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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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New Writing, New Projects

We’re just two months away from the end of 2014, daylight hours are shortening (Eastern Daylight Time ends tomorrow morning), and I find myself turning toward revision and reflection.

Photo of research notes.
Write Every Day.

For the last few days I’ve been getting caught up in QuickBooks so I don’t have to futz with a million business receipts come January.

And the Maryland Performance Excellence Foundation’s 2014 review cycle has ended: all healthcare applicants received their awards at the Baltimore American Society for Quality banquet on October 16. The MPEF board also recognized me for my work with the examiner team this cycle.

But today’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve logged in, launched my daily writing file, and am ready to go. I made it to 44,000 words as a Rebel last year.

Write every day. That’s the heart of NaNoWriMo. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a novel, a play, an essay series, or any other genre.

What matters is the discipline of daily action on a project you care about. Deliver that project from thoughts in your head to words in print. Be the midwife for your own work this month.

Are you writing with the NaNoWriMo community this year? What are you working on?

Writing Around the Web

If you want a break from your own work, catch up on some of my recent writing.

Patheos columnist Sarah Moon has invited her readers to reconsider the liturgy of their tradition specifically or the Christian faith overall. She began Liberating Liturgies with a reflection and update of the Apostles’ Creed. And she’s been a gracious host of the two-part series on baptismal vows and congregational covenants that I published on this site last year.

Part 1, From Vows to Action, is already up: feel free to share about the vows that bind you to your congregation there.

Some of my Adventist peers noted the passage of October 22 a little less than a fortnight ago. October 22 is the anniversary of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844. The early Adventists who expected Christ’s physical return that October day grieved their disappointment, revised their theology about the timeline, and, within twenty years had reorganized enough to form what is now the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

A few friends and I wondered that week whether our community might benefit from observing October 22 intentionally each fall: we might take memories of that period as a symbol of community resilience rather than as a family embarrassment to be hidden, explained away, or used to induce perfectionist guilt today.

I don’t think that will happen, at least not at the behest of the General Conference calendar. Revisiting what that date can mean will be up to local members: meaning-making is something we can all do.

So that’s what inspired me to ask my Facebook friends about Halloween (October 31), even though it’s a holiday I’ve never celebrated. Spectrum Magazine’s Jared Wright asked me to write, and what resulted is an article on Jamaican parenting, monsters, and facing up to the parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected.

I’m glad at least some readers understand that the article is only tangentially about All Hallows’ Eve.

And In Case You Missed It: A New Project from Akers and Eyer

Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-producers of the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists, have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to support a new project. SGA allowed thousands of people to open a different quality of conversation about Adventist faith and sexuality in their families and with friends.

But pastors and congregational lay leaders still have a lot of questions, and there just aren’t many quality resources available to them.

Check out Daneen and Stephen’s note on the dialogue film they’d like to produce, and support the film at any level you can. They need to raise $20,000 this month to get started, and they’re already 38% of the way there.

Fund good dialogue! And share this campaign with others. 

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Reader Review 05

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

Quakers examining core principles: non-violence and a returning Christ

QuakerQuaker: A Hermeneutic of Non-Violence (Randy Oftedahl)

QuakerQuaker is a site that collects posts from Friends (Quakers) from across the internet and allows members to discuss the points they raise. Quakers are well known for their “peace testimony,” a conviction and witness about peace-building and war that has expanded over generations. In this post, Oftedahl asks whether there is or should be a Quaker hermeneutic about non-violence: some kind of meaning and interpretation heuristic that helps Quakers identify and pursue peaceful options not just at the macro-state level but also at the micro-level of the person:

We live in an era when large scale State violence, though still very present, appears to be on wane while interpersonal, communal, and social violence, from the surveillance state to online bullying, is finding new venues in the technological age. A new “democratization of violence” is happening, as culture wars begin to look more and more like real wars. What might the Spirit require of us?

Should this [hermeneutic] include a willingness on the part of each one of us to examine and speak out against ALL forms of violence, in ourselves, in others, in our S/society, in our country, and in our world, whether inter-personal violence or cultural violence, whether in the form of militarism, or racism, or sexism, or classism, or economic exploitation, or religious prejudice, or any other form, whether historical by our ancestors or in ourselves today, whether blatant, or latent, or actively denied?—Randy Oftedahl

Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvas, 75 x 89.5 cm
“The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks, 1820

This is a question about how the identity-shaping practice of telling stories about a religious tradition and its historical advocacy might discourage an adherent from working out similar convictions in the present day, centuries removed from the contexts and concerns of their tradition’s founders.

In a sense, this is the classical “religious sustainability” question: how shall we honor our religious heritage while ensuring we’re expressing something of value in our time and passing on something valuable to those who will follow us?

I’m also mulling over a fantastic series on a Quakerly way to view the Second Coming, in terms of anticipation, transformation, and present intimacy: “Christ is come, and is coming—not Christ will come.” British Quaker and teacher Ben Pink Dandelion shared these ideas with the Canadian Yearly Meeting late last summer. The videos run about 5 hours in total.

My intent is to take a few months to revisit the concept of the peaceable kingdom, which I referred to in my talk at Loma Linda last month. I have a couple of books on my study list; if you have recommendations, please let me know.

Why Comparing Your LGBTI Children To Murderers Is Neither Supportive nor Progressive

Believe Out Loud: “If My Son Was A Murderer…” (Johnie J. Guerra)

Heard this one before? A child discloses they aren’t heterosexual. Their parent says “If you were a murderer, or in jail, or an alcoholic prostitute, I would visit you, and I would remember you in prayer, but I would mourn forever. That is what I’ll do with you now and I’ll never condone your choice.”

Nice.

The cutest kitten and puppy ever. (via Tumblr)
The cutest kitten and puppy ever. (via Tumblr)

Some Christian parents feel compelled to make some version of this speech to their LGBTI children—and while I’m sure it’s not an easy speech for the parents to deliver, it’s even more horrific for the children forced to hear and bear it. Johnie Guerra, a hetero Christian, explains in his Believe Out Loud piece why rhetoric like this just doesn’t work—and isn’t a necessary part of keeping the faith. I, too, hope his parents will adjust to his beliefs in time.

As another blogger wrote this week:

“We are complicated beings. Emotionally.  Sexually. Intellectually. Being in love can be complicated, as most of us know.
But supporting love is not complicated…

Love.  Acceptance.  Safety. Affection.  Respect… Giving another human being these things is not going to shred the very fabric of society, or ruin your children.

Your children will benefit from your willingness to get rid of those calluses and be open to more LOVE in the world. They may be one of those tender souls that the anti-gay movement is so viciously attacking.  It may be your vulnerable child you are burning painful scars into with your bigoted remarks and support of anti-gay rhetoric. It might be your child that will sit at the lunch counter and be refused service because of who they are.” —Megan P.

What’s Going on for Public Sphere Religion?

Salon: The dying right: Why Christian fundamentalists are in panic mode (CJ Werleman)
The Atlantic: How religious-freedom laws could come back to haunt the faithful (Jonathan Merritt)

Werleman reviews recent US surveys of religious adherence and whether people stay with childhood faiths over time. The Public Religion Research Institute’s survey, which CJ cites, is worth looking over:

Among its key findings for Millennials: that almost one-third of Millennials who leave their childhood church say they did so because of that church’s anti-LGBT policies. 14% said church anti-LGBT policies were a very important factor in their decision to leave, and 17% said it was somewhat important. On general perception, 70% of Millennials surveyed think religious groups’ anti-LGBT approach alienates people.

Similarly, “Majorities of Americans perceive three religious groups to be unfriendly to LGBT people: the Catholic Church (58%), the Mormon church (53%), and evangelical Christian churches (51%). Perceptions of non-evangelical Protestant churches, African-American churches and the Jewish religion are notably less negative.” As I’ve said many times, these are well-earned reputations; they’re not unfounded perceptions at all.

The Adventist denomination and North American Division both keep wondering what’s going to happen to their Millennial members. As even the GC’s Archives and Research office realizes, we can draw the lines between the church’s anti-LGBT work and my generation’s perceptions of it; what remains to be seen is whether we’ll change anything, or rather dig in and hope that Adventists trained to sustain the church’s current trajectory will carry the denomination into increasingly “pure” irrelevance over the next 25-40 years. Meanwhile those constituencies will also change and I can only hope that the denomination will adapt to them better than it has to its North American membership.

Werleman notes how some Christians affiliated with the right political wing have responded to and stoked these demographic trends: “These ‘religious freedom’ bills did not arrive here overnight,” he says; “they’re three decades in the making.” While Adventism was more hands-off in its public sphere work during the Moral Majority’s rise (1970s-1980s), it has still been affected by the MM/Religious Right’s approach. Even today, the church paper, the Adventist Review continues to promote columns and “analysis” from Albert Mohler (Southern Baptist Convention).

By contrast, Merritt, an evangelical columnist, recently took some hits for questioning the anti-LGBTI “religious freedom” discrimination laws being proposed across the US, in Kansas, Arizona, and Tennessee, for instance. In this column, he asks the question he shared on his website a week or two ago: “If Christians really believe they’re becoming marginalized, why would they disempower marginalized people in the marketplace?”

The thought that has recurred for me ever since this story cycle began was “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” But ethics of reciprocity are, as it turns out, low-hanging ethical fruit: even children know how to trade. Surely religious ethics can call one to something a little less self-centered than “better not persecute if we don’t want to be persecuted”?

Unfortunately this seems to be the beginners’ level we’re at right now.

What intolerance looks like outside the US: inter-religious violence in the Central African Republic

Washington Post: Christian vigilantes wielding machetes have killed scores of Muslims (Sudarsan Raghavan)
NPR: Jewels Lie Beneath The Violence In The Central African Republic (Gregory Warner)

Between these two articles from the Washington Post and NPR, we get a sense of how religion and economics and ethnocentrism and nurtured grudges can produce and maintain cycles of vicious violence, cycles that some religious people struggle to stop or don’t even wish to stop. I’m reminded of the 1990s genocides in Serbia and Rwanda, each fueled and coddled by different kinds of religious adherents.

I’m concerned that our moral outcomes are so mixed. I’m also concerned that contemporary moral arguments seem so tangled up with fiscal concerns rather than more fundamental human values: what we plan to do with minorities is evaluated in terms of legal and institutional policy impacts, not impacts to the human person. It can’t always be about the dollar: people will always matter more.

I’m keeping an eye on updates on the situation in CAR and will share when I see news. It unnerves me that it didn’t merit a mention at the Academy Awards this weekend when the Ukraine and Venezuela did. We have the capacity to attend to all critical issues, and I hope CAR and Uganda don’t get left behind.

[Update re. Uganda: Local civil society workers have published several concrete ways that concerned non-Ugandans can support them now. Hop over to GLAAD and check out their list. Note, too, that they don’t recommend general aid conditionality.]

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Reader Review #04

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

When spirituality gets corporatized: The commercial dharma

Tricycle Mag: Protesters crash Google talk on corporate mindfulness at Wisdom 2.0 conference (Alex Caring-Lobel)

Alex’ sharp critique of corporate spirituality—Buddhist-ish instruction of mindfulness to help corporations improve business effectiveness—prompted me to write on Twitter “The snark is strong with this one.”

And so it is, but perhaps no more than Zizek’s challenge to compassionate consumerism. Both Caring-Lobel and Zizek challenge the way that capitalism and corporatism have co-opted narratives of social concern and/or spiritual awareness. For Tricycle Mag and Curtis White, Google’s ability to sponsor a presentation at Wisdom 2.0 over local objections about its business impacts is a sign that mindfulness has been divorced from its religious roots and any responsibilities that those roots might challenge practitioners to address.

A January 2014 TIME cover reignited similar questions about how publications package and represent practices like yoga and meditation to Western readers—almost exclusively with photographs of thin, White women, and usually in terms of individual benefits and stress relief.

The RSA animated part of Zizek’s talk in 2010:

(A London Guardian columnist snapped back at Zizek quite hard the next year. The debate continues.)

If the Other feels forced to cover, we all lose out

Harvard Business Review: Fear of being different stifles talent (Kenji Yoshino and Christie Smith)

Yoshino and Smith surveyed 3,000 corporate employees and analyzed participants’ responses by demographic categories. They found that when employees felt pressured to “cover” or repress their differences to fit in with the corporate culture, they also reported feeling less committed to the organization, less self-assured, and less engaged.

I look forward to research that correlates these self-reports to more objective performance measures, and I suspect that the patterns will be similar: environments that encourage employee self-repression also purchase poorer employee performance. There is already some related research showing that stereotype threats undermine students’ performance in tests.

“Obeying God rather than men” on the left side of the political spectrum

Quaker Quaker: The case of 1st amendment vs. 1st commandment (Clem Gerdelmann)

A short reflection on how theocratic arguments can be made for people who are otherwise left-leaning. For instance, if the law of the land is pro-segregation, but you feel compelled to promote equality, you might just appeal to your deity as creator of all and consider human rights that deity’s legacy to all.

Gerdelmann doesn’t explain what we should do with this reasoning, whether we should think it valid or invalid; he simply offers it as a narrative that complicates the usual dichotomy of “constitutional permissions vs. moral imperatives.”

This morning another Quaker article caught my attention. Friend minister and theology professor Dr. Wess Daniels weighs the difference between denominational branding—PR marketing—and rearticulating denominational mission and impact as salt, light, and center of transformation. This mirrors some of the conversations I had with Seventh-day Adventists at this weekend’s panel on the future of the church and its relationship with Millennial members.

If someone tells you not to look in a box, do you look?

Vimeo: Bombay Sapphire’s Imagination Video series

The short film is a fantastic medium in the right hands. Imagination Video is a series of shorts based on the same script and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire. The three below are my favorites, and are all subtitled.

What to do about the US’ tolerance for violence against black men?

New York Times: Young, Black, and Male in America (Room for Debate Panel)

A nine-strong panel of commentators discusses black men, assumptions of criminality, education access, parenting, employment, multi-generational stigmatization, and low conviction rates for cases where people coded unarmed and non-aggressive people as a threat and killed them.

“Stand Your Ground” laws have received special attention since the Trayvon Martin case (2012) and similar cases since then (e.g. Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Jonathan Ferrell). Esther Armah also writes on the latest case in which a white man who shot at a car full of young black men has been convicted for shooting at several of them, but not convicted for actually killing one. She also framed that case in terms of social entitlement and the privileged expectation that Others will submit to one on demand.

While there are several articles reflecting on the violence trend, the NYT series links the outcome to possible sources elsewhere in society. Is it a pattern we can break?

HT for the NYT piece to Broderick Greer, a Virginia-based MDiv student and writer.
Related: Dr. L’Heureux Dumi Lewis-McCoy’s article on the PBS education documentary, American Promise, which focuses on two Black American boys’ experience with discipline and diagnosis in public-private education.

On the intern/no-hire cycle: for creatives, what’s the path forward?

Buzzfeed: Can the intern hamster wheel be stopped? (Doree Shafrir)

This is the article that inspired the #myinternship hashtag on Twitter this afternoon. Lots of stories and experiences from current and former interns there.

People who are on the internship hamster wheel for years need to think about whether these industries are right for them, and we who are now in charge need to figure out a way to be able to hire the brightest, most creative people if we want our industries to survive. Keeping the gates completely closed to young people—and their new ideas and perspectives—is probably the fastest way to ensure our collective irrelevance. —Doree Shafrir

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Reader Review #03 – Bonus Edition

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

I missed posting a Reader Review last week, so you’re getting a few extras this week.

Are “success cultures” kryptonite to creatives? What happens to cities when their artists leave?

London Guardian: I left New York for LA because creativity requires the freedom to fail (Moby)

I was so accustomed to the city’s absurd cult of money that it took me years to notice I didn’t have any artist friends left in Manhattan, and the artists and musicians I knew were slowly moving farther and farther east, with many parts of Brooklyn even becoming too pricey for aspiring or working artists. —Moby

Moby reflects on New York’s evolution from culture center to culture consumer. His piece is low on objective measures and high on subjective ones, but if your region also has an artistic community that’s changed over the last 15-20 years, what effects have you noticed?

More on Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, your content, and your metadata

London Guardian: Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Yahoo release US surveillance requests (Shane Ackerman and Dominic Rushe)

Reader Review #02 included a post on civic surveillance in Ukraine. On Monday this week, the London Guardian updated us on how major US-based web service providers have forwarded user content and metadata to the government in just the last year. The raw numbers aren’t overwhelming, but the sharing culture merits sustained and substantive conversation about the balance of privacy and security we’re willing to live with.

Janna Malamud Smith offers a sobering judgment at the end of Private Matters:

“There is no doubt that finding ever new ways of linking databases is on many people’s minds for corporate profit and national security, as well as a jumble of other confused purposes. The terrorism ‘war’ mentality makes it less likely that attention will be paid to the long-term and compounded implications of such ‘security’ decisions.” — Janna Malamud Smith

The common herbicide that poisons animals—and us

New Yorker: The Scientist Who Took on a Leading Herbicide Manufacturer (Rachel Aviv) #LongRead
TEDWomen2010: The Toxic Baby (Penelope Jagessar Chaffer & Dr. Tyrone Hayes | 18 min. video, with transcript)

The herbicide in question is atrazine.

In their 2010 talk, Chaffer and Hayes explain that atrazine turns on aromatase, an enzyme that converts androgens into estrogens. Estrogens in turn promote some hormone-receptive cancers, and breast cancer medicine has included estrogen inhibitors for decades. A newer hormone-blocker, letrazole, works by blocking aromatase and preventing the androgen-estrogen conversion process triggered by substances like atrazine. Atrazine is now banned in the EU, not for health reasons, but because of its ability to contaminate groundwater—what one Houston, TX, nursery calls its ability to persist.

Read or listen to NPR: Chemical Study Becomes A Tale of Conspiracy and Paranoia. Note how much the Aviv report re-focuses on the individual scientist rather than the studies he’s produced.

Also check out Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass (Charles Duhigg, NYT, 2009). This article notes that concentrations of atrazine are not always reflected in local consumer water safety reports.

If you live in the US, about how many pounds of atrazine does your state use per square mile? What the map below shows about my own state concerns me. Of course, the use of atrazine seems concentrated in the corn-producing Midwest and parts of the Midatlantic region. This is logical since atrazine is used mostly on corn crops, just under 60 million pounds of it on corn in 2009.

Estimated Agricultural Use for Atrazine, 2009, via the US Geological Survey's Pesticide Use Maps.
“Estimated Agricultural Use for Atrazine, 2009” via the US Geological Survey’s Pesticide Use Maps.

“The public good is not as important as profits.” —RJ Casey, Detroit

“Regarding science, it is important to keep in mind that the major players in Washington do not understand science.” —The White House Writers Group

HT to Brent Welch for the share.

On the future of ‘America the Unique’

The Atlantic: The End of American Exceptionalism (Peter Beinart)

The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart focuses on US exceptionalism tenets promoted by the conservative political wing: public religiosity (Protestant Christianity in particular), patriotism (including promulgating US values via media and enforcing them via the US military), and economic mobility accessible to everyone. Drawing on population trends and Pew research, Beinart argues that these three tenets are “declining fast” with rising resistance to organized traditions and their clergy, limited collective international action or outright non-interventionism, and increasing class consciousness taking their place. These shifts worry some older Americans, but Beinart sees humility and recognition of fallibility as a potential positive:

“As [Reinhold] Niebuhr and [Walter] Lippmann understood, the best way to ensure that America remains an exceptional power—better than the predatory empires of the old world—is to remember that we are not inherently better at all.” —Peter Beinart

It’s also worth bearing mind that US experiments like institutionalizing religious liberty or centering power in “the consent of the governed” rather than in a monarch or a state distanced from the people aren’t unique to the United States anymore. If anything, the US is less unique than it used to be because other nations observed which ideas worked and adopted or adapted them locally: the US is less exceptional wherever it succeeded.

After last week’s Nye-Ham dust-up, the Baha’i suggest that “religion must be in accord with science.”

Huffington Post: A Baha’i Take on the Creation/Evolution Debate (Stephen R. Friberg)

The conflict [between religion and science] is darn good drama, marvelous for motivating the troops, or the congregation, or the donors, and for grabbing headlines and commentary.

Modernism and fundamentalism, science and apologetics have been duking it out for about 6 centuries. Their battle continues with high human, educational, and community costs within my denomination as well. I don’t expect this to be resolved by the 2015 General Conference session next either: at this meeting, the Adventists’ fundamental belief on creationism will be edited and its meaning will be restricted to further marginalize evolutionary science or theology related to it.

Only on the surface is the creationism-evolution debate a battle about language and word meanings. I also think framing it as a conflict in worldviews or culture—how it’s usually framed in the mass media and how Nye and Ham framed their own debate—traps us all into a crush-our-opposition mode rather than a more constructive learning, knowledge-building mode.

What if it doesn’t matter whether we believe the world was made in 6 days or over millions of years because we’re failing to care well for the world we have today? There are many reasons we might make good choices, and many excuses to make poor ones: sustainability can flow from religious, secular, mythic, or empirical reasons. Fact can ground, and stories can inspire. Why eliminate reason categories out of hand when what we need is more motivation, not less?

Ultimately, it is a conflict that should just be peacefully resolved. Men and women of goodwill should work together to lay the issue to rest where it belong—along with other dead or dying 19th-century ideological battles. It is just diversion and a side-show to our main task, which is to work together towards that necessary and long-hoped for goal of peace and prosperity for all the countries and peoples of the world, regardless of their beliefs—or lack thereof. — Stephen R. Friberg

HT to Jack Gordon of Faith in Action DC and the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, which sponsored the Young Adult Faith Leaders Summit I attended this weekend.

How homophobia, social oppression, and shaming affect even seasoned performers

Video: Panti’s Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland (Panti Bliss [Rory O’Neill])
Content note: frank discussion of homophobic verbal abuse, violence, socially-acceptable oppression, self-hatred, self-doubt, and the odd logical acrobatics necessary when LGBT people are no longer free to name attacks against them.


From the Irish theater stage to the computer screens and smartphones of the world: Panti Bliss, an Irish drag artist known off-stage as Rory O’Neill, waded into Ireland’s marriage debates last weekend with this monologue at Abbey Theater on homophobic violence, marginalization, and how oppression prompts self-doubt.

Panti was welcomed onstage by Abbey actors at the end of a performance of The Risen People, a play about poverty and workers’ strikes in Dublin during a turbulent historical period. Scotland passed an equal access to marriage bill just last week, but I’m not sure Ireland is ready to follow.

Bonus Reads

Crystal St. Marie Lewis: Go Ahead. Leave Your Church. (Notes on the Myth of One-Size-Fits-all Christianity): This is why we call Crystal “the other C.S. Lewis.” In this article, my friend absolutely nails the institutional Church’s facile responses to “nones” and other unaffiliated believers. “Go Ahead, Leave Your Church” is one of her clearest comments on the merit of non-affiliation and the challenge it represents to reactive, institution-centric outreach to new or former church members.

Most of us understand that the hand-wringing doesn’t work and panels and surveys every few years play themselves out. Whether we are brave enough to accept that what once worked no longer works and that radical change is necessary remains to be seen.

Scot McKnight of Jesus Creed (via Bryan Berghoef): New Year’s Resolution: Conversation: Scot refers back to the salons of the 17th Century French Enlightenment for insights into the “central characteristics of a genuine conversation.” The French salon model of conversation inspired the American Revolution’s “Great Conversations” across the Pond. In person and in print, new Americans shared and debated the principles of the nation and government they were building together.

McKnight points out how conversations necessarily fail if designed to affirm orthodoxy or transfer information, and how conversation requires safety, questions, shared assumptions, a spirit of exploration (including an openness to learning), wisdom, and focus. Great read and worth reflecting on.

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Reader Review #02

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

Kenyan Author Binyavanga Wainaina Tells Us All:
“We Must Free Our Imaginations.”

Africa is a Country: #Watch Binyavanga’s brilliant YouTube documentary calling out the BS behind “African” homophobia (Elliot Ross)

Warm red-toned pop-art style graphic illustration of Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina
Illustration credit: Dragon76 via Arise Live

In a 6-part Youtube series, Wainaina addresses his peers—middle class Kenyans and Africans—and challenges them on their cultural indoctrination. He’s not the first post-colonial writer to reflect on how “civilizing” education can deaden curiosity, creativity, risk tolerance, and the willingness to challenge paths that are safely average. Each video is between 4 and 8 minutes long and well worth watching.

Note: These videos don’t include captions and so are not text-reader accessible. If I find a solid transcript, I’ll update the post.

When Technology’s Used to Control, Not Connect

Motherboard: Maybe the Most Orwellian Text Message A Government’s Ever Sent (Brian Merchant)

In the first Reader Review, I shared a Wall Street Journal article on how consumer companies used cellular location data to track customer interests/purchasing patterns and then segment them for tailored marketing. I wrote:

Socially, we’re still figuring what “privacy” means, and what it’s reasonable to expect from our governments, companies, religions, and clubs.

That’s why Motherboard’s report on civic surveillance stood out to me. Ukraine’s government has just passed a law prohibiting public demonstrations. Motherboard reports that citizens whose phones had been located near a demonstration received a text message informing them that they’d been added to a government database. “Chilling” is not the only word that comes to mind.

I’ll be checking for updates on this story.

On Being There When Someone’s Hurt

New York Times: The Art of Presence (David Brooks)

Photo credit: Keisha McKenzie, 2007. Shakera and Jada, New Hope Children's Home, Jamaica
Photo credit: Keisha McKenzie. Shakera and Jada at New Hope Children’s Home, Jamaica (2007)

This is a remarkably humane column from the New York Times‘ David Brooks about how to connect with others as they experience or express trauma. The suggestions: Be there. Don’t compare. Bring soup. Don’t say ‘You’ll get over it’. Build with people. Don’t sermonize, explain away, or dismiss.

Just as Brené Brown’s breaks down empathy, Brooks breaks down presence. Both remind us that humane connection heals.

HT to Trischa Goodwin for the share.

Education Testmaker ETS Shifts to Workplace Readiness…
What’s Really Going On Here?

NPR: Certification test focuses on readying students for work, not college (Gwen Ifill)

As part of our continuing work with a local public school system, my colleagues and I have been monitoring developments in U.S. education. The rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or STEAM (science, technology, arts, engineering, and mathematics) is one development that’s been ramping up for the last 15 years or so. “Workplace readiness” is another that responds to ancient concerns about a disconnect between the educational system and the employing market. These concerns are especially sharp now that US higher education is so costly and costs fall more on students than ever before.

What each of these trends means seems to ride a lot on analysts’ perspective, and observers even disagree on whether there’s a “STEM crisis” at all. One IEEE writer thinks the crisis is mythical and that the myth is damaging to STEM professionals and society; by contrast the National Academies are absolutely certain there’s a Category 5 storm approaching.

In both cases, though, objections and alarms rise or fall on how many degrees and jobs there are, not how much innovative activity is happening or how scientifically informed the lay population is. We don’t even agree on the measures to use so how can we judge progress or decline or agree on how to move forward?

Enter Educational Testing Service, stage left.

Since being founded during the U.S’ post-WWII public education boom, ETS has entrenched itself in the education services industry, positioned itself as a gatekeeper, and driven an emphasis on regularizing student skills assessment. Almost everyone who has entered college, graduate school, or any higher ed preparatory program has first had to pass through ETS’ battery of tests: SAT, ACT, CLEP, TOEFL, and/or GRE (ETS also influenced but no longer manages the MCAT [medicine]).

I have a lot of questions about ETS’ move into “preparing students for work” but this intro is already too long. Read or watch the NPR segment and let me know some of yours.

IHOP: Dominionist Theology and Delusional Leadership

Rolling Stone: Love and Death In the International House of Prayer: A Cultlike Christian Group’s Darkest Secrets (Jeff Tietz)

One of the hardest things to read this week came via Rolling Stone’s long-form piece on the International House of Prayer, the IHOP that doesn’t serve happiness via fluffy pancakes. Between tight, controlling theology and a leadership culture that required deference to delusion, vulnerable students didn’t stand a chance.

The whole article is unsettling. But about a third of the way through is a passage that disturbed me because it was all too familiar:

“With a community of believers around me, I’m not vulnerable,” [student Micah Moore] told a friend. Moore became as zealous as anyone in the group. He often spoke of the fallen world. “God is so pure and we are so sinful that the only way we can ever go near him is because of Jesus. Without Jesus, God can’t even look at us.”

HT to Boze Herrington, quoted in the piece and now recovering from his experiences.  

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Reader Review #01

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

How Othering and Social Bias Impact Minorities’ Work Advancement

Harvard Business Review: Minority Women Report Downsizing Their Ambitions Because of Bias (Jennifer Thorpe-Moscon)

Credit: A Amando
Credit: A Amando

As Thorpe-Moscon says, “the experience of “otherness” is broader than any one demographic category.” But no, it’s not all about an employee “feeling different” or “feeling valued.” Some issues aren’t about mere perception; they’re about fact.

The facts of difference and the realities of inclusion and value do not depend on how sensitive an individual might be. They are instead directly related to the organizational structure and practiced values of the institution and the policies that flow from each: as an structural issue, they merit structural responses.

Building diversity initiatives around the perception of change rather than actual change is not wise.

Why You Might Want to Check Your Phone’s Location and Wifi Settings (And Who’s Getting Paid Because You Don’t)

MSN Money/Wall Street Journal: Your Phone is Sharing Your Secrets

Last month I finished reading Gurbaksh Chabal’s autobiography, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions. Chabal became a millionaire while in his teens by investing in web advertising that tracked users’ web activity through cookies rather than their demographic categories.

This WSJ article highlights companies doing similar work but through mobile technology. Turnstyle Solutions, Euclid Analytics, Verizon, and Apple all now pull users’ location data from devices’ geo-location feature or from wireless broadcasting. They then aggregate that metadata to build up a view of where people go, how often they gather, and what activities or lifestyles they are involved with.

Salient:

Aj Tin, a university student and customer at Rsquared Café, was surprised to learn that by logging into the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, he was enabling Turnstyle to track his movements and offer other local businesses an aggregated profile of his activities. The disclosure form tells consumers they will be tracked, but not how aggregated personal information will be distributed. “Privacy is cheap,” Tin said.

Individualized, cookie-based advertising makes businesses the most happy and they will and do pay pretty money for the option. “Brute-force” demographics-based advertising still works—just not as consistently.

For the most part, we consumers also prefer the outcomes of individualized advertising. We complain about commercials on regular broadcasting because they’re usually irrelevant to us: they’re based on who advertisers think we are based on what we happen to be watching in a given time slot.. We don’t mind ads as much when they’re based on what we’ve bought in the past, activities we do, or who we’d like to believe we are.

And individualized marketing works: our demographic categories don’t require us to watch a show or go to a certain location, and not everyone in a category has the same interests, concerns, or “pain points.” But we watch and go and do because we choose to; our choices arise out of who we are and the experiences we’ve had. Advertisers want to move away from marketing based on passive category to marketing based on active choice. We will let them do it, and they don’t care how long it takes for us to adjust to the idea without fear.

Socially, we’re still figuring what “privacy” means, and what it’s reasonable to expect from our governments, companies, religions, and clubs.

On Practicing Inclusion—Beyond Words and Accepting Change

BRACE (Building Radically Accessible Communities Everywhere): PSA: When You Actually Welcome Us, Shit’s Gonna Change

An editorial about how ableism impacts disabled people who shouldn’t have to beg for accommodations and enabled people who assume spaces should be centered around them. Plenty to think about.

Have you caught yourself grumbling about having to change how you do things to make others more comfortable? Have you been on the other side of that grumbling? Tell me a story about it in the comments.

Paths to Success: Whose Advice Should You Take?

ActingNaturally_Watts
“You discover who you are by acting naturally.” —Alan Watts

You’ll have noticed a lot of voices in the personal development coach choir, especially those aimed at young professionals,d  from 99U and Switch and Shift. This week Paul C. Brunson offered a list of habits he’d picked up from two billionaires. The list includes some great advice about nurturing your relationships and habits of association.

As you pick up coaches, consider this from Forbes’ Tim Maurer: Two Reasons Why Copying Successful People Won’t Make You Successful:

We wake each day on a quest for personal validation that we apparently believe is found in someone’s definition of success.  We then presume that rote replication of the habits of the supposedly successful will directly correlate to similar degrees of success in our own lives.

While appealing, this logic fails—for two primary reasons:

1)      You’re not them.

2)      They’re not you.

Maurer writes: “When we cultivate our own unique significance through a perpetual cycle of self-examination, education and practice, success becomes a natural byproduct.”

I agree. Onward and upward, but not as an imitation of another. Onward and upward as yourself.