THE GRACE GAP: What Happens after an Apology?
November 18, 2025
By Dr. Mya Fisher
A curious thing happened this week: a public figure with a long, damaging history of inflammatory rhetoric issued an apology. Not a hedged apology. Not a strategic half-step. But what appeared to be an actual admission of responsibility. Taking their behavior over the past few weeks into account, taking it at face value, the apology seemed… sincere. And before the words had even settled into the air, the reaction was immediate: Too late. Too convenient. Too little. Not enough. You did this to yourself.
I’m not interested in defending her. What interests me is what this moment reveals about us. We say we want people—especially our political leaders—to admit when they’re wrong. We claim to value humility over pride, accountability over deflection. Yet when someone finally does the very thing we’ve been demanding, we often find ourselves unprepared or unwilling to receive it. It’s as if we’ve built a culture that knows how to call out wrongdoing, but has no imagination for what it takes to return from it.
The Suspicion Reflex — and When It Turns Into Cynicism
Part of this resistance is rooted in something understandable: the suspicion reflex. We’ve seen enough performative apologies in public life to develop a healthy skepticism. People apologize to stop the backlash, to reset their image, to blunt political consequences, and to avoid the kinds of financial or reputational losses that can follow them for years. It’s wise—not foolish—to ask whether the apology means anything beyond optics. And if it is strategic, does that automatically mean it has no value?
But something troubling happens when skepticism, in the absence of any shared process for discernment, hardens into reflexive cynicism. When we decide in advance that no apology can ever be enough, what we are protecting isn’t accountability—it’s the illusion of moral certainty.
I struggle with this tension myself. What if the apology is lip-service? Of course we should demand changed behavior, not just softened rhetoric. But why do we assume someone won’t change before we’ve even given them a chance to do or be differently? Why do we collapse the possibility of growth before we’ve created the conditions for it? And why is there almost never any discussion of the work that must happen after the apology? That assumption—that certainty—is not accountability. It is foreclosure.
The Catalyst Problem: Why We Shame the Moment Someone Arrives
There is another layer to this conversation that we rarely name out loud. Many people dismissed this week’s apology because of its timing—because the consequences of the political culture she helped create have now turned on her. It’s the contemporary equivalent of the internet’s “leopards eating my face” meme: you only care now that the harm you unleashed has circled back to you.
A more solemn version of that idea has existed for decades. Martin Niemöller’s famous post-Holocaust reflection—“First they came…”—warns of the moral danger in failing to oppose harm until the harm comes for you. These two expressions, separated by generations and tone, share a common lesson: people often awaken to danger only when it becomes personal.
But catalysts for change are rarely noble. Most of us do not arrive at accountability because we suddenly develop a generous moral imagination. We arrive because something breaks open. Because harm becomes visible. Because we experience a cost. Because the world we built begins to collapse in our hands. Self-interest is not a moral failure; it is a very human entry point into transformation.
Yet in public life, we treat the catalyst as if it invalidates the arrival. We judge the path someone took to get here rather than evaluating what they are prepared to do now that they have arrived. We ask whether the timing is pure instead of asking whether the commitment is real. We focus on past performance instead of future potential—on the origin story rather than the trajectory ahead.
If someone comes toward us seeking safety, clarity, or a new alignment because the “leopards” have turned on them—or because they suddenly recognize the implications of harm—is the reason what matters most? In war, when someone defects from the opposing side, no one demands purity of motivation. The only question is whether they will fight with us now—whether their presence strengthens the cause, whether their conversion is sincere, whether they are committed to what lies ahead. And even if they are not fully or ideologically aligned in every dimension, do they need to be in order to advance shared goals?
The problem is not that someone arrives late. The problem is that we have no process for what happens once they do. And when there is no process, we default to judgment, suspicion, and shame. But shame is not a strategy. And moral superiority is not a plan nor the character we need for building coalitions capable of governing or transforming anything.
The Missing Middle: We Don’t Know What Comes After Accountability
The real problem in American civic life isn’t that we hold people accountable. It’s that we have no shared framework for what actually constitutes accountability. We tend to treat it as a moment rather than a process. So once the apology moment has passed, we are left feeling some kind of way with no “next,” no practice, and no process.
Many communities—faith traditions, Indigenous restorative circles, and reconciliation processes—understand accountability as a sequence: naming harm, understanding impact, taking responsibility, repairing trust, and re-entering community with new commitments. In public life, we rarely get past the first step. We treat apologies as final verdicts rather than opening moves. We demand that people admit they were wrong, but then offer no pathway for repair or reintegration, no criteria for what “enough” looks like, no shared language for evaluating change over time. And even when we try, it’s often reduced to tweets or posts on social media rather than grounded in real-world behavior or relational changes observed over time.
Restorative justice offers that missing middle, but our civic discourse doesn’t even create space for it. Too many people hear “restorative” or “reconciliation” and assume softness or leniency—flimsy, sentimental ideas that weaken accountability instead of deepening it. But restorative justice, at its best, is rigorous. Reconciliation, at its best, is structured, demanding, and oriented toward repairing the conditions that made the harm possible in the first place. Both require clarity, honesty, repair, accountability, and time. They make room for both truth and transformation. And they give us a way to distinguish genuine growth from political theater, which is exactly the distinction we claim to care about.
What Sits Beneath the Surface: A Communication Gap, Not a Moral One
The Iceberg Project lens helps us to see another layer of the problem. Above the surface, all we see is the apology: the words spoken, the timing, the politics surrounding it. But below the surface are the questions we rarely articulate: What norms guide accountability? Who decides when an apology is enough? What expectations for future behavior should we set? How do we communicate about harm without humiliating the person who caused it? And critically: what skills do communities need in order to reintegrate someone who acknowledges wrongdoing?
Reintegration is not instinctive. It is a learned communication practice—one most of us have never been taught and in most cases never learn. And the civic version of this practice requires the very skills we treat as optional, decorative, or secondary when, in truth, they are foundational. These are full-bodied skills of consequence, the ones the Iceberg Project framework elevates: curiosity instead of certainty, groundedness when discussing harm, the ability to narrate impact without erasing someone’s humanity, the steadiness to set boundaries without demanding public self-flagellation, and the humility to stay open to growth while still insisting on responsibility and repair.
These are not soft skills; they are civic muscles. And when they are strong, they strengthen our communities, our institutions, and our country. They allow us to meet the challenges we face with determination, clarity, and collective action. They help us stay in relationship even when the conversation is hard. They make transformation possible—not just for individuals, but for systems.
And we have allowed these muscles to weaken. The consequence is not just interpersonal fragility; it is civic fragility. When we lose the capacity to practice reintegration, we lose the capacity to govern together, repair together, and imagine together. We confuse accountability with punishment, responsibility with shame, and justice with permanent exclusion. And in that confusion, we erode the very democratic habits we claim to be protecting.
Democracy Requires Return — Not Eternal Exile
A democracy cannot survive on punishment alone. It requires the possibility of return—the belief that people can learn, grow, and do better than before, if given the grace of another chance. Not just a second chance, because some lessons are hard to learn. Some lessons take time. If every mistake becomes a life sentence of exclusion, if every apology is rejected on arrival, if reintegration is structurally impossible, then we are not practicing accountability. We are practicing exclusion. And exclusion, when moralized and weaponized, is the soil where authoritarian impulses take root.
An apology, by itself, is never enough. But neither is permanent exile. The space between those two poles is where democracy breathes. It is where civic maturity lives. And it is where our public imagination is most anemic. We have to marshal our strength, our imagination, and our collective will to fill that gap with possibility and processes—structures that make repair real instead of rhetorical.
What happens after an apology depends on us—on our willingness to build criteria, practices, expectations, and pathways that allow us to tell the difference between performance and transformation. Grace is not naïveté. Grace is a disciplined posture: the courage to remain open to the possibility of change while still honoring accountability, repair, and the integrity of the community. In public life, grace doesn’t negate responsibility; it provides the framework for what responsibility looks like over time. Grace makes accountability sustainable, not superficial.
Accountability ends where grace begins. And our democracy desperately needs both.
“The health of any society is measured not by how we punish, but by how we return to one another.”
— Dr. Mya Fisher, Global Equity Forward
Reflect with me in community
If apologies are opening moves, what do you believe the next steps should be?
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