K and I attended The Evolve Experience last night, a show about race and policing and powerful personal experiences. It was good. A little frustrating, which was one of the good parts. We saw Hands Up a few years ago, and it was great — it felt authentic and appropriately overwhelming. We were sorry to miss Cop Out, the Red Door’s next show, but Evolve is in some sense a synthesis of the two.
Evolve is essentially a conversation between a black guy and a white cop, which is as brutal and intractable a dynamic as you’d expect. No simple answers, no resolution. Often not the framing or the questions I would have chosen. But representative, I think, of the real experience of those who inhabit those roles.
I’ve always struggled with polarization and black and white mindsets, and I appreciate efforts to complicate the narrative. There’s a lot I could say about that, but I’m extremely tired due to pre-jetlag, so I’ll leave it for another time.
I do want to mention a few organizations, though, which do related work:
- Braver Angels (previously known as “Better Angels”), dedicated to creating dialogue between liberals and conservatives.
- 1440, a daily news digest intended to be “as unbiased as humanly possible.”
- Tangle, another news digest, which also includes one major daily story and a breakdown of liberal and conservative responses (along with the founder’s take). I would highly recommend reading some of their issues, and perhaps checking out their editorial policy.
The day after tomorrow, we leave for Uzbekistan.