There Are No White Hats or Black Hats
Nearly everyone is somewhere on the continuum of flawed human being
Shortly after Kobe Bryant was tragically killed, I wrote about how we were doing a disservice to both him and the woman that he assaulted by not allowing him to be a nuanced human being capable of both good and not so good. Subscribing to the rigid binary of him either as a good guy, a “white hat,” or a bad guy, “a black hat” meant that we had to only choose one. If we put him in the white hat, then that left the black hat to the woman who called him out on the harm that he did to her. And since Bryant had publicly apologized to her, it’s appropriate to speak of that as a fact, and not an allegation, although that’s a minor detail for the purposes of this story.
In this binary scenario, she was either the white hat and he was the black hat or vice versa. But not only is this strict binary unrealistic, but it’s also non-serving in a variety of ways. I had several angry women chide me in the wake of that story because it seemed to them that I was saying that Bryant was actually good and that he shouldn’t have to pay in some way for assaulting that woman. But that wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was saying that the system they were using to evaluate the situation was flawed because it was either/or.
