Forgiveness in Black and White
"Ebony and Ivory" was a bad song. I wish there were more songs like it.
When we think of forgiveness, we usually think of people who have gone through a traumatic event that might involve losing a loved one and they end up forgiving the perpetrator. But forgiveness isn't just about forgiving someone who murders your sister- it also has a role in how we deal with one another, especially on the issue of race.
A few days ago, my husband and I were listening to SiriusXM as we drove to a restaurant for dinner. Being members of Generation X, we were listening to the 80s on 8 station which was playing the Top 40 songs for this week in 1982 (they have the OG MTV VJs doing the countdown, but I much better prefer replaying the old Casey Kasem version instead). The #1 song this week 41 years ago was Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder singing "Ebony and Ivory." Two thoughts came as the song played.
The first one is that it's a terrible song.
The second one is that I miss the sentiment that the song conveyed.
Ebony and Ivory is a song of its time when synthesizers were starting to be used in pop music and while it might have seemed high-tech in '82 it doesn't seem so now. But bad synths aside, the lyrics talk about something that looking back seems rather profound: two well-known musicians talking about racial harmony. In the early 80s this talking about whites and blacks together was at least for me nice and incredibly normal. I was of the generation that grew up watching Sesame Street where there were a lot of Black and Latino kids that looked like me and spoke at times in Spanish mixed in with white kids. I was young enough that this kind of integration was normal for me. Of course, 20 years before Paul and Stevie were crooning at a piano, there were parts of the United States where blacks and whites couldn't mingle. The Loving v. Virginia ruling that would strike down laws against interracial marriage was still five years away. The fact that two artists of different races could sing a schlocky song a mere two decades later is a miracle.
The song talked about differences, but it also talked about what unites us: our common humanity. "We all know, that people are the same wherever you go," they say. "There is good and bad in everyone." In the 1980s there was a push to focus on what bound us together. That didn't mean that our differences didn't matter, but what mattered more than our differences was what united us: the fact that we are human, and that we can do great things and horrible things.
As I listened to the song, I felt a twinge. The twinge was a sense that this belief that while we are different we are also the same seems so distant these days. In many ways when it comes to race relations, it seems that the hope that is linked by a common humanity seems quaint, and maybe to some people it seems even offensive. The song never talks about forgiveness, but it's there as they talk about learning to live with each other, and acknowledging the good and the bad that lie within each soul regardless of the color of the skin.
As a society, we talk a lot about diversity, and on the surface this is a good thing. If you look at television or go into a major chain like Target, you can see a commitment to diversity that wasn't seen in 1982. As a society, we are far more diverse than we used to be. We see people of every color, sexuality, and gender and on a certain level, that's good. While the results of legalized racism might still be felt today, it is considered beyond the pale to be overtly racist. More women, more people of color, and more people from LGBTQ backgrounds have a role in our society. Diversity isn't simply a far-away dream, but it is becoming a reality.
And yet, we feel more divided. I think part of the reason is that while we are more diverse, we are less forgiving these days.
Over 30 years later, another white artist teamed up with an African American artist to sing a song about better understanding between the races. In 2013, Country artist Brad Paisley released the song "Accidental Racist" with hip-hop legend LL Cool J joining in. The song has Paisley trying to show the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of Southern Pride and not simply racism. In the lyrics, Paisley explains the reasoning behind the song: "We're still picking up the pieces, walking on eggshells, fighting over yesterday" as well as "Paying for the mistakes that a lot of folks made long before we came," stating "We're all left holding the bag here, left with the burden of these generations. And I think the younger generations are really kind of looking for ways out of this."
The song could be a bit cringe at least by today's standards, especially when it talks about wearing the Confederate flag. And what I heard was not going to make it memorable musically. But Paisley along with LL Cool J were trying to do the same thing McCartney and Wonder did three decades before, find a way to bridge the divisions over race- finding a way to learn to live with each other and learning to accept each other.
To no one's surprise, it was pilloried in the wider culture. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic that there were better ways to celebrate Southern culture than the Stars and Bars which was the focus of the song and came close to calling Paisley a racist:
Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.
Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.
The sentiment behind the two songs was based in a shared humanity and frailty. Coates’ response is not one that focuses on shared humanity but on difference. Coates’ answer to Paisley is to celebrate Southern Pride on his terms and not on Paisley's. Instead of trying to understand intent, it casts an assumption on Paisley's beliefs marking them suspect.
The belief behind this newsletter, the concept of IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations seems to say that diversity has to be about community. But the diversity that we might talk about these days doesn't feel communal. It doesn't feel universal. There is a difference on the surface, but underneath you get the feeling that there is conformity and exclusivity that keeps some people out. There isn't a sense of our common humanity as much as there is a certain way of being that we must join.
It's hard to have IDIC if you don't have a sense of forgiveness between people because all human interaction is going to fall short.
Words like forgiveness, grace, and toleration don't hold much value in our culture. And lest you think this is just a problem among progressives; the recent dustup among Southern Baptists where they are kicking out churches that dare ordain women, is an example of not showing humility or forgiveness towards the other.
In a 2021 essay, the late Tim Keller wrote about how forgiveness is fading from modern society. He shares several examples of recent racial atrocities including the muder of 9 church goers in South Carolina in 2015 where African Americans forgave the perpetrators. The responses to these acts of mercy by younger generations was interesting. Many saw forgiveness as a way for white Americans to not come face to face with their guilt. "Today, after the renewal of the racial justice movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the emphasis on guilt and justice is ever more on the rise and the concept of forgiveness seems, especially to the younger generation, increasingly problematic," Keller wrote. He writes there are many reasons why this is a problem and one of them is the rise of shame/honor culture. What does that have to do with diversity? Shame and honor, lead to prizing victimhood, according to Keller, it becomes essential to our identity. He wrote:
According to Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, the therapeutic culture has converted us into a collection of “self-actualizers,” whose primary concern is to get respect and affirmation of one’s own identity. But the therapeutic culture also taught us to think of ourselves as individuals needing protection from society and from various groups with power who oppress us. So, ironically, we have developed “a shame and honor culture of victimhood.” Greater honour and moral virtue are assigned to people the more they have been victimized and oppressed by society or others in power. So the further down the existing social ladder one is, the greater the possibilities for honour.
In the new culture, companies, institutions, and governing agencies are now tasked not with treating all individuals equally, but with the moral obligation to defend victims—those who have been oppressed by the powerful. This provides a second ring of honour in the emerging culture. While highest honour comes to victims, it secondarily comes to defenders of victims. So now there is no better way for a business, school, or government to gain honour (and, frankly, to divert attention from their own wealth and power) than to mercilessly punish anyone seen as a victimizer.
Campbell and Manning’s critique is that this new honour society—also called “cancel culture”—ends up valuing fragility over strength, creating a society of constant, good-versus-evil conflict over the smallest issues as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of the victim. It atrophies our ability to lovingly overlook slights (cf. 1 Peter 4:8: “Love covers a multitude of sins”). But most of all, it sweeps away the very concept of forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is seen now as radically unjust and impractical, as short-circuiting the ability of victims to gain honour and virtue as others rise to defend them.
The role of forgivenss, its fading role in our culture and how things have changed from the 1980s has much to do with the role of the self in the intervening four decades. Keller notes that our culture has become more therapeutic which means it is focused more on the role of the self than it is on others.
Keller adds that concepts like social justice which have their roots in the Biblical story have become shorn of their original sacred roots. Instead of seeing values like social justice as rooted in the sacred, these values are considered sacred on their own.
But without the roots, social justice can become rather curdled, taking positive values and making them rather oppressive. As Alan Jacob notes:
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.
Over the last few decades we have lost the ability to see people who aren't part of our tribe as fellow humans in need of as much love and grace as the next guy. Instead we are focused on ourselves and what hurts us or harms us instead of how we can love and care for the other. The thing is, as much as we prize diversity, I don't think we can get to there if we aren't able to see one another as faulty humans in need of grace and forgiveness.
In a sermon called "Loving Your Enemies," Martin Luther King writes that for reconciliation to happen, we have to be able to forgive. "He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love," King said. He continues:
Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt. The words “I will forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done” never explain the real nature of forgiveness. Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing it totally from his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, “I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.” Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.
Ebony and Ivory was a schlocky song and Accidental Racist was cringe. But we need more of their sentiment if we actually want a diverse society where we truly respect and care for one another.