I write: Stalin was more brutal than Hitler.

I write: 10,293 tons of printer ink makes its way to the ocean each year.

I write:  Barack Obama was born in the United States.

They look at me with their half-moon eyelids, heavily. They have likely scrolled through dozens of status updates, tweets, and headlines by the time I am on the road to school with my travel mug of coffee. They know more about a constructed world than I do, and we both know it.

Once the students have all arrived, I have them self-select break-out groups, five in each.

“Now,” I announce grandly, my dry-erase in my left hand, walking to the front of the board like Vanna White. “Which of these are facts, and which are opinions?”

That is the lesson for today: the fundamentals of thinking. Differentiating between when something is opinion (which is overtly subjective) and when something is truth (which is covertly subjective). Once they’ve weighed in on their verdicts (opinion, opinion but easy to substantiate, opinion, fact), we do another round.

“Ok,” I say, “Now, what needs to happen to make these opinions facts?”

We broke it down to it’s cardboard-box basics: in order for an opinion to be a fact, the abstract must become concrete. What does it mean to conquer the world? What if it was universally, specifically defined? Well, then we’d know what it entails, and, under our enterprising capitalism, which shoes to wear while we did our conquering.

Then we do a third round. I give the students context about each of the quotes—information that may compromise their ability to think critically. Suddenly, the oceans affected (even though I made the number up about the printer ink) are very near to our backyard beaches. Suddenly, I reveal that the first statement (roughly) belonged to Marilyn Monroe (“How does it change the meaning to know that the shoes may be stilettos?”). At the end of this exercise, I showed them a video of Mollie Tibbetts’ father, talking about how inappropriately his daughter’s death is being used, to further a racist agenda she didn’t believe in.

“Find the information, find the facts,” I told them, and they set to work. They Googled and scoured social media; they looked at both reliable and unreliable sources using their laptops or their phones. I accepted unreliable information along with reliable, so we could hold each one up to the light and look through it.

A student approached me after class.

“My question is—are there any right answers? At the end of the day, are we all just making decisions based off our core values?” She asked, holding her folder to her chest as if shielding herself from the insult of vagueness.

“You’ve just identified the very crux of this class,” I smiled.

Here are a few facts that help break down the current relevance or irrelevance of facts:

1. It has, as of last year, been two hundred years since John Keats introduced the idea of negative capability, or the ability to sit with uncertainty, mystery, or doubt without needing to reach for reason or fact.
2. Last night, my friend Nadia sat across from me, slumped back in her chair after we’d just finished a two-hour go-around about what art is (and is not). “Art just… promotes thinking,” she said, exhausted.
3. A man in my screenwriting class, who is currently balls-deep in writing a superhero script about an anti-hero superhero who “doesn’t see race,” demanded that I explain to him my two female teenage characters. “Are they gay, or aren’t they?” “They’re teenagers,” I said to him, counting the number of circles in the pegboard behind his head.

Critical thinking, I’m told, is the externalization of the process of thought; it is the consciousness surrounding thinking, which is, or can be, a subconscious process. For example, we can know the following from these pieces of information, from this externalization of my own fact-gathering: negative capability is still in full-force; art is a tool for greater understanding and nothing more/less; and sexuality is more “acceptably” fluid than it used to be.

These are the ‘facts’ I’ve gathered in just the past few days, and they bump up against one another in the darkness of my brain.

Critical thinking, I’m told, is the externalization of the process of thought; it is the consciousness surrounding thinking.
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I am constantly reminding my students that I’m no authority on anything. I’m constantly providing materials that demonstrate that there are only varying degrees of truth and falsehood. It can make a person feel bananas, sometimes, realizing how much of their life they spend talking about the value of not only seeing and navigating gray areas, but also being wholly comfortable with them. That without negative capability, or grayscale, we’d not be able to digest art.

And now, with alternative facts, fake news, and click-bait, we’d not be able to hold our realities and our surrealities in the same hand.

There is value in taking the time to sit back and reflect, be grateful for, hold, how little we know. Or, rather, that the truths we know sometimes go to the mat with one another.

“We live in a post-truth world,” says The Guardian. I disagree. I think we live in a world rife and ripe with a smorgasbord of truths, a world we must show up to with a tool belt of discernment and critical thinking skills. A world that needs a nuanced touch. “Post-truth world” makes me think too much about my twelfth grade English teacher (whom I loved like a father), who prepped us for the world by plying us with dystopian literature, and then died a few years before things got truly dystopian.

However, even if we entertain the thought that we do live in a present state of post-truth, what of it? We humans are by definition irreconcilable, full of contradictory definitions of truths, momentary and life-long.

“The terrible thing about the movie Titanic,” a mentor once told me, “is that there’s nothing complicated about it—it’s just fucking sad. You want a true measure of human nature?” he shook his head ruefully, “Watch Clockwork Orange.”

I don’t disagree. Once, while in the middle of a soul-crushing breakup where I lived off tears and Doritos, I found myself sitting in a room with a woman who had a tipped-over pear on the table in front of her. The pear was so lovely, so shapely. I was suddenly overcome with a lust for the woman that was so intense I had to leave immediately. I can be miserable and lustful at the same time. A person can be bludgeoned in the head while Singing in the Rain plays in the background.  

After all, we hold prisms of truth inside us every day. We love art by artists who have done awful things. We are committed to our lives, but dream of uprooting to Fiji. We help a struggling stranger with change, a hand, a coat, but have violent revenge fantasies about the man in the BMW who cut us off on the freeway. We’re not straightforward in our human-ness, ever, and why should we be? That’d be a disservice to the very best things that we contain (which would be multitudes).

Keep being complicated.

“You’re just going to drive people away with that attitude.”

This comment is one I’ve received multiple times. Almost always said by a concerned white person, just letting me know that my directness, my impatience, my anger is pushing them and others away in my fight for racial justice. This message has been sent to me on Facebook, on Twitter, via email. This message can take on a friendly, helpful tone — like the white women who write to me begging me to swear a little less, so that their friends and neighbors would hear my words and not my tone. The message can also take on a more hostile tenor — such as when I’m told that I am “just like Jesse Jackson” or “my own worst enemy.” But no matter the tone, the message is the same. And my response to that message is always the same.

You don’t have to like me. You just have to believe I’m a human being.

Here’s the thing. You either believe in justice and equality or you don’t. You either believe that people of color are human beings deserving of full rights or you don’t. There are no preconditions to that. There are no exceptions to that. You believe in my humanity or you don’t.

You either believe that people of color are human beings deserving of full rights or you don’t.
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I fight every day, not only for the “best and brightest” of Black America, but for all my brothers and sisters, for those of us behind bars, for those of us addicted to drugs, for those of us on the streets. I fight for us all, because justice does not leave our most vulnerable behind. I fight for the humanity of all people. And that means that I spend a lot of time fighting for people I love, but also for people who despise me, for people who will never be grateful for my work, for people who will never fight for me.

Because I believe that you are a human being. I believe you are a human being even if you are a hotep in my mentions saying that my feminism is ruining black men. And I’ll fight for you even if I have to block you on Twitter. I believe you are a human being even when you are a feminist who wishes I would talk about race a little less and focus on issues that really matter. And I’ll fight for you even if I have to call your ass out on Facebook.

If you do not like me, I will live. If you do not believe in my humanity, I may not. Lack of friendship is not killing black people in America. We are not shot in the street by police because we are unliked. We are not given substandard treatment by doctors because we are unliked. We are not being kicked out of school because we are unliked.

We are being shot because people don’t believe that our life is as important as theirs. We are being given substandard treatment because doctors don’t believe we feel pain like everyone else. We are being kicked out of schools because educators do not believe that we deserve the same level of education and the same opportunities to be children as everyone else. And if you require anything from me other than my existence to believe in my humanity, then, even then — even when all prerequisites are met — you still won’t really believe.

When you tell oppressed people that they need to be more likable in order to forward their fight for justice, what you are saying is that there are preconditions on their humanity, and that you are in the superior position to determine what those preconditions are. You are saying that you are more than, and they are less.

If you do not like me, I will live. If you do not believe in my humanity, I may not.
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When you tell me that the problem is my attitude and not the fundamental injustice and inequality of our systems and society, what you are saying is that I have not earned my freedom. You are saying that I was not born with inalienable rights, like you were. You are saying that there is something different about me that makes me less entitled to the freedoms you’ve always taken for granted.

In the wake of this disastrous presidential election, I’ve heard a lot of talk from white progressive elites stating that it was the fight for equality on behalf of our most marginalized populations that gave Trump a win. It was the push for transgender people to be able to safely use public restrooms, the fight for Black people’s lives to matter, the fight for women to not be assaulted and abused — that was the real problem. We asked for too much, and we didn’t say please.

But isn’t the problem the fact that you need oppressed people to prostrate themselves before you in order to grant them the same rights you currently enjoy? Isn’t the problem that you couldn’t rally around justice for those you may not know or like? Isn’t the problem the fact that you think that you can set a timetable on the recognition of someone’s humanity?

If you believe in justice and equality then you believe in it 100% every day, for every person. Perhaps, instead of asking why we asked for so much, you should ask why you thought it was ever okay to ask for so little.