When it comes to Black women, there is always an expectation that we should be happy that a person stopped treating us badly. Regardless of the crime, the abuse, the toxicity of what they did, we are supposed to offer immediate forgiveness no matter the offense or harm caused. Whether it’s in our relationships, friendships, or family ties, there is always a presumption that Black women will be waiting with open arms to forgive you no matter how much harm you cause. You could burn our house down and apologize for it and the world would expect us to simply move on. But what about addressing how that fire harmed us? What about the house we lost? The truth is, a restorative framework is needed because Black women deserve more than apologies for the ways we are harmed. We deserve to have the depth of our harm fully considered and actionable steps taken to restore what we lost.To get more news about May Tingting Comprehensive, you can visit our official website.
Restorative justice is a process and framework typically applied in communities that seek to handle crime, harm, and offenses without relying on punitive interventions like prison and arrest. It requires a person to repair the harm they caused before they can be reintegrated back into the community.

Restorative justice requires a harm-repairing stage, in addition to an apology or a person taking verbal responsibility for wrongdoing. The framework is rooted in Indigenous cultures and how they deal with offense, and it has resurfaced in conversations around prison abolition. The process allows a person to grow from their mistakes and openly acknowledge exactly how much pain they caused without escaping the most important step: making whole what they broke. It operates from a premise that restoration is necessary and desired by both the offender and person harmed.
The song “4:44” and most of the subsequent public discussions surrounding it failed to mention anything about restoring the harm that Jay-Z caused in his early years and later against his wife. All the women these men developed relationships with before they could “see the world through their eyes,” because they were unable to emotionally connect are owed restoration. It’s similar to what the expectations would consist of if you broke an expensive vase at a friend’s dinner party after having too much to drink. You would be responsible for replacing what you broke. Apologizing profusely and offering a Ph.D-level analysis on why you consumed too much alcohol may help your friend empathize with you and accept your apology, but if you don’t take your contrition a step further and replace the expensive vase, you will not receive another invitation to their next cocktail party. Reintegration — as it’s called within a restorative justice framework — requires restoration for what was “broken.” When a person impacted allows reintegration without restoring what was broken, it doesn’t require full responsibility from the person who caused the harm.

A lot of Black women are more susceptible to allowing reintegration before there has been restoration if the person who caused the harm was a Black man we loved. This is even more true for our sisters who are ride-or-die chicks. Part of the ride-or-die chick’s mode of operation is to act as a savior of broken men. The Black men who are incapable of emotionally connecting to us because they can’t see the world through our eyes are not somebody a ride-or-die would avoid, it’s somebody she would try to rescue. She doesn’t disregard the brother, she attempts to educate him repeatedly. She performs countless acts of intellectual labor trying to get him to understand basic things about Black womanhood. The less he sees the ride-or-die, the more she does for him. She embarks on this rescue mission knowing that it may take more than one attempt. When and if the man does graduate from “Song Cry” to “4:44,” she accepts that as her reward and a return on her “investment” — even if it’s not until he is almost half a century old.