Actually, I haven't been writing as much in the past few months, but some of it may be due to Algorithmia. I'm with you on not resorting to the White Hat/Black Hat scenario. I think that's a huge mistake that robs people of their humanity and sets up a zero-sum dynamic (although that is in large part what patriarchy is about - that zero-sum thing, one of the reasons that I find issues with it).
"Either Bryant was a magnetic basketball luminary who inspired so many and caused grown men to publicly weep upon hearing of his death, or he was just another clueless and entitled star athlete who took what he wanted from a woman, under the assumption that if that’s what he wanted, she must want it too. The problem arises when you can’t accept that he was actually both of those things. Kobe Bryant was neither an angel nor a demon, but instead, a flawed human being.
But again, this story isn’t really about Kobe Bryant and I’m not trying to be an apologist for him in any way. That’s just a useful illustration of how we cannot truly pigeonhole most people as “good people” or “bad people.” There are too many factors that complicate that kind of blanket and binary characterization, and if we have to choose between only “white hats” and “black hats” then quite often it is the victims who get characterized as being the bad ones. They have tarnished the perfect image of a known “white hat” so they must themselves be evil. Based on the death threats and other forms of vilification that this woman faced for speaking up in the Bryant case, that is exactly how it went. We all know that he was good, so she must be the one who was bad.
The other issue is that when we decide that someone wears a “white hat” it blinds us to the possibility of them actually doing something that is harmful. It took 60 women to bring down Bill Cosby and that’s because we were all so sure he was a good guy, that it was inconceivable that he could have done such bad things until the evidence against him was too overwhelming to ignore any longer. When we frame people in this type of binary, it creates a cover for those who have the veneer of wearing a white hat so that some of them can actually perpetrate really bad things undisturbed and unquestioned.
This was also the case of beloved British TV personality Jimmy Savile, who had been knighted and was well respected for his charity work. After his death, it came to light that Savile had sexually abused hundreds of individuals, both male and female, all the way from children to adults over his life and career. How did he get away with that for so long? People overwhelmingly believed he was a “white hat.”
Reducing people to labels makes it a bit easier to sort them into categories so that we don’t have to actually do much conscious thinking, but it also wreaks a lot of havoc, particularly within a society that tends to blame victims for their own troubles. Human beings are full of vices, foibles, and weaknesses. There may be some who have no socially redeeming qualities whatsoever, whom we could feel pretty justified in classifying as bad, but those people are in the minority. Most people cannot be so neatly categorized."
