#sendforgivenessviral

"We can react emotionally and carelessly with little genuine critical thought. Or we can do something that's much more difficult than that. When we're presented with something that we perceive to be an outrageous opinion, we can consider what motivated that person and try to understand their fear and then empathize with how they came to that conclusion.

This morning I woke up to see the #sendforgivenessviral hash tag going viral in my news feed, following Waleed Aly’s sensible and intelligent plea to circulate forgiveness and kindness, rather than hatred and anger.

Waleed Aly is journalist doing his best to inject goodness into the world, rather than fear, and thankfully we have at least one voice of reason we can hang our thoughts and Facebook…

I’ve seen a video float around Facebook from a segment by The Project about bigotry stemming from fearfulness. Instead of being angry when someone says a racist comment, the video calls for us to stop perpetuating the cycle of fear by being empathetic to bigots. It sounds nice and frames it in a way that makes us the ‘more tolerant ones’. But if we step back for a moment, there is really no justification for hate speech, discrimination or any form of abuse. It’s not hard to understand that someone is acting out of fear when they are violent or racist, but how does it make that act okay?

Perpetrators of hate speech already hold a false sense of victimhood which is self-imposed and self-serving. People who are asking for the deportation or internment of a group of people may be ‘scared’, but of what? It’s a position of privilege to feel that you are available to have those kinds of options of safety where you have the power to remove or incarcerate someone for their race or religion. Victims of discrimination do not have that luxury - you are always ‘coloured’. Being tolerant towards acts of hate and hate speech, because we assume that those people are simply ‘afraid’, problematically glosses over institutional and systemic racism.

Victims have consistently been told to ‘forgive’ their abusers, but it should never be asked of the victim to forgive and forget. Especially when the person who performed the hate has not asked for it themselves.

Victims have always been forced into the role of ‘the tolerant educator’, but this returns the burden of maintaining safety onto the victim. Asking someone who is on fire ‘how can I do better?’ doesn’t elevate the pain and is incredibly draining (although most people who perform hate speech are not interested in helping the people they are discriminating against and are often unapologetic).

Calling out people who say terrible things and hold terrible opinions is important. This is the thing I most appreciate from my friends - otherwise I’m forced to maintain my own safety alone.