9781626569768

What Have We Been Apologizing For? What If
We Stopped?
As a nine-year-old, I was sorry for everything. “Sonie, you left the
refrigerator open!” “Sorry.” “Sonya, why is your coat on the couch?”
“Sorry.” “Sonya, did you get grape jelly on that white pantsuit I paid good
money for?” “Sorry, sorry, sorry…” A litany of apologies for my ever
clumsy, messy, forgetful self, who spilled evidence of such all over the
house. “Sorry” was my way of gathering up the spill. After all, I was a new
generation of “raising kids” my grandmother was enlisted to do after having
already raised three children on her own. I knew that my grandmother loved
me, but even at nine years old I also knew she had to be exhausted.
Grandma eventually started scolding me for saying sorry all the time.
“Hush all that sorry. You ain’t sorry. If you were sorry you would stop
doing it!” I wondered if there was any truth to my grandmother’s
admonishment. If I were sorry, truly sorry, would I stop doing whatever it
was? Could I?
Living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body
with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set
of apologies to already live on our tongues. There is a level of “not enough”
or “too much” sewn into these strands of difference. Recent discoveries in
the field of epigenetics have established how the traumas and resiliency of
our ancestors are passed on to us molecularly. 17 Being sorry is literally a
lesson in our DNA. In the Jim Crow South, an apology could at times be
exacted by death sentence. Emmett Till’s family came to know this brutal
fact in the summer of 1955, when the fifteen-year-old’s obligatory apology
for whistling at a White woman would come in the form of a fatal gunshot
after which his lifeless body was affixed to a tire and dumped in the
Tallahatchie River. 18 For far too many women, the expectation of apology
began after the sexual-assault report ended in an interrogation about the
length of the skirt she was wearing or how many drinks she had at the party.
There are minuscule daily ways each of us will be asked to apologize for
our bodies, no matter how “normal” they appear. The conservative haircut
needed to placate the new supervisor, the tattoo you cover when you step
into an office building to increase your chances of being treated
“professionally” are examples of tiny apologies society will ask you to