Are you bummed by the humungous number of insincere, self-serving, clueless, defensive “sorry if”s you’ve heard of late? Join us, won’t you, on a journey of thoughtful apologies! We have for your delectation a knitting magazine, a rapper, a rapist, and a humorist. Let’s begin!
#1: Here’s a well-crafted one from Laine Magazine! Who knew there was “a high-quality Nordic knit & lifestyle magazine“? Obviously there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our fiber philosophy.
This appeared on both FB and Instagram.
Why is it a good apology? It uses the word “sorry.” It takes responsibility. It acknowledges the effect of what it did wrong. It promises action, and in the right way (reaching out more to designers of color, and noting that people of color should not be expected to do the work of educating white people). Alas, the comments on the FB post are unfortunate but unsurprising; not everyone will appreciate an apology or get why it’s important. Yet we’re obligated to apologize for our screw-ups. No one else is obligated to accept them. The only thing that would have made this apology better was a recap of what led to the apology — what’s the backstory here? Otherwise, it’s very good.
#2. Chance the Rapper’s apology for working with R. Kelly. In the wake of Lifetime’s series, Surviving R. Kelly, Chance tells interviewer Jamilah Lemieux, “Making a song with R. Kelly was a mistake. I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women,” he said. “I made a mistake.” To Snarly, a white woman, this comment was sufficient; he seemed to be honestly critical of his past decisions. Snarly, however, is not the demo. It’s more important to listen to the voices of Black women. And in great numbers, Black women did not accept this. Chance then said that his quote was taken out of context, which is almost always a cop-out. (And why it is a square in Bad Apology Bingo.)
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) January 6, 2019
However, in context, his quote WAS clearer!
pic.twitter.com/0J46S5YOkW — Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) January 6, 2019
The quote: “We’re programed to really be hypersensitive to black male oppression. It’s just prevalent in all media. And when you see n****s getting beat up by the police, it’s men…Slavery, for a lot of people, they envision men in chains, but black women are, you know, exponentially a higher oppressed and violated group of people. Like, just in comparison to the whole world, you know? Maybe I didn’t care because I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women.”
This is a fine apology. Uses the word “apologize” rather than “regret,” takes responsibility, offers an explanation that is not an excuse (he’s CLEARLY being self-critical) — he’s pointing out a historical, longterm problem that he has been part of: Failing to believe Black women, and/or failing to support them, because the voices and experiences of Black men have been given more credence, volume, and primacy. SorryWatch gathers that Chance is often viewed as a problematic figure. But we are an apology blog, and this is a good apology.
#3. A rapist apologizes to his victim. In a piece for The Atlantic, Deborah Copaken (who is, full disclosure, a friend of SorryWatch) writes about confronting her college rapist, 30 years later, in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation mishegas. Read the story here. The upshot: Copaken wrote the man a letter. He called her a half-hour later and said, “Oh, Deb. Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I’m filled with shame.”
We spoke for a long time, maybe 20 minutes. He had no recollection of raping me, just of the party where we’d met. He’d blacked out that night from excessive drinking and soon thereafter entered Alcoholics Anonymous. But that, he said, was no excuse. The fact that he’d done this to me and that I’d been living with the resulting trauma for 30 years was horrifying to him. He was so sorry, he said. He just kept repeating those words, “I’m so sorry,” over and over.
Suddenly, 30 years of pain and grief fell out of me. I cried. And I cried. And I kept crying for the next several hours, as I prepared for Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of forgiveness. And then, suddenly, I was cleansed. Reborn. The trauma was gone. All because of a belated apology.
Snarly was also sexually assaulted in college (three years after Deb, at the same school), by a then-sophomore. When Snarly reported the incident to a college administrator, the administrator said, “Well, it’s your word against his.” She advised not reporting him to the Administrative Board. So Snarly didn’t. The administrator ruled that the sophomore was no longer allowed to come into Snarly’s residential suite; Snarly’s roommates, who were also friends with the sophomore, were annoyed at Snarly. Didn’t she understand that he was damaged, that he was only expressing affection in his messed-up way, that he had been a childhood victim of sexual assault? The sophomore filled her voicemail with taunting messages and stood with his toes on her doorjamb as she entered and exited, gently crooning, “Marjorie haaaaates meeeeee! I’m not allowed to come iiiiiiiin!” The next year, Snarly petitioned to move to a different house (an uncommon request) and it was granted. She never spoke to the sophomore again. He reportedly committed suicide several years after graduation. The administrator, on the other hand, is now a full professor at another university. As #metoo turned into a crescendo, Snarly wrote an email to her, saying, “I hope if a student ever comes to you today with a report of being sexually assaulted, you’ll do better.” Snarly never heard back. All of this is a longwinded way to say that Snarly understands how powerful an apology like the one Deb got can be; Snarly yearned, ached, for such an apology. A good apology can be a huge help in facilitating forgiveness, and the mental and even physical health benefits of forgiveness are huge. ACCORDING TO SCIENCE. Again, though, you should not feel guilty if you can’t forgive. Be proud that you’re still here.
#4: A completely fictional apology from Louis CK! Many of us (Snarly included) have written off this gross wanker. Others — including comic Sarah Silverman — have not. To each their own! We repeat: No one is owed redemption! And people who do horrid things over and over (thinking of Harvey Weinstein here) are unlikely to deliver a great apology. The same monstrous ego and amorality that let them do the bad things in the first place generally prevent them from having the compassion to see things from their victim’s point of view. For profoundly vile people, an apology is only an attempt to get out of trouble. Personally, given his earlier apology (which some folks thought was good, but let’s just say SorryWatch disagreed), Snarly finds it hard to imagine Louis CK apologizing well enough for her to grant him absolution. But writer Nell Scovell managed to write a pretend stand-up set for Louis that MIGHT, if it were real, make Snarly think about forgiving him. It’s even funny! That quite an accomplishment, though not altogether surprising from the author of Just The Funny Parts, a very sharp and often bitter account of Scovell’s 30-odd years in the trenches of male writing rooms.
We have two more good apologies in our pocket. But this post is already long, so we’ll save them for a rainy day when we need a little humans-don’t-always-suck sunshine.
Snarly, I’m very upset about what happened to you in college.
I have a 23-year-old daughter who went away for college (as far as New Zealand for one term) and if I had heard of someone doing that to my daughter, I would not probably have bothered with the legal procedures and their process of shaming her for some vicious animal’s act — I would have introduced that animal to the business end of my Alex Rodriguez model baseball bat and tried to break his home run numbers (696) on his head.
That being said, I have not had to do so. But she was tormented by a classmate in high school, and that required a conference with his family, our family, the principal, and the police officer who was responsible for schools.
The young man accused my daughter of yelling “white power” in the lunchroom. I turned to my daughter and said, “On pain of perjury and grounding, did you say that?”
“No!” my daughter gasped.
I whirled on the young man and ripped into him for first, being a liar, and second, picking on my daughter. After doing that, I demanded to know from the kid what he had against my daughter. Thumping the table, I yelled, “What’s your problem? I want to hear this!”
His mother tried to stop me, but I yelled, “He’s 14 years old! All 14-year-olds have all the answers! Ask them! He thinks he chose to be 14! He knows what’s cool! He knows what music to listen to and what attitudes to have! I want an answer! This is not a rhetorical question!”
He gave tears as a non-rhetorical answer.
He left my daughter alone, and evaded most discipline as his mother was shipping him to a Catholic school in our city next year, where discipline would be tougher. My wife, a victim and survivor of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, exchanged a smile with me.
Sure enough, a few years later, our newspaper’s top columnist wrote a piece about kids who had been designed a series of inspirational-message signs that resembled “Walk Don’t Walk” signs, that were attached to lampposts and street signs across our city. The column was about one kid who had done his sign from the county’s juvenile hall.
He was there, the column said, because he had committed an armed robbery of a bodega. He had also quit a Catholic school. And fathered a child. All at age 16.
The kid was my daughter’s tormentor. I didn’t tell my daughter and wife. They read the story and told me. For once in my life, there was justice in the world.
My daughter went off to a top liberal arts college, graduating 11th in her class, top 26 percent from her college, and is working in her field. I don’t know what happened to her tormentor.
Sometimes Proverbs 22:29 is right: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.”
What a story. I’m really glad your daughter is doing so well!
She can do anything but play the clarinet. She found that out in middle school on the band.
She used the experience to write a college application essay about learning from failure.
I had missed that piece in the Atlantic.
Thank you – what a description of the way shame breaks and shatters to dust, even in the presence of a genuine, long overdue apology.
And …I can’t even speak to your college administrator’s choice in the way that she spoke to you. I am sorry you have to walk that road.
Thank you, Tanita. xoxo
Show me an “educator” and I’ll show you a jerk.
“Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Those who can’t teach gym, become school administrators.”
Does it help to make a snarky, judgmental generalization disguised as wit? I don’t think it adds much to the discussion, but it did make me remember my high school gym teacher who taught me a great deal about being a strong, independent woman.
My teachers taught me, personally, in the top academic high school in the United States, that I was “the stupidest person in class,” an utterly worthless human being, and all I was good for was to repair their cars, unless I chose to be a mathematician, biochemist, or engineer. Unfortunately, I had the lowest math grades for any student in the history of the school who did not take the final examination while high on drugs. The head of the Math Department told me he was going to transfer me on his own authority — and never mind the law — to Automotive High School. At any rate, all my teachers told me, everything was going down on my PERMANENT RECORD CARD, which would guarantee that I could do nothing in life but fix cars or clean toilets.
The “stupidest person in class” definition came after I was stupid enough to put up my hand in chemistry class and give the correct answer to the name of a chemical formula. I was the “stupidest person in class” for giving the right answer. I exploded at the teacher, went home, and tried to kill myself. Regrettably, I failed.
As for my gym teacher, he ordered me to head soccer balls while wearing glasses, which broke them in two. When my mother came in to complain to that teacher at parent-teacher conference day, the teacher (in front of his colleagues) exploded and went off on her, moving my mother to tears.
While she cried and he raged, he actually had the nerve to phone his assistant principal and supervisor, to ask for his support in berating my mother. The AP materialized to find the teacher hollering at Mom, her in tears, and awkwardly escorted her out of the room and up to his office. He “apologized for the teacher.”
The teacher never apologized to her or me.
The next day, the AP and one of the other teachers asked me in the locker room if I had any problems with the gym course. I slammed my locker hard to keep their attention and said, “Yeah. that guy made me break my glasses and then cursed out my mother. If he ever does that again, I’ll kill you,” pointing at the AP, “and you,” pointing at the teacher. “And if you don’t understand why, just ask yourself, ‘What would you do if someone cursed out your mother?'” They looked at each other and nodded. My family was on the hook for the glasses. The teacher never apologized.
When my assistant principal fed me cookies to which I was deathly allergic, and I lay on the cot in the nurse’s office, going into anaphylactic shock, he and two flunky teachers (who had been present at the original giveaway) came bouncing into the office, big smiles on their faces, making jokes, and grabbing their bellies at my agony. Then they bounced out again, laughing hard.
The nurse gave me a chit to go home, and as I shuffled past the AP’s office, he peered out from his secretaries’ desks, and said, “Hey, Kiwiwriter, how’re you doing?”
I grabbed my stomach in pain, and the AP mocked me, going, “Oooh, oooh, oooh!” Then he pointed at me and laughed hard, before retreating into his inner office. One of the secretaries came out to sign off on my chit, and I let her have it for her boss’s sadistic behavior and refused to accept the chit.
“You can’t go home without the chit,” she gasped.
“Watch me,” I said. “If he thinks it’s so damn funny that I nearly die, it must be fall down pee-in-your-pants hilarious if I actually die. Maybe I’ll give him his wish.”
“Please wait here,” the secretary said, running back into her office. I turned around, went home, and spent the rest of the day in agony, took some Benadryl, passed out, and stayed home the next day, composing a 15-page single-spaced letter to the AP, which I delivered to him the following morning.
He was sitting in his office with the same flunkies. He greeted me with a big smile. I handed the 15 pages of yellow foolscap to him, and said, in my clipped British accent (I have two), “I have a letter for you, sir.”
He looked at the top of it, with a big grin, and the grin slowly evaporated. He looked up at me after a few seconds and said, in a nervous voice, “I will read this.”
I then left.
The 15 pages started with a description of my version of the previous day’s events and my pain. The rest was sarcastic applause for his raw sadism and comparing it with the behavior of the Allgemeine SS in the Nazi Konzentrationlagers, with him inferior in humanity to the Nazis. I continued by recommending that he be promoted to Chancellor of the New York Board of Education, so that his theories on treating wounded and injured students — particularly those who were not math-minded — be made system wide, and ended by saying in a less sarcastic tone that I did not want his apology…just a memo to all the teachers and administrators on the proper way to treat wounded students.
After I emerged from my next class, I had to walk by this AP’s office. He stood out front, looking like he’d been hit in the head by a brick. He didn’t say anything. He put out his right hand, wearing a pained expression.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
He extended the hand. I waved at it in dismissal and went on my way.
A week later, one of the flunkies came up to me in the hall and made a follow-up joke about the incident. After I went off on him, I stormed downstairs to the AP’s office and let him have it, with a follow-up letter…ripping him for not having read my original note.
Finally, he apologized. It was a little too late.
Sometime after that came the “stupidest person in class” incident, which was, of course, in March of my senior year. I flew out of class from that, went home, and tried to kill myself. Like everything else in my life before or since, it failed.
So I wrote a letter to the AP, making him an offer I figured he couldn’t refuse. The deal was that I would kill myself in the manner he chose in front of the witnesses he wanted for their amusement and his, if he would do two things:
1. Provide my family with a written memo as to why my death was a good thing and justified.
2. Provide my disabled brother with the support, assistance , consideration, and respect he was not receiving — presumably because his teachers were assuming he was me, and I was scum.
The AP looked at the letter and responded by telling me he wanted to see me, one of my parents, and the school counselor, in his office, at 9 a.m., the following morning.
We did so. He led us in, told his secretaries not to disturb him short of nuclear war, sat behind his desk, and said what I had been waiting three years, “Kiwiwriter, what’s going on?”
It was far too late. I emerged from the experience a self-loathing, suicidal alcoholic. While I’m not an alcoholic now, and am less suicidal, I still have no self-esteem, and firmly believe the world would be a better place if I was dead or had never existed.
In 1999, Frank McCourt — yes, THAT Frank McCourt — debuted his last book, and I got the invite to attend, as he is one of my four writing mentors. At the event, there were several oiled-up teachers from the 1999 generation. I told them how their predecessors used the PERMANENT RECORD CARD as a threat against me.
One of the teachers found that very funny. “And did that scare you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said angrily. “I tried to kill myself.”
They stood there in dead silence. For once, the educator didn’t know what to say to the student.
There is a difference between the educator and the teacher. Teachers care about teaching. Educators care about climbing up the pole. Either way, I’ve had enough of both.
And that’s all I have to say about that.