justice : Page 7 : mackenzian

January 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Suffering and solidarity

a large dark chain lies on concrete. It appears to be daylight. — Photo credit: Kaley Dykstra

This week I’m reading a remarkable essay by Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker on the many, many ways that theologians and activists have explained redemptive suffering, punishment, and justice. It’s part of the old collection Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse.

What’s fascinating about the arguments I’ve read so far is that they’re more than 28 years old yet still sound so current. A lot can happen in three decades—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the evolution of the internet—but theological debates about responding patiently in the face of abuse haven’t moved much in that time.

Brown and Parker review classical penal, satisfaction, moral influence atonement theories as well as recent criticisms that challenge “that distant, impassive patriarch in the clouds who is beyond being affected by the turmoil below.” They point out that knowing others suffer with us can be encouraging but doesn’t change the situation that produced suffering in the first place.

“Bearing the burden with another,” they write, “does not take the burden away. Sympathetic companionship makes suffering more bearable, but the friendship between slaves, for example, does not stop the master from wielding the lash.”

This is a good self-check for those of us thinking about what it means to express solidarity with others in our relationships and work. Our solidarity with others, and others’ solidarity with us, has to be more than a synonym for shared trauma. Solidarity should provoke ethical action: the drive to transform relationships that deal domination and death into relationships where “abundant life” is experience and not merely hope.

Redemption happens when people refuse to relinquish respect and concern for others, when people refuse to relinquish fullness of feeling, when people refuse to give up seeing, experiencing, and being connected and affected by all of life… [The insistent zest for experiencing and responding] is what has the power to create community and sustain justice.” —Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker

January 1, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Weaving with parallel lines in mind

You can count on Jacobin to offer a grinch-like critique of a mass moment like New Year’s Day. And so they did, by republishing an essay from Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci.

“I hate these New Year’s,” Gramsci writes. “The date becomes an obstacle, a parapet that stops us from seeing that history continues to unfold along the same fundamental unchanging line, without abrupt stops.”

He argues for treating every day as a “New Year,” focusing on the continuities across calendar markers and the era boundaries we retrospectively overlay on our histories. I’ve argued something similar about other holidays, even though I still ride the social current and treat this season as my personal fourth quarter.

I thought of Gramsci’s essay while finishing Angela Davis’ book Freedom is a Constant Struggle this weekend.

In 2015, Davis told a Turkish audience that a feminist approach to justice required them to recognize the connections between oppressive patterns in history and in the present as well as within their culture and in others around the world.

Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.” —Angela Y. Davis

I cannot count the times I have read other communities’ histories and noticed commonalities and intersections with my own communities’ stories.

The colonization of Native peoples in the Americas has commonalities with the colonization of people of African descent across Africa and the Western Hemisphere. Genocides in Turkey share threads with genocides in Cambodia, Austria, and Bosnia. Private security and incarceration policies in Israel surface in South Africa and the United States and France and Britain.

Rather than tunneling exclusively into histories that obviously relate to me, I can learn so much by learning from other people’s stories too. Ultimately, as Davis argues, our histories are interwoven, and recognizing that allows us to build cross-community solidarity. Sustainable social progress depends on it.

December 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Core questions for Christianity

In the classic book Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, several writers and feminist theologians discuss how Christianity teaches people, particularly women, to accept suffering as a utility for spiritual growth or an explicit virtue modeled by God Godself through Jesus.

This was a theme that I and Herb Montgomery addressed during our talks at the Spectrum Conference on atonement and nonviolence this fall.

In the first chapter-essay, coauthors Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker broach the conundrum that people who want to keep participating in religion face: we have to determine whether our faiths are fundamentally flawed or simply complicit with cultural oppressive patterns. Neither is a fun conclusion to come to.

As we make that determination, though, we have to be careful that we don’t simply become apologists, making shallow excuses for our religions as Brown and Parker say: “they don’t mean it; they said they were sorry and would be better; they need me/us; we can fix it if we just try harder and are better; I’d leave but how can I survive outside; we have nowhere else to go.”

I’ve heard the latter few justifications several times in the last five years, and may have made some myself, while male ministers have debated whether female colleagues who share similar and sometimes greater workloads should receive the same denominational credential as they do. The denomination has declined to treat all of its ministers equally, and ministers and members alike make comments like “Leaving this church would leave me in cold isolation.” It’s not just women’s imaginations that are limited in this system—the source of the quote in the previous sentence is a man who’s invested almost 40 years in denominational work and cannot imagine a whole, healthy life without it. That concerns me as much as I imagine it would concern Brown and Parker.

“Only if the church is the place where cycles of abuse are named, condemned, and broken can it be a haven of blessing and a place of peace for women. That the church is such a place is not clearly evident.” —Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker

While these authors come to bleak conclusions about the historical Christian tradition, they also counter-propose a compelling vision of how Christianity and Christians can express faith that “frees” people instead of “imprisoning” them in the assumption that the best they can hope for in life is enduring suffering patiently.

As I continue my public faith work, I keep asking and beimg asked the question “Why stay?” My answers have changed since I first began my work, but still boil down to this:

If I can be a counter-illustration just by showing up, that’s fun; if I can cooperate with others in the spaces between the bricks and logs of an institution carrying on as normal, that’s great; and if either of those things is no longer true, I will stop. (“When faith fails, people move on.“)

In the meantime, it’s better for me not to daydream about changing the character of a multi-million-member organization from the edge: you have to be in the center to do that, and the center turns much too slowly for the kinds of people I’m committed to.

But out on the edges, when we recognize people are overtly suffering and where we can take much more fluid direct action, we don’t need permission to work with them, and we don’t have to wait for the fundamental logic of the institution to change. We can acknowledge the system’s gifts and weaknesses with clarity, and work without flinching with all the people, not just those our institutions deign to include.

December 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

News from Michigan, Alabama, and Russia

A common thread of resistance and environmental racism links Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and Waller County, Texas, where residents are fighting, respectively, state negligence, corporate encroachment, and an unwanted landfill.

Phillip Luke Sintierre writes on the proposed landfill in Waller County for the African American Intellectual History Society:

Opposition to Green Group’s landfill proposal on the grounds of environmental racism relates to the work of environmental justice activist Benjamin Chavis, who defines environmental racism as “the deliberate targeting of people-of-color communities for hazardous waste facilities, such as landfills and incinerators, and the siting of polluting industries. [Environmental racism] is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of color.” —Phillip Luke Sintierre, December 18, 2016

For the LA Times, Ivan Perry reports on a town in Alabama where residents have faced an eight-year battle with state officials after a sulfur compound leaked into their soil and groundwater.

Residents of Bismarck, ND, were able to refuse the Dakota Access Pipeline but the residents of Standing Rock Reservation still have to warily eye pipeline construction lights and equipment. Last year, Porter Ranch, CA, suffered a methane leak and the state responded by evacuating residents until the leak had been plugged. Residents of Eight Mile, AL, have received no comparable consideration:

‘Our sense of smell is acutely sensitive to mercaptans,’ Jackson said. ‘They’re irritants. They irritate our eyes. They’re designed to smell bad, to be unpleasant.’

Dr. Jeffrey Nordella, an urgent care physician in Porter Ranch, said he has been conducting his own research on mercaptan’s health effects since the Aliso Canyon leak.

‘Mercaptan is toxic to the human body,’ Nordella said. ‘The question is exposure — how much and for how long?’ … The years of troubles in Eight Mile have led some residents to pack up and move. But most of the 3,000 residents don’t have the resources to leave.” —Ivan Perry, October 15, 2016

In the Detroit Free Press, Ryan Garza leads a multi-media appeal on behalf of Flint, Michigan, whose residents still don’t have drinkable tap water and just rebuffed the state’s attempt to stop delivering bottled water.

Don’t forget about Flint. It’s a sentiment we’ve heard since the national media and presidential campaigns swept through this city in crisis. As we approach 2017, the three-year anniversary of the start of Flint’s water crisis, it bears repeating.

Don’t forget what the people of Flint must do for clean water. Many are still using cases of bottled water to cook with, bathe in and drink.” —Ryan Garza, December 17, 2016

Finally, climate communicator Alex Steffen explores key influences on carbon policy, the climate change denial that will likely be a major part of the next US federal administration, and corporate construction of new carbon-fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access Pipeline. There’s a gap, Steffen writes, between how much items like oil and beachfront property are worth today and how sustainable they are in the long-run. He calls this gap “the carbon bubble.”

If we can’t burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can’t defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon...

For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.” —Alex Steffen, December 15, 2016

Researchers Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have written extensively about how public campaigns of science denial have worked, not just on climate change but also on tobacco, DDT, and acid rain. Read or watch their work and note how corporations and their think tank partners are using the same playbook on environmental and climate issues today.

December 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Knowing history can change the conversation

This weekend I watched an extended presentation by Bert Haloviak and Dr. Kendra Haloviak Valentine on the Adventist community’s first 150 years with female pastors. It’s part of a series of talks from 2014, and so occurred before the 2015 General Conference vote in San Antonio.

Adventist Women In Ministry – Progress or Regress? from Azure Hills Church on Vimeo.

Bert Haloviak is a former staff member of the denomination’s archives, and has written several papers exploring the 19th Century church. Kendra Haloviak Valentine specializes in both Revelation and women’s role in the 1st Century house church.

Facts they share:

At least 50 Adventist female ministers received ministerial licenses from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Early Adventist language for what we now call “ordination” included the phrases “laying on of hands” and “setting apart.” Ordination practices in the denomination’s first several years involved prayer and a piece of paper, and recognized a person’s authority to preach and baptize as early as the 1850s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the IRS began asking questions about how the Adventist denomination determined which ministers merited tax-shielded benefits.
Rather than treat all ministers equally, GC officials chained future decisions to global consensus, stripped female ministers of their credentials, and granted them “missionary” licenses instead. Missionary-licensed ministers and “associates in pastoral care” were no longer eligible for “ordination.”
In the 1970s, three congregations, including a university church, recognized female ministers serving locally and ordained them. These ordinations in Maryland and California were not nationally or internationally recognized.
The first Adventist recognized as a local church minister rather than an itinerant was a woman, Bert Haloviak says.

An interesting point surfaces during the post-presentation questions: Kendra Haloviak notes that her younger students tend to assume that because they have seen female ministers at work in churches, there is no policy obstacle. And this makes them less exercised about removing those barriers: if people are doing the work, how can there be a problem?

The North American Division has indeed hosted a different kind of conversation about ordination in the 2010s than it did in the 1970s, but the wider denominational stalemate persists and institutional limits are still in place. While male pastors encourage their female colleagues, these structural limits mean that Adventist congregations are not by default welcoming environments for ministers who aren’t male, and congregations and conferences that do welcome them remain unusual.

But once we acknowledge our history a full century before mainstream society woke up to women’s equality, the question shouldn’t be “should we ordain women?” It should be “Did we ever have sound reasons to stop ordaining them?” When the motivation for redefining “minister” as exclusive of women was money and pressure from the IRS, my answer has to be no.

You can read a text version of this presentation; the video is not captioned.

December 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Remote war and responsibility

Contains spoilers for Eye in the Sky.

The United States recently expanded its military activity in the Horn of Africa. Among the regional groups it now openly targets in the name of post-9/11 counter-terrorism is Al-Shabab (The Youth), a decentralized network based in Somalia and operating around the Somali-Kenyan border. The US has in fact been active in the area for months, using “Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies” as its proxies.

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.” — New York Times, November 27, 2016

A recent film makes this conflict its context. Directed by Gavin Hood, Eye in the Sky (2015) is a 90-minute study of a modern military drone attack on a house in a Kenyan neighborhood. Unlike US foreign policy, however, the film begins with the perspective of one Kenyan family: a father repairing his daughter’s toys, a mother baking bread for the daughter to sell, and, beyond their gate, traders, soldiers, and Wahhabi Muslims monitoring one another’s dress, families, and morals.

Fascinating for me given my doctoral research are sections of the film that feature government officials in the West, military leaders on the ground, and researchers, advisors, and drone operators in three countries (Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The audience observes these military, political, and legal representatives arguing from the logics of their respective domains: they each have to judge whether the UK should conduct a bombing that will injure or kill noncombatant neighborhood residents as well as people the two governments have named as enemies.

Can we bomb a house in a neighborhood in a country we aren’t explicitly bound to?

Should we?

What if a child will be caught in the blast radius?

What if there will be two children?

What if there are suicide bombers in the house?

What if we can watch the would-be bombers don their vests and get ready to deal death?

What if the bombers’ video gets onto YouTube?

What if Western governments’ secret surveillance footage gets onto YouTube?

What if the chain of decision-making offers more stalling than accountability?

What if the military’s risk estimates are fluffy?

What about the drone operators’ mental health?

What does it do to people to have the workday regularly include killing others remotely, watching them die, and then poking through the rubble to identify their remains?

What is our responsibility when all this and more happens in the name of the British and American public, and persists as governmental policy regardless of which political parties hold the reins?

Just as social media moderators experience trauma from their work, so do military drone operators tasked to surveil and sometimes kill. So, too, do people living out their lives with relatives while people thousands of miles away superimpose brutal geopolitics on their homes, families, and children.

Toward the end of Eye in the Sky, a general says to a disapproving politician, “Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war.”

Soldiers know the costs because they live it, and many of us may never know the cost ourselves. We might be able to grasp it remotely or through fiction, and if so, ok: some things no one should experience firsthand.