There are certain events whose horror is of such a magnitude that the vocabulary of apology and contrition seem entirely inappropriate, even intolerable. The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes that “radical evil” is neither punishable nor forgivable, its scale rendering the idea of retributive justice unthinkable. These crimes can defy response on account of their sheer size, as with genocide. But they can also be crimes that on the surface are more ordinary – with established social protocols, however imperfect, to deal with them – and underneath it are charged by decades of historical injustice and violence, such as the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
In the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, which led to Black Lives Matter protests globally, the apparently unanswerable evil of racist violence left many white people (including myself) paralysed by confusion about how to respond. There was the question of whether to respond publicly and vocally at all if doing so was inevitably self-serving, an attempt to disown any perceived responsibility for the persistence of racism. There were suggestions to donate silently to relevant funds, and then opposing suggestions that acting invisibly was inadequate. For me, the crucial question became not only about whether one should express sorrow in public but also about the notion and limits of apology. Should you extend an apology for an injustice that you did not personally carry out, but in which you feel yourself to be to some degree complicit? Or is the abstraction of such an apology an insult to the idea of meaningful reconciliation?
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