Must-read New Yorker essay: 'Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever'

Sometimes, you encounter a piece of writing suffused with such brilliant clarity that you feel immediately compelled to share it with others. Such is the case with a new essay in the New Yorker from Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who divides her time between the country of her birth and the United States and has much to say about the current state of affairs in America. It would be an injustice to attempt to summarize the piece, but Adichie’s clarion call on how we must respond to life in the age of Trump will show you just how incandescent her thinking is:

Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. Now is the time to speak up and to wear as a badge of honor the opprobrium of bigots. Now is the time to confront the weak core at the heart of America’s addiction to optimism; it allows too little room for resilience, and too much for fragility. Hazy visions of “healing” and “not becoming the hate we hate” sound dangerously like appeasement. The responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators. The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.

The quote in the headline is drawn from an emphatic demand that we can never let go of or back away from:

Yet, a day after the election, I heard a journalist on the radio speak of the vitriol between Obama and Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one.

Please read Adichie’s entire piece, and take it all to heart. It’s a manual for how we must fight in the coming years, and a reminder of things we must never, ever forget.