• Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director

Within the first few minutes of his inaugural address this past Wednesday, U.S. President Joseph Biden brought up national unity.  To overcome our challenges, he said, will require, “Unity. Unity.”  That’s not a typo; he said unity twice.  Then, by my count, he said it 7 more times.  “Without unity," he said, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury.” 

Yikes, we’d better get some unity, and soon.
 
Or maybe not.

On the NBCnews Think website, Tonya Russell pulls no punches when it comes to unity, “Please,” she writes, “spare me your toxic positivity.  Calls for 'unity and “harmony' indicate that some want us to forgive and forget.”  After reminding us of overt threats not just to abstract freedoms but to the actual lives of Black, Indigenous and other people of color; GLBTQ people, and people with disabilities, Russell continues, “remember, this isn’t [just] a fight on the playground.” [1]
 
Russell echoes the novelist Robert Jones, who wrote, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”  [2] Jones is not having unity with people who wish him diminished, or worse, dead.  A lot of other people are not having it either; if you search for that line, you’ll find that it has become a most ubiquitous meme (by the way often misattributed to James Baldwin; Jones tweets as “Son of Baldwin.”)
 
Harvard law professor Martha Minnow offers a slightly different critique, suggesting that unity too often comes with a requirement that, “groups that have been disadvantaged structurally [and] historically are often expected to be forgiving. Certainly that’s true for African Americans and women.” In the same article, Yale historian David Blight warns of the lesson of unity “without justice” offered by the Civil War, which resulted in a united nation that nonetheless continued and encouraged violent systemic racism and white supremacy. [3]
 
Calls for unity often come along with calls for healing. That also sounds good, but restorative justice advocates warn that healing only happens in the wake of accountability, which is also a critical precursor to forgiveness. Admonitions from leaders to unify and heal too often leave that out. Recriminations begin when the harmed resist calls for unity. Tonya Russell feels this so strongly she was moved to exclaim, “We aren’t monsters” for not being so sure about unity, it “doesn’t mean that we’ll cause chaos or spread hate.”
 
My point here isn’t to take the wind completely out of the arguably hopeful sail of unity.  Universal meaning is the thing I’m most concerned about, not unity itself. Universal meaning isn’t real, not for the big concepts and ideas, and especially not in the United States, a country that writer and MSNBC news analyst Anand Giridharadas describes as,

“. . . trying to do something that does not work in theory. To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people's first language at home.” (link in the resources section below).

That’s a compelling description of what many have called the American Experiment.  Giridharadas continues, “what we're trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word.”
 
And it won’t work if we don’t slow down to check out our assumptions that imbue concepts like unity with the same meaning, or character. Ironically, those kinds of assumptions only separate, not, if you like, unify.  Once you start checking these assumptions, things can get very interesting, and I’ve found that my world gets bigger, that I feel more connected because I understand better how others make meaning of their world. 

Here’s one more example: chaos.  Tonya Russell relates chaos to hate and monsters.  President Biden, continuing his description of life without unity,  warned of a nation beset by, “No progress, only exhausting outrage, no nation, only a state of chaos.”

So chaos is bad.  But maybe not; here’s Giridharadas again in his January 15th newsletter, “It’s scary out there right now. It’s going to be scary for some time to come. What has been unleashed, what has been revealed, is ugly.” 
 
But, he goes on, “If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture. This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something. . . . We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
 
That’s an understanding of chaos I can embrace. It’s hopeful, and I’m grateful to Giridharadas for inviting me to look at chaos from a different angle. This understanding of chaos invites me to imagine and to connect with others as we move into a more just and nonviolent future.
 
Without a healthy wariness of assumptions of meaning  -- a habit of thinking, but wait, is there another way to see this? – I would have missed that hopeful reframe of chaos. I might have trumpeted unity to the detriment of my capacity to contribute to accountability and genuine healing.  I don’t want to miss those opportunities.