“Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a collection of his sermons called “Strength to Love,” published in 1963.
In the book, King addresses loving people responsible for racial segregation and violence against Black Americans, but he does so without ever condoning racial harm.
While King’s understanding of forgiveness flowed from his theology, psychology offers a perspective on whether forgiveness may be more or less helpful for us when a broader social offense has been committed or is ongoing. Though most forgiveness research has looked at offenses between two people—like friends or family members—a few efforts have tried to understand intergroup offenses, like racism. Even wrongs committed between two community members in the U.S. and elsewhere happen within an inescapable reality shaped by race.
Thus, for Americans from racially marginalized groups, considering whether to forgive involves taking into account our individual wellness, as well as the historical context and the social and cultural worlds we live in.
Racial pressure to forgive
On the whole, forgiveness should be viewed within a larger context, says Michael Perez, a social psychologist at Wesleyan University, particularly when it comes to race. If social justice is yet to be achieved, then forgiveness has some risks.
In a courtroom in October 2018, Brandt Jean hugged and forgave Amber Guyger, a white off-duty officer, for fatally shooting his older brother Botham Jean in his Dallas apartment, drawing media fascination with his forgiveness in spite of her murder conviction.
Perez, who was a psychology Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University at the time, became troubled by the coverage. It held echoes of the racially motivated gunning down of nine Mother Emanuel AME Church congregants in Charleston in 2017. “What I felt was that in those instances because the forgiveness was so front and center the racial components of this case [melted into the background]. It was the forgiveness that took up all the narrative oxygen,” he says.
Perez prompts mental health professionals and psychologists to consider the social context of racism when public forgiveness is expressed through Black pain.
Historian and journalist Stacey Patton wrote for the Washington Post, “Black pain is only heard after forgiveness is afforded to these white perpetrators. Black rage is challenged as inappropriate and unhelpful, while the media and others celebrate the traumatized family members’ ability to respond to this latest heinous crime with compassion and love. When black forgiveness is the means for white atonement, it enables white denial about the harms that racist violence creates. When black redemption of white America is prioritized over justice and accountability, there is no chance of truth and reconciliation. It trivializes real black suffering, grief, and the heavy lifting required for any possibility of societal progress.”
If you are not white, Perez says, there may be “cultural expectations of decorum and how you should engage” that stigmatize anger or pushback. Perez worries about the risk of coerced forgiveness when society almost expects forgiveness from certain racialized groups.
In recent years, as public shootings of Black people receive attention, communication scholars have turned an eye to analyzing Black forgiveness whenever a socially visible violence occurs. Communication scholar Daniel Morris documents how news reporters frequently ask the relatives of victims of police brutality if they will forgive the perpetrators.
“We maintain that the wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause Black pain but also those grief-stricken Black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and [expeditious] ways that eases public consciences,” write scholars Andre Johnson and Earle Fischer.
Therefore, an individual choice to forgive may be influenced by larger societal pressures to do so, not just religious pressure but also racial pressure.
In broader culture, Perez argues, Black forgiveness narratives may reinforce the idea that we live in a more equitable, colorblind society than we actually do, thus letting society off the hook from having to dismantle systems of injustice.
“A lot of the prevailing literature is that forgiveness is letting a weight down. But the pressure to forgive can actually be quite burdensome,” says Perez. The field needs “more people to really think about the idea of how racism can permeate seemingly positive things.”
One of researcher Robert Enright’s (non-sequential) four phases of forgiveness is examining your anger. Perez says we must afford people the right to process that anger on their own timeline. “Sometimes we shy away from the negative emotions,” he says. “But anger gets people to push for change.”
Perez worries that forgiveness just “helps Black people survive in a toxic environment of racism as opposed to addressing the sociocultural worlds that reproduce racism.”
Forgiveness as a coping mechanism
However, despite our social realities, Perez recognizes that some individuals choose forgiveness as a part of their journey. For some, forgiveness may serve as a coping mechanism to survive the environment in which they live day to day—and it may have some benefits.
African Americans who cultivate forgiveness as a general disposition have decreased depressive symptoms, according to a study by Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a University of California, Berkeley, psychologist. She surveyed 101 African American college students who said they had experienced racial discrimination.
Approximately 27% of them met criteria for clinical depression, and the more racial discrimination they said they experienced, the higher their depression symptoms. But this link was weaker when people had a higher tendency to forgive.
The findings corroborated a 2017 study, which found that African American men who practiced forgiveness developed fewer depressive symptoms even as they experienced everyday racial discrimination. However, younger men reported experiencing racism more often and struggled more with depression and granting forgiveness.
Several scholars have also looked at forgiveness through the lens of health.
In a 2012 article, sociologist Michael McFarland, an associate professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues explored the results from a 2001 nationally representative survey of older American Christians—both Blacks and whites. The study found that Blacks who have a more forgiving disposition are less likely to experience alcohol abuse and chronic health conditions.
But those who lived in rundown neighborhoods did not experience the same benefits. They found that Blacks who live “in more deteriorated neighborhoods may not receive the health benefits from forgiveness that those in less deteriorated neighborhoods receive.”
Together, these studies suggest forgiveness has benefits for those who belong to racial minority groups, but they may be limited when other social factors are not addressed.
Forgiveness as a benefits and risk assessment
Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego, finds that people can cultivate unforgiveness as a survival mechanism, particularly in communities that receive underinvestment. Neighborhood culture there may encourage unforgiveness or even revenge to protect people from more harms. Being forgiving could be perceived as weakness and make someone vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
McCullough studies forgiveness through an evolutionary lens. He theorizes about what conditions lead to forgiveness.
After an offense, a victim has different choices about how to respond. In a 2021 review, McCullough and his colleague Thomas McCauley write, one option is to simply avoid the offender to reduce the likelihood of being harmed again—but that might be difficult depending on any prior relationship to the offender. The victim could take revenge, but that might have its own risks. Both of these strategies also run another risk: losing access to whatever benefits the exploiter offers, such as employment or educational opportunities, financial benefits, or even belonging, love, or acceptance.
Forgiveness might become the right solution, but it depends on the conditions that exist in a particular scenario. For example, a nonprofit that supports BIPOC youth relies on a high-profile donor. The donor makes some insensitive comments that reveal racial biases and are hurtful to staff members, who are also primarily members of these racial groups. In this case, the donor is a long-time partner of the organization and plays a vital role in connecting them to others in the community.
McCullough and his colleagues have found that our decision to forgive is related to our calculation of both the threat of future harm and the value of our relationship with the offender, though neither of these are necessarily the only clear cause of our choice to forgive.
If when confronted, the donor is dismissive and shows no intention to change, staff members might still choose a type of forgiveness to preserve the relationship, while remaining guarded around him. After all, the options to either avoid the offender or take revenge contain their own risks to the stability of the nonprofit.
But if the donor apologizes and takes accountability for the harm by committing to a racial bias training, the nonprofit director might value the relationship more and believe his staff is less likely to be harmed again—thus, encouraging forgiveness.
Intergroup forgiveness
Another line of inquiry is attempting to measure and define forgiveness in an intergroup setting, specifically as it applies to race-related offenses.
In 2015, Georgia State University psychologist Don Davis and his colleagues tested a newly created intergroup forgiveness survey with African American students, who answered questions about their decision to forgive, their perceptions of the value of relationships with an offending group, and how much they predicted being exploited by that group. Students also filled out questionnaires on forgiveness and microaggressions.
They found that students frequently chose to avoid the group—rather than forgive—when they did not judge relationships with that group to be valuable or thought future harm to be likely. The more they felt exploited, the more often they chose a strategy of revenge.
Taking it a step further, Davis and his colleagues asked a separate group of racially or ethnically marginalized students about how committed they were to religion and how connected they were to their racial or ethnic identity, alongside their intergroup forgiveness.
Within the population studied, their findings hinted that people with a stronger racial or ethnic identity showed more intergroup forgiveness. Of the participants, 72.5% had a strong racial or ethnic identity and were more likely to forgive, while the rest were less forgiving but varied in their sense of identity.
People with more religious commitment tended to show particular aspects of forgiveness indicating a decision to forgive—e.g., “I have made a commitment to forgiving them” and “My choice is to forgive them.” Davis says that this might support the idea that intending to forgive can be a coping strategy, similar to Stephens’s notion of forgiveness.
This research shows that interpersonal and intergroup forgiveness appear to be different things. Furthermore, members of the same group choose different strategies in response to race-based offenses, which only sometimes include forgiveness.
Radical forgiveness
Meanwhile, Perez agrees that there might be insights to learn from how Black Christians during the Civil Rights Movement reframed forgiveness not as weak but as power. Public, radical love expressed in peaceful protest highlighted the depths of racist hatred and aimed to move sympathetic whites to join them in social change.
In King’s writing on forgiveness, he was elaborating on the biblical text where Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a brother who sinned against him. While Peter asks if seven times is enough, Jesus challenges him to 70 times that amount.
King’s elaboration is that no one who forgives that much could do so without forgiveness becoming a permanent character trait. Yet it is by displaying that inner change—actively standing against injustice using (in his case) faith-informed non-violent civil action—that puts on display the depth of the evil underlying racial discriminations.
In a later chapter in “Strength to Love,” King wrote about loving our enemies: “Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
King’s aim was to forgive so hard and thoroughly that justice would flow.
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