Best Of: What We Get Wrong About Forgiveness

1A

NPR

News

4.3 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June 2015, nine people died at Charleston's Emanuel A.M.E. Church, victims of a racist shooter's rampage.

Some of the victims' relatives publicly forgave the murderer, including Chris Singleton, whose mother, Sharonda Coleman Singleton, was killed.

Philosopher Myisha Cherry was struck by the story and its response. Some, she says, paid more attention to the inspirational story of forgiveness than the racial hatred behind the shooting.

In her new book, Professor Cherry seeks to understand what forgiveness means and why we venerate it. Sometimes, she argues, forgiveness can do more harm than good, especially if it lets the perpetrator of wrongdoing off the hook – whether that be a person, system or anything else.

We discuss forgiveness – what it means and its effect.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's time to be true to who you are.
0:05.0	Go ahead, let NPR become your entire personality.
0:09.0	At the NPR Online Shop, we've got free shipping on all orders over $99.
0:14.0	Totes, hats, t-shirts, the works, only until December 8th.
0:18.0	Live your truth at a discount at shop. nbr.org.
0:30.0	To air is human to forgive divine that quote is from a poem published by Enlightenment era writer Alexander Pope in 1711
0:39.5	More than 300 years later forgiveness is still seen as an act of inspiration and admiration.
0:46.4	The family of a Colorado teenager shot and killed by a classmate at school is asking people to forgive
0:52.0	the killer.
0:52.8	A powerful moment of forgiveness in an Ionia County courtroom today as a Hudsonville
0:57.2	woman faces the driver who caused the crash that killed her husband.
1:01.2	For the judge sent him away, the family of the victim had an important message.
1:05.4	They forgave him.
1:06.7	Those are all moments from TV news broadcasts.
1:09.7	But in February, Zenetta Everhart had a different message.
1:13.3	Her son was among the victims of the 2022 shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
1:18.6	The world says you have to forgive in order to move on.
1:22.2	But I stand before you today to say that will never happen.
1:27.0	Forgiveness to me puts this tragedy in the lapse of the victims and I nor my son will accept the responsibility of his terroristic act.
1:35.0	This is his and his alone.
1:37.0	It is he who will need to ask for forgiveness.
1:40.0	Today we're talking about why we venerate forgiveness and why that way of thinking may do more harm than good.
	...

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