The Holdout

by Graham Moore

Time, Maya thought, had the strangest technique for smoothing old rivalries. Rather than gestating apologies, the years fomented a false nostalgia. It made them wistful for what had likely been the most miserable time of their lives.

“People should change their minds when presented with new information,” he said. “That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”

It was the unsparing physics of cause and effect: The wake of one boat became the wave that dashed another.

Being innocent often made it harder to construct a good defense. Innocent people always wanted to shout out what really happened from the rooftops—but sometimes the best defense, legally speaking, wasn’t the truth.

That was the real motherfucker about being poor. It pickled your brain. It made you think your situation was everybody’s fault but your own. And everyone around you thought the same way. Some poor folks stewed in those thoughts, marinated in them for a lifetime and then passed them on, generation to generation.

She understood what it was like to have argued for so long that the result of the argument no longer mattered—the only thing that provided any relief was not being right, but showing that from the very beginning you had been right.

Their punishment for being people who demanded answers was that they would be forced to go on in perpetuity with their doubts.

But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation.

If everything was racist, Trisha had tried to say, then nothing was.

You had to really care about someone to fight with them this hard. You had to deeply care about someone’s opinion to be this offended by how totally wrong they were.

But what if it’s not so clear? What if it’s more complicated than here’s some heroic non-racist white people and here’s some villainous racist white people? What if, for me, the most pressing questions are not about how ‘racist’ you think you are or can prove that you aren’t. I don’t give a shit whether you think you’re a one or a ten on some kind of racism Kinsey scale. I care about what you’re going to do about it.”