Rajini Srikanth
Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts
Core Faculty, TCCS Program
I first started to think seriously about the linguistic act of apology when I encountered a comparison of the apology letters of two Presidents writing to Japanese American internees for the violation of their constitutional rights and for the material and psychological devastations to their lives caused by the internment.
The comparison is provided by Stewart Ikeda, and the two letters he assesses are those by President George H. Bush and President Clinton. His conclusion, after a careful examination of the structure of the two apology letters, is that Clinton’s letter is the more sincere and therefore the more effective, because he does not take refuge in bureaucratic language, does not use the passive voice to distance himself from taking responsibility for the internment, and explicitly states that racism and wartime hysteria were the reasons that the country – the leaders in particular but also the people – allowed such a gross violation of the rights of 120,000 people of Japanese descent to occur.
Ikeda does not consider whether an apology is a sincere speech act to begin with; he takes it for granted that an apology is worth delivering for an injury done and that an apology should communicate genuine remorse and self-reflection on the part of the one who caused the injury. If you have ever received a meaningful apology from someone who caused you harm – economic, psychological, medical or any other type – you likely remember, in your muscles and bones, the experience of feeling less weighed down, of feeling uplifted, of a certain kind of veil being removed from your view of the world, of the purging of anger, of the quieting of sorrow. An apology can alter you both psychologically and physiologically.
If you have ever received a meaningful apology from someone who caused you harm – economic, psychological, medical or any other type – you likely remember, in your muscles and bones, the experience of feeling less weighed down, of feeling uplifted, of a certain kind of veil being removed from your view of the world, of the purging of anger, of the quieting of sorrow.
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I’ve often wondered, what would Michael Brown’s mother feel like if she received an apology from Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael in August 2014? Or Eric Garner’s daughter, if she received an apology from the police officer whose chokehold strangled her father, in 2014? Would the apology have prolonged her own short life? She was an outspoken activist against police brutality. Did the stress of that task claim her life in 2017?
President Obama signed an Apology Resolution in 2009 for wrongs done to Native Americans, but this resolution is almost perfunctory and, moreover, the apology was not announced to Native American groups and brought to their attention. Robert Coulter of the Indian Law Resource Center observes, “What kind of an apology is it when they don’t tell the people they are apologizing to? For an apology to have any meaning at all, you do have to tell the people you’re apologizing to.” True. Other nations – Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – have issued public apologies for the harms done to indigenous peoples.
Nine states in the United States have issued apologies for slavery. But what does it mean to apologize for such an egregious wrong, a devastating violation that persisted for more than two centuries and affected millions of individuals? Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2014 essay in The Atlantic calls for reparations for slavery, describing the myriad ways in which white America has plundered black Americans and left them economically and psychologically vulnerable. That neither political party wants to discuss reparations – even to study what it would mean and how much it would cost – says something about the fundamental unwillingness of this country to acknowledge the deeply problematic foundations on which it stands, he says. So, while apologies for slavery have been issued, the conditions of Black life have changed little. There is a hollowness to the words, one could argue.
Other glaring omissions or inadequacies remain. Japan has still not issued an “unequivocal” apology to all the women from many Asian countries who were sexually exploited as “comfort women” for the soldiers of the Japanese army during World War II. The surviving women who were used as sex slaves do not accept as a meaningful and genuine apology the agreement that was reached between South Korea and Japan in 2015 on the matter of comfort women. The United States has not apologized for the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the radioactive poisoning of the environment and subsequent generations of Japanese.
One of my colleagues, who is sometimes justifiably cynical, has argued with me that apologies are suspect articulations. One can mask exploitative and oppressive practices by performing apologies that are skillfully crafted and delivered. Abject apologies can convey a sense of deep remorse, but in fact the injurer may not have fundamentally changed. A company can apologize for some serious lapse of oversight that resulted in death or injury: a medication that was priced too high and therefore inaccessible to those who really needed it. A hospital for a botched procedure: Surgeon Atul Gawande recommends apologizing for medical injuries even though in a culture as litigious as ours, an apology could be read as admission of deliberate wrongdoing and therefore culpability before the law.
But an apology can radically transform the possibilities for the future of a relationship between two people, between two countries, between two groups. It can eliminate fear and engender a new beginning. An apology can function like the big bang – creating the conditions for new life and new collaborations and harmonies. But what if each party in the disrupted relationship believes itself to be the injured subject and is therefore expecting the other party to deliver the apology? And this is where we come to that vexed issue of power.
The more powerful of the two parties involved should deliver the apology – after all, the powerful have less to lose than those without power. An apology by the powerful to those less powerful may even make the former feel a certain sense of righteous self-satisfaction: “see how generous and noble I am that I can set aside my pride and humble myself to this person, this group.” I would argue that even a self-serving apology, delivered by the more powerful party, can achieve a type of clearing of the fog, a parting of entangled branches, to deliver a clear view of the terrain that both parties can now traverse together.
David Grossman, Israeli novelist, essayist, and journalist, in a compelling speech delivered in 2006 on the occasion of the memorial rally for slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, exhorts his fellow Israelis to apologize to the Palestinians. Grossman is proudly Zionist, and as a committed Zionist he realizes that it is in the best interest of the Israeli Jews to reach out to the Palestinians and acknowledge the profound destruction of their way of life wrought by the founding of the state of Israel. Let us as a people, says Grossman, recognize the misery and suffering we have caused the Palestinians.
There is no way of knowing whether this apology would open up a new pathway for a meaningful interaction between Palestinians and the state of Israel, but it is certainly worth an effort. Should the Palestinians trust the sincerity of the utterance? Should they accept the apology as a genuine offering of recognition of their humanity? And, herein, I believe, lies the crux of the linguistic act. Can it carry within it all the complexities of sentiment and understanding that the injured party needs to feel from the injuring party so that the injured group feels there is a deep and genuine desire to connect emanating from its adversary? The performance of the apology – and I admit that initially it might be primarily performance – must be skilled and rich, textured and complex – so that it carries within it the potential for transition from performance to desire, ritual to internalized sentiment and practice.
Can it carry within it all the complexities of sentiment and understanding that the injured party needs to feel from the injuring party so that the injured group feels there is a deep and genuine desire to connect emanating from its adversary?
Aaron Lazare, well known researcher on apology, observes that delivering an apology can purge the injuring party of guilt and shame and, he says, not only can it heal a broken relationship, but it can also enhance a relationship because “something is discovered” in the act of apologizing. While I agree in the main with Lazare’s belief in the salutary effects of apology on the one making it, I wonder what happens when the injuring party feels no guilt and shame because the party that has suffered the injury is not considered “fully human” or fully deserving of the embrace of humanity. Would white police officers, who are by and large culturally conditioned to see the black man’s body as a weapon, truly embrace the humanity of the African American male? Would they feel sufficient guilt and shame at having wrongly injured or killed a black man so that they would be moved to offer an apology to the family member or loved one of the injured or dead man?
Shame and guilt are necessarily accompanied by introspection. Without introspection, without the capacity to look within oneself, there can be no apology. The introspective act requires one to acknowledge culpability – to be able to say, “I did a wrong”—and to feel genuine sorrow, shame, or guilt for the wrong one has done. And, as Lazare reminds us, a sincere apology also signals “forbearance” – a promise that one will not repeat the offense. Apologizing is an act of humility – one is prepared to “de-center” oneself and to foreground the emotional well-being and dignity of another person – that individual or group one has harmed. (I borrow the word “de-center” from Elaine Scarry.)
A sincere apology is a gift: the gift of your vulnerability and your humility to those whose suffering you have caused. You go as a supplicant asking that your gift be received, and in that gesture, you demonstrate that you are seeking to build a relationship with that person, that group, whom you previously had treated with indifference, callousness, or hostility.