July 7, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975

Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison

Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream.

“A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, turpentine, and humans, Morrison highlights the inhumanity of American slavery, the studied ignorance and skew of contemporary social sciences, and opportunities for Black artists to write and speak to their own community rather than write as educators for curious White audiences.

This weekend I sat down to listen to the 2-hour audio recording and transcribe Morrison’s presentation and responses during the Q&A. She discusses aspects of historical and contemporary racism, the economic roots of the racism tree, and uses racial epithets while describing how specific populations buy their way out of limiting social positions—literally using their creativity to become indispensable to local markets.

Download the transcript in Rich Text Format or in PDF.

Since Portland State’s Soundcloud recording remains free, please don’t sell/resell this transcript or access to it. And to honor Morrison’s argument and intellectual legacy, please do use this content to fuel your own research, self-education, and art.

Please send any transcription corrections via my contact form. I’ll update the links above with the latest versions.

[Latest transcripts: 7/7/2014]

March 24, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

From the Archives: Spring Cleaning

This article was first published around the March equinox four years ago. Winter 2014 has been long here in Maryland. The clocks have sprung forward and the sunset sprawls wide in the evening—but yesterday it was only 43°F and we’re not yet sure whether spring is here to stay.

“Spring Cleaning” surfaced when I reviewed my March 2010 journals and posts during my birthday month reflections last week, and publishing it again after such a long snow season seems a fitting way to honor this phase in the inexorable turning of the Earth.

Spring Cleaning

When I was small, it was common for people to talk about spring cleaning and mean it literally. We threw open the windows, aired our homes, gave away old clothes, and started walking off any “winter baggage.” I still feel extra fresh during spring, especially when I see the sun hanging in the sky a little longer, and the first few buds breaking out on the branches outside.

I prefer to start my new year in March, rather than in January. By March the mainstream “new year resolution” fever has worn off, and I no longer have to hear what TV breakfast show hosts think I should change about myself. The popular spotlight has moved to some other issue, and I can enjoy my month without a million contradictory voices clamoring for my allegiance. I can be still, and watch the trees.

When the trees outside begin to blossom, they’re not blossoming because someone voted to permit it. The trees follow a pattern that God laid down in their cell biology, a pattern that unfolds via wind, sun, rain, soil, and time. Every spring, after the dead quiet of winter, that pattern pushes out new twigs, leaves, petals. Soon buds open, and fruits appear. Whether humans cultivate the land or leave it to rest, this is a reliable order.

Writer Oriah Mountain Dreamer once presented a graduation speech to her former high school, and she describes how uncertain she was about what to say. (Graduation speeches are notoriously difficult to write: everyone remembers if a speech is bad, but whether it is good or bad, no one remembers what was said.)

Speaking to graduates who were ready to leave their most awkward years behind, she said:

“‘Your parents and teachers and others who care about you, in an effort to prepare you for life, have told you a story about who you are and what you can and should do. Now, it’s your job to sift through all of what you have been given and decide what is useful to you and what is not. Because… a lot of what you have been taught has nothing to do with you.’

There was a short stunned silence followed by a smattering of polite applause.”

I wonder how many parents left that ceremony pleased with this speech! Not even friends like to be told that their opinions aren’t helpful, and all of us grow by being willing to learn. Yet when every passing soul has an opinion about your unfolding, how do you filter the voices?

I think Job’s story is marvelous not only because he didn’t curse God, but also because he didn’t curse his friends. His friends explained his upturned life as just punishment, but God judged that they didn’t have a clue about Job or his circumstances. No doubt they intended well, but their good intentions only gave their words more power to undermine Job’s confidence in the one Authority that held him steady. Instead of cursing his friends, though, Job offered sacrifices for them; he acted in favor of those who believed him wicked and out of step with his Redeemer. He trusted God to balance the scales, and held onto God’s pattern in him.

When I look outside each spring, I see all of creation following its pattern, and I remember this very simple prayer from R. Lionel Blue: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has made me as He wanted me.”

What does spring teach you? What are some of the things you do to clear your mind and life as the seasons change?

February 8, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Technology, Authority, & Teaching

From the cobwebbed archives of the web:

Battle Beyond the Millenium: the Internet Versus the Teacher Culture: Are You Ready to Rumble?

Texas Tech’s Fred Kemp explains why teachers need to lean into technology to support student-centered learning, not pull back fearing a loss of teacher authority. Kemp offered this talk to the Computers and Writing community in 1999 and showcased TTU’s computer-mediated freshman composition web app, TOPIC.

We teachers do not have the option of resisting or rejecting the Internet. You can turn your back on the tide, but that doesn’t stop the tide…

Our job is not to wow students with us or our brilliant subject matter, or to clone them into becoming, God forbid, English majors. Our job is to get them to figure out how to manage their lives productively through critical thinking, and for that we have to reduce our domination of the classroom, maybe even to the point of moving learning outside the classroom.

As one of his colleagues said when this was reposted this week, “This is probably the only thing ever written about the computing world that is as current today as the day it was delivered.”

April 24, 2011 By Keisha McKenzie

Seasonal Thoughts

Some friends have participated in religious liturgies this month, and with those friends I’ve been reflecting on the multitude of stories that we recount around Passover and Easter. There are a world of possible insights to draw from them — including the following.

Last Sunday, Palm Sunday, Rabbi David Ingber explored the meaning of freedom for a modern mixed multitude at St. Francis Xavier church in New York. He recounted the Israelite exodus memorialized by the Passover Seder: the Passover/Exodus story culminates with tears of sorrow and tears of relief, some people saved and others drowned. I’ve been thinking a lot about how he read it: a story of Israelites winning and Egyptians losing, a zero-sum game that contemporary freedom evangelists should seek to outgrow.

We won’t be fooled by movements which free only some of us and in which our so-called “freedom” rests upon enslavement or embitterment of others… God help us dream new paths to freedom so that the next sea-opening is not also a drowning, so that our singing is never again their wailing.

— R. David Ingber

The recent and very public arguments among Christian proponents of different hell doctrines put a big spotlight on the zero-sum game for me. Whatever each model might otherwise resolve, all of them amplify the idea that some will drown while others escape, that some will sing a new song while others gnash their teeth, and that this is a good that will be so eternally.

Along with Ingber’s comments, another contrast came to me from Buddhism’ first universal vow, which I read this week. The author who shared it was a Catholic priest who had received this redemption vow from a friend at one of the darkest moments in his life. The vow gave him the language he needed to figure out how to emerge from his darkness, he stabilized, and went on to a deeply transformative ministerial life.

I take upon myself the burden of my suffering brothers and sisters; I am resolved to do so. I will endure it. I will not turn or run away. I will not turn back. I cannot.

And why? My endeavors do not merely aim at my own deliverance. I must help all my brothers and sisters cross the stream of this life which is so difficult to cross. With the help of the boat of compassion I must help them across the stream. I would fain become a soother of all the sorrows of my brothers and sisters. May I be a balm to those who are sick, their healer and servant until sickness come never again. May I become an unfailing store for my poor brothers and sisters and serve them in their need. May I be, in the famine at the ages’ end, their drink and their meat.

My own being, all my life, all my spirituality in the past, present, and future, I surrender that my brothers and sisters may win through to their end, for they dwell in my spirit.

A person who took on this vow might have a rough time assuming that his or her enlightenment could be had at others’ expense: if you live for service to all, then service to just some won’t satisfy you. Instead one must assume that one’s life’s work will be bound up in the lives and experiences of one’s entire human family: the whole with the tribe, not the remnant over the rest. I don’t think this vow is just about universal scope either; Easter sermons ritually describe the Christian narrative as universally important, but whenever the Easter story is framed only in historical terms, it’s rarely also taught as a symbol of universal experience — universal compassion and universal participation.

Twitter is replete with tweets about what the Paschal season “really means,” as if without the Twitterati we’d collapse under a candy avalanche with nary an opportunity to contemplate sacrifice, redemption, or renewal. But thanks to the contributions I’ve shared in this note (one of which I got via Twitter, lol), I’ve been imprinted with the phrase “participation without partiality.” PWP: How might I embody universal relationship while also living in a society and amongst people who treasure partial, zero-sum relationships over impartial, non-zero-sum ones? I don’t have much more to say to that yet, except the sense that it’s something I should keep embodying, and that I shouldn’t retreat into partiality whatever my incentives.

May your coming week be filled with moderate consumption of leftover chocolate. And immoderate perception of love.