Featured Essays

How does intellectual humility express itself across the tapestry of Braver Angels?

This belief that love can transcend our differences is a belief that yet binds many Christians and non-Christians alike. We need love if we are to heal America. And we need the teachings and exemplars of love to come forth from our heritage to show us the way to mend.

By combining the ideas of very different people—and organizations—to discover not only what each can contribute but what collectively we can create, we might finally accept that together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. 

But the question of whiteness is a profound one, arching over history, society, psychology and identity. Is whiteness a cancer? A legitimate identity? Or is it just another divisive racial category that obscures the value of the individual?

The answer is complicated for a Black man like me.

Each one of us can, and should always seek to, keep growing and changing for the better. But our only hope is for others to give us the space, and the grace, to do so.

We must go beyond the anger and vengeance of those who see us as the sinners, and focus on the narratives that create it.

Each of us is a product of our experiences. Understanding them helps us see that which makes the other human. This seems particularly important to me as we watch the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson unfold.

I think it’s safe to say most of us have been involved in heated political discussions with family or friends, whether we initiated them or not. But what flipped the switch from polite family discussions about whose turn is it to go pick up groceries to tense discussions about politics?

We already have the other ingredients that have helped stabilize and soothe Northern Ireland. We have the hope; we Americans are an optimistic people. We also have the intent, as seen abundantly in what Braver Angels and like-minded organizations are pushing so hard for. 

This week we released an interview with Lorenzo Murphy, once righthand man to one of the most powerful drug dealers in America during the crack cocaine era: Freeway Rick Ross. The crack era gave rise to the phenomenon of mass incarceration, the decline of inner-city life and a new age of distrust between African-American communities and police. Our current controversies over race cannot be understood without an understanding of what happened to America—and black America—during this particular period of time.

It is so much easier to talk about people who disagree with us than with them. But there’s no other way when we’re this polarized, I’ve realized, to let our real perspectives check, challenge, and enrich one another. Nor is there any other way to look past our perspectives to the experiences and values that shaped them — the paths different people walk to their views.

And indeed, my feelings about the two issues are fairly similar. Given the numbers, I feel that both pit bulls and guns should be subject to fairly aggressive restrictions. But my certainty over these issues is weakened by my understanding of the good-faith concerns and beliefs of those on the other side.

At each moment, millions of us held our breath, and millions more of us raged in righteous fury, or stood in trembling fear. The stakes of our times shone clear, the twists and turns of American life on bright, terrible display. Each a moment of fury and dread that, still unresolved, lives on. Each a moment, we raged and feared, that would end America as we know it.

“We have to be fair, human beings are works in progress… It’s going to take all of us reflecting on ourselves. That doesn’t mean that we still don’t have a problem for people that are different in this country.”

Without justice, unity is tyranny. Without dialogue, unity is based in falsehood. So how can we reckon with a fractured nation? Is unity, even among friends, possible in my lifetime?

There’s an inherent tension between this desire to enforce common values that we believe are important for creating a free and prosperous society and allowing individual communities within that society to choose their own values, to the exclusion of some chosen by others. So who gets to decide where this line is drawn?

The work of unity is a patriotic endeavor. But it is incumbent upon those of us who would take up this cause to recognize that one source of the division that plagues us is the language of patriotism itself.

Redressing injustice and rebuilding community will force us all to acknowledge our shortcomings. But we have to get started.