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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Anansi

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The wrong question to ask at story time

A large green lizard stands on a palm tree trunk. It is facing downward. In the background, blurry, are palm fronds and a bright blue sky.
Photo credit: Mason Jones

I’ve loved Anansi stories since I first heard and read them. Disenfranchised, disinherited people have used these and other “trickster” fables to write themselves into a world where they aren’t the pawns of the powerful, where Tiger isn’t the only power in the animal kingdom, and where wit and vision make them a way of escape.

So much of the story of Black people in the West is the tale of people hustling up ways to be free, spinning the tricky webs of Anansi to carve out alternatives to the dominant storyline, and using wit, cunning, persistence, and pluck so our descendants can have a more whole, less harmful experience on Earth than we’ve had.” —Me, in July

These fables and the genre of satire are one in this sense: Fable and satire both allow us to describe a thing by holding it in peripheral view.

We aren’t creating a technical report when we explain that Cat and Dog are enemies because Cat once stole Dog’s avocados. We’re not giving deposition evidence when we say Crab has a hard shell because he helped Anansi to outwit Old Woman Crim. An account of Cricket schooling Lion on what greatness means isn’t about the facts any more than Swift’s “modest proposal” was about dinner. We’re taking glimpses of a system from the corner of our eyes.

“Did it happen?” is the wrong question to ask of a fable or an instance of satire. It’s the wrong question because facts aren’t the point. Glimpsing the system is the point, and as an elder recently told me, we can grasp more of this system obliquely than we can by staring directly into its abyss.

How we read texts and how we read circumstances; how we frame problems and how we frame people—these are all issues of definition and interpretation that cut across faith, labor, life, and relationships. To get answers that work, we first have to establish which genres of experience we’re dealing with. And then we have to ask questions that actually fit them.

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Serving the micro by changing the macro

"Freedom cuts its own path. And in a hostial system, your micro-status does not change the macro-rules." —@mackenzian

On the blog Ask A Manager, author Alison Green offers job-seekers and employees advice on interacting with their supervisors, managing relationships with colleagues, and developing their careers.

A few weeks ago, Green responded to a question from someone who had forbidden an employee from taking time off to attend their graduation. The letter-writer had granted other employees time to attend concerts, and accommodated substitutions that workers had arranged on their own, but refused their “go-to-person” the chance to celebrate their own achievement. The employee resigned.

Of course Green and the Ask A Manager community had a field day with this scenario: The letter-writer had failed to honor the employee’s loyalty and reliability, and had set aside their rules to accommodate others with much less significant commitments. The manager had no basis for denying the employee a release, and the employee was not the problem.

That employee, a first-generation college student and someone clearly committed to their job, had spent years working in a hostile system. But their environment only becomes completely intolerable when they need a few hours to celebrate their hard work and receive punishment instead of reasonable accommodation.

On my recent reading book list is M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. In the first few chapters, Copeland explains why we have to ground philosophy and theology right where we are, acknowledging our particularly embodied experiences and how bodies like ours have been framed through history.

She combs through first-person accounts of the United States’ system of enslavement to highlight not only the conditions of enslavement that Black people faced here, but also their resistance strategies: exercising faith, prayer, and hope independently of White people; educating themselves, often in secret; physically resisting assault attempts, even at the risk of retaliatory beatings, torture, and murder; undermining plantation work schedules or deploying sass; and obscuring or outright denying their desire for freedom.

Incarnate spirit refuses to be bound. Escaping to freedom, purchasing one’s own freedom or that of a loved one, fighting for freedom, offering up one’s own body for the life and freedom of another, and dying for freedom were acts of redemption that aimed to restore black bodily and psychic integrity. Living within a ‘system built on violence, disenfranchisement, and white supremacy’ surely pushed some enslaved people to respond…’with self-hatred, anger, and identification with the aggressor.’ Still, many other enslaved women stocked their arsenal with wit, cunning, verbal warfare, daring, physical strength, and so-called uppity behavior. Freedom was the prize; they put their hands to its plow, and held on.” —M. Shawn Copeland

The celebration of Juneteenth reminds us of the resilience of Black people who endured two extra years of enslavement because the good news of emancipation didn’t reach them. Copeland notes how one plantation owner deliberately resisted sharing that good news, and then abandoned the people he’d claimed to own without any of the resources they’d need to live independent lives as legally free people.

“Meeting the practical demands of freedom could be daunting,” Copeland writes. The practical demands of freedom include finding food to feed both oneself and dependents, maintaining shelter and regular work. An individual can enjoy none of the elements of a “free life” without money or the material support of the society around them. We aren’t really free if the system doesn’t allow for the conditions of freedom.

And this is why individual experiences, personal advantages, and private successes don’t change the nature of the system in which they occur. My ability to secure residency and create work over the last three years doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. immigration process is a nightmare. My education history wouldn’t especially protect me in an encounter with police or other armed state officers. My anecdotes don’t overrule the system’s logic or trends.

So much of the story of Black people in the West is the tale of people hustling up ways to be free, spinning the tricky webs of Anansi to carve out alternatives to the dominant storyline, and using wit, cunning, persistence, and pluck so our descendants can have a more whole, less harmful experience on Earth than we’ve had.

Whether we’re loyal or reliable or not, at some point we learn that we can’t depend on the rules or rule-enforcers, but that we still need to make lives in societies not designed for us. And some of us add to the righteous work of making our individual lives the more complex work of challenging the wider society in order to change it.

The logic of the wider society frames and often contracts our individual experiences. The newly freed people of the Adams plantation needed material resources to make good on the legal status Lincoln’s proclamation had given them. They didn’t get them because the White supremacist logic that had made them targets of enslavement and abuse hadn’t vanished with either the war or the 1863 executive order.

Today, Black people need work and wages that can support their health and households, freedom from fear, and freedom from violence. But the system’s logic, the logic that long ago pronounced Black people inferior and indolent still persists. It has changed form, as all systems do, but it still persists.

It can be hard to remember that the micro’s answers aren’t an adequate response to the system’s questions, but that’s the reminder that the ancestors’ stories give me. Unless we can change the system that frames our lives, we’d have to agree with them that “Freedom ain’t nothin, less you got somethin to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin on liberty is lak… livin on love. It just don’t work” (in Copeland, p. 47).

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