John McMillian. Beatles vs. Stones. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. Pp. 303. $26.00 (Cloth).

The crime of innocence and the depths of sorriness: Notes on apologies and reparations in the United States

“…In the wake of the Charleston shooting, much of the media and the public oohed about the mercy exhibited by the victims’ family members because their act of forgiving the White shooter seemed impossible. But perhaps a public audience transfixed upon Black mercifulness also reflected a popular expectation or wish that African Americans readily forgive White violence with or without an apology or that forgiveness and a certain politics of emotion that often emanates from traditions of Christianity in the African American community is a more appropriate response than anger or political demands (Coates, 2015: 78–79; Devega, 2015; Mellor et al, 2007).…”

“…The intertwined construction of blackness and whiteness that I describe, resting on questions of who is and who is not “sorry,” involves a zoning practice that maps the differential quality and worth of people according to varied “habitations of modernity” (Chakrabarty, 2002) and conditions and scenes of life. Efforts to ameliorate structural problems are rebuffed when a semiotics of display and dismay and disarray is linked to determinations about the responsibility of people for their own sorry fate and when what is said to be exceptional about America is foundational innocence—what Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) calls “the Dream”—rather than the particular and problematic complicities and conflictual arrangements of a history of the present.…”