Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

American Revolution

By

Taking a holiday from mythology

A sparkler shines with a purple glow. It is night time and the photo appears to be in a garden.
Photo credit: Y. S. Elliott

National holidays can be a great break from the daily routine for those who get to hit pause on the workday clock. They’re also another time when society pumps energy and attention into the old, old myths that the status quo tells itself so it can sleep well at night.

We don’t have to comply.

This weekend churches around the US will include remarks and prayers about “this great country” and “liberty” and how many people “came to this country in search of freedom.”

There’s a much deeper collective story than that, and it’s up to us to choose to tell it, especially when it’s awkward to tell, especially during the holidays.

What if, rather than singing a one-verse hymn about grateful, voluntary immigrants fleeing Cuba or European economic quicksand, churches this weekend shared a more complex song?

What if we said something like this:

This weekend the nation will pause to remember our war of independence from Great Britain and King George III. This weekend, we’ll gather with our families and talk of greatness and freedom and opportunity and hope.

But not all of us came here to find freedom. Many of us were crushed in the great vice of the colonial militias and United States army. Many of us are here because our neighbors’ ancestors stripped our elders of their freedom, ripped them from their homes, and dragged them to a new hemisphere.

We and our ancestors before us have always struggled to live up to the ideals that we recite and teach our children—that the truth of our value is self-evident, that all of us are equal, that our rights are inalienable, that none of us are really alien, that all of us are welcome, that all of us are free.

We struggle to live up to those ideals. But we’re here now together. And we have so much work still to do to build the nation that we dream of, that generations before ours wrote about, and taught their children, who taught their children, who taught their children, who taught us.

They declared independence in a moment, but the work of living freedom in this world of interdependence and soft boundaries between nations is a much deeper work.

We dare not take imperial might for granted, as they did. We dare not take the righteousness of the nation-state for granted, as they did.

And we dare not march forward without reckoning with the Native people among us. They preceded us all by 12,000 years, and this is their land, no matter our doctrines and our laws. Our independence is a debt we owe to them.

As people who claim “citizenship” in the kingdom of God, belonging beyond our membership in shifting, fickle, and fragile nation-states, we need wisdom to recognize the responsibilities that freedom demands of us.

Freedom means we accept that our ancestors used God and church as a weapon against the vulnerable, that they bound themselves with the abuse they inflicted on others. They weren’t free.

Freedom means we acknowledge how we today follow in their tracks, using God and church as a weapon against the vulnerable, and binding ourselves. Where we oppress, we aren’t free.

Freedom means we face the gap between our mythology and the muck of the lives we live. Freedom means we get to choose what we sow in the world now.

It’s not easy. It’s not festive. But it’s true.

One of my all-time favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, includes a scene that I remember every Fourth of July.

[If you haven’t seen this movie, why not? The next paragraph includes a spoiler; so sorry. You should see the movie anyway.]

The lead character, Andy, makes his escape from prison under the cover of a vicious nighttime lightning storm. There’s torrential rain, thunder, and crashing lightning, and he strikes a sewer pipe with every crack of lightning. This grand, gorgeous story plays out in the heavens, while Andy splashes about in the prison sewage down below.

Andy is the United States when it realizes it can’t get free without wading through its sewage. The process won’t be easy and it won’t be festive, but even with the holiday fireworks bursting overhead, we can still tell the truth.

By

All Our Euphemisms Are Like Filthy Rags

Note: This article features Anansi, the Akan spider-man. And because I love you, it includes no images of actual spiders. —KM

Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag while on the flagpole outside the South Carolina state capitol building. Photo via @Bipartisanism.
Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag from atop the flagpole outside South Carolina’s Capitol Building. Photo: Adam Anderson via Bipartisan Report, Twitter.

A lot of people I know skipped church last weekend. A lot of Black people I know skipped church last weekend.

A sprinkling of days after a young White racist slaughtered nine praying Black people in the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, a lot of sweet souls skipped church, and I was tempted to be one of them.

Brokenhearted, I was tempted to crawl back under my summer blanket and wail in the timeless language of tea and chocolate and fitful sleep. Instead I rose and put on a dress shirt instead of sackcloth, and I went to the morning service at my congregation.

I left the sanctuary as empty as I’d entered it. In fact, I left even emptier than I’d entered it. I’d walked into the building with two mites of hope, and my offering dissipated in an unrelated sermon series and two nods to Charleston: one reference to “somber feelings” and one “racial…uh…stuff.”

The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist's attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 23, 2015). Art credit: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence
The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist’s attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 17, 2015). Illustration: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence

Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old.
Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old.
DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49 years old.
Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old.
Myra Thompson, 59 years old.
Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old.
Daniel Simmons Sr., 74 years old.
Susie Jackson, 87 years old.

Their bodies will be buried this week. Black churches are burning across the South. And the most my congregation could say was “racial stuff.” We couldn’t even say their names.

At Rev. Pinckney’s memorial service on June 26, President Barack Obama praised him as a good man who gave his prime years to religious and public leadership, to both preaching and protest. The president noted what inspired Pinckney to serve the communities beyond his congregation: the Black Church has always sent its servants out into the world.

“To put our faith in action is more than individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation… to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society.”

Pinckney’s persistent faith, Obama said, drew on the same spirit that inspires the U.S. to expand its freedoms and policies of care, and to account for a wider circle, not a narrower one. The faith and grace of God is in that movement. Obama unsteadily sang “Amazing Grace”; the organist helped him, and the church said Amen.

Last weekend, I couldn’t have sung with them. This weekend, the release of song still feels alien. As I watched the C-SPAN funeral feed on Friday night, it hit me that Clementa Pinckney was the same age as my sister. Six days after that supremacist killed him and the other Emanuel members, a third member of my sister’s generation, a friend, mother, wife, and the senior minister of one of my churches, “put on invisibility” and passed away.

In my fatigue over the last 10 months of relentless Black Death, and my sadness at the passing of my friend and mentor, I find myself far less awed by the “amazing grace” invoked at the Pinckney funeral and far more amazed at the apathy of the faithful.

It was amazing apathy, not grace, that kept John Newton comfortable in both slavery investments and Christian preaching for forty years before an English politician introduced him to abolitionism. How was it that the word he preached failed to awaken him to the sacred life of his African siblings?

And the AME denomination, the oldest independent Black denomination in the world—how is it that the word that the AME denomination has preached since 1816 hasn’t yet transformed it into an advocate for all Black lives, not just some? The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered equal access to civil marriage, and LGBT-antagonist church folk struck up apocalyptic mourning chants as soon as the decision hit SCOTUSblog.

The Emanuel 9 deserved more than limp euphemism. We deserve more than apathy in the face of inequity.

This Saturday as I ventured out to church again, Bree Newsome and James Ian Tyson brought the Confederate battle flag down from its mast in front of the South Carolina Capitol complex. Shortly after their arrest, two Capitol employees raised it again. One of the flag-raisers was Black.

After Newsome’s and Tyson’s arrest, South Carolina residents rallied outside the capitol to “Defend the Flag.” The scripture-quoting pole-climbing film-making Black activist woman and the man who spotted her on the pole had never allowed the battle flag to touch the ground: they offered the Confederate soldiers’ emblem far more respect than the secessionist movement ever claimed for them. As South Carolina’s flag came down, battle flags west of SC went up: Alabama crowds drunk on nostalgia took to the streets to declare that they, too, matter and they wished they were in Dixie.

As I saw the stories about Newsome, Tyson, and the battle flag coming down, the flag action bail fund ticked past $30,000, $40,000, $60,000, then $100,000. I saw the spirit of Anansi at work.

Kwaku Anansi is the trickster, shapeshifter, and storykeeper of the Akan diaspora. He brings wily, situational wisdom, prudence, and cunning skill to the inequitable world of the animals, that world where Tiger is king and expectations of spiders are low. The Greeks called Anansi’s gifts metis, but I grew up seeing empire-identified critics fretting over whether we should tell Anansi tales to children and blaming the spider-man for inspiring social fraud and corruption.

They were wrong. Anansi is worthy of honor. And when spun into action like spiders’ silk, Anansi’s metis is a beautiful and powerful thing.

In one story, Anansi wonders how to undermine Tiger and draw some of the boastful king’s power to himself. Tiger challenges Anansi to earn renown by besting Snake. Anansi doesn’t attack anyone. He fails at first with a conventional trap. And so our hero “goes home to think.”

“A trap will never work,” Anansi said to himself. “Snake can climb trees and slither and slide away, so I’ll have to outsmart him. And I’m the smartest fellow there is!”

And so he uses his intelligence to find a way. He appeals to Snake’s beliefs about himself, and with all his wits and hearts and guts, Anansi gets what he wants.

“You come against me with hate and oppression and violence,” Newsome shouted from the middle of the flagpole. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” And it came down. Anansi targets Tiger’s and Snake’s false pride and no one is harmed. A scripture-quoting woman climbed a pole and made the SC Capitol and its sluggish legislators look foolish.

It was the most straightforward solution I think she could have found, and it had good precedent. Not allowed to eat at a restaurant? Go sit at the counter and wait out patrons’ fury. Banned from the front of the bus? Don’t use any buses until you’re free to sit where you please on any of them. Tired of legislators stalling and want the secessionist battle flag to come down? Go up and get it yourself, and wear safety gear.

In the late 1940s, theologian and activist Howard Thurman described trickster wisdom as “perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong” (Deception, Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 58-69). As he points out, “deception” only appears in unequal relationships and in groups and societies that resist overt challenge to their symbols and structures. Thurman didn’t advocate deception: he feared that double meanings, duplicity, and feints degraded marginalized people and put them at risk for moral compromise.

But the cunning surprises that worried Thurman aren’t the only quality Anansi brings with him. The adaptability and resourcefulness of metis also showed up in Newsome’s and Tyson’s direct action yesterday. Both activists were absolutely measured, calm, and intentional, and they confounded the expectations of a system that has responded to #TakeItDown/#KeepItDown with “We’ll discuss it next legislative session.” In the meantime, the system only recognizes passive compliance and submission.

Passive compliance will not do in this season. Newsome and Tyson cooperated with police but were never once out of control. They made the pole-climb a craft (technê). Their team documented the action meticulously. And they promise there will be more to come.

All through our history we’ve seen that Anansi’s wisdom doesn’t surface on a plane of equals. And this is the challenge of marginalized people:

  • We immunize ourselves against fear.
  • We know that we are the children of heaven and earth, that we belong, that we merit existence.
  • We know that self-hate is worse than death and that even death cannot conquer our story.

All the while, we live in contexts that deny our humanity, our magic, and our trauma; that expect us to keep producing through pain; and that have the gall to fly supremacists’ battle flags over our coffins. One hundred and fifty-two years after emancipation, the system still hasn’t digested that we are no one’s inferior. And so we use the gifts of Anansi.

Euphemism can’t get us to clarity now. A teacher told me last week that every new headline of murder or arson is another call to know and speak the truth. She was right. Choosing the filthy rags of euphemism over the salve of truth can only delay our healing: all our euphemism is like filthy rags, and if there’s any social institution that should understand what this means for our “salvation” as a country, it’s the Christian church.

A sector of the US Adventist church recently apologized for the racism that launched it 70 years ago. Current leaders recognized that though they were not culpable for their predecessors’ wrongs, they were responsible for the system they inherited and steward today. That’s part of what knowing and speaking the truth can do.

While I kept up with the flag action on Saturday, I also saw that the National Cathedral’s dean had called for the removal of two Civil War stained windows. The National Cathedral is one of my favorite churches in the world: it took more than eight decades to build and the designs of its windows reflect that history.

I can’t agree with the dean that we should remove these panes. I do agree with him that we need historians to help us re-frame the windows with a thoughtful contextual display. As I said on Saturday, the natural fractures exposed during the Civil War persist in new forms in contemporary US politics and politicians. We can’t gut living history and think no one will notice. Racism is neither dead nor extreme, and we have to tell the truth about it.

Dear Lord, I thank You for the faith that frees,
The love that knows it cannot lose its own;
The love that, looking through the shadows, sees
That You and he and I are ever one! —James Dillet Freeman

By

Intelligence Wars: A Conversation with Dr. Lowell Christy

The People have power and we can tap into that again. —Lowell Christy

Cropped shot of Dr. Lowell Christy. He is standing in front of a rock wall, and smiling.
Lowell Christy, Cultural Strategies Institute

Last July, as the media reported on Edward Snowden, the NSA, and surveillance through phone and internet service companies like Verizon, Google, and Microsoft, I spoke with Dr. Lowell Christy about his research on the American Revolution and the logic of 21st Century intelligence-gathering.

Dr. Christy, founder and director of the Maryland-based Cultural Strategies Institute and a board advisor for George Washington University’s Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning, has spent more than three decades applying cybernetics insights, systems thinking, and collective IQ techniques to social and cultural transformation initiatives all over the world. His five-part series, The Intelligence Wars, will be released later this year.

KM: Who are you writing The Intelligence Wars for?

LC: I’m writing for ordinary Americans, not policy-makers. During the Revolutionary War, British General Howe’s plans were undermined by an American housewife by the name of Lydia Darragh. Howe planned to move his troops into Whitemarsh, PA, but Mrs. Darragh leaked the details to George Washington so that American forces weren’t taken by surprise.

That was the colonial American informal information network in action: ordinary untrained people outwitting a superior British military. The People have power and we can tap into that again.

There have been a lot of surveillance-related news stories recently: Manning, Wikileaks, Snowden, PRISM, whistle-blowing, Xkeyscore, and the government’s intelligence-gathering systems. Why should an ordinary person care about intelligence-gathering or metadata?

A simple way to define intelligence is as “in tell”—telling into a subject. To understand a network, intelligence agencies can now compile every piece of mail sent through the postal service, every phone call, credit card, every email, every internet keystroke. And every license plate too—more than ten thousand new licenses are added to this database every day. Combined with the interstate camera system, the metadata in the database allows the agencies to know who travels where and when, and who is speaking with whom.

The art of assembly is the attack point here; the monitoring of assembly subliminally oppresses the People. These strategies eat away at the root of American genius, which is our ability to share and debate ideas freely in order to thresh out differences, separate the truth from the chaff, and grow our commonwealth together.

When you say the art of assembly is under attack with meta-surveillance, what do you mean? Are there any insights into this from your study of the US Revolution and the Founders’ writings?

In the foreground, the Liberty Bell. In the background, the US flag superimposed on the first page of the US constitution. "We the People" is in large script at the top of the page
“Constitution with Liberty Bell” (c) Framed Legacy

Yes. John Adams wrote that the American Revolution “was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” He wanted future generations of Americans to codify the Revolutions’ pamphlets, letters, and communications of the Revolution, to archive the war, so that we would build an understanding of not just the war’s surface politics and military strategy, but also the conversations and relationships among ordinary people that the Revolution was based on.

The Revolution was triggered in part by the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a duty on pamphlets more than half a page long. Ben Franklin was a printer, so he and other writers and critics were directly impacted by this law, and Jonathan Swift predicted that the Stamp Act would “utterly ruin” pamphleteers and the larger press. In England and the colonies, the monarchy used the Stamp Act to raise revenue from writers and inhibit the criticism they distributed through the print media. So that Act was a choke-and control point that strangled the knowledge-building networks of America, and it became the tripwire for the Revolutionary War.

I write more about this in the second article in the series: the data collection programs that are part of the surveillance state today are very similar to the “intolerable acts” that sparked the Revolution.

What other modern parallels do you see?

Have you heard about the anti-pornography regulations in the United Kingdom?

Yes, the Prime Minister is proposing that all broadband subscribers have to opt in to receive the unfiltered internet at home. The justification is “child safety.”

That’s right. But the ISPs’ proposed restricted content includes “adult content” as well as “extremist related content” and “web forums, esoteric material, and web blocking circumvention tools.” And the government wants that content automatically blocked. The UK has also gathered DNA from every newborn as part of a public health program since 2002, so the concept of “personal privacy” is a losing argument in this climate.

Wow. So you write about threats to the People’s assembly and parallels between what we face today and the Revolution era Stamp Act. What else can Intelligence Wars readers look forward to learning about?

In Part 3, I write about the Founders’ principles and the tenets of commonwealth that motivated them. They wanted to build the new nation on the philosophies of natural ability potentials and distributed networked intelligence, not the monarchical model of centralized power and centralized control. Part 4 looks at the organizational pathologies and institutional complexes that work against this natural ability and strangle the organism that is our nation. Finally in Part 5, I explain how we can move forward now we’re dealing with the same issues of centralized power and restricted assembly that colonial Americans dealt with in the 18th Century.

So much else has changed in 250 years. Why do you think we’re having these conversations again now?

It comes down to power. In the 18th Century, America was fighting against a world power. Now we are that power. In 1913, the United States transitioned from its geographical isolation into “America the powerful” and this was a major shift in the context of our role in the world.

But power is an information ecology toxin: it fixes a point and organizes new information and interpretations around it instead of engaging new information in an ongoing conversation. So we became powerful, and we also developed a truncated, militarized mind.

The sun rises in the background as a US soldier in fatigues walks across a dusty desert foreground. His rifle is pointed downward.
Karbala, Iraq, March 17, 2003 (c) John Moore, AP

A militarized mind truncates the decision-making process: it fixes one’s attention on deciding and acting, but doesn’t allow for the observation and orientation need to learn intelligently. Our wars have given us a lot of technology, but technology reinforces this shortcut because it is based on “assumption in, assumption out.”

So what’s the way out? What are our alternatives?

The US revolution was an experiment based the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment teaches us to understand problems by looking at systems, not just individuals, and to accept the concept of evolution or change. In the Herbert Spencer model, evolution is the capacity to have a different future beyond the condemnation of the past or the present: we have the capacity to leap beyond the limits of our past.

We’re often taught the surface reasons for our revolution—shaking off the monarchy, resentment about taxes—but the Revolution has much deeper roots than that. If we can understand those deeper natural intelligence principles and the tools they give us to break our organizational and institutional pathologies, then we can start navigating our way out of the artificial power-centric hegemony that’s dominant today.

Get future updates on Dr. Christy, the Intelligence Wars series, cybernetics, and the Cultural Strategies Institute by becoming a subscriber of mackenzian.com. Also read about a precursor to the 1765 Stamp Act: the 1643 Licensing Order Act that inspired John Milton’s Areopagitica.