No Time for Nuance

Laura and I lived a few houses away from a U.S. Bank branch that was burned to the ground in the wake of the rioting that broke out after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, murdered an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, MN, on May 25, 2020. Strings of shops and businesses up and down Lake Street, just half a block from where we used to live, were broken into, looted, and set on fire. Graffiti now covers store fronts and boarded up windows. In the aftermath of all that happened, news footage showed torched cars and piles of rubble. In some places the smoke was still rising. And all these many miles away, as I watched the local news reports and people’s personal accounts of the carnage on Facebook live, I felt something rising up within me along with the smoke. In a word, it was a feeling of tension.

The tension I was feeling centered around how I was supposed to feel. What was the right emotional response? To be honest, I felt stuck, and the more I thought about it, I think I came to some conclusion as to why I felt that way. Subconsciously, I felt compelled to take some sort of side, and in my mind, there were only two sides to choose from. I felt like I had to choose between defending the black community or defending the police. I felt like if I agreed that this man should not have died from the knee of a police officer, then I also had to endorse the torching of shops and businesses up and down the street where I used to live. Or if I thought that rioting and looting was a travesty, then I must also be some kind of right-wing racist.

You know, there’s actually a term for that kind of logic. It’s called binary thinking. Now, there are times and places for this type of reasoning. Either murder warrants the death penalty as a fair and reasonable consequence, or it doesn’t. Either Hitler’s slaughtering of millions of people because he considered them to be inferior was justified, or it wasn’t. I’d be hard pressed to find any shades of gray there. By and large, however, it’s hard to divide most of life into two neatly defined boxes. Nevertheless, I admit that I often feel the pressure to do exactly that and then choose my box and hunker down in it.

We must always be on the lookout for oversimplifications of very complex issues. In the United States especially, it seems like every message we’re presented with only comes in very specifically defined binary pairs: red versus blue, white versus black, right versus left, capitalists versus socialists, rich versus poor, and on and on and on. From the way so many people talk, you would think every issue only had two sides, and the pressure’s on to make up your mind about which camp you’re going to set up your tent in.

There are reasons for the pervasiveness of binary thinking in our culture when it comes to, well, everything. You see, nuance doesn’t fit into a Tweet. You can’t fit subtleties into a three-second sound bite. With the average local TV news story being a mere 41 seconds long, there’s simply not the space for careful, extended, logical explanation that can address the true complexities of a given situation and result in more refined, multi-faceted, sometimes perhaps even contradictory conclusions. We want a this-or-that conclusion and rarely take the time or effort to reach a this-when-A-B-and-C-are-true-but-that-in-the-cases-of-D-and-E-unless-of-course-F-and-G kind of conclusion. Perhaps we’re all getting a little intellectually flabby. Or perhaps we simply don’t have the attention span.

What’s more, many issues that have no business becoming political issues almost always end up as such, and as soon as one side takes one stance, it seems that automatically means the other side must necessarily take the opposing stance. Soon you have standard Republican and Democratic positions on almost everything, including what car you drive and what kind of radio stations you listen to. Deviation from the party line will get you kicked out of either group. And heaven forbid you ever look at the other side and say, “Hey, you know what? I think they got this one right.”

As I looked at the state of the city Laura and I called home for six years, I felt that same compulsion to take one of two predefined sides welling up within me. And you know something, I’m just not going to do it.

An unarmed, handcuffed black man should not have died on a city street from having the knee of a white, armed officer pressed into the back of his neck for over eight minutes while three other officers and many other bystanders looked on. It should cause each and every human being with a pulse to shudder to think that if George Floyd had been white, he would probably still be alive.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

Anger as hot as the fires that burned down the U.S. Bank next to our old house should rage within every thinking, feeling person on the planet at the thought that one human being created in the image of God would consider himself so far above another human being created in the image of God that he had the right to use what was by all accounts unnecessary force that resulted in a man’s death.

And—not but—and—we should be horrified by the livelihoods that were wiped out in just two nights of rioting and looting. It should make us sick that many of those business were owned by and provided work for minorities, many of whom had been hit the hardest by the quarantine and are now out of work permanently. Burning down grocery stores or any other form of radical, reactionary violence does not further the cause of bringing equality to the United States. Those who incite and carry out such acts should be held accountable by the very same justice system that they so strongly oppose. Or as I taught my third graders when I was a Minneapolis Public School teacher, if he stole your colored pencils and as a result you hit him, you’re both going to be punished because stealing and hitting are both wrong. Yes, perhaps each is wrong to a different degree, but one wrong does not justify another.

And we must allow for complexities. We should acknowledge the fact that peaceful protests and rioting are two very different things and not lump all people into a single group, just like not all police officers are racist. Yes, some people who started fires in Minneapolis and St. Paul truly believe inciting mob violence is a justifiable response to the unwarranted death of an unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer. Many others, however, who feel just as strongly about George Floyd’s death, do not.

There are nuances here that need to be parsed, and when we do that, we will see that thinking in terms of which one of two teams you’re going to join simply isn’t helpful or reasonable in light of the situation. Life is often more complicated than that.

For those of us who have put our stake in a traveling preacher and healer from first century Palestine, even he leaves us in a bit of a conundrum. This is the guy who made a whip, knocked over all the tables of the money changers and the people who were selling oxen, sheep, and pigeons in the temple, and drove them all out of his Father’s house. Yet, lest we all start making whips of our own, this is also the guy who, when he was about to be arrested and Peter took a sword and cut off the ear of one of the men present, healed the man and told his disciples that those who live by the sword will also die by the sword. So life is complicated. Sometimes you need to knock tables over. Sometimes you need to hand yourself over to those who have come out under the cover of night to unjustly arrest you. There are subtleties that need to be considered. Apparently there are not overly simplistic rules for these kinds of things. And most certainly, there are more than only two sides to choose from.

Oh, that I were capable of more nuanced thinking instead of shrinking my options down to the rigid binary options heralded by the loudest and the windiest among us. Oh, that I loved my neighbor more than I love my “side.” Oh, that I were more in tune with God’s Spirit leading from within. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.