A Side Is Not A Divide
To hear people tell it, there are two sides to issues, the most recent example being the tragic-any-way-you-slice-it Charlottesville situation. It goes like this: On one side there’s Yadda-yadda-yadda; on the other there’s Blah-blah-blah. This divide is drawn out most glaringly by pundits and politicians, who needs easy binaries for short-attention-span audiences. Too much nuance makes Johnny change the channel.
This act of dumbing down and dividing may get person elected to office, but it does nothing to resolve the problem, whatever it is. Any complex issue such as race in the U.S.A. has more than two sides. Many more. How many ways does racism show up? How many generations deep does the oppression of black and minority and female Americans go? How many ways do tragic histories still unfold? Ask any adult African American, and he or she can give you a hundred. Ask any woman working in business, she’ll do the same. Generations-long issues like racism and gender discrimination are never one-cut wounds.
There are a thousand sides to a complex issue. It’s only when let go of binaries, when we quit seeing a side as a divide and, instead, see a side as a facet of the problem, that we can begin to resolve the problem.
