Obama's speech today in Philly was something to watch, to put it mildly. What really astonishes me in reading the chattering classes and the public comments throughout the day is how often people are censoring Obama for failing to provide a full-throated denunciation of Rev. White. Instead, Obama offers that he certainly knew of White's comments, that he saw and heard them for years, yet the comments themselves are but one facet of White's identity as a black man and as an individual. He credits White with having flaws, with having complexity and contradictions, with being human. His observation about his grandmother perfectly captures this dilemma, and (to me) reveres her humanity, reveres her for being her, rather than accepting her as the archetype of a saintly grandmother.
Similarly, these criticisms are predicated on the same assumptions as Lewis' inane trifecta that Jesus could not be "just" a good moral teacher because he claimed to be the son of God; if Jesus was not in fact the son of God, then he was either lying or a lunatic. I'm more than willing to accept either label. But using the label doesn't change the essential qualities of his sermons. It only cautions us that we must remain skeptical and use reason to sift truth from falsity. Only in a binary, essentialist construction can Jesus be a liar or a lunatic yet be incapable of espousing good moral philosophy. He can be either a liar/lunatic or he can be right, but not both. He must be either Knight or Knave.
The same fallacy appears when discussing sexuality. A rather novel piece in this weekend's WaPo outlook explored Eliot Spitzer as a literary character, looking for contradictions and flaws, glorious virtue and reviled vice. Only if we assume that our moral paragons, our avatars, must be stainless, and that the presence of flaws disqualifies someone or their policies, only then can we say that Spitzer's tragic flaw invalidated all his work on human trafficking and modern slavery. By definition, a tragic flaw is tragic only because of the contradictory counterpoint between good and evil.
This same binary metric is also the same issue that poisons discussions of gendered differences.
The argument goes that if we type-cast girls as being inferior in math, it becomes FACT and in so doing we deny them an opportunity to grow, to struggle, to evolve. We have distilled their essence into the stereotype that "girls are bad at math". And this schema is equally (if not moreso) prevalent in the minds of those who fight against this stereotyping, because they want to reify the worldview that men and women should be interchangeable. That they use their own essentialist definition doesn't make it any less essentialist.
As an example, let's look at the old saw that it takes women twice as much work to get half as far. It is certainly possible this is because they aren't being recognized appropriately, as if they worked equally hard to get half as far. But it could also be because they're working really inefficiently, as if they worked twice as hard to get equally far. One doesn't preclude the other. Unless we oversimplify and stick everything into little boxes of "essential" character with nice binaries.
Anyways, in each case, we assume we can capture someone's fundamental essence in a turn of phrase (racist and anti-Semite; lair, lunatic, or Lord; viceless "Steamroller" or worthless adulterer; "anything you can do, I can do better"). We do it habitually, as a normal course of life. It is easy to think that people have some core identity from which all actions, thoughts, and beliefs flow. And constructing that heuristic obscures contradictions, complexities. We dismiss too easily, and we don't give enough people credit for simple human individuality. The fascinating, contradictory essence of the everyman is that he isn't every man.
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