The true strength of ‘When We Rise’ is its use of long narratives to chart a path to…

First, the broad strokes: “When We Rise” is a four-part miniseries, created by Dustin Lance Black and airing over the week on ABC, starting Feb. 27 and concluding on March 3.

It’s a dramatized account of the lives, loves, and struggles of three real-life individuals engaged in the civil rights fight for LGBT equality and takes place over roughly a fifty year span: Cleve Jones (played in his youth by Austin P. McKenzie and by Guy Pearce as an adult), Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs and Mary-Louise Parker), and Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors and Michael Kenneth Williams).

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In looking at the story as a whole, we find ourselves returning to a scene in the final episode, Part IV, that rather neatly summarizes the overriding lesson all of these characters will eventually learn on their respective journeys… And delivers, as the project does throughout, an “aha” moment for a lot of us, in terms of how aware we really are — and whether we’re willing to face that.

The scene involves a court case in which commonly held misconceptions and biases about same-sex marriage are being examined, and marriage “expert” David Blankenhorn (Rob Reiner) is called upon to provide a legal defense of those misconceptions. At one point, Judge Vaughn Walker (Richard Schiff) humorously calls out Blankenhorn for his wordy and basically  incomprehensible response to a question:

Blankenhorn quite simply can’t bring himself to admit, or to say,”I don’t know.”

This makes a simple point that resonates profoundly: just how many of us are afraid to admit, “I don’t know.” In this scene, but also for all the characters, just like in real life, the most painful extension of that phrase might very well be, “I don’t know if I’m right.”

It’s basic human nature to crave comfort, certainty and solid ground to stand on within the chaos of life, and “I don’t know” is an impossibly direct threat to that. It’s why encountering people with different perspectives is such a challenge for most of us: If only one of us can be right, it stands to reason that the other person is lying, or unbelievably ignorant, or else we would agree with them.

It’s why concepts like unity and intersectionality seem great in theory, but are demonstrably tough to pull off — it’s brutally hard to consider that those perspectives might know something we don’t. It might force us to consider that what we “think” we know is more tenuous, more refutable,  less complete, than we’d initially believed — and as obvious as the answer may seem, implies the question: Can any one person possibly be right about everything? We only seem to believe that lofty goal is true of, or at least attainable for, ourselves.

A refusal to admit we don’t know can come from entrenchment in youthful idealism, as proves to be the case for the younger incarnations of Cleve and Roma: They’re so sure of what they “know,” from their limited, naturally self-serving perspectives at the outset, and get burned for it. But as their stories unfold and intertwine, they eventually warm to the realization that another person may know things they don’t.

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For instance, Roma, a lesbian, soon recognizes that gay men were ahead on the learning curve in their fight for rights, and that the lesbian movement could benefit from some of that hard-won wisdom if they could just admit, “We might not know everything.” And as these two characters grow older, both Cleve and Roma are reminded that the younger generation (for Roma, her partner’s daughter that she’s co-parented, and for Cleve, the next generation of activists he winds up mentoring) might also know some things they could still stand to learn.

Ken’s struggles, the “I don’t knows” that he must own, are markedly different and more complex. He does know on one level that the religious condemnation he grew up with was painful and damaging. And as the most intersectionally burdened (and privileged) of all the characters — an ex-military, black, sometimes-Christian gay man — Ken doesn’t know where he really belongs. It’s an infinitely more understandable source of confusion, and in turn it leads to a struggle with addiction, but for a long time, he doesn’t know how to reverse these destructive patterns. He continues to replicate that intolerance and rejection in his adult life, by drawing relationships into his life that must remain closeted, and by returning again and again to a religious background that undermines and rejects his true authentic self.

It’s beautiful and certainly instructional to watch these characters constantly loosening their grip on what they think they know, about themselves, others and life, over the span of the four episodes. While quite possibly nothing in the human experience is more “easily said than done” than this — to admit that we don’t really know if we’re right — it’s exactly what’s missing from the current political climate, and of course what created and creates it. It’s how we can pay a lot of lip service to the importance of concepts like intersectionality and unity, common decency, respect for other humans, without ever really getting there.

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As Cleve says at the outset of Part I, “Each generation has its own epic confrontations that it must face.” Yet “When We Rise” has landed in a political climate in which our confrontations are eerily similar to those of these previous generations. This series might offer up the ultimate irony, proving that we still can’t admit what we don’t know — particularly, that we don’t know how to establish common ground and attain unity for the benefit and progress of the greater good — but offers hope that, as at every turn in history, we might admit it this time around, and do better.

Everything that rises must converge, as they say. When I rise, you rise; we converge. We rise up together.

“When We Rise” airs at 9 p.m. on ABC. The final three parts air Wednesday through Friday, Mar. 1 through Mar. 3.

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