Apologies for Past Racism are not for Me.

For J.H. and C.M. and my students

Who are apologies for? I ask this question in ethics classes. My students and I have discussions about things like why people apologize, how, and when — especially the when, timing matters in apologies.

In the recent months, three groups I have some history with or current stakes in have issued what amount to apologies for past racism. Each time these statements were issued with grand fan fair, even in pandemic times — there were press releases, news stories, prepared speeches, videos. Each time I have tried my hardest to be generous — perhaps these apologies do something for someone else who experiences the harms of antiblack racism, even when they either do nothing for me, or worse, in at least two of these cases, make things demonstrably worse for me.

But the time for those generosities are over. It does me no personal or professional good. It serves no purpose for the work I do. My quiet annoyance and respectable suffering does no good for the students and colleagues who are in more precarious positions than I am who have sought me out to air their hurts and frustrations.

Apologies for past racism may be good starts if what you are trying to do is to convince the uninformed to come along. Some may really feel like having big institutions and professional organizations acknowledge their historical wrongs is a welcome and necessary step toward some hoped for future. To this, I am not wholly unsympathetic.

Yet,

when it is COVID-19

and people are dying and protesting in the streets,

crying out to be heard,

and

there is a Supreme Court justice nominee who will vote to end the life you just made with the rights you just got because she thinks she’s pro-life

and

there is a long line for early voting where my folks are sweating because November is coming and they are dying for a change

and when there are people in cages in prisons and at borders

and

when my colleagues sit in meetings and whine about having to even THINK of ways to PLAN to be antiracist

and

when

my students can’t come to my office to cry about the thing that happened that they can’t name and we have to sit on Zoom and wail…

Well, my sympathies for antiracism statements and apologies dry up into a hot anger. It sits in a tight, dried up knot in my head that pushes out other thoughts of other things and makes me write this instead of the other things I desperately want to be writing.

It’s the same type of anger I’ve felt when someone in my personal life has done some horrible thing and issued an apology that I refused. It becomes very clear, very quickly that the apology was for them and not for me. It centers their feelings — their desires to still be good in my eyes, their need to present themselves as morally upstanding, though they have done some bad thing or in many cases, they have inherited the spoils of past sins. It centers their knowledge — they did not know it would hurt, they did not know that the apology was late, they did not know that the apology picked at old wounds, deepened the cuts. They did not know. But I knew. I knew and knew.

I have come to see such efforts as wrongheaded in the way many personal apologies are.

What people think I want is a sorry, when what I want is freedom.

Freedom from being an object in their pursuit of knowledge,

freedom from the burden of centering their desires,

freedom from being the nonconsenting party in their confessions,

freedom from wondering if the time, resources, and effort it took to craft such a grand gesture could not have been directed toward the time, resources, and effort it takes to support freedom, not their feelings.

A student asked me why they felt so bad when the folks doing the apologizing seemed to feel so good about doing something they think is right. And I couldn’t tell them why they felt bad, I could only offer why I felt bad.

And so now there’s this…

Sorry.