Chapter Eight
Kantian Victims
“Christ was a victim.”
Peter Thiel summed up his objection to this book like he was a lawyer making his closing argument. We were having a drink at his home in Southern California a couple of weeks before Christmas last year. He’d come out of his bedroom into the living room, emerging from what appeared to be a deeply contemplative evening of reflection. We talked about Woke, Inc., my last book, for a bit, and our conversation quickly turned to the upcoming one that I had begun to write—about victimhood and excellence.
“If you think excellence is the solution to wokeness, you’re wrong,” Peter said. Instead, he argued that the solution was simple, and that there was only one: Christianity.
The founder of PayPal and other companies characterized wokeness as Christianity without forgiveness. He didn’t like valorizing “excellence” because he thought that either the word meant some kind of artificial, bureaucratic meritocracy, or it would be subjectively defined by each person for themselves, rendering it too vague to serve as a guiding principle for a culture. The right answer to victimhood culture isn’t to deny victimhood status, he claimed, but to recognize that everyone is a victim. Even Christ himself.
If we all recognize that everyone is a victim and everyone is an oppressor, Peter’s thinking goes, no one will be able to use victimhood to claim the moral high ground, so everyone will have to give up their arms and forgive each other. I think of his theory as the social version of mutually assured destruction, where claims of victimization are the social equivalent of nukes. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. If we all show that we have victim cards and threaten to play them, no one will.
This reasoning is actually a Kantian argument that using victimhood as a tool to gain power isn’t universalizable—it’s irrational because it doesn’t work if everyone does it. If you have a good victim card and consider using it to gain social status, you have to imagine what will happen if everyone else who has a victim card plays theirs too. They’re rational people just like you are, so whatever you decide to do, you should assume they’ll do too. But here’s the thing: everyone else does in fact have their own victim card. If everyone plays theirs, victimhood will no longer be a special status that confers advantages to those who claim it. So if we just skip to the part where we recognize that everyone is a victim, we rob victimhood claims of their power.
I don’t think Peter is wrong. Recognizing that everyone has valid claims to victimhood is the first and perhaps most important step in our nation’s path out of its current morass. That’s one reason why in the first half of this book I laid out all the valid claims to victimhood different groups of Americans can make—black people, white people, liberals, conservatives, you name it. But there’s a counterargument that this approach must overcome.
One could argue that society is already trying things his way, and it’s not working. We’ve already arrived at a world where everyone claims to be a victim. It’s the natural consequence of making claims of oppression a path to social status. Everyone grabs whatever well-established victimhood identity they can avail themselves of, and as many as possible. Wielding a good victim card is the twenty-first-century equivalent of making sure you’re armed in the Wild West: don’t leave home without it. When skin color or gender alone won’t do the trick, we find ways to casually signal our victim identities in conversation, like cowboys flashing their guns. In conversations that touch on social justice, just watch the white guys waiting patiently for the opportune moment to drop the fact that they’re gay, or Hispanic, or Jewish. We’re already a nation of victims.
But here’s what Peter’s argument missed: not all claims of victimhood are equally powerful. We’ll never get this mutually assured social destruction that makes everyone refuse to play their victim card, one could argue, because some people are carrying six-shooters and others have cannons. Instead of giving up our arms, we compete to outgun each other.
Sure, maybe we can recognize that a gay black woman, a straight Chinese woman, and a gay white man—and sure, even a straight white man who drives a truck—all have socially valid claims to victimhood. We already recognize that. But there’s obviously a hierarchy that makes some victim identities more powerful than others. The gay black woman is clearly at the top of the intersectional ladder. And in social settings with all four present, the straight Chinese woman and gay white man would subtly compete with each other to win her validation as the second-most oppressed. If the gay white man is conversationally framed as a white man by the two nonwhite people, at some point he’ll redirect the discussion toward his gayness. If the Chinese woman is then the oppressor because she’s one of the straight ones, she’ll highlight her womanhood. If the straight white man points to the fact that he lost his manufacturing job, he’s told to shut up and check his privilege.
These are just the rules of the game, the law of the intersectional jungle. There’s a hierarchy that gives some victims greater status than others, so the simple recognition that everyone’s a victim is not by itself enough to compel everyone to give up their grievances.
Let me put this objection in Kantian terms: Peter and I are making an argument that using victimhood as a shortcut to power and status isn’t universalizable—an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, so let’s all set our weapons aside and forgive each other our trespasses. But this gets to a complication in Kantian reasoning: the gay black woman, straight Chinese woman, and gay white man can all make valid claims to victimhood, but they are not in fact in the same situation when we look closely, with a fine enough grain. The gay black woman benefits much more from a world where victimhood claims are a path to power, and she stands to lose more if all four agree to set all their claims aside, so why should rationality command her to do so?
At first glance, it might seem foolish for everyone to forgive each other when some have greater grievances than others. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” sounds good, but it’s not a compelling argument when one party starts out with a lot more power than the other—it’s just the desperate plea the weaker one makes to save their skin. To put this point in terms of my fisherman example from chapter 6, the Kantian argument against overfishing no longer works as well if you’re in a different situation from the other rational fishermen because you start out with far more ability to overfish than they do. If you have greater ability to cheat because you have much larger nets than everyone else, for instance, you can break the rule without fearing that everyone else will.
But this concern is actually a better objection to the Kantian argument for sustainable fishing than the one for national forgiveness. There’s a key difference between the two situations: it’s a well-known feature of the American system that power often changes hands. The gay black woman may be at the top of the food chain right now, the apex victim, but she ought to reason that someday soon, the shoe will be on the other foot. If all the Kantian fishermen periodically exchange which one gets to use the largest nets, the argument against overfishing suddenly returns in full force: if you catch too many fish when it’s your turn, you ought to reason that the next guy will when it’s his. So deciding to break the rule once again leads to a world where everyone breaks it and everyone has less.
That’s actually the situation the American nation of victims is in today. At the moment I write these words, Democrats control both houses of Congress and the presidency, along with most of the levers of cultural power, like universities, news outlets, and media. It is this particular favorable national environment that allows the gay black woman to extract maximum advantage from pressing each of her victimhood claims. She’s the one with the largest net, for the moment. But in the American system, that privileged status is temporary and contingent, not inherent.
By the time you read this, things may have changed dramatically. The first domino to fall may be liberal political control, from the local to national level. The congressional midterm elections are coming up in November 2022, and it’s no secret that all signs are pointing to a red wave of Republican victories. The party in power always faces an uphill battle in midterm elections to begin with, and Democrats are burdened by President Biden’s plummeting approval ratings, down from 55 percent when he entered office to around 42 percent today.1 This parallels a sharp reversal in party affiliation. A Gallup poll found that at the start of 2021, 49 percent of respondents leaned toward the Democratic party compared to 40 percent toward the Republican party, while by the end of the year, the tables had turned and Republicans led 47 percent to 42 percent.2 It was one of the largest swings ever recorded. Democratic congressmen are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. So far, thirty House Democrats have announced their retirement, an exodus the likes of which hasn’t been seen in three decades.3
Analysts are conducting autopsies of the impending Democratic wipeout before it even occurs. An op-ed from Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times gave a particularly astute pre-mortem assessment:
How did Democrats get into so much trouble so quick? Inherited trends, including Covid-19, deficits and geostrategic overreach, are partly to blame. So is poor policymaking on issues like the economic stimulus. But the heart of the problem lies elsewhere. Democrats are telling a story about America—about the depth and pervasiveness of racism, and about the existential dangers of Mr. Trump—that a great many Americans, even a great many would-be Democrats, do not buy.4
Famed Democratic analyst James Carville once memorably said “It’s the economy, stupid,” to explain what the 1992 presidential election came down to. Today, the carnage Democrats face in the voting booth could be summed up with “It’s wokeness, stupid.” No one likes it. I sometimes read the comments on New York Times articles, and these days it seems half of them begin with the author’s obligatory disclaimer that they’re a lifelong Democrat, then end with a long rant about how much they hate and fear the Spanish Inquisition–style wokeness that’s overtaken their party. Carville himself cracked open the door for Democrats to publicly acknowledge the issue in a widely discussed interview with Vox, saying “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today—and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party—who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.” When asked why that was so, he answered “Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled.”5
Carville’s interview made waves not because he’d been uniquely insightful, but because he’d been one of the first on the left to publicly observe that the emperor had no clothes. In the 2022 election, we will see what happens once the entire crowd feels free to say the same, first from the privacy of the voting booth, then publicly once they see that others agree their emperor is naked. The progressive left appears to have confused the ability to control what people say with the power to dictate how they vote.
While today the gay black woman possesses the greatest ability to profit from a world where victimhood claims are an easy path to power and wealth, by the time you read this, straight white conservative men may be the ones eagerly seeking compensation for all their own built-up grievances. In other words, the fishermen are about to trade nets. But in our nation of victims, when one group of American fishermen gains control of the largest net, it catches as many fish as it can in the limited time it has, concerned only with matching the haul of the previous owner. We can either collectively relinquish our many victimhood claims or press them to the fullest whenever we take our turn controlling the levers of power and watch the nation’s resources dwindle as each new apex victim raids it.
So we all have reason to forgive each other our grievances even though some groups can benefit more from victimhood claims than others: as we exchange political control, we rotate which groups are best able to press their claims. A regime where victimhood is a path to power then inevitably becomes a race to the bottom. But there’s another reason we all have incentive to give up our arms, too.
Political control tends to be a pendulum in the American system, swinging from one party to another, but there are some arenas in American life that operate differently. Universities and news and entertainment media, for instance, seem firmly entrenched in the far left’s worldview. Even if there is a brewing political backlash toward progressive identity politics, it may take years or even decades to reach these cultural institutions. One could argue, then, that the gay black woman and others currently at the top of the victim hierarchy have a strong incentive not to embrace national forgiveness because they still stand to lose more from it, since their status in cultural institutions is firmly rooted.
But there’s still a brewing backlash against wokeness, and when it can’t voice itself in one outlet, it will simply find another. Consider liberal dominance of universities, for instance. Conservatives know they can’t challenge that from within the university system. But this fact simply makes them vent their frustration in the systems they can control. The Florida House of Representatives, for instance, just passed two controversial bills aimed at trying to alter the hierarchy of victimhood in the educational arena.6
One of them, HB 7, inspired by Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” agenda, attempts to prevent teachers and employers from indoctrinating those under their power with CRT-inspired theories. It expands Florida’s civil rights law to make it discrimination to make students and employees feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress on the basis of their race, color, sex, or national origin. It also prohibits training or instruction involving other tenets of CRT, such as the insistence that virtues like merit and excellence are the products of white supremacy.7 The other bill, HB 1557, is dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics. It forbids instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, and requires that discussions of those topics in other grade levels be age appropriate.8
Personally, I think bills like these tread into dangerous waters. I’m not a fan of the wave of CRT bans and book bans sweeping the country. I default to the view that the answer to speech is more speech. Voltaire had the right of things. No matter how noble the intentions behind these bills are, the inherent vagueness in any ban on speech tends to have a chilling effect that makes the law silence more speech than it’s meant to. My purpose in mentioning these bills is not to argue for or against them, but to point out that laws like these are the inevitable consequence of making victimhood claims a path to power and enshrining the liberal hierarchy of victimhood in cultural institutions. If the ones at the bottom of the ladder can’t express their backlash in universities or media, they’ll simply relocate their frustrations to whichever institutions they can control, then voice them even louder.
Like their liberal opponents, conservatives embrace the principle that since it’s hard to hit any target perfectly, justice requires you to overshoot. This mutual pattern of excessive backlash creates a nation destined to spiral. When everyone embraces the ideology of victimhood, we’re gradually led to mutually assured destruction—not the theory (which is about avoiding destruction, after all), but the destruction itself. With nuclear weapons, the threat of mutually assured destruction is obvious and happens all at once, and is therefore avoided by all. But social weapons work more subtly. The logic of victimhood draws us into our mutual demise slowly but surely, like the grip of a black hole, each step toward ruin seeming rational and necessary as we take it. The fact that the path to destruction is gradual rather than sudden is what makes it possible to actually get there.
My favorite part of the story about the emperor’s new clothes is the ending, a small detail most don’t remember. When the people in the crowd all start exclaiming that the emperor has no clothes, he himself finally recognizes the truth. But it’s too late for him to turn back. All he can do is keep walking, so he does so even more proudly than before.
America is trapped too, locked in a grievance-fueled race to the bottom propelled by two major forces: cyclical control of the political levers of power and unrestrained backlash to the entrenched cultural ones. The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim. Otherwise all we’ll be able to do is walk proudly toward our bitter end as it finally comes into view.
How Forgiveness Enables Excellence
I’ve said a lot about the various forms of American victimhood so far in this book. But ultimately I want to look to the future, not the past; toward excellence, not grievance. To do that, I owe you an account of what excellence really is. So far I’ve defined it in negative terms. I’ve told you that victimhood shrinks the economic pie, that it makes people resentful and unhappy, that it divides us, even that excellence can’t consist in being superior to anyone. But there is more to being an excellent person or nation than having wealth or even happiness, more to it even than respecting others as equals. I owe you a positive account of what it means to pursue excellence.
I have a somewhat unconventional conception of excellence, one inspired by my faith. It’s best if I begin with a concrete example of someone who rejected victimhood to embrace excellence and, by doing so, helped his would-be enemies do the same.
Daryl Davis is an accomplished black musician who plays R&B and the blues. He’s played with musical icons like B.B. King and Chuck Berry, the father of rock and roll. He even played with Bill Clinton. But he’s more famous for his unusual hobby: befriending Ku Klux Klan members.
Davis became fascinated with the phenomenon of racism when he was ten years old and experienced it for the first time. He was the son of an American diplomat, so he’d spent his childhood traveling the world, attending racially diverse schools. After his family moved to Massachusetts, he joined an all-white Cub Scout pack. One day while he was marching in a parade with the other boys and carrying the American flag, members of the crowd started hurling bottles and rocks at him. He concluded they had an inexplicable hatred of Cub Scouts until he realized he was the only one being targeted. Later that day, his parents sat him down and explained that it had been about the color of his skin. Davis says he found that explanation so absurd that “I literally thought they were lying to me.”9
That incident sparked a lifelong obsession with uncovering the roots of racism. As a young man who’d recently graduated from college, he stumbled on the beginnings of an answer when he played piano at an all-white Maryland bar frequented by white supremacists. A shared love of excellence happened to be the catalyst.
After Davis’s set was done, a man came up and complimented his skills, saying he’d never heard a black man play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Davis said Lewis was a friend of his and he knew for a fact that black men had taught him how to play.10 Skeptical but fascinated, the other man bought him a drink. They had a great conversation about music, and he mentioned that never in his life had he had a drink or even a conversation with a black man.
“Why is that?” Davis asked.
“I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.11 Now it was Davis’s turn to be skeptical. The other guy showed him his Klan membership card, gave him his number, and asked him to call next time he was doing a gig in town so he could come watch. The two men became friends; years later, the man left the KKK.12
That first friendship led to many more. Davis convinced his new friend to put him in touch with Roger Kelly, the grand dragon of the Maryland KKK. Davis set up an interview with him without letting him know he was black. At the end, Kelly gave him his business card and asked him to stay in touch. He did—he invited Kelly to his gigs and then his home, where Davis would bring over black people and Jews to chat with him. A couple years later, Kelly became imperial wizard, the national leader of the KKK. He began inviting Davis to his own home.13
Davis started attending Klan rallies, making it clear to the members that he disagreed with them but shaking hands, taking pictures, and having polite intellectual conversations about their differences. Kelly eventually left the KKK and handed Davis his robe and hood. Davis befriended the next two leaders of the Maryland KKK and they left it too; he claims to have effectively ended the Maryland Klan.14
Over the last few decades, he says he’s directly convinced more than two hundred white supremacists to abandon the KKK and similar groups. Many of them hand him their robe and hood when they leave. One of those, former Tennessee grand dragon Scott Shepherd, now calls himself a reformed racist and fights against white supremacy.15 “Daryl saved my life,” he said. “Daryl extended his hand and actually just extended his heart, too, and we became brothers.”16
Predictably, many black people and antiracists say that Davis is committing a grave sin by attending Klan meetings and befriending white supremacists. They often call him an Oreo (black on the outside, white inside) or an Uncle Tom. There’s that ugly phrase again, the one slur against dark-skinned people antiracism not only allows, but requires. Davis doesn’t let it faze him. He says that when he shows his critics his vast trove of robes and hoods and asks them how many white supremacists they’ve convinced to give up their racism, they usually shut up.17
Daryl Davis didn’t exactly shed the identity of black victimhood; it’s more like he shrugged it off as others tried to place it on him. Forgiveness came very easily to him because he never allowed himself to feel harmed. He’s been so successful at persuading white supremacists to abandon their racism through the simple power of being himself around them, unencumbered by the false identities they or anyone else would impose on him.
Excellence is an easy concept to appeal to but a hard one to define. As Justice Potter Stewart once said when attempting to define pornography, “I know it when I see it.”18 In most contexts, an intuitive understanding of excellence is enough. But as Peter Thiel pointed out to me, if we’re going to exchange our national fixation on victimhood for one centered on excellence, we have to have at least some idea of what it means. He argued that we face the dilemma of either over defining excellence, leading to a rigid bureaucratic focus on raising artificial measures like GDP or standardized test scores, or under defining it, leading to the vague pursuit of whatever people want. The dilemma is that a conception of excellence must be either artificially objective or hopelessly subjective.
I lean toward the subjective side of things, but I aim to convince you that the pursuit of excellence doesn’t have to be hopelessly subjective. I do have an account of what it means to be excellent, and people like Daryl Davis exemplify it. My understanding is shaped by principles from my Hindu faith. To put it concisely, to be excellent is to actualize one’s true inner self.
Most people probably know little more of Hindus than that we believe in a cycle of reincarnation. This is true, to a point, but it misses the goal of the process. Unlike Christians, we have no notion of heaven or hell; there is life after death, but it takes place in the same world we’re in now. To us, the ultimate goal is moksa, the end of the cycle of reincarnation, which one can only reach by achieving perfect self-knowledge. Our essential selves are not attached to particular features of our identities like skin color or sex, and our true selves continue even when we are reborn and those features change.
This gets pretty deep into theology, but the Hindu belief is that at our core, we are all just the matter of the universe given fleeting form in life. That life might take the form of a tree, or a bird, or a human; if it’s human, it might take the shape of a man or a woman; if a man, maybe a father. But each of these identities is a contingent, temporary form imposed on the matter of the universe, easily shed when one life ends and the soul begins another. Our true selves are like water taken from a vast ocean, temporarily taking on the shape of whatever vessel they’re poured into. If you see water in a pot, it takes one shape, but pour it into a cup, and it takes an entirely different one; spill the cup to the ground and the water becomes a puddle, a form far different from the first two, with much different characteristics. But the water itself is unchanged.
The cycle of death and rebirth isn’t endless, but a process aimed at shedding our contingent identities and thereby gradually coming to understand our true natures, our true selves. The purpose of the cycle of reincarnation is to teach us what we really are, that our true selves aren’t attached to any of the particular vessels we happen to find ourselves in during any given lifetime. To a Hindu, pursuing excellence amounts to successfully abandoning our attachment to the layers of artificial identities that prevent us from seeing our true selves, illusions upon illusions. Some identities, of course, are much easier to lose than others. It is far easier for me to cast off the man-made identity of CEO than father, for instance, or American.
We have to achieve self-knowledge gradually, removing the identities furthest from our cores first. But in the end, if the water has been in a pot, then a cup, then a puddle, then a cloud, then a raindrop, it may eventually realize that it is none of those things. And then it is no loss to lose its form completely and once again become part of the sea. Once we truly understand what our essential selves are, the death that ends the cycle of rebirth is really nothing more than, after a long and difficult journey, finally finding our way home.
From my perspective, then, when I gave you the account of what excellence isn’t, I was simultaneously telling you what it is. Victimhood, like superiority, is one of the artificial identities furthest from our cores, one of the first that must be cast aside to become our true selves. When we see ourselves and others as true equals, we become excellent by taking an important step toward seeing everyone as they really are.
Through this lens, forgiving someone else’s prejudice is not some grand act of self-sacrifice, but the simple realization that neither you nor they are defined by the wrong they have done you. Forgiving someone’s bigotry involves not giving up a grievance you have a right to, but understanding that what they did to you was the least and smallest part of who they are, that they merely mistook you for the least and smallest part of who you are.
That’s what I find so appealing in the life and works of Daryl Davis. He’s a living example of someone who embodies these ideals. Because he spent the formative years of his childhood in other countries, away from the racial lens America imposes on the world, he never defined himself by his race. And when he came to America and others defined him by his skin color, instead of seeing himself as a victim, he rightly saw them as confused. Where an American inculcated in victimhood would’ve seen it as unwise and dangerous to talk to white supremacists, Davis instinctively understood that they simply hadn’t seen his true self, and that if he merely showed them who he was, they would have no choice but to change.
The question that launched Davis’s quixotic quest to befriend white supremacists, the question he asks them to their faces, is “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” When they see him as nothing more than a black man, he shows them a musician, a citizen, a friend, knowing their racism cannot easily survive.
This way of thinking is completely alien to the American mindset. Our nation of victims thinks racism must be confronted because it’s the product of evil oppressors. Because we think of prejudiced people as innately evil and punish anyone who denies that, we think that it would be the height of foolishness to simply talk to them. But Davis understands that prejudice is merely the byproduct of ignorance of one’s true self, and it therefore has to be not confronted, but dissolved.
Like the cycle of reincarnation, although the cycle of victimhood may seem endless, it can be broken simply by seeing yourself and others for what you really are. When you free yourself from the illusion that you’re a mere victim, you simultaneously free yourself from seeing others as mere oppressors. They will see your excellence and want the same thing for themselves; when you show others your true self, you help them become theirs. The way I see it, when all those KKK members gave up their robes and hoods, they were just shedding the artificial identity that was furthest from their core. Superiority and inferiority are the greatest illusions of all.
At the beginning of an interlude where he meditates on forgiveness, Douglas Murray raises the case of Quinn Norton, who was hired by The New York Times and then just as quickly unhired once it emerged that a few years earlier she had used crude words like “fag” and the N-word as she argued in the cesspools of the internet. Murray’s presentation of the aftermath stuck with me:
In a subsequent piece in The Atlantic Norton explained what she thought had happened. She acknowledged that many things she had written and tweeted in the past had been ignorant and embarrassing. She also explained what it felt like to, in her words, have a “doppleganger” version of herself swiftly emerge online. In common with other people who had been the subject of online shaming this version of herself that people were railing against was not “who she was” but a simplified, out-of-context version of tiny parts of herself.19
“What is a fair way to describe somebody?” Murray asks. “Norton, for instance, might henceforth be summed up as ‘the racist, homophobic tech journalist fired by The New York Times.’ She might think a fairer version of her life could be ‘Writer and mother’… So who gets to call it?”20
“That’s not who I am” sounds like the flimsiest excuse of all, and that’s how I took it at the time Norton said it. As Murray points out, isn’t that just when everyone says when they have no excuse left to appeal to, when their own words condemn them? Anyone who utters it seems to be arguing with their past self and losing.
I’m no exception. I’m not particularly proud of when I vaguely intimated that we wanted to bring in some third party to resolve a lawn-mowing dispute with my aunt’s black neighbor, and he’d ranted about my skin color and threatened my life. That memory returned to me as I was writing this chapter on forgiveness, because I’m still in the process of figuring out how to forgive him and myself for the events of that day.
I’d planned on talking about that experience with the neighbor in Woke, Inc., but everyone told me to take it out. They said it reflected poorly on me. “What exactly did you mean when you threatened to bring in a third party?” they asked me. “The police? Lawyers? All over the way a guy mows his lawn?”
That’s not who I am, I thought. It felt not like an excuse, but a truth I knew deep down, but could not get them to see. That’s how it must feel to everyone who says it. I’m willing to bet that guy thinks the same thing to himself when he remembers sounding off against Indian people and talking about shooting me.
The things that man and I said to each other that morning weren’t who we were at all. Yes, we said them, and so they must reflect a small part of us. But only the parts of us farthest from our cores. Just illusions piled on top of illusions.
I’m not some kind of expert on forgiveness; most of us aren’t. But we need to figure out a way to start doing it. You know, I think what Daryl Davis does is very admirable, talking to white supremacists and befriending them and all. But everyone can’t be a Daryl Davis. I doubt I could. I hope to have dinner with my aunt’s neighbor one day, but I haven’t even talked to him again. He couldn’t bring himself to apologize to us, either. That’s why his wife came over to do it. So I get it when people say it’s far too much to ask to expect black people to talk to KKK members, or gay people to talk to homophobes. Maybe sometimes it’s even too much to ask for Democrats and Republicans to talk to each other: the gravitational pull of grievance is just too strong today.
But there are many steps before sainthood. You don’t have to befriend your enemy; you don’t have to fully forgive them; you don’t even have to talk to them. We might just start with understanding that they could be worthy of these things. That you may have only seen the smallest and least part of them, and they must’ve only seen the smallest and least part of you.
These grievances we hold and the way they make us treat each other are not who we are. They’re just temporary forms our true selves have been molded by, easily abandoned once we release these shapes and find our next lives. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the black man next time; for all I know, I was before. The water all makes it back to sea in the end.