On Depolarization, Nonviolence and Truthtelling

For the past seven years, I’ve been part of several conversations related to polarization in American life and how one should best respond to what feels to many of us like a new political, cultural, and information environment. While I’ve been involved in global discussions of the subject through the Institute for Integrated Transitions, I find myself reflecting most particularly on the United States because of my own story and the implications of what happens there for the rest of the world. This reflection has involved a bit of soul-searching, as friends have challenged me to consider whether polarization was a framework worth my time and attention. These friends include fellow organizers who have been on the front lines of nonviolent protests and leading crisis response in the wake of increased violence coming from government and other actors. I feel accountable to them, and I have at times felt caught between worlds.

How does depolarization connect to my commitment to nonviolence and the moral and spiritual commitments that guide my work?

That reflection leads me first to the experiences that ground me. I am among those who relate to nonviolence as a way of life; it is for me a spiritual commitment. Thanks significantly to the work of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, many know that nonviolence is also of great strategic value. On the two occasions I had to converse with Gene Sharp, we had a healthy discussion about his belief that those of us on the spiritual side of things got in the way of others embracing nonviolence as an effective strategy. He was gracious but clear in his criticism, and I don’t entirely disagree with it. I know that many of us approach nonviolence in a way that feels utterly inaccessible to others. Nonviolence should be understood as a practical, strategic and moral choice without it needing to be considered as a spiritual matter.

For me, however, I can’t really imagine enduring all that nonviolence can sometimes demand of a person without understanding it as an extension of spiritual practice, but for me, this is also somewhat biographical.

While I devoted time to the study of nonviolence, its origins in my life were through the examples around me, and I can’t separate those examples from the spiritual context that shaped my life. The Christian tradition that caught hold of me as a child taught me to deplore violence; this was such a clear part of my spiritual formation that it was hard for me to accept that one could share this faith but not this orientation. I understand that clearly, and tragically, many do not. I witnessed nonviolence practiced most significantly by my grandmother, who grew up in segregation and had to endure all kinds of separate and unequal nonsense.

She nonetheless had this powerful way of instructing us not to hate the white people who sought to make life hell for the black residents of Suwannee County, Florida. To my grandmother, the nonviolence that I saw her casually and routinely display was part and parcel of what it meant to be Christian. She wasn’t a pacifist, but she tried stridently to love her enemies, and that left an impression on me. She always told the truth about what white people had done and what they were capable of, but she did not seem to regard them as destined to be the worst version of themselves that was on display throughout her life; she saw a human problem and she believed in the possibility of redemption. I saw the pride and strength that enabled her to hold her head high in defiance against bigotry, and it inspired me. I already had an anger brewing in me as a child, and it was squarely in response to my early apprehensions of how racism functioned to confine all our lives.

When my own capacity for violence in my youth terrified me, I prayed that I could change. I credit that prayer, alongside an older brother and sister who helped me feel less alone navigating the confusing world of race and violence in the United States, for the direction of my growth back then. The memory of my grandmother not only anchors me in my spiritual orientation towards nonviolence, but also reminds me of who I must hold myself accountable to.

In different contexts with practitioners of nonviolent social change, I have often found myself among those to whom society had bestowed a certain amount of power, often — but not exclusively — by virtue of race. I noticed that their commitments to nonviolence seemed to come from a desire to divest themselves of a kind of violent power they had inherited. My orientation was different, and from a different vantage point. Beyond the fact that we had a different relationship to power, our relationship to nonviolence was also tied to a more communal orientation to life. It wasn’t rooted in individual emancipation or self-discovery; it was more collectivist in nature. I sincerely believe that before I fully understood that there was an “I,” I understood there was a “we,” and nonviolence had everything to do with the need to wrest power from the hands of those who would mean “us” harm.

It was about achieving power that would keep us all safe, but doing so in a way that we would not become our tormentors. I always knew this was not a simple matter. My intimate life was full of a myriad of different responses to the violence of racism. My father’s father was much more militant, bitter, armed, and prepared to fight in defense of us. I knew the emotional validity of this response to what he had endured. Admonitions to love our enemies when they seem hell-bent on destroying you can land like a poison pill in a room full of rage and grief.

There has been this casual way that people talk about our polarized times that I’ve always rejected. It is an ahistorical narrative that asserts we are experiencing something entirely new, roughly since the election of Donald Trump. Polarization is a normal part of democratic life, but what many people say, and what I partially concede, is that we are experiencing a new kind of polarization. People distinguish it by describing it as toxic or by pointing to the affective quality of group-identity-based dislike and distrust. Yet, for me, any discourse about polarization that ignores the country’s history with race — the dehumanization and attempted subjugation of African people and their descendants — perpetuates a lie at the heart of the American experiment of democracy.

This feels important for me to insist not simply for moral reasons, which should not be dismissed, but also because it ignores the way that race has always been used to polarize American society. This is particularly true in today’s context of affective polarization. While the tribal identities into which we’ve been polarized may appear to transcend race, the markers of belonging are rooted in one’s allegiance to certain narratives about race and American history in relation to race.

Even if I were to detach my personal experience from the matter, I don’t see how any accurate reading of history would conclude otherwise. It would not be possible for Americans to be this toxically polarized if so many of us did not cling so tightly to whiteness and the belief in the birthright it was meant to afford them. I understand that people don’t see themselves functioning that way when they vote for this or that candidate or policy, but that ignorance doesn’t make it any less true or the impact of those decisions any less real for the rest of us. This truth means that any serious depolarization strategy should include consideration of  how we rid ourselves of racism and white supremacy. Therein we find the evidence of our critical challenge: the very mention of the words “racism” or “white supremacy” in any conversation about toxic polarization will often be polarizing.

It is a challenging thing to deal with the very real and painful impact of a construct which you hope to eliminate from the world. It’s even more challenging when not everyone agrees on its elimination. To speak of the construct of race without making it some immutable quality of being requires nuance, sophistication, and grace that eludes our public discourse. But without telling the truth of our journey, our successes, and our failures, how can we hope to achieve a pluralist and inclusive democracy? How can we hope to achieve a long-lasting peace in a country that has been at war with itself since its inception? Any analysis about how democracy has changed, or how political discourse has shifted, that does not recognize that we’ve only just begun trying to truly be a democracy that includes the majority of the U.S. population, is missing a key diagnostic tool. That the current expression of our cruelty is focused on legal entry and citizenship status does not make this not about race. It seems entirely related to the fact that our country’s foundation was economically and politically structured upon the presence of a dehumanized and would-be permanent servant class.

It’s been my anecdotal experience that there is an interesting overlap between people concerned with polarization and those from the peacebuilding field. I think this overlap relates to the very real concerns about how toxic polarization leads to armed conflict. There is a conflict resolution framework that seems to encourage a rather detached approach to the internal dynamics going on inside a country. This detachment fosters a kind of abdication of responsibility with respect to moral questions in the service of a cessation of armed conflict. To prevent a continuation of bloodshed, important questions about justice are often ignored, or perhaps temporarily put aside.

I am sympathetic to the reasons for that relative detachment in the context of protracted violence. For one, a third party entering a conflict is in a poor position to weigh these matters appropriately. The clearer moral reason, to me, however, is that there is a point at which justice is a cosmic matter for which no further earthly blood should be shed.

Notwithstanding the improbability of meaningful justice in many of the world’s tragedies, various approaches to peacebuilding are, in my view, rightly criticized for lacking an analysis of power and sometimes enabling problematic actors to evade accountability. I, like many, have oriented myself away from expectations of justice and towards questions of healing. Fundamentally, all peacebuilding and nonviolence approaches share the same problem: the only way to stop a cycle of violence is for someone to absorb the blow and not return it. In my experience, that heroic act of grace and courage often falls to the least empowered and the least responsible for whatever the broader conditions are. There’s a sense in which it’s kind of always, to put it bluntly, fucked up. Yet, more people are alive in the end, and life must always be a goal.

This tension in peacebuilding seems also to be very present in our conversations about polarization. The moral and ethical road we walk requires nuance and complexity, and I enter the peacebuilding and depolarization conversations knowing very well that I’m wading into troubled waters. This tension I’m describing is one of the reasons so many of us have found John Paul Lederach’s work on conflict transformation so important. Reading his Little Book on Conflict Transformation in seminary gave me a reason to stay the course.

When conflict resolution translates to a cessation of extreme violence, I understand that it’s sometimes necessary. However, if the status quo is your subjugation or dehumanization, it is certainly not enough. The ideal for which I might lay aside my demands for justice is the pursuit of a transformed relationship that might allow us to live the hard questions of justice together. In some depolarization conversations, there are people who decry those for whom “depolarize” actually means “I’m building a bridge for you to walk across to my side.” The truth is, I’m realizing increasingly, that this might be me. I enter discussions about polarization from the prism of my lived experience and my commitment to nonviolence. I cannot play referee to positions of false moral equivalency.

So what do we do when our opponents operate with a different set of facts? What do we do when algorithms fuel animus and there are fewer means to provoke the conscience of a people who feel justified in hardening themselves to human suffering?

I don’t have all the answers to this, but I know that “relationship” can’t always mean complicity in the context of democracy. Relationships have at times proven stronger than misinformation campaigns. We exist in relationship to one another; to behave as if we don’t is to further  participate in a lie. Boundaried relationships, holding to one’s moral and ethical center — honoring our opponents’ fears while still telling the truth — might point a way forward.

I know this is not always possible; we are not all equally positioned. We are not all safe enough, well enough, to engage the risk that this entails, but many of us are. Like all aspects of nonviolence, I cannot insist that others, with their backs against the wall, make this choice. I can make it for myself and try to create hospitable conditions for the grace that I hope endures. I can hope and pray that others do the same.

The participatory democracy to which I aspire to belong is one in which we never stop trying to persuade each other of the best ideas for the common good. I can’t stop seeing perpetrators as people capable of change. History has put me at a certain angle to world events, and I have no interest in pretending that this isn’t the case. When you move through the world as dark-skinned as I am, your relationship to certain historical events is known, both by you and by the people you encounter.

My queerness is similarly situated in both history and in the way we have been used to polarize. I exist in a world where queer people are constantly the wedge issue, used to demonstrate one’s belonging in whatever conservative ethos one seeks belonging to, whether that be a variety of white evangelicalism, its black, latino, or asian counterpart, or a certain masculinist Pan-Africanism. So, I’m marked, as it were. I didn’t choose for my identities to be politicized, but they are, and I can’t be neutral to world events.

I have identities that transcend affective polarization — brother, son, partner, friend — but I learned with my first real police encounter at 16 that for people with the power to end my life, they do not matter. So, then I am who I am, and I have to tell the truth about my experiences and the experiences of those to whom I belong. I am, also, because we are.

Ultimately, what I am really after is a transformation of relationships — this is critical to my theory of change. The spiritual discipline of nonviolence can help us depolarize when depolarization is ultimately about changing who we are committed to being to one another. The nonviolence tradition to which I belong is rooted in a moral outlook that I should not have to surrender to engage in the work of depolarization. I can show curiosity about my opponents’ experiences, and I can defend their right to life and to participate in our democracy; but I refuse to be curious about my own destruction, and I won’t shrink from making a moral argument in defense of the communities to which I belong.

In the United States (and in Europe), we are in a pitched struggle to define ourselves for the future to come. Holding firm to my grandmother’s witness, I will not needlessly ridicule my opponents. I will search for their fears and deal seriously with their legitimate grievances. I will do my best to offer them a belonging on the other side of white supremacy when they divest. I will honor the way that humans change and grow, and acknowledge the difficulty of change in my work. I will search myself for all the ways that I must change and grow, and endeavor not to fall into polarized and poisoned wells that prevent me from seeing the humanity of my opponents.

I will grieve all the loss and make room for joy when it comes. I know that I am on a side; that line crossed me; I didn’t draw it. I will keep trying to tell the truth, as polarizing as it may be, and defend my communities when under attack. I will also keep a bridge open for my opponents, and defend it with my life and my love, in the hope that we find our way back to each other.