Apology
In his Aeon Magazine exploration of national apologies, Edwin Battistella reveals that both personal and national apologies “involve a naming of the offence, a condemnation of previous behaviour, and a request for forgiveness” (1). While national apologies feature distinctions, such as the inability to come to the unanimous consensus of an individual or concerns about blaming predecessors, the basic action performed is the same. Even if it is a longer and more consequential process, nations undergo the same introspection and admission that people do.
Although we like to imagine our apologies as autonomous, institutions and incentives help dictate how and when we apologize. In When Should Law Forgive, Martha Minow revealed that the South African Truth & Reconciliation Committee did not condition amnesty upon apology “because then no offer of apology could be viewed as genuine” (20). She also frowns upon the US states which do not exclude apologies from evidence in court, dissuading expressions of remorse which could be used against someone at trial. Evidently, the law has immense power in dictating when apologies occur. Minow believes it should neither reward disingenuous apologies nor punish heartfelt ones.
Even institutions with less sway than the law can shape apologies. For instance, in Savannah Shange’s article Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches, the unconventional structure of the Robeson Justice Academy where she teaches opens the door for her to apologize. Through its commitment to social justice and consequent erosion of the teachers’ impenetrability as authority figures, Robeson empowers Shange to be able to be open and vulnerable and express remorse over taking one side in a fight between two of her students. Without the school culture, norms, and policies, Shange would have been hesitant to compromise her role as a teacher and admit wrongdoing.
(Legal) Class
The tiers of seating present in the opera house described by David Powers in “Colonial Society at the Theatre” visually demonstrate the function of legal class—not in the sense of socioeconomic status, but in terms of the determination of membership in particular groups which confer certain legal rights or protections—in action. The best seats were reserved for government officials and their associates, with the rest distributed in descending order of social and racial status. Typically defined by whiteness and wealth, membership in the privileged class granted people access to these benefits. Although the opera house was a private cultural venue rather than a formal legal institution, its conferral of privileges according to class membership effectively models the law’s approach to class, albeit in a far more stark and racist way than modern legal systems do.
The Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973) illustrates the law’s relationship with class when designations are more nuanced than “white and wealthy.” Recognizing the inherently short nature of pregnancies which would render “appellate review effectively denied” in pregnancy-related cases, the Court granted pregnant women an exception to typical expectations of standing, thus elevating them into a distinct legal class entitled to constitutional protection (Blackmun 125). Simultaneously, it designated fetuses as a separate class, holding that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,” thus excluding them from personhood and its associated rights (Blackmun 158). In doing so, Roe reveals the malleability of legal class, particularly in circumstances like this that blur the line between class and status. Roe demonstrates class as more than a passive sorting of people by fixed traits, but an active judicial choice about which conditions warrant protection from the law.
Double Consciousness
Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in his book The Souls of Black Folk to describe the African-American experience and the “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (38). He hypothesized the existence of a veil which influenced the way he viewed the world and how the world viewed him. This perception accentuated the duality of the Black experience in America: “an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 38).
Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance discipline, reflects this double consciousness well. Barbara Browning, author of “Headspin: Capoeira’s Ironic Inversions,” asks, “Capoeira is decidedly an Afro-Brazilian art, but which half of this term should be weighted?” (91). She answers this by asserting “capoeiristas generally acknowledge that a martial arts technique and choreographic and rhythmic vocabularies were brought from Africa. But the strategic blending of fight and dance occurred in Brazil, under specific pressures” (91). Thus, capoeira is reflective of the Afro-Brazilian dual consciousness, as neither the African nor the Brazilian identity component of the dance can be isolated from the whole.
Entitlement Theory of Justice
Established by 20th century libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the entitlement theory of justice “is historical; whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about” (Nozick 732). For Nozick, as long as I employ just means of property acquisition, I’m entitled to my holdings and always will be. To extrapolate Nozick’s logic beyond its focus on justice in holdings, the entitlement theory promotes justice as what each individual deserves, not necessarily what’s best for society at large.
To see a practical manifestation of this mentality, the eponymous protagonist’s friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar in the Book of Job provide a powerful example. They all argue that God inflicted extraordinary punishment on Job and his family because they committed transgressions to deserve it. For instance, Bildad claims, “Your sons have sinned against Him, that is all, and He got rid of them on account of their own crimes” (Job 8:4). The same way Nozick views properly acquired holdings as entitled, Bildad and his friends see divine justice as deserved—for better or worse—by its subjects.
Forgiveness
In When Should Law Forgive?, legal scholar Martha Minow defines forgiveness as “a conscious, deliberate decision to forgo rightful grounds for grievance against those who have committed a wrong or harm” (7). Not limiting the definition to specific contexts, Minow invokes forgiveness in matters from petty personal squabbles to bankruptcy to genocide, true to the term’s potential for application in diverse contexts.
To see forgiveness in action, the parents of Jordan Russell Davis, a Black teen murdered in a racially motivated killing, show the term’s meaning. Forgiveness is not about forgetting or understating. In William Cheng’s Loving Music Till It Hurts, Davis’s mother Lucy McBath maintains the murder was a “21st century lynching” (193). Forgiveness is not about passing the responsibility for retribution to God. While on the witness stand, McBath addressed the murderer: “I choose to forgive you, Mr. Dunn, for taking my son’s life… I pray to God to have mercy on your soul” (223). Forgiveness is about believing in someone’s ability to change. McBath’s husband Ron Davis said “[McBath’s husband Ron Davis] said he believed that Michael Dunn, who is serving a life sentence, could—rather, will—one day change. Dunn, insisted Ron, will reckon with his racism and emerge a better man, whether it’s in five years, or ten, or twenty. When that day comes, Ron will want to visit Dunn in prison. Not a day sooner” (225). Davis will not just forgive and forget his son’s murder; however, he will have faith in the perpetrator’s ability to be better.
The parents of Amy Biehl, another young victim of racial violence, showed a similar capacity for forgiveness in the documentary Long Night’s Journey Into Day. Recognizing that the killing was “politically motivated,” Biehl’s parents looked to “honor her with some sort of action.” Recognizing that “Amy would have embraced [the] truth and reconciliation process,” the Biehls “met the mother of one of her killers and told her they would not oppose his application to be freed from jail.” While forgiveness was never directly stated, the Biehls’ actions of forgiveness—putting a national reconciliation movement and amnesty for a politically motivated mistake above the desire for retributive justice—speak far louder than hollow rhetoric.
Imperial
Drawing from the values articulated by Rabbi Simon ben Gamiliel of justice, truth, and peace, legal theorist Robert Cover created the term imperial as part of his landmark article “Nomos and Narrative.” In an imperial world, “norms are universal and enforced by institutions. They need not be taught at all, as long as they are effective” (Cover 13). To elicit compliance with the law, imperial forces turn not to persuasion, pedagogy, and reciprocity, but to institutions, force, and objectivity.
For a manifestation of the imperial mentality in action, I look to Creon, King of Thebes, from Antigone. In one of his many justifications of his strict enforcement of order and his belief in the primacy of governmental law, he exclaims “Anarchy—show me a greater crime in all the earth! … Therefore we must defend the men who live by law” (752-757). Creon’s principles reveal imperial law as a vehicle to keep anarchy at bay by any means necessary.
Imperial forces can extend into any realm—even dance! Barbara Browning’s piece “Headspin: Capoeira’s Ironic Inversions” details how capoeira was “institutionalized” through the academy system, which served as a “controlled space” and a “structure of containment” (98). Through such institutionalization, capoeira “began to be tolerated” in Brazil, at the expense of the free movement which popularized it to begin with (Browning 98). This speaks to Cover’s point, as imperial forces like the academy uphold order yet disrupt the natural creation of meaning.
Lynching
In his book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, Ken Gonzalez-Day references the most-cited definition of lynching, courtesy of the Tuskegee Institute: “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition” (43). Unfortunately, Gonzalez-Day finds that this definition was primarily applied only to killings of African-Americans in the South, omitting the indigenous and Latino populations in California killed in similar ways (often public hangings) for similarly racist reasons. Thus, he broadens the implicit scope of lynching beyond the Jim Crow South and Black Americans.
Beyond the academic sphere, creative works reveal the range of kinesthetic empathic reactions to lynching. Showing the enthusiastic participation of the entire (white) community, including the glee of small children, the graphic novel Incognegro positions lynching as a prevalent social and cultural practice, not simply the work of a few rogue zealots. Nonetheless, if one can divorce their mind from the community trying to justify the lynching, it is a profoundly horrifying experience. Pearl Primus’s dance Strange Fruit revolves around a white woman in shock as she spectates a lynching. Taken together, these examples represent the conflicts within members of lynching communities, pitting their basic sense of human dignity against the encouragement of their friends, family, and neighbors.
Marronage
As highlighted in Andreas Roberts’ article Performance as Place Preservation, marronage refers most directly to the “act of escaping enslavement” (8). However, it does not stand on its own as an instantaneous declaration and realization of freedom. Instead, marronage is part of a “neverending process of becoming free” (Roberts 8). Even after fleeing their masters, former slaves continued to struggle for freedom, leading to the formation of freedom colonies like Shanklesville, the one Roberts depicts, that affirm and protect the achievement of marronage.
Marronage is not reserved exclusively for the clear act of running away from slavery, also encompassing similar forms of Black liberation. For instance, in Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” after their liberation through the Civil War, Kossula and his fellow freed slaves form a community called Africatown, rooted not directly in the virtues of hiding from slave owners like antebellum freedom colonies did, but carrying a similar ethos of marronage by uplifting one another whilst acting against racist power structures. Even over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, marronage remains relevant and visible in society. Broadening the scope of marronage to generally include acts of leaving, resisting bondage, and surviving, LeConté J Dill positions contemporary Blackgirls as maroons in plain sight whose actions—from meaningful poetic articulations of their struggles to quotidian activities like waiting with friends for a meal— resist a status quo that continues to reject their existence. Finding refuge in one another just like the residents of Shankklesville and Africatown many decades before, Blackgirls of today, even if often invisible, typify the ongoing legacy of Black liberation.
Mass Incarceration
In her article “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander frames the astronomical rise in incarceration over the late 20th century as emanating not from a legitimate interest in fighting crime, but a desire to maintain the racist power structures from the antebellum and Jim Crow periods. While the basic idea of imprisoning someone for a heinous crime seems logical, the concept’s facially colorblind yet functionally racist policies make it “the primary mechanism for racial oppression and the denial of equal opportunity” (Alexander 234). For instance, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th shines a light on the sentencing practices for crack and cocaine. Despite the two drugs having similar effects, cocaine’s predominantly white user base allowed offenders to enjoy light sentences, while Black crack users suffered the full brunt of the law.
Once in prison, Black Americans remain bound by the same racist worldviews that got them to prison to begin with in many cases. In “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison,” Pierpaolo Polzonetti epitomizes such biases, assuming his predominantly Black incarcerated audience was rap fans and framing his opera classes at the prison as a way of civilizing and removing the criminal from his students. As Bonnie Gordon points out in “The Perils of Public Musicology,” Polzonetti neglects to mention “mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow and on the criminalization of black men,” instead implying that his students had full agency over the path that sent them to prison (Gordon 1). Polzonetti demonstrates the prevailing view in American society of mass incarceration as a function of just legal principles, not embedded power structures.
Memory
How we retrospectively view the greatest horrors of history dictates how we approach the moral debates of today. Condemning the usage of Holocaust memory to defend Israeli actions in Palestine, Omer Bartov and his colleagues urge that “when invoking the past, we must do so in ways that illuminate the present and do not distort it” (3). When left unchecked, memory can warp perceptions of current events, in this case by using the purportedly unparalleled devastation of the Holocaust to justify and minimize present annihilation. However, other scholars point to the “Nazi connection to Hamas” and the continued strain of anti-semitism connecting the movements as a reason to keep the Holocaust central in the Israel-Palestine discussion (Herf 2). In this way, memory of atrocities can be used for good in modern politics by ensuring that the worst of yesterday does not repeat itself today.
Physical institutions are critical vehicles for facilitating memory. For example, juxtaposing two types of monument on the same event, the Holocaust, Berlin resident Barbara Steiner remarks that “the huge monuments are always about performing memory,” compared to more intimate memorials that are “really connected to a person” (Smith 27). While the statues that attract millions of people promote a singular, monolithic memory, unorthodox monuments like the stolpersteine—cobblestone-sized plaques embedded in sidewalks to mark the last residences of Holocaust victims—promote a multiplicity of memories by orienting different stories around each person. Museums share this stewardship over memory, as Amy Lonetree laments that the National Museum of the American Indian missed the “opportunity to truly challenge the American Master Narrative—a narrative that has silenced and even erased the memory of the genocidal policies of America’s past and present” (310-311). Clearly, memory is not some nebulous entity with a mind of its own, but a construct responsive to the choices we make and the things we build.
Revenge
In his 2024 article “On Jewish Revenge” in Aeon Magazine, cultural historian Shachar Pinsker presents revenge as “the opposite of justice, a product of utter despair, a kind of empty and final gesture toward restoring one’s shattered self-respect.” While revenge is often framed as a last-ditch effort to secure justice, it often has the opposite effect, only sowing further injustice. This is certainly the case for Pinsker, who later invokes nekama, the Hebrew word for vengeance or revenge, as a cause for violent Israeli reprisal operations against Arab communities, which ultimately contributed to greater instability in the region.
The Book of Job illustrates the benefits of renouncing one’s thirst for revenge. At the end of the story, Yahweh denounces Job’s friends’ problematic depiction of Him and rewards Job for his loyalty and thoughtful view of divine justice. In doing so, He implicitly gives Job carte blanche to act with vengeance against his pals and their transgressions. While he neglects to fully forgive his friends, Job decides not to retaliate, and is rewarded handsomely: “Yahweh restored Job’s fortune after he prayed for his friends, doubling everything Job had” (Job 42:10). Given the didactic nature of biblical literature, this marks a clear endorsement of resisting the vindictive desires that Pinsker warns against.
Nevertheless, while some dismiss revenge as a destructive impulse, it can serve as a legitimate response to the failure of formal justice systems. In Medea, the eponymous protagonist’s calculated revenge scheme emerges not from mindless rage, but from a sober recognition of her powerlessness in a patriarchal society that denies her any other path to justice. Similarly, in Don Giovanni, when Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Donna Elvira, Zerlina, and Masetto seek revenge on the title character for his crimes, it is framed not as a deranged form of vigilante justice but as a reasonable response to the lack of civil authority holding Don Giovanni in check. The embodiment of divine justice, the Commendatore validates these pursuits of revenge returning from the dead to confront Don Giovanni and, when he refuses to repent, dragging him to hell. His intervention frames revenge not as cruelty, but as a necessary moral reckoning when all other systems fail.
Social Choreography
Movement is not always spontaneous. In her book Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers, Imani Kai Johnson defines social choreography “as the ways that the people of a given society are trained to move (both physically and spatially) and to contort and comport their bodies in keeping with and in (sometimes counter) production to a given social order” (64-65). Ostensibly free movement often follows more of a script than we like to acknowledge.
Yet while Kai Johnson uses social choreography as a tool for Black cultural resistance and expression, social choreography is often weaponized for repression. In his article “Choreopolice and Chorepolitics,” performance studies scholar André Lepecki identifies choreopoliced movement, a product of a repressive form of social choreography, as “any movement incapable of breaking the endless reproduction of an imposed circulation of consensual subjectivity, where to be is to fit a prechoreographed pattern of circulation, corporeality, and belonging” (20). These efforts to choreopolice are not an accident. They have a clear purpose: “to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political” (Lepecki 20). Inhibiting physical freedom is not a bug of this system; it is a feature.
The Third Reich provides a powerful case study for Lepecki’s thesis in action. Marie Percy observes in “Movement Choirs and the Nazi Olympics” that “the Nazi ‘Heil Hitler’ salute was the perfect physical manifestation of the nation’s solidarity” (787). The Nazis exemplify how imposing social choreography can effectively consolidate political control.
Supererogatory
In the gradebook of ethics, not every assignment is required. Some things are for extra credit. In his philosophy treatise “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Peter Singer identifies the name for such actions: supererogatory, which he defines as “an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do” (Singer 235). This creates a gray area between necessary actions and morally problematic ones in the form of choices that are permissible and encouraged, but not mandatory in order to act ethically.
For an example of supererogatory behavior in action, I look to Zane Pinchback, the main character of Mat Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro. Enjoying a newspaper job in Harlem, a comparatively safe place for an African-American in the 1930s, Pinchback could have justifiably found many ways of advocating for civil rights and an end to lynching without directly risking his life. However, he chose the path that was not morally necessary, but supererogatory, traveling to the Jim Crow South to stop lynchings or bring lynchers to justice. Stylized by illustrator Warren Pleece like a classic comic book superhero, Pinchback makes the decision any other great hero would, doing good even when it is not his moral obligation and showing how embracing supererogatory actions distinguish decent people from great ones.
Torture
Torture is not as simple or systematic as inflicting pain upon the victim and receiving the desired output of information. Taking inspiration from the scholarship of Elaine Scarry, Robert Cover defines torture as “the deliberate infliction of pain in order to destroy the victim’s normative world and capacity to create shared realities” (1603). To him, torture is less of a tool for information acquisition and more of a bastion of social control. Even when the torturers gain the desired information, the knowledge itself is somewhat of a byproduct. Their true prize is the “betrayal—a demonstration that the victim’s intangible normative world has been crushed by the material reality of pain and its extension, fear” communicated by the victim’s submission.
Stories bringing to life the harrowing experience of torture validate the abstract characteristics that Cover lays out. In Garage Olimpo, the usage of blindfolds and loud music in the torture center seeks to silo off each victim from any reality they can share with each other or the outside world. The frequent cuts from the dark torture center to the bright, bustling streets of Buenos Aires show how far protagonist and victim Maria is from the world she is accustomed to, making her weaker and more vulnerable to the torture. Death and the Maiden reveals the disinterest of many torturers in legitimate information acquisition, instead deriving sadistic pleasure from the torture itself. Dr. Roberto Miranda never attributes his cruel torture practices to an interest in getting victims to confess valuable details, instead focusing only on his morbid curiosity around what his victims could take. Much like Cover does, this demonstrates an approach to torture rooted in a desire for control, not for practical information.
Utilitarianism
Developed by Jeremy Bentham in his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical theory defined by its “principle of utility… which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever” (14). Based on a calculation of the opposing forces of pain and pleasure, utilitarianism asserts the moral worth of an action is “determined by and proportioned to the tendency… to augment or to diminish the happiness of the community” (15). Thus, the principle of utility does not care about duty, rights, history, or any other value. It judges actions exclusively on their ability to influence aggregate happiness.
In her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin presents a fascinating case study of utilitarianism in action. She depicts the glorious society of Omelas, a “joyous city” filled with “happy people” (315-316). However, there’s a catch: Omelas is only a place of universal delight because of the endless suffering of a small child, plagued by “fear, malnutrition, and neglect” (317). For utilitarians, this is a clearly just world: an entire city enjoys limitless pleasure at the expense of just one child’s pain. However, for those with other conceptualizations of justice, the arbitrary, unrelenting punishment present in Omelas is horrifying, polarizing them against utilitarianism’s cold, rational calculations of pleasure and pain.
Visibility
Sociologist Ruha Benjamin employs French philosopher Michel Foucault’s contention that “visibility is a trap” as a means of exploring how modern technology persecutes marginalized groups (17). While the idea of being seen and catered to seems appealing, such visibility is dangerous when its goal is exclusion, as Benjamin reveals is the case with everything from DNA testing of African asylum seekers in the UK to the criminalization of Blackness via Zimbabwean facial recognition technology. Depicted in Susan Foster’s article Choreographies of Protest, the demonstrators at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protest typify this justified fear of visibility. Fearing vilification from a media “owned and operated by the same forces they were trying to overthrow,” the protestors took great efforts to avoid visibility through traditional media channels, instead conducting their own news documentation with handheld cameras (Foster 409). Seeing mass visibility as a tool of the powerful, they refused to comply with its demands.
Nonetheless, visibility has promise through its capacity to catalyze social change. In another protest example, Foster cites the civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and the activists’ desire for “news media [to] document the injustice they suffered” (Foster 402). Only through such visibility, wherein the American public could be appalled and galvanized into action by the bigotry and violence that Black people faced on a daily basis, could the civil rights movement achieve its goals.
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