Few things unify the nation more than does the indignation directed towards celebrities who voice vile things about certain portions of our culture, portions that have historically been on the receiving end of oppressive, often inhuman treatment. The indignation is righteous, for speech comes from thought, and thought gives rise to action. Who doubts that the comments of Don Imus, and of Michael Richards before him, and of Mel Gibson before him, have real analogues in the daily lives of black women, of blacks generally, and of Jews? We are right to be angry, all of us, for Imus, Richards, and Gibson did things that were very, very wrong. And that's…okay.

You read that right: that's okay.

I of course don't mean at all to exonerate these three men. What each did was hurtful, damaging, regressive. Worse than that, none of them truly apologized for their deepest and truest moral failing. To say that "I was just trying to keep my show edgy" (Imus), or that "I was putting on a comic character" (Richards), or that "it was the booze talking" (Gibson), doesn't wash when we note how spontaneously the rancid language came out. Those thoughts and phrases were well-ensconced in these men long before the need to keep up the ratings, the need to keep 'em laughing, and the need to dull the pain, ever showed up. I'm sorry, Mr. Imus, you are a sneering racist and sexist. And you, Mr. Richards, were racist, too. And Mr. Gibson, you are an anti-Semite.

And that's okay.

It's okay not because the social and historical maladies of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, could ever be conducive to the common good. It's okay rather because, in being broken at a deep level, these three men are like every one of the rest of us; we are all together on the raft of human moral incompetence. We may not suffer from the specific moral failure that stunts the souls of Imus, Richards, and Gibson. But it's a good bet that you and I suffer from some sort of –ism that we'd rather not have in the spotlight. Lucky for you and me, the light shines on their fractured souls today; our day may come.

The 2005 Oscar-winning movie Crash helped me see things this way, and has frankly liberated me to talk about racism, and sexism, and any other –ism openly, with reduced fear of getting it wrong, or offending. I worry less because, as the movie showed, everyone can be broken, even those who are most often the ones we think prejudice is against. In the movie a black man inveighs against white prejudice against blacks…just as he begins a carjacking of white people. A Persian, who is thought to be an angry and dangerous Arab, gets enraged and attempts to kill a Hispanic who he thinks did him wrong because he thought him to be an Arab. And white people in the movie are at best quivering moral guides. A white man manually rapes a black woman, and a black man calls the Puerto Rican woman he is sleeping with a Mexican, for simplicity's sake. Everyone is broken.

The movie has instructed me, a white man, not only that everyone else has moral troubles, but also that it is almost inevitable that I—or frankly anyone—have deep-seated prejudices of some sort or other, and that those prejudices are sure to come out as I speak about important issues of race, sex, economics, religion, on and on. But—and here is my personal epiphany—I will not cease to think and speak about these issues, for fear of revealing my personal brokenness. For I am broken, yet neither I nor the world will improve if we cease to broach these weighty issues for fear of revealing our own failure. Once we all admit that we all are broken, we can be about the common business of fixing things.

So go on and be angry when bad things are done—by Imus, or whomever—but don't think that anger in itself is the accomplishment here. Anger is the result of your correct understanding that moral evil exists, but it should above all call you and me to inquire whether we ourselves are besmirched in some way by the same, or similar, malady. And when we realize that we are, we are better motivated to help shoulder the moral burdens that our brothers and sisters carry. We will help them, and they will help us. And if we do these things together we may indeed help to make things turn out to be okay.