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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Wedge politics

Two wooden-handled axes lie blade up and down, facing each other and forming a rectangle.
Photo credit: Felix Russell Saw

In all seriousness, as if the United States skipped abolition, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, and the last four decades of Reconstruction Part Deux, American Christians are debating whether White supremacists are the new outsider whom they’re compelled by grace to welcome.

It’s an odd scenario to represent as merely hypothetical when one of the last times Black church folks welcomed an actual White supremacist into their midst, he killed nine of them.

It’s also not hypothetical at all. US White supremacist groups have always included Christians. Some of those members have become police officers and prison guards, and others have graduated into long and quiet careers as pastors and priests.

Within a decade of burning crosses on the private and community property of Black and Jewish people, sending hate mail to Coretta Scott King, threatening to bomb Fort Meade, and getting sentenced to just 150 days in prison, William Aitcherson left the MidAtlantic, turned the page, and began a thirty-year ministerial career.

He served in three states. The diocese knew of his history. And his name and story is only public now because of a column on grace and redemption that he wrote for The Arlington Catholic Herald after Charlottesville’s supremacist mayhem last week (cached copy).

According to the Herald, Aitcherson has volunteered to “step away from public ministry.” Whether he’ll return—he’s just a few years short of retirement age now—isn’t yet clear. But his redemption narrative found a ready audience, as have other “former Neo-Nazis” calling for compassion and kindness this week.

I know called and qualified people across the US and at all stages of adulthood who can’t even be ordained because of their gender; others who’ve been hounded out of ministry or fellowship because their sexuality, their children’s sexuality, or their affirming theology; and still others who’ve had delayed congregational or ministry assignments because of their ethnicity. Welcome and inclusion don’t extend to them.

It’s fascinating. Some kinds of people may have “troubled youths” and write epistles about them later. Others will never touch the common table. I understand the early Christians’ skepticism about Paul in a new way now.

That’s just one uncomfortable pattern of inclusion I’ve dug into over the last week. I’ve also been reading about the White gay men who now have visible advocacy roles among contemporary supremacists. It’s a notable shift, which journalist Minkowitz describes as “outreach,” after several decades in which US White supremacists have smeared, physically attacked, and intentionally excluded non-heterosexual people.

But they’re learning from their European cousins, who’ve reached out to White cisgender gay men there and used them to drag supremacist and xenophobic ideology into the civic mainstream. Now, as under Ernst Röhm during WWII, that outreach has worked in both the United States and in Europe because White cisgender gay men have long harbored anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-fem[me], and anti-trans sentiments. You don’t have to trawl apps to find it. Just go to any public LGBTQIA site comment section—at The Advocate, OUT Magazine, even my own Believe Out Loud—and wait. It’s there, and it’s why we need active comment moderation.

So White supremacists haven’t invented anything here. They’re only leveraging the intra-community bigotry that has existed since the LGBTQIA community took its current form in the 1950s. And they’re building on anxieties surfacing now, post-marriage, as the community changes, as people of color and trans and nonbinary people become more visible, and as the donors and foundations that fund the community shift their investments toward equity and justice rather than to just equality and integration.

I’ve noted on Twitter that these dynamics merit a close reading, that it’s not good enough to dismiss all supremacists as racist, or cover the Church’s complicity with buzzwords like reconciliation.

There’s such mythology around the LGBTQIA community’s “inclusion.” It functions just like Christian myths about “unity”: to foreclose conversations about what inclusion and unity actually mean as we try to live them out, and who in each of our communities has to pay for these values with their well-being.

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Note: Contemporary White supremacists are discussed or quoted extensively in the articles below. Take care.

  • “If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy.” —Dr. Peter Simi in The Intercept (January 31, 2017)
  • “If the emergence of out gay white nationalists shows anything, it’s that LGBTQ people truly are everywhere.” —Donna Minkowitz in Slate (June 5, 2017)
  • “Remembering and memorializing are two different things.” —Maggie Penman in NPR’s Codeswitch (August 16, 2017)

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Thanks for learning with me

back soon. regular posts resume in july.

The United States begins its summer season a little ahead of the solstice with Memorial Day weekend.

The end of May also brings my year-long writing experiment to a close.

Thank you so much for reading and learning with me since last May. I’ll be writing again in a few weeks.

Subscribers will hear first what’s next for me. If you know someone who’d enjoy reading, please invite them to sign up too.

See you soon!

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Respecting the evidence

Learn something. If an action or a pattern doesn't work or isn't healthy, stop. And then don't start again.

Once upon a time (last year), after I’d moved to yet another state (NY) and found a place to live in a tough market in a rather unreasonable amount of time (three weeks), someone who loves me very much called me “determined.”

I translated that affirmation as “willful,” and I laughed as I thanked her for it.

Willfulness involves a strong intention, the ability to drive from concept to act, and the power to push through resistance. It’s a trait I inherited from all branches of my family tree, and so no one who knows my people should be surprised that I’m good at it and only improving with age.

As I type this, I’m mostly laughing at myself. Willfulness can mean drive, and it can also mean fact-resistance. I have the capacity to keep on pushing despite jeers and storms, and I also have the capacity to be stubborn and stuck.

Determination and willfulness are both ways to honor purposeful commitment. I only offer the full force of my intentions when I believe something is worth committing to, and I think most people are similar to me in this.

In other words, one of the things that irks me most about my fundamentalist brethren—doggedness—is a trait I have too.

It means I’ll almost never give up on a course too soon: I’m more inclined to turn my ship a little late. Because I know that my default is Hanging In There™, I use all possible evaluation tools to disrupt my default, to keep me strategic and “on time.”

I’m learning from my own experiences and my observation of others’ experiences that nothing thwarts progress so easily and so thoroughly as failure to rightly read the data and integrate it into new action.

If something doesn’t work or isn’t healthy, a teacher told me to my face last year, don’t do it again. 

I reread that line this week and felt exposed. Because it’s really that easy to self-delude: to imagine there are more degrees of flex in a rule than there are, to perceive a wider span of openness among relatives than exists, and to assert greater freedom in an organization than actually goes to participants at my level.

After my face flushed, though, I was able to swallow the wisdom again.

In every context where my choices matter, it’s up to me to pay attention to the outcomes of my assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors. And if those outcomes aren’t up to snuff, it’s up to me to change something.

Ultimately, the thing that proves learning is changed action.

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Unnecessary ties

Let us lay aside every weight... and let us run with endurance. —Hebrews 12

Dependence of church members on civil government for material support should be avoided if possible, especially where such dependence would interfere with the Christian’s freedom to testify to the government of Christ.” —Friends of Truth / Glenside Friends Meeting, Christian Conduct

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…” —Hebrews 12

I know people who run races with giant tires chained to their waists—by choice. It’s resistance and strength training, and it works.

It’s also entirely voluntary. After their training and races are over, they take the tires and the chains off. They don’t walk through their entire life weighed down.

I’m learning from them, from my Quaker siblings, and from the writer of Hebrews.

The early Quakers interpreted this principle in terms of being bonded to the state, but it doesn’t only have to refer to those kinds of entanglements.

It could also mean not accepting work that you know includes ethical conflicts or people who’ll hamper your ability to resolve those conflicts. It might mean reconsidering your relationships and finally replacing old relational habits.

It’s not just a rule about what to do; it’s a rule about why it’s worth doing.

Cutting unnecessary ties and shedding unnecessary chains means relieving yourself of those “weights” that limit, discourage, and repress rather freeing and inspiring you to walk out your best values and sense of call.

I love that this verse follows a long account of community heroes—that “cloud of witnesses.”

As we change our lives, we’re in good company. Trimming connections that “hinder” you can just as easily mean walking in the footsteps of elders, mentors, colleagues, and friends. It doesn’t always have to mean stepping away from the known world into isolation.

Seek out the stories of those who’ve followed the paths you’re on. Situate yourself in their midst and allow them to nourish you. And then “run,” as they did, “with endurance.”

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Dying from an inability to say no

a white hand writes with a black ballpoint pen a list on square grid paper. the list is out of focus.
Photo credit: Glenn Carstens Peters

I was going to title this post “Say no so you can say yes,” but I googled the phrase first and found that Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta has already written that thought down.

“We have to clear up some space [in our lives],” Babauta writes, “by saying No to things we’d like to do, but that are taking up space in our lives — space that could be used by something we really really want to do.”

If you’re watching the second half of 2017 jog toward you like a smug Usain Bolt, you might need to create some more room: room to breathe, room to feel, room to reflect, and, yes, room to do.

By June, for instance, I’ll have completed a full year of daily writing and almost-daily posts. I’m creating room for myself by not publishing new content to this website for a month. I’ll return in July with a new schedule.

In the meantime, read Babauta’s article and the Derek Sivers post that inspired him. Consider what they might mean for you, should you apply them to your own life.

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Why old dogs can learn new tricks

An out of focus airy and well-lit shot of a model brain and biological head. A person is walking by the display in the background.
Photo credit: Jesse Orrico

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a proverb I learned in primary school along with other common English idioms. It never occurred to me at the time that the saying contradicted the also-common “You’re never too old to learn.”

It turns out that even if the battle between “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets” is largely imaginary, “You’re never too old to learn” is the more accurate of the two sayings. Learning is always possible, even if it can become more difficult with time.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to respond to our environment and experiences by changing its structure, creating new circuits, signals, and neural pathways. New connections within the structure of the brain is the physiological evidence of learning, whether the content being learned is how to walk (motor function), how to make toast with peanut butter (object function), or how to adapt with and navigate a difficult family relationship (relational function).

Today I learned about three strategies that support learning and the rewiring of the brain:

The exercise suggestion surprised me, but I’ve noticed that people pushing for significant change in an area of their lives will often take up some form of physical discipline or training alongside that attempt to chage: a program of weightlifting, walking, running, yoga, or another organized practice like a martial art.

I would never have thought of these kinds of exercise as something that drove literal brain changes, but that’s what the research suggests.

“Old dogs can learn new tricks” because our brains aren’t cement or hardened clay. They’re soft, mushy, and more resilient than I’m sometimes tempted to acknowledge.

We can learn: it’s possible. Whether it’s likely is a combination of our will, our finding or making social networks and other structures that support our learning, and how motivated we are to learn and keep learning even in the face of resistance.