal government.