Yesterday, Dr. Oluwatomisin Oredein posted an important challenge/critique on Facebook:
"Let's take "reconciliation" and "forgiveness" out of our theological vocabulary for now.
Let's see if people can do sound theology attentive to white supremacy without it."

A thread.

It's been my experience that most white folks haven't thought deeply about their theological terms, so let's talk about "forgiveness" and "reconciliation."
These terms are often flattened and recontextualized in ways that support those in power/oppressors.

Forgiveness, as a Christian concept, has always been what I understand as a power-from-below. It is the action of the victim asserting their own power to make amends with someone who has power over them. In other words, it's a weak-power.

I'm not interested in discussing "what about God's forgiveness bc God is all-powerful." That's the not the issue at hand when we're talking about white supremacy and the ways that the concept and action of forgiveness is weaponized. Go have that discussion somewhere else.

If forgiveness is from below, then white folks have no place using the term in the context of white supremacy's systemic targeting, subjugation, and annihilation of black, brown, and indigenous people. Forgiveness is for the powerless - not the powerful.

If forgiveness enters the conversation via white folk, that conversation has *immediately* shifted to one that centers the white person's guilt/shame/feelings. The discussion is no longer about the injustice and suffering endured by a black person.
It's not about white feelings.

Forgiveness in this way can never be from 'below.'
This is a reappropriated, weaponized forgiveness that only seeks to absolve the white guilt - now indicted by the unavoidable and painful destructive capacity of white supremacy - that did not act to save black lives.

Reconciliation means something like to 'seek conciliation again.' This presupposes that the two groups of people were once on equal, equitable grounds.
In the case of white supremacy, there has never been a time when black, brown, and indigenous folks have ever been equal.

Racism is about the systemic oppression and exploitation of one group over one or more groups. Racism is about power and wealth and control. Reconciliation, in this context, is a myth of white theology. There is no ancient time in our collective memories when all were equal.

I do believe that someday there can be a sort of conciliatory amends process. Perhaps in the next life. I don't know when. But it won't be inaugurated by the system that profits in the death of those outside of whiteness. The oppressing group doesn't get to decide the terms.

If white folks are so desperate to assuage their guilt, let's talk about reparations. Let's talk about giving land back. Let's talk about actual, practical, material means of restoring justice to those who have been oppressed for generations.

Any talk of reconciliation that cannot bother addressing the material suffering of those whom have been crushed by whiteness is entirely for show, self-serving, and devoid of anything that black, brown, and indigenous folks need.

These terms - forgiveness and reconciliation - are terms that, as Dr. Oredein has powerfully articulated, should not be in the mouths of white folks as they do theology that addresses white supremacy.
White feelings have no place on the table when black lives are being destroyed.