Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from Amanda Knox’s Atlantic essay about how people continue to exploit for profit her identity and the lies told about her.
As someone who has been falsely accused, reading this impacted me in a significant way.
So now I also try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. We don’t know the whole story about any other person.
I know how it feels for a group of people to be wrong about me. That is a pain I don’t wish on others. So I work to refrain from the judgment of others. I don’t want to make that same mistake.
All of this has made me extremely skeptical of those who easily pass judgment. It has made me allergic to the impulse to flatten others into cardboard, to erase their human complexity, to rage against things about which I know only a snippet. Judgment only gets in the way of understanding. Refraining from judgment has become a way of life for me. Call it radical empathy, or extreme benefit of the doubt. I know how wrong people were about me, and I don’t ever want to be that wrong about another person. The world is not filled with monsters and heroes; it’s filled with people, and people are extraordinarily complex.
“My Identity Continues to Be Exploited,” by Amanda Knox in The Atlantic