Warts and all

During the years before the faculty union blacklisted me, I used to engage in conversations with colleagues.  In one of those in-the-hallway chats, an adjunct faculty and I got to talking about imperfections in humans, especially the political leaders who transformed societies for the better.

We talked, in particular, about Gandhi and MLK.  And we both agreed that it does not help anybody by making them saint-like.  Instead, we ought to understand and appreciate them, warts-and-all.  Such an unvarnished image then will help us understand that ordinary mortals like you and me were able to do so much, which will be way more encouraging to the youth than if they thought that one had to be super-human of sorts.

The adjunct's contract was not renewed, and I lost touch with him.

It is not that Gandhi and MLK had moral clarity from day one of their adult lives, and it is not as if they did not err in their daily lives.  Mistakes were in plenty.  Yet, they were able to accomplish what millions of us together will never ever be able to do.

Take Gandhi, for instance.  Most of us are familiar with his years in South Africa, which is when he began to understand white supremacy and, therefore, his own brown-skin standing in the bastard empire.  However, Gandhi in South Africa was not very much different from the white supremacists there, when it came to their views on the "native" Africans.  Gandhi thought less of black Africans, and his struggle was only to elevate the status of Indians like him who were there in the bastard empire, which he was not really fighting against.  As his biographer, grandson, wrote:

After all, Gandhi too was an imperfect human being. ... The imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots.

And by the time he became the Gandhi that we usually think about, he had become way less imperfect.

There is no need to create a false Gandhi here that ignores the real Gandhi since the real Gandhi is himself such a historical exception. And, of course, the fact that the real Gandhi was only remarkable – but not perfect, as per today’s moral standards – is also nothing to be ashamed of.

Over the years, the more I understand the imperfect Gandhi, the more I have walked away from referring to him as a "mahatma."  But, while recognizing imperfections, we ought to know better than to wrongfully equate Gandhi with Churchill, for instance.  Not all imperfect leaders are created alike!

I have always preferred unsanitized biographies of transformative leaders like Gandhi and MLK.  I don't want kids to go through the same kind of shocks that I went through when I learnt much later in life that MLK was no saint.  Had I known earlier that MLK himself said, "You don't need to go out saying Martin Luther King, Jr. is a saint," I would have appreciated him even more.  I would rather that kids understood how much MLK was able to fight white supremacy and taught all of us what it means to be human--through and despite his own personal flaws.