leadership : Page 2 : mackenzian

February 9, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The hardest thing

The hardest thing to do in moments of deep distress is to stay fully present.

It’s hard because the human brain and body learn quickly how to answer attacks they can’t escape: they help us survive by taking us somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

As I’ve mentioned, my brain recently took me away from the current administration by reminding me about The West Wing‘s Jed Barlet. This is a great thing. It’s just not the only thing.

When navigating difficult relationships, what's the difference between neutrality and numbness? It's easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what's happening right now. — From the Execudeck series, on the difference between neutrality and numbness.

“When navigating difficult relationships, what’s the difference between neutrality and numbness?

“It’s easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what’s happening right now.”

We won’t lack opportunities to practice this insight over the next four years. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll wake up, get on the train to the office, and parse how the administration’s latest orders on crime affect my communities.

I can respond to this challenging now by taking a breath before I begin, interrupting the reflex to tighten up and lock down, insisting on a pause to feel, and disrupting the bio-neurological default to flee the present.

I don’t want to do my work numb, and I don’t want to get to 2020 carrying a hard heart.

Full presence is the hardest thing, and it’s also a gift. As we work to build solutions for the world, I hope more of us will give this gift to ourselves.

January 26, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Never annoy the secretary

The PG version of one of my favorite pieces of life advice is “Never annoy the secretary.”

It’s from the days when office administrators and managers were rather known as “secretaries,” and hapless visitors underestimated just how essential these staff members were to the smooth functioning of the office. Distracted by the glitter and shine of class, rank, and conventional authority, someone might learn how easily paperwork can go astray, how variably messages can reach their intended recipients if left unshepherded, and how important it is to acknowledge others’ full humanity no matter where they sit around the organizational table.

The recent 1960s nostalgic series Mad Men includes several moments where the secretarial pool exercises its power from below over executives—almost all men—who assume that their formal titles and conventional authority mean that what actually happens in their world is up to them.

I’ve been fascinated by these power dynamics for years. Perhaps what started my curiosity was watching majority-female congregations being run by men who kept voting to exclude women from the highest formal roles in their tradition. Yet major actions in those congregations didn’t happen without the buy-in of the older women in the community, some of whom were eventually endorsed as elders.

Native people are maintaining their socio-political and spiritual resistance to the powers that have been destroying them since the 15th Century. Women are marching, and scientists and LGBTQ people now plan to do the same. In this climate, business as usual seems impossible because those without conventional power are simply too fed up to permit it.

The national park service social media teams (and those writing in their name), and EPA staff with them, are all responding to new White House restrictions with much more passion and concern than I would have predicted even a week ago. And, even if the probabilities aren’t ours, I can’t help but hope that this energy means that ordinary people “several levels down” from the new president and his administration are about to get good things done.

January 16, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Picking up the mantle

The best way to honor a mentor is to practice what they taught you.

It’s the application of the message that validates their work, not the affirmation or lionization they might attract. Their contribution to us all lies in what they taught and worked for during their lives, not in how we reinterpret them after they’ve died or been murdered.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading James Tabor’s book on the differences between Pauline Christianity and the teachings of Jesus and the Jerusalem church led by James and Peter.

In earnest since the 18th Century, biblical scholars and other students of religion have tried to recover the world and debates of the early church, because the principle seems to be that it doesn’t take long for a martyr’s convictions to fade and for their community’s mythology about them to overshadow their actual work.

I suspect that the legacy of outgoing President Barack Obama will be shaped in the same way: even when he was just a presidential candidate, the idea of Obama outshone much of his Congressional and local organizing records. Popular expectations did work in his favor to the tune of two terms as president, but perhaps popular disappointments would have been less severe if members of the public had been inspired to act more than we were inspired to idealize.

Writing about the contemporary legacy of Martin Luther King, the Rev. M. William Howard once said, “If [people] revere Martin, if they treasure his work, and his memory, then the next step is you resolve to pick up the mantle. There’s no way you can do that now without the capacity to analyze, and to strategize, and to be disciplined.”

Discipline, of course, is related to discipleship, the process of learning as if a pupil through association and practice with a mentor or teacher.

What we have of King today is his speeches, the reports of his contemporaries and relatives, and the multi-leader movement he participated in 50 years ago.

That movement has morphed as society has, but what hasn’t changed is that every era’s leaders leave a mantle of action and responsibility behind them, and our best way to honor them is to pick it up and wear it.

January 7, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Dialogue, certainty, and change

“Dialogue is a conversation between adults the outcome of which is unknown.” I don’t know whether Buber ever wrote this: I couldn’t find a source text for it. But it’s a smart thought, and a hard thing to practice.

Enduring social debates range from whether to recognize climate change and take action to mitigate it to whether to acknowledge the LGBTQ members of the Church and, if so, how to make room for their participation in Church life.

Sometimes it’s hard not to imagine that all of these debates could be retired with vintage jerseys if only someone in the room, preferably the Other Guy, experienced what the early Quakers called convincement.

Christian theological contexts and the US public sphere are both set up for that moment when light dawns, a voice from above speaks, and a former antagonist switches sides, convinced by raw logic and shiny truth.

If only they would circle back and say to us, as Francis Hogwill once said, “My eyes were opened.”

But holding onto that hope for others, even if they are in fact dead wrong, isn’t a good basis for conversation. It doesn’t change minds or open hearts.

The idea remains solid in many movements that the path to change involves convincing people to change their minds… Philosophically, entering dialogue entails a willingness, however small, to be changed by the process.” —Miki Kashtan

What’s scary about this idea is the risk of change. As much as many activists want change, not many of us want to change. Our positions have been hard-won and we have the scars to show for them. Our antagonists have put us through hell. What’s the point of even sitting down with them, especially if we’re going to give up the hope that they might one day agree with us?

In a society that prefers convincement to walking with others toward the unknown, some of us will give up conversation altogether. I get that. In some of my relationships I’ve done it too.

That’s the thing about social currents: they flow around us and also through us, despite our ideals. We’re part of the world we want to change, not apart from it. And our work, as much as we try to nudge our societies in healthier directions, is to nudge ourselves in healthier directions too.

For me, that means being willing to explore how much I’m open to being changed in relationship with people I know who’ve been hostile and antagonistic and are sure that they’re right to be.

It’s terrible. I hate it. I’m doing it anyway.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

January 2, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Learning about character from Shakespeare

On a jet black background, a pink-to-purple rose. The lighting highlights the color of the flower and deep shadow. The flower is lit from the bottom left. — Photo credit: Simone Dalmeri

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet muses about the conflict between her family, the Capulets, and the family of her beloved, Romeo. The two families are feuding and she’s been trained to hate the name “Montague,” yet she’s still managed to fall in love with someone from that clan.

Jul. O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet…

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.” —Romeo and Juliet, Act II, sc. ii

Romeo, who’s been eavesdropping out of sight until this point in the scene, tells Juliet that he’d abandon his name if he could because of her antipathy for it.

The phrase that’s passed into common English: That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare was partially right: the substance of a thing is still its substance no matter what it’s called.

But marketing rests on the fact that we don’t always accurately perceive substance when its branding or marketing points us to something different. When the name of a thing misdirects us, that affects our perceptions of it. And when there’s a mismatch between a thing’s “name” or self-declaration and its actual nature, there are only negative feelings.

Back in the 1990s, three or four major soda companies tried a “clear cola” experiment, and soda drinkers just wouldn’t latch on. Coca Cola’s Tab Clear made it just two years in the UK and US. It had as much caffeine as classic and diet Coke did, and it was just as flavorful.

But Coca Cola sold the drink under one of its down-quality product lines, and they positioned it to tank a Pepsi competitor. To consumers, it wasn’t Coke enough: A cola by another name and color didn’t taste as sweet.

In the aftermath of the US federal election, Evangelicals including Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne have worried that the Evangelical brand is so corrupted that they can no longer use it. “Jesus-centered faith needs a new name,” Campolo and Claiborne wrote in the New York Times, arguing that the community once known as Evangelical needed to shed its sociopolitical baggage and its association with the 45th President and the Republican Party.

Other writers have pushed back hard on Campolo and Claiborne’s attempt to dissociate, but the core issue Evangelicals face today is the same one Shakespeare explored through Juliet and Romeo:

People are susceptible to Madison Avenue’s psychological marketing techniques, and we wrestle with the distances between the substance of a person, product, service, or community and whichever associations its marketers and brand strategists promote. When character and name or experience and brand are at odds, we notice. No one likes false advertising and expectations that aren’t met, but we do like to be pleasantly surprised, to have our expectations exceeded.

The lesson from this could be the simple dictum “under-promise and over-deliver.” But perhaps a better lesson is that in religion and in relationship we should rather focus on the health of our characters and the quality of our contributions. No matter what people call it, a rose only smells sweet when it is fresh. No marketing campaign, even on Madison Avenue, can cover up the stink of rancid flowers or the disappointment of a clear soda.

December 20, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Acknowledging the team behind the hero

Every so often, a historian will teach us a little more about the cast of thousands who co-created the 20th Century US Civil Rights Movement, those who preceded charismatic figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Ture in the work, and whose stories surface far less often.

In a new collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, former professor and lifelong abolitionist Angela Y. Davis speaks to the teams that are always just off-stage when we rather focus the spotlights of headlines or memorials on single and supposedly singular individuals. Mandela’s work in South Africa is a great example. So is Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid 1950s and 1960s:

Dominant representations of the Black freedom movement are a discrete series of historical moments largely produced by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. And somehow, although Martin Luther Jr. himself began to emerge to prominence as a consequence of that boycott, he is seen as always already the orator and leader of the civil rights movement.

Even though numbers of books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on the role of women in the 1955 boycott, Dr. King, who was actually invited to be a spokesperson for a movement when he was entirely unknown—the movement had already formed—Dr. King remains the dominant figure…

As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers. And given the fact that the majority of people who rode buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression?

Even though we may not know the names of all of those women who refused to ride the bus from poor Black communities to affluent white communities in Montgomery, Alabama, it seems that we should at least acknowledge their collective accomplishment.” —Angela Y. Davis, October 25, 2013

Yes, we should. Work worth doing always involves more than one person, and usually more than a plucky handful. When we tell the stories of our movements, we need to acknowledge the teams with whom we move from mere imagination to collective progress.