The Holdout

by Graham Moore

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

She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were. But

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.

When the villains are so clear, we can tuck ourselves into bed at night knowing that we’re nothing like them. 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.”

It was that once you combined them all…well, somehow it felt like these people were going to collide against each other like marbles. They were going to send each other in directions none of them saw coming.