A couple years ago, in the wake of the death of a prominent hip-hop figure, I wrote about the divergent reactions from the public to this sudden and devastating event — grief and sympathy vs. relief and apathy — as well as the importance of looking at people’s lives holistically and not engaging in the act of revisionist history, whereby we pick and choose the parts of a person’s life story that we want to acknowledge and elevate, while dismissing and sometimes even silencing the parts that don’t sound quite as pleasant in the memoirs.

I expressed dichotomous feelings, because I was incredibly saddened by the tragic death of someone so young, whose influence on the youth was so profound and whose music touched the hearts of so many people; but I was also sympathetic to those who were not inspired by this person’s life and expressed disdain for the harm he had caused while he was alive. I stated that I believe in human potential and the ability for people to get “better.” But I’ve learned that it isn’t fair to overemphasize potential at the cost of respect and empathy for those who are harmed by the actions of these “legends.”

The past couple of years have featured numerous celebrity deaths that have all challenged our collective ability to reckon with the complexities of human beings and the complicated nature of their legacies, with honesty and tact. If you ask me, I’d say that we, collectively, have not been up to this challenge.

Kobe Bryant passed away recently, and this death shook me in a way many of the others haven’t. I couldn’t think straight for a couple days. I had to pinch myself throughout the day and continually check the date and time, just to make sure I wasn’t in a dream or some Matrix-like simulation. Even now, it still baffles me that he is really gone; it’s just one of those things that I wouldn’t have ever thought or dreamt of, even in my worst nightmares.

But like many of the biggest name celebrities that have left this world, this man’s legacy presented a complication for many people. After my initial wave of grief and confusion subsided, I was willing to embrace this complication, because, as I’ve expressed before, I believe that honesty — not revisionism or over-deification — is the greatest act of respect and reverence that we can have for someone who has passed.

Embracing the complication of his legacy means I’ve had to reckon with the fact that he was not an invincible superhero. Embracing complication means I’ve had to reconcile with the fact that he was far from perfect, and that a decision that he made almost two decades ago caused real-life harm to another person.

From what I’ve seen so far, people have been largely unwilling to engage critically with this aspect of Bryant’s life. I’ve seen some people state that now “isn’t a good time.” I’ve seen people reject this part of his story entirely, resorting to the patented retort “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” I’ve seen celebrities, influencers, etc. go on misogynistic, apologistic, hotep-ish tirades against Black women who ask tough questions that challenge the ways which we choose to remember people’s legacies.

I’ve witnessed a lot of revisionist history, and to be very honest, it’s saddened me much more than Bryant’s death did.

It saddens me because we prove every single day that we lack the intellectual capacity to have challenging, meaningful discussions. It saddens me because we prove every single day that we are willing to elevate some people (typically men) at the expense of other people (typically Black women and/or sexual assault survivors). It saddens me because we prove every single day that our fear is so crippling that we’d rather live in a fantasy world absent the various nuances and contradictions of life.

This man victimized and harmed a woman, losing the trust of his wife and women everywhere in the process. But over the course of the following decade-and-a-half, he fathered four Black girls, became heavily involved in women’s sports (even coaching his daughter’s basketball team) and took enormous pride in being a “girl dad.” Embracing complexity is understanding that these two seemingly contradictory realities are both a part of his story. Embracing complexity is realizing that accepting one reality does not mean we reject the other, and that, just because we believe Bryant “redeemed” himself, doesn’t mean we erase the violence that took place and the woman’s life that was changed forever.

Embracing complexity is accepting that it is perfectly reasonable to have complex feelings about a complex person’s complex legacy.

Revising history and constructing one-sided narratives that conveniently disregard the people whose lives intersected with that of our heroes, is not honor or reverence. Regardless of whether we believe a person is redeemable or not, we must be wiling to grapple with every side and angle of that person — the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly.