Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

christianity

By

CN: The bias of memory

Open books in different shades of white and sepia are tacked to a wall.
Photo credit: Patrick Tomasso

Content note: Genocide.

In 1989, I sat in my family’s kitchen with my father, listening to radio journalists as East and West Germans broke down the wall that had separated neighbor from neighbor, family member from family member.

In 1991, the stock newspaper photo for stories about the Persian Gulf war was an F-15. My brother and I played a flight simulator computer game. My parents fretted about the price of petrol.

From 1991-1995, I came home from school in the afternoons to children’s news shows on the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian conflict between Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats. I learned how to pronounce Srebrenica, Karadžić, Milošević, and Sarajevo. At school, we gossiped about the Los Angeles riots and, later, the O.J. Simpson case.

In 1993, all Adventists would talk about was David Koresh and the Branch Davidians who burned to death in Waco, TX. Some of the dead had once been part of the British Caribbean church circuit I grew up in, and rooms hushed when their names and photos washed up on the other side of the Atlantic. By 1994, Waco had been put to rest, and we learned about the Rwandan genocide. No one told me there were Adventist church leaders among both the murderers and the murdered.

In 1997, I woke up to a frantic TV bulletin about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s car accident in Paris. In 2001, I watched my then-85-year-old grandmother swaying on her feet in Jamaica while New York’s Twin Towers crumbled live on cable TV. She was on the phone with her oldest daughter. They invoked the apocalypse and soon coming of Jesus: it was their only way to make sense of what they were seeing.

The trait common to all but one of these formative childhood memories is trauma. The spin to all but one of them is negative. 

I had a good, safe childhood. And I have lots of great memories, yet almost all of my positive formative memories are private, and almost all of my common memories are negative.

In organizational contexts too, leadership, organizational, and personnel assessments can be like this. We struggle to praise one another and find summing up team accomplishments painful, but we easily notice each other’s errors and evil when it arises.

For years, I’ve insisted that we remember our histories together: Georges Erasmus is right when he describes common national memory as the only viable grounds for a just society.

I just hope that we can train ourselves to tell the truth, and not only the negative truth. I think we need the whole truth at all levels, at the level of persons, organizations, nations, and beyond.

Even when the negative is true, it has to be to our detriment that all we can keep of our past is its shadow.

By

(CN) Moderate and neutral

Content note: descriptions of anti-Black lynching and White terrorism. This post is related to yesterday’s comments on torture.

I’m at that point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree where James Cone asks how Reinhold Niebuhr, one of 20th Century America’s leading Christian theologians, managed to live through the heyday of anti-Black lynching but never mentioned it as an ethical concern.

How could he have taught the church during the era of W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, yet failed to cite any Black philosophers, activists, or writers? How could he have read the newspapers during the years that White mobs kidnapped and killed Mack Parker and Emmett Till, but failed to engage the conditions or communities that produced their murders? How could he have insisted that Black people be “patient” with White crawls toward a just society yet promoted a gospel that inspired economic justice throughout the South?

Cone explains this Laodicean dissonance as a failure of empathy.

It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans…

Niebuhr knew that denying membership to persons merely on the basis of race was also a denial of the Church’s Christian identity. Yet he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

So Niebuhr understood that Christianity called followers of Jesus to social equity, and he acknowledged that churches were failing to embody that standard. But he wasn’t willing to challenge the churches for failing their own faith’s standards, and he also literally encouraged a congregation to abandon its attempt to integrate.

The camera looks up at a tower of the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. The tower is scaffolded for repairs. In the background a deep blue sky is filled with white, fluffy clouds. The tower is in shadow. Photo by Keisha E. McKenzie.
The National Cathedral, like the nation’s faith, needs work. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

This morning I read a fantastic extended article on the only person known to have survived a race-based lynching in the United States, James Herbert Cameron.

Cameron, born in 1914 and therefore just a year older than my still-living grandfather, was one of three teenagers arrested by local Indiana police and then set upon by a mob of White vigilantes. Cameron’s friends were beaten, tortured, and hung in the middle of town, but someone interrupted his hanging—his memoir and others’ accounts conflict on who—and he was able to escape from town.

Cameron died in 2006, after years he’d filled with family, manufacturing jobs and store management, writing and book sales, and founding, funding, and curating America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. At that museum, he walked visitors through exhibits on slavery, segregation, lynching, and his own experience.

Read his story.

Even with stories like Cameron’s, “White theologians, then and since,” Cone writes, “have typically ignored the problem of race or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics.”

This moderate neutrality is uncomfortable to recognize. It should be uncomfortable to recognize. And it’s part of the “profound moral failure” that people of faith today must be willing to resolve.

I see no way to be moderate or neutral when it comes to human flourishing. I believe moral leadership requires more from us, even and especially those of us in faith subcultures that “aren’t prepared” to move forward.

The bad news:

The will-to-survive is so strong that it transmutes easily in to the will-to-power… Groups use both religion and reason to advance their own interests and find it nearly impossible to ‘feel the pain of others as vividly as they do [their own].'”

The good news: “Nearly impossible” is not impossible! I still believe that empathy, reason, and faith can support us in subverting dangerous and violent expressions of our drive to survive.

And I take encouragement from James Herbert Cameron’s lifelong resilience despite a community that nearly beat him to death while both the police and the church looked on.

By

Comfort food

Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World. (Image source)
Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World smirks at my self-justification. (Image source)

I ate a quarter of a large Ledo’s olive pizza this morning. For breakfast. It was a meal with all the right pieces: carbohydrate, protein, vegetables.

I don’t always eat pizza for breakfast, but when I do, I wolf down a quarter of it, and then I tell myself it’s a meal with all the right pieces.

I eat a portion of a large olive pizza with the same two beloved ones about every 6-8 weeks. We go to the same restaurant, order the same pizza, and talk about what’s new.

This time, one of my meal-mates is dealing with post-funeral family drama. The other meal-mate and I are dealing with post-pet-loss grief. We’re all dealing with post-massacre fatigue and funk. And in all of this, our monthly pizza is a reliable comfort, something we can count on to be good to us.

Before I went out this morning, I spoke to a friend in East Africa. I wanted to know some of the ways they’ve practiced resilience in their life and the strategies they’ve come to rely on to help them bounce back from trauma.

They were a well of wisdom and I’m looking forward to sharing their comments at a presentation next month. What struck me as they spoke was how much they insist on moving through life as a whole person, not fragmented, not bifurcated into acceptable and not acceptable, but whole.

Then I came home from pizza and watched BET’s recent documentary on LGBTQ people and the U.S. Black church, Holler If You Hear Me. Person after person shares how their religious families, leaders, and congregations affirmed them as long as they’d submit to being broken into parts, acceptable and not acceptable.

Special music: acceptable. Capacity to love and be intimate: not acceptable.

This isn’t abundant life.

I know people of faith with a lot of conscience beginning to ask post-Orlando, “What’s our work in this moment?” I’ve already helped to write statements, and I see peers preparing sermons and litanies for the weekend’s services.

I get that work, and I’m also interested in us cooking up something less like pizza for breakfast, something less instant, less easy, and more fulfilling long-term.

Our work can’t just be about checking off the right “awareness” criteria, and it can’t be just about what’s comfortable, not this time: the lives of real people are at stake and so is the health of the communities we share.

Uncaptioned Video: BET hosts Holler If You Hear Me (uncaptioned) in six parts on its website: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 (CN: frank references to CSA and suicide) | Part 5 | Part 6

By

Writing from The Justice Conference

In popular culture, doing business is synonymous with taking action. Flip open a magazine about business or entrepreneurship and you’ll see articles and imagery about design scrums, mergers, stocks and sales, commercial transportation options, the best ways to expand, and ideal places to travel on your down time.

Vacations, too, are framed in terms of activity: hunting for a region’s best restaurants, heading to the waterfront or mountains for an adventure away from the office, and exploring galleries, exhibitions, and touring festivals. Advertising promises we can absorb the best of a town “in 18 hours!” and perhaps we can, but by the time anyone could possibly account for all of the recommended destinations and detours, they’d have worked enough to merit another vacation.

The challenge for our time isn’t filling the hours of the day. We’ve mastered that. Our deep challenge is releasing the vise grip of clock-time and calendars, knowing when and how to pause, and how to take the liberty to rest, refrain, and recover even when the culture around us is ambivalent about it.

I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist community, a comparatively small 150-year-old Christian denomination that teaches the observance of a weekly Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Sabbath is still one of my favorite spiritual practices: beyond its many theological and sociological rationales, Sabbath is a material and embodied reminder that everything that lives participates in an in-breath as well as an out-breath, reception as well as expression, rest as well as activity. Hustlers, business-builders, and worldchangers need that reminder.

The body constitutes a site of divine revelation.” —M. Shawn Copeland

As much as “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived” (Mary Douglas), it’s the physical body that limits not only what we can perceive on our own but also frames, through shared mental structures such as metaphor and analogy, how we organize and interpret the data that comes to us through our senses and all that we experience through our bodies (Beatrice Bruteau, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Richard Beck).

Even more: we live in a world where law and convention each regulate our bodies, our enfleshed us. In this world, social systems frame some bodies as ripe for hyper-analysis and suspicion when alive and fit for dissection and critique after death.

Andreas Vesalius, father of modern dissection, was neither the first nor the last to imagine that one could extract more wisdom from a tortured, dead, or carved-up body than from living bodies, pulsing and mobile, unpredictable, and capable of talking and pushing back.

As someone just four generations removed from people whose Christian slavers refused them the liberty to rest when their bodies demanded it, the capacity to cease work is sacred to me. And as someone driven to make, to investigate, to develop, to teach, to heal, and to help in a world with no off-switch, the disciplines of rest and listening are a critical counterbalance for me.

This weekend, Sabbath meets me away from home and work near what used to be the Cabrini-Green projects of North Chicago. Now “redeveloped,” that is, gentrified, this block hosts an expanding mostly White, middle-class mega-church and out-of-town tourists like me. We’re in town this weekend for the 2016 Justice Conference (#Justice16) and I’m most excited about hearing from Mark Charles (@wirelesshogan).

Mark Charles on stage at The Justice Conference, Chicago, IL.
Mark Charles speaks at The Justice Conference (Chicago, IL), June 3, 2016

Charles is a Navajo writer and consultant who teaches about the Doctrine of Discovery, the complicity of religion in the Western Hemisphere’s genocides, and the United States’ desperate need to tell the truth about the violations that scar its social body. These violations are ongoing, not merely historical. We sustain this pace of frenetic activity despite that ongoing injury, and that’s about as wise as running a marathon on a broken hip.

Charles calls us to pause, to stop and take stock. To stop acting long enough to allow truth to bubble up through layers of dehumanization and injustice. To stop acting long enough for all us to move from oppression and confession to lament and deep change.

What does justice look like when everything you have is stolen, when the entire system is corrupt?” —Mark Charles

I’ll share more tomorrow.

By

It Will Take All of Us to Build a Just World

When the 2015 Urbana Missions Conference tackled race head-on last December, it seemed that the evangelical Christian community could finally say “Black Lives Matter” without hedging.

Some dug through Urbana’s archives to find one of evangelicalism’s best preachers breaking down the American church’s history with systemic injustice and making the case for people of faith to stand up, speak up, and act up.

During the 1970 conference, Tom Skinner was as direct about the Church’s complicity with racism and bigotry as any street activist has been this decade. His speech was proof for us that post-Trayvon America isn’t the Church’s first chance to choose justice, mercy, and humility.

I listened to a handful of Skinner’s talks, and as inspiring as they were on race, they also included a few throwaway comments about gender and sexuality that lit up for me like the Bellagio fountains.

A moving gif of the Las Vegas Bellagio fountains, lit from below, rising, and falling.
The Fountains of Bellagio, one of the features of Las Vegas it’s impossible to miss. Via gifsoup.com

Skinner highlighted his vision of Jesus: the ultimate man’s man, the forceful, aggressive defender and protector, not a “sissy,” not a “punk.” If the only way Skinner could affirm his Jesus was to demonize “effeminate” masculinity, he proved himself willing to cut that deal.

And he wasn’t alone in his calculus. In Black churches across the U.S. today, from T.D. Jakes’ Potter’s House in the South to Jamal Bryant’s Empowerment Temple in the North, some communities of deep faith use fidelity to God and their scriptures as a reason to leave LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups on the far side of the church gate.

But that story isn’t the only story possible for people of faith. I can envision so much more for us and our communities: so much more hope, wholeness, and healing. I believe people and communities of faith can be partners in the common good—ambassadors of a just world.

I don’t believe the best way to honor the faith of my spiritual ancestors or assertively confront contemporary evil is to demonize others because of where they were born, how they organize their family, how much they earn, or whether they pray.

I don’t believe that Divine dignity depends on me using the weight of the law to marginalize LGBTQ people, my unemployed neighbors, my Muslim friends, or people living in immigration limbo in my state.

I don’t believe that the integrity of the Church rests on how much I exclude women from leadership or restrict the membership of people with addictions or criminal records.

I don’t believe that the good news requires me to stand by while any of us tries to thrive without secure housing, in fear of domestic or state abuse, or in an environment with polluted air, poor food, or poisoned water.

I do believe in a just faith and a just world. And I want to work with theists and humanists and people of all faiths and none who are committed to do good on matters that impact us all.

The Christian scriptures include the teaching that all humans were made “of one blood”: we’re related. We’re family. And we thrive when nourished and given space to contribute and grow.

#AJustFaith is a black LGBTQ multi-faith, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational coalition of people who speak, teach and organize to create a just world for all. We are inspired by our faiths’ most positive values to promote love for all humankind and responsible stewardship of our world.
If you envision a just world for all, now’s the time to organize. #AJustFaith (Image: A.J. Williams)

As the co-conspirators in #AJustFaith publicize our vision for a world that allows all people room to flourish, we invite others who share this vision to step up, speak up, and act up too. Let’s challenge injustice wherever it’s found: all people are worthy of love and belonging, and it will take all of us to build a world that we can all call home.

#AJustFaith is a black LGBTQ multi-faith, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational coalition of people who speak, teach and organize to create a just world for all. We are inspired by our faiths’ most positive values to promote love for all humankind and responsible stewardship of our world.

Partner with us by using the #AJustFaith hashtag on social media. Our site will be live soon!

By

Don’t wait too long to do the right thing

“THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: Moabites are bad. They were not to be allowed to dwell among God’s people (Dt. 23).
BUT THEN comes the story of “Ruth the Moabite,” which challenges the prejudice against Moabites.

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: People from Uz are evil (Jer. 25).
BUT THEN comes the story of Job, a man from Uz who was the “most blameless man on earth.”

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: No foreigners or eunuchs allowed (Dt. 23).
BUT THEN comes the story of an African eunuch welcomed into the church (Acts 8).

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: God’s people _hated_ Samaritans.
BUT THEN Jesus tells a story that shows not all Samaritans were bad.

THE STORY MAY BEGIN with prejudice, discrimination, & animosity, but the Spirit moves God’s people towards openness, welcome, inclusion, acceptance, & affirmation.” —Bixby Knolls Christian Church

 

Text meme: "THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: Moabites are bad. They were not to be allowed to dwell among God's people (Dt. 23). BUT THEN comes the story of "Ruth the Moabite," which challenges the prejudice against Moabites. THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: People from Uz are evil (Jer. 25). BUT THEN comes the story of Job, a man from Uz who was the "most blameless man on earth." THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: No foreigners or eunuchs allowed (Dt. 23). BUT THEN comes the story of an African eunuch welcomed into the church (Acts 8). THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: God's people _hated_ Samaritans. BUT THEN Jesus tells a story that shows not all Samaritans were bad. THE STORY MAY BEGIN with prejudice, discrimination, & animosity, but the Spirit moves God's people towards openness, welcome, inclusion, acceptance, & affirmation." —Bixby Knolls Christian Church
“The Bible is clear.” Image via Bixby Knolls Christian Church, Long Beach, CA.

We don’t have to wait as long as Acts to see a new story in the Bible about eunuchs or Africans. Eunuchs in Persia aid Esther in attracting Xerxes. The Ethiopian Ebed-Melech helps Jeremiah get out of the well-prison he would otherwise have died in. And Isaiah imagines eunuchs in the world made right.

Sometimes, even when we see the social storyline changing, we’re willing to wait too long to make the story real.

We don’t have the time for that. The Overview Effect, the result of observing our cosmic address, can help remind us of the stakes and the planetary challenges that are ours to resolve.