The Illusion of Separation

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our culture teaches and exalts that we are all free and separate individuals.

Our individuality is one of our primary virtues, to be cultivated and defended. In our community life we are separate from those who vote differently, believe differently, or suffer differently. This illusion of separation allows us to turn away. It permits indifference, and can quietly rationalize the harm suffered by others.

But human life teaches us different lessons about separateness.

In 1939 the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was going through a divorce and working to make sense of her identities and experience of separation. She produced the epochal large-scale double self-portrait, "The Two Fridas." Two versions of Kahlo sit side by side, the two dresses represent her European and Mexican heritages. Their hearts are exposed and linked by a single vein. One heart is wounded, the other whole, yet blood flows between them.

The image refuses separation. Even within a single person, identities are multiple and inseparable. The wound of one self becomes the wound of the other. The painting also extends outward. What is true within us is true between us. We share a common bloodstream. The suffering of one moves through the whole.

These ideas were central to Martin Luther King Jr's theory of nonviolent protest. In 1963, a supporter of King smuggled a newspaper to him while he was incarcerated in the Birmingham City Jail for leading protests in the city. The paper contained a statement from white Alabama clergy titled "A Call for Unity" that criticized King as an "outside agitator" who was sewing disunity in their city by his actions. King responded with the now famous, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in the same paper's margins and on available scraps.

Addressing his fellow clerics directly, King took issue with their convenient invocation of separateness, as it elides a deeper reality and responsibility. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly," wrote King.

His words cut through our illusions and reveal a deeper structure beneath our apparent divisions. We are part of an ineluctable system of connection in which no action is isolated and no life stands alone.

We belong to one another whether we realize it or not.

1. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 1963.
2. Frida Kahlo, "The Two Fridas," 1939. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.