After a self-described white supremacist fatally shot nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, several family members of the victims forgave the shooter. A similar scene played out in 2019, when the brother of Botham Jean hugged the police officer who had killed him, igniting fresh debate over expectations that people of colour forgive their aggressors.

Robert Moore, who founded El Paso Matters and previously reported on the El Paso shooting for The Washington Post, said Tinajero’s embrace on Tuesday left the courtroom – “the security personnel, the families, the media, the judge” – weeping.

“I’ve never been in the position of having to report a story while sobbing uncontrollably,” Moore told the Post. The hearing felt cathartic for the city, he said.

Tinajero told the defendant that he had been wrong about El Paso. She said there was no “Hispanic invasion of Texas”, as he had believed; the city was simply welcoming people who would have opened their doors to him and offered him a Mexican meal.

“Your ugly thoughts of us that have been instilled in you would have turned around” had they broken bread together, Tinajero said, according to Moore’s dispatch.

Not everyone expressed mercy. Other family members of victims wished the defendant misery as he serves his life sentence in prison. Francisco Rodriguez, father of 15-year-old Javier Ramirez, the youngest person killed, repeatedly demanded that the defendant look at him and at his son’s picture, Moore recalled.

“I wish I could just get five minutes with you – me and you – and get all of this, get it over with,” Rodriguez said during his victim impact statement, according to the Associated Press.

Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, which studies the effects of forgiveness on health, said forgiveness is a response to “unmerited suffering” that lets someone release resentment, blame and self-pity. But it’s not a shortcut to avoiding pain, he added.

“Forgiveness often necessitates real pain and suffering before one releases it,” Luskin said.

People of colour are often not given the space to go through that, said Jemar Tisby, a history professor at Simmons College of Kentucky. Instead, he said, they’re expected to quickly absolve those who have wronged them. That pressure, he said, denies their humanity by blocking the grieving process: sadness, anger, despair.

Tisby said that when he learnt that Tinajero had forgiven the man who murdered her brother, he thought of the outpouring of support for Botham Jean’s brother, Brandt, when he hugged Amber Guyger. Senator Ted Cruz and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley praised the embrace at the time as an act of “Christian love” and an “amazing example of faith, love and forgiveness”.

But Tisby saw it as another instance in a long history of Black people giving White people quick absolution for perpetrating horrific wrongs.

“People of colour are not often given space for those [negative] emotions,” Tisby said.

Loading

Since the El Paso shooting, Moore, the journalist, said the victims’ family members have expressed that “the act of forgiveness meant that the gunman no longer had any power over their lives”.

Spencer, the defence lawyer, said that of the dozens of people who gave impact statements this week, 14 offered forgiveness to the defendant. Two asked to hug him.

“The graciousness that these victims showed, the forgiveness and the love – I’ll be honest, if I were a victim I don’t know if I’d be as gracious,” Spencer said. “I pray to God that I would be. But I don’t know.”

Loading

After Tinajero hugged the defendant, Adriana Zandri, whose husband Ivan Manzano was killed in the shooting, asked to do the same.

The defendant, Moore said, knew about Zandri’s request in advance. When she reached for him he embraced her with his wrists in shackles.

Minutes later the judge asked the bailiff to escort the defendant from the courtroom.

“To have the last act of the court process being this amazing act of mercy,” Moore said, “it was just such an El Paso moment.”