Nuance and Self-Implication
If there were ever a time in my life that the people of the US saw as black and white it was 2020. A global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by police following the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, a contentious election. It was a time for discernment and nuance, and yet it was a polarizing time, dealing only in extremes.
Tim Keller, an evangelical favorite, was cast down by many in that group for his commitment to racial justice and a traditional biblical ethic of sexuality. He refused to see either Republican or Democrat as the "Christian party," and for that he was called weak-willed, wishy-washy, coward. He was seen as playing both sides and not taking a stand. He came down hard against sin but not against people, and we didn’t like it.
While our nation had been becoming increasingly polarized, 2020 was the culmination and the breaking point.
We started to question the morality of our loved ones, of people we had known, valued, and trusted for years. How could they oppose my (moral and upright) side on an issue and still be good? How could they not be just as evil as the side they lauded?
The election was in our hands, and God needed us to save Him. The pandemic was in our hands, and God needed us to protect ourselves. We didn’t take responsibility or ownership; we took authority. And those who opposed us were either wicked or deceived.
As much as I tried to have a balanced mindset, as much as I tried to implicate myself, I lacked understanding of those with whom I disagreed. I tried to resist polarization, and yet my nuance left my side even as I thought I was clinging to it.
The most stark example for me was my opinions towards a local company. I didn’t know much about the company except that they had donated a large door prize to a fundraising event for a nonprofit about which I was passionate; because of this, I had vague feelings of warmth towards them. But then members of a place they had financially supported acted against the company’s politics, and they pulled their support. It was all over social media: a company leveraging their power and their privilege to make an organization act their way. I thought the company had been good, but I would not forgive that misuse of power . . . But then they did something else: they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor and supplies to create a home for another nonprofit. And that was good, and I didn’t have a way around it. But how could I hold both? The bad was still bad and the good was still good.
Nuance.
That was my only answer.
Some people see nuance as the easy way out. As a place of refusing to take a stance. But nuance is the harder position. It’s the place of tension. Of knowing that neither people nor places are one dimensional.
The problem is that when people are one-dimensional, we preserve ourselves from recognizing good in those we see as evil and recognizing evil in those we see as good, including ourselves.
The absence of nuance paves the way for deception and self-justification.
Recently I was reading a book set partially during the era of slavery. A black woman traveled back in time and interacted with a young boy whom she was determined to influence so that he would not grow up to be like his father, the plantation owner.
And what happened?
He grew up to be like his father. He grew up to think of black people as property. He grew up to take out his violence on them when he didn’t get his way.
But he didn’t just grow up to be an enslaver, torturer, and villain. He grew up to be human, nuanced and whole. Sympathetic and relational at times despite his evil.
So much of the media surrounding slavery doesn’t do this. It creates one-dimensional, evil white people. Maybe even with the intention of showing how horrific treatment of the enslaved was and unyieldingly casting blame in the proper place. After all, we have no excuse.
I'd like to think that is the intention, but the more I see, the more I think media like this does more harm than good. Not only is it often trauma porn for the white consumer but also it allows us to dismiss our own culpability.
Because we know that we are not one-dimensional. We know that we are not ultimate evil. We know that our great-great-grandfather was not ultimate evil. So if the picture on the screen is incapable of good, we are incapable of identifying with it. The responsibility for evil stays “other.”
I was always told that my family treated our slaves well--How has that messed up phrase made its way into our cultural lexicon? How have we allowed it to offer us relief? What value does it have? It only placates us from the evil. Yes, I hope my family was not physically violent with those they enslaved. I hope they provided for the basic needs of those they dehumanized. But whether or not they did (and with no evidence to support it except the word of mouth passed down from generations with a changing definition of “treated well”), those people were still enslaved. My family owned them and considered them property, not persons. That’s not an evil that can be diminished. Not by treating the enslaved well and not by being an otherwise “good person.”
Nuance is essential in situations like this, but both the presence and absence of nuance can be weaponized. Nuance can be an excuse for diminishing the evil done, but without nuance that evil is not something we can identify with at all because we don't fit into our one-dimensional expectations of it. Without nuance we allow any amount of good to exonerate those who are doing evil just as we allow any amount of evil to condemn those who are doing good. It becomes a choice of where we choose to look, which is usually a choice of which version is less complicated for us.
We struggle to see “good” people as also bigoted even when their bigotry is blatant, and we can’t make sense of “bad” people doing good. We have no place for the tension, and so we dismiss the problem entirely, condemning as a way to free it from our mind or writing it off entirely to avoid reckoning with it. But we're missing the truth in an attempt to ease our own minds.
We have to acknowledge that we are all made up of good and bad, and we all choose both in the course of our lives. If we see only evil in a person, we dismiss the possibility of good, dismiss the very person as evil, and raise ourselves as morally superior. If we see only good, we dismiss justice, accountability, and change. And if our views are black and white, they can always find justification for our own actions because we will always be able to find the good in ourselves.
We have to have nuance.
We have to be able to measure the world against God’s standards and not a one-dimensional label of good or evil.
We have to be able to implicate ourselves.
It’s the only way for us to change.
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