In Our Complexity Lies the Possibility of Change

-Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director

In his 1984 essay collection Notes of a Native Son, the writer, activist and social critic James Baldwin wrote, “In overlooking, denying, evading complexity . . . we are diminished and we perish.”

I thought of Baldwin’s warning this week as many people I know expressed disappointment and despair about the results of U.S. elections, especially dismay about people who voted differently than they. One writer described a whole group of voters, close to half the country, as, “angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.”

The ILI is a federally recognized non-profit organization, so writing in my capacity as its director I’m obliged to refrain from partisanship, but I would refrain anyway here because partisanship is beside my point, which was also Baldwin’s point; we ignore complexity at our peril.

We ignore others’ complexity at our peril because complexity reflects our full humanity, and no one who claims the cause of liberatory change can with integrity diminish that light in anyone. As I’ve written before, we can and ought to vigorously confront ideas, policies, structures, systems and behaviors, but disregarding complexity in others will only feed the beast.

It is also at our peril because successful efforts for change require understanding what needs changing. It is simply not possible that everyone who voted for one particular candidate is the same, that their motivations are universally misguided. Since that claim can’t possibly be true, it’s not the thing that needs changing. And the stakes are very high; we need to know where to put our efforts for change.

It’s not enough to say, “Their minds - that’s what needs changing.” They think the same of you.

Baldwin’s invitation is to set aside such claims, and instead take up the task of seeing others whole -- as a tool for liberation. His warning is that if we don’t, we risk losing everything.

In our complexity lies the possibility of change. Seeing complexity is the harder path; Baldwin called it, “this journey toward a more vast reality.” In the service of liberatory change, it’s that vast reality we need to understand.