Extending Grace Too Soon

I have come to realize that one of my most consistent instincts is to extend grace before I extend suspicion.

That may not sound remarkable on its face. In fact, many people would probably see it as a virtue. Grace is usually treated as a good thing, and in many cases, it is. It keeps us from assuming the worst too quickly. It gives people the benefit of the doubt. It allows for mistakes, distraction, misunderstanding, and all the ordinary human messiness that can make a difficult moment less personal than it first appears.

But what I am beginning to notice is that my grace often arrives before my self-protection does. Even in moments that might reasonably call for anger, caution, or at the very least a sharper interpretation, my first instinct is often to explain the other person’s behavior in the kindest possible way.

Maybe they did not see me. Maybe they were in a hurry. Maybe they were distracted. Maybe there is another explanation.

Only later, after I have mentally stepped through the situation a few times, does the anger arrive. Only later do I feel the full weight of what may actually have happened. Only later do I wonder whether I was too quick to absolve someone who had done nothing to earn it.

That pattern showed up for me recently in a very ordinary but unsettling moment.

I was dropping my son off at school and had to cross a small but busy intersection. Usually, if I can help it, I wait until there are no cars coming. I know what it is like to be rushing, especially before a final bell, and I try to make room for other people’s urgency when I can. That morning, though, I had somewhere to be and could not wait.

As I stepped into the crosswalk, I saw a car coming down the street. I waited until the driver was close enough that I felt they could see me, and they did seem to slow down. I waved, partly out of acknowledgement and partly out of gratitude, because it looked like they were stopping for me.

Then, as I reached the middle of the street, I noticed the car accelerating again while the driver looked directly at me.

I stopped short and moved quickly toward the sidewalk.

I could have been hit!

Was it intentional? Did they really see me? Were they trying to scare me? Was this some sort of passive aggression, a driver trying to signal that I should move faster?
Or was it just a careless, impatient person just a bad driver?

Those are the kinds of questions most people would ask in a situation like that, often with some expletives attached. But my first thought was not anger. My first thought was, oh, they must not have seen me. Oh, they must be late. Oh, maybe I mistimed it.

Only after that did the anger set in. Only after I had already granted them a certain amount of innocence did I fully feel how dangerous their behavior had been.

That is what I mean when I say I often extend grace before I extend suspicion. It is not that I never get angry. I do. It is that my mind seems to reach for understanding before it reaches for self-protection.

I have been thinking about why that happens.

My therapist suggested that I may be projecting something onto other people, in the sense that I want grace extended to me, so I extend it outward in hopes of reciprocity. That may be part of it. It is a thoughtful and probably true observation. I have also wondered whether it has something to do with trauma, with the deeply familiar feeling of not quite believing that I am worthy of grace myself, so I hand it out to everyone else first and leave myself for later.

I think both of those things may be true.

But I also think there may be something more specific happening for autistic Black people, or at least for me as an autistic Black man moving through the world.

Part of autism, for many of us, is a constant awareness that social interpretation is unstable. We are often told, directly or indirectly, that we may be missing something, misreading something, or failing to grasp what others seem to know intuitively. That can make us cautious about assigning intent too quickly. It can make us more likely to pause, analyze, and search for the explanation that best preserves social coherence. In some ways, grace becomes a method of slowing down the story before we decide what it means.

But race changes the stakes.

Black people, especially Black men, do not get to be wrong in public the same way others do. We are often read through assumptions long before our actions are understood on their own terms. Anger can be dangerous. Defensiveness can be dangerous. Even a justifiable response can be turned into evidence against us. So there is often a pressure, spoken or unspoken, to remain calm, measured, and legible in ways that do not invite punishment.

Grace, then, may not only be kindness. It may also be a strategy.

It may be a way of keeping the world from escalating too quickly. It may be a way of preserving safety in the split second before a situation gets worse. It may be a way of staying within the bounds of what is seen as respectable, reasonable, and nonthreatening. That does not make the grace false. It makes it complicated.

And yet, there is another layer I do not want to ignore.

Sometimes I wonder whether my tendency to grant grace is also about where I locate value. If I am not always certain that I will be given grace, maybe I learn to become the one who gives it. If I am used to explaining myself, softening my tone, and anticipating other people’s discomfort, then grace can start to feel like a moral habit as well as a survival one. I do not simply want the world to be more generous. I may also be trying to live in a way that protects me from becoming what I fear in others.

That is the tension that interests me.

Because grace is not a problem in itself. The problem is when grace becomes a reflex that outruns discernment. The problem is when I keep narrating other people’s harm in the most charitable way possible while my own body is still registering danger. The problem is when I protect the humanity of people who may not be protecting mine.

I do not think that makes me foolish. I think it makes me someone who has learned to survive by searching for order in other people’s chaos. I also think it may be a form of emotional discipline shaped by a world that rewards my restraint more than my truth.

That is a hard thing to admit, because grace is so often framed as a sign of spiritual maturity or moral beauty. And sometimes it is. But in my case, I have to ask whether grace is always a virtue, or whether it can sometimes be a habit formed under pressure. I have to ask whether my eagerness to explain away harm is an expression of generosity, or whether it is a delay tactic that keeps me from fully acknowledging how much space harm takes up in my life.

The school intersection that morning reminded me that these questions are not abstract.

A driver can nearly hit you, and your first instinct can still be to save them from being the villain in your mind. That is not nothing. It tells me something about how deeply I have internalized the need to understand before I accuse, to soften before I object, to grant humanity before I grant accountability.

Maybe that is empathy. Maybe that is trauma. Maybe that is autism. Maybe that is race. Maybe it’s all of the above.

But whatever it is, it deserves attention.

Because if I am always offering grace too early, then I may be leaving too little room for my own safety, my own anger, and my own accurate reading of what is happening around me. And if that is true, then the deeper question is not simply why I do it. The deeper question is what it has cost me to become so practiced at protecting other people from the consequences of their own behavior.

That may be the real work.

Not to stop being gracious, but to learn when grace is a value, when it is a habit, and when it is asking me to ignore something that deserves my attention.