Never Start By Making Things Too Complex

Here’s what I really want to say to you today: if you only love someone when they’re unthreatening, if you only support a group of people when you can cast them as blameless, if you’ll only fight for a class of people when you can insist that they’re harmless, you do not love them, you cannot support them, and will never really fight for them. Love that does not love the unlovable part of someone is not love.

When Michael Brown was killed, and The New York Times ran the infamous passage above, the controversy that ensued struck me as uniquely sad, thanks to the way the reaction against it spoke the same language. There was justifiable anger that the Times would front an 18-year-old’s checkered past - whether real or propaganda is not the point - in a story about him getting shot to death in the street. Some of those who responded to the NYT piece, I’m sorry to say, responded by demanding that he was in fact innocent of the claims about his past and the allegations about his conduct on the day he was killed. I can understand this impulse, but I found it unfortunate in a really profound way. Because to respond to the implication of “no angel,” that someone might have been complicit in their own execution because of bad things they’d done, by denying that they’d done anything bad is to surrender to the assumption that such an execution can be deserved by dint of bad deeds. It attempts to win a battle by declaring surrender in the war.