Apologies
What makes a good apology, political & public apologies, reconciliation, and getting broken up with on a post-it note.
**listen to the voiceover to read along with me :)
As of late, I've been having recurring dreams about someone who ended our friendship in a tragically mean way —to say the absolute least. In the dreams they’re either telling me about their new life after our rift or apologizing for the pain they caused me. I never say anything. I’m there, conscious and present within the dream, but I never say a word. Because what do you say to the person who betrayed you, your trust, and your safety? Even in my dreams, I don’t know.
There’s an episode of Sex and the City, where Carrie is dating a fellow writer (nick)named Burger. At the time, Carrie’s career is taking off and she gets a book deal, concurrently Burrger’s recently released book is a flop. Threatened by her success, Burger succumbs to his insecurities and ghosts Carrie. He sleeps over one night and in the morning is nowhere to be found, all that is left behind is a post-it note posted to her laptop that reads:
“I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me —”
Carrie uses the post-it break-up as an excuse to spiral, and also to get out of going to jail for smoking a joint (rightfully so). Would it have been better to be ghosted, or is this post-it and the flagrant “I’m sorry” a suitable basic apology?
Well, we have to look at the definition of an apology. “Lazare, a professor of psychiatry, offers the following ‘basic definition’ of an apology: ‘an acknowledgment of an offense and an expression of remorse.’”1
So....Burger’s post-it sort of meets the definition, because, honestly, how much can you really fit on a post-it? Maybe he should have posted a video to Twitter (now renamed “X” by owner El*n M*sk, but I never updated the app so mine still has the Twitter logo), or Instagram, publicly apologizing to Carrie. That’s what all the other low-alphabet-list celebrities are doing nowadays.
In our current culture, it seems we demand apologies from everyone except those who have actually partook in wrongdoings. We forcefully demand public apologies from F-list celebrities after they cheated on their wife or something else stupid, but we won’t mention to the avoidant friend that their spaciness is making us insecure, we just stop talking to them. We accept haphazard admissions of regret from public figures with whom we’ve developed weird idealized parasocial relationships with but hold on to resentments with people in our real lives until they boil over into an explosion of pain. I’m not advocating for bringing watered-down therapy speak to the group chat, but if someone you care about hurts you, you have to make it known so a genuine apology can be made. “[W]e rarely make explicit precisely what we expect from a gesture of contrition. As a result, apologizing has become a vague, clumsy, and sometimes spiteful ritual.”2
Clearly, there is some type of social duty to make public apologies, they have become a sort of empty write-off to excuse bad behavior. I literally do not give a fuck if a celebrity does or does not make a public apology for cheating, it is not my relationship, who the fuck cares. Go apologize to your partner, not your followers on Instagram. But everything is managed and maintained by public relations representatives and marketing teams, so maybe apologizing to their followers is going to be more significant to their lives than apologizing to their partner. It’s all about saving face and relinquishing the guilt imposed by others. So, a 2-minute 45-second video of Mila Kunis and her husband apologizing for defending their co-star after he was convicted of rape becomes the norm to restore the celebrity status quo. The lackluster reading of a scripted apology from Kunis and her husband was probably worse than no apology at all, and yet people demanded they say something. However, we do not demand an apology from president Joseph R Biden after lying about the beheading of 40 babies in israel, a blatant lie that caused and still is causing extensive harm.
But of course, an apology is going to become meaningless when “sorry” is used as common speak bread and butter. In high school, I started saying sorry more than I ever had in my entire life. In addition to being a teenage girl who, thanks to social conditioning under patriarchy is required to apologize for everything, I think it was because I was surrounded by suburban white people who unconsciously uphold the white supremacist pillar of the fear of open conflict. According to, many sources but specifically, the paper “White Supremacy Culture” from the Minnesota Historical Society’s Department of Inclusion and Community Engagement, fear of conflict is one of the 12 pillars of white supremacist culture that are damaging to both, people of color, and white people. Fear of open conflict can be defined by:
people in power are scared of conflict and try to ignore it or run from it
when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem
emphasis on being polite
equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line3
By senior year saying “sorry” was so indotrinated in me that I would say “sorry” to the wall when I bumped into it. Saying “sorry” means nothing anymore when it’s used as a catch-all & inadvertently upholds white supremacist values.
Apologizing, or admitting fault can feel like a bruise to our sense of self. Sociologist Erving Goffman noted in his book Relations in Public, that by apologizing “we figuratively divide the self in two and cast off the past self.”4
Apologies represent a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with the blame giving, and, by implication, is worthy of being brought back into the fold.5
A lot of people cannot face their self, and when/if they can they don’t want to admit that they’re a flawed human with the capability of making a mistake. Like I said in On Being Wrong back in April, our sense of self is tied up in our beliefs, and to be wrong feels like a crack in our belief system. But apologizing and holding ourselves accountable for our wrongs, is the puddy that can repair our belief system. Ignoring the wrongdoing or distributing blame robs both the victim and the perpetrator of the ability to heal, learn, and reach reconciliation. A good apology demonstrates to the victim that the perpetrator is “worthy” of forgiveness and that reconciliation is possible. I think being able to divide your ego from your self begets that “good apology”. Apologizing has multiple elements: one must ditch their ego, express remorse and chagrin, acknowledge the wrongdoing, sympathize, renounce the bad behavior, commit to bettering their future behavior, and make atonement.
(Speaking of apologies, Watch Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) if you like history, romance, and want to righteously hate a little girl.) My 5th grade teacher put it simply when she was scolding a classmate who kept acting out and would always try to smooth it all over by saying “sorry”, she said: “If you were sorry you wouldn’t do it again.”
An arbitrary “sorry” is like using Elmer’s glue to repair a crack in the Golden Gate Bridge. It doesn’t do anything... I’ll even go as far as saying that an apology made without remorse is comparable to a lie —because they’re not sorry, there is no chagrin, there is no penance, and there won’t be atonement. “Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be. . . .”6
I’m so good at lying it could be my superpower. But it’s a superpower like Bruce Banner’s Hulk, I don’t want to have to use my powers, I’m too good at smashing, too good at lying. I would much rather tell the truth because —maybe it’s positivism maybe it's naivety, maybe it’s a combination of both— but I hope that my honesty can beget honesty from the relationships in my life. Truth is complex, argumentatively subjective, and hard to maintain; but the truth must be regarded.
However, lying is a way to retain power, unfortunately, some of the most important people in our society sustain their power by lying. Much the same, lies and diverting blame about political and historical wrongdoings undermine the victims’ pain and can cause further harm. Lies that downplay the horrors of slavery, lies that cover up the depravity of the Israeli government, lies that abusers and manipulators tell themselves, and lies from those in positions of oppressive power who want to keep that power, prevail because the lie is simpler than the truth, and forgoes accountability.
For any victim hoping for reconciliation, the perpetrator needs to bridge the chasm created by the wrongdoing. For some, that will be an apology card and some flowers, for others, specifically, those harmed by centuries of apartheid in South Africa it looks like the TRC, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC was a court-like-body established by the new South African government in 1995, framed as a way to attempt to heal the country after 350 years of apartheid. If you don’t know what apartheid is, or just need clarity, I will tell you:
Apartheid is when a government has different laws for different sects of people and can explicitly oppress people with those laws. An apartheid state is an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.” Think American Jim Crow laws maintaining “separate but equal” status (that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1965), think modern-day israel designating different roads that Palestinians in the West Bank can or cannot use, think of laws against black and white people getting married in America, think laws against interfaith marriages in israel (still in place today), think president Ulysses S. Grant banning Jews from walking on certain roads in Tennessee, think black veterans being excluded from the GI bill that gave white WW2 veterans tuition assistance, low-cost mortgages, and low-interest entrepreneurial loans, I could literally go on and on just about these two countries alone & their oppressive laws against all ethnicities, races, and religions, but you get the picture.
In contrast to the Nuremberg trials of the nazi’s after WW2 ended, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasized investigations of victims and perpetrators of apartheid crimes and claimed to reach towards goals of truth recovery, reparations, and laws to ensure these crimes never happen again. The TRC allowed people to make voluntary claims for amnesty for their crimes upon full confession and proof of crimes.
The TRC has become almost synonymous with the notion that an apology for the past is sufficient to obtain forgiveness, even for the gravest of crimes, given the equating of the amnesty process with forgiveness. This is in complete contradiction to the notion that an apology should be victim-centred and not compromise the rights of victims to justice, truth, and reparations, and should instead facilitate the delivery of those rights.7
My sister visited South Africa a few years ago, although there is no legal apartheid in South Africa anymore, the country is still primarily divided. Of course, the pain of 350 years of oppression does not just disappear overnight, but it seems as if the TRC believed that an apology from the state, as the perpetrator of institutionalized oppression, would subsequently entitle them to forgiveness from the victims.
Similarly, as Junetheeth just passed, why would the U.S. government think that giving black people a federal holiday would be an adequate apology for the heinous crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and over 60 years of people just hating black people in general?
While I do appreciate the day off from work, the Juneteenth “holiday” is a lame excuse for atonement. What black people in America really need are reparations.
And if your eyes just glazed over the word “reparations” because the thought of giving almost 50 million people monetary compensation seems like a farce, go fuck yourself, think about it this way, German reparations to survivors of the holocaust during WW2 set the example for the success of compensation regarding atrocities perpetrated by the state.
Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes released a new article through the Harvard Kennedy School outlining the ways that the U.S. government has previously compensated people who have been victims of nonracial harms perpetrated by the state. “Included in the article is a detailed table of over 36 government programs, beginning as early as 1862 and ranging to the present day, designed to offer some form of compensation for harms against Americans.”8
Americans harmed by the development and testing of the nuclear bomb were paid by the U.S. government with the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), compensated coal miners, and residents of coal towns afflicted with black lung, and I think we all remember in March 2020 getting stimulus payment per the CARES Act. In instances not related to the state, the descendants of slave owners tracked down the descendants of the enslaved and developed a land trust for them, and last month I got $6 from a class action lawsuit. “The numerosity and diversity of reparatory compensation programs created by our government makes clear that reparations for nonracial harms is regular and routine.”9 Paying people who have been wronged is the norm, and if black Americans do not get a chance to grow, in this country, on an equal playing field, they will never receive justice. You could have 13 more juneteenths and it wouldn’t matter, a federal holiday does not beget forgiveness, accountability, penance, and reconciliation begets forgiveness.
That being said, governmental reconciliations are not handled as simply as interpersonal reconciliations. As I get older I incorporate more and more people into my life that I hope to keep around for a long time, and if I do something wrong I know I’m going to have to eat my ego, hold myself accountable, and ask for forgiveness—and that’s fine with me. Repairing the relationship is more important than any pride that I’m going to have to swallow. But then again…I could always just leave a note and avoid the problem…but that’s what insecure cowards do.
Nick Smith. (2008). I Was Wrong : The Meanings of Apologies. Cambridge University Press.
Nick Smith. (2008). I Was Wrong : The Meanings of Apologies. Cambridge University Press.
https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf
Edwin L. Battistella. 2014. Sorry About That : The Language of Public Apology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page 2
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Adrienne Rich, from “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”
Sooka, Yasmin. “Can an Apology Ever Be Enough for Crimes of the Past?” In Unsettling Apologies: Critical Writings on Apology from South Africa, edited by Melanie Judge and Dee Smythe, 1st ed., 29–52. Bristol University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2xqnf6r.8.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/fairness-justice/harvard-professors-newly-published-research-reveals
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