I think about that expectation, to hold off injustice with one arm while still consistently offering forgiveness with the other. I think about how often that is what blackness in America amounts to. Even when grandmothers are burying their children, and their children’s children. What forgiveness looks like when there are still churches being blown apart, still black bodies who arrived to pray, and ended up murdered. When the right arm is reaching into a fire to push away decades of injustice that still presents itself, how long before the whole body is engulfed in flames?
