complicity : mackenzian

November 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

More on connecting values and action

Lately I’ve been meditating on the relationship between personal convictions and social action. Between Believe Out Loud mobilizing Christians and others to express their values during the electoral cycle and my other work with faith-based organizations, I’m not seeing any way to dodge the real-world impacts of our most closely-held values.

What we believe matters.

What we do because we believe, and how we allow what we do to reflect what we believe also matters. How we spend our voluntary time demonstrates our priorities. And who we choose to devote our working time to does as well.

It wouldn’t make much sense if our values, intentions, speech, and action are framed with clarity and awareness and our livelihood is out of sync… To be truly responsible, we must express our value of life with what we contribute to as much as with what we personally do and say.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Building an ethically coherent life means each one of us paying attention to the people, groups, and causes that we support with our time, funds, or network connections. Wittingly or unwittingly, we’re fueling a world of some sort with all of these forms of energy, and it’s a world that we and those who follow us will have to live in.

When I evaluate my contributions to, say, my denomination, I simply want to know that what I bring to the table goes to good ends. I don’t want to participate in my own or others’ oppression. I don’t want to fund lobbying for the right to discriminate. I’m happy to give time to serve people in my community. I enjoy supporting my local church’s budget: a congregation that can afford to fix plumbing or paint multi-purpose rooms is going to be in a decent position to do what other good work it’s called to do.

And so these considerations affect the way I give, what I donate, and how I serve. That’s as it should be: there should be a connection between my motives and my actions, between my core values and my contributions.

It’s not about purity, though: as I’ve said before, there are no clean hands in this world where we’re all one or two or three degrees removed from each other. But it’s precisely because of our connectedness that we need to practice awareness of our relationships and entanglements.

A few weeks ago, Native people critiquing the Dakota Access Pipeline circulated articles about the banks funding the companies behind the project. “Send them a message,” the activists told us. “Put your money somewhere else.”

These banks are investing $3.8 billion in a vision of the world where continued oil dependence is not only necessary but something to be sought out.

Williams puts that dynamic in stark terms:

There are companies that dump toxic waste and sludge into our oceans or hide it beneath the ground in inner cities. That same ground may eventually be the site of buildings that some of our children will live in. How can we support and participate in the choking of our resources and a disregard for the health and well-being of poorer people?

… You have to think of what it means to work for [a company] that molests whole communities and the world by tearing down rain forests that provide balance for our ecosystems and nourish life.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

We may not work directly for companies like these, but we’re not otherwise that distant from them. We can’t escape our fundamental connectedness, even when we want to!

October 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The ability to choose

As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm… There’s no way to live in this world and come up clean.” —Me, in August

When I visit new places, I like to pay attention to which kinds of commercial resources are in the area. I look at the ratio of banks to check cashing places and the financial terms those institutions offer in that zip code. I check out the kinds of grocery and restaurant options available. I notice which public transit services residents have accessible to them. All of these and other things tell me a story about the community and how invested its governments are in the people who live in there.

I walked around today in a part of New York that has Chase Bank signs every few blocks. New York City is JP Morgan Chase Bank’s home base, and one of its recent merging partners, Bank of the Manhattan Company, has operated on that part of the NY archipelago for 217 years.

Contemporary Chase advertising may be fresh, trendy, and blue, but whenever I see the company’s name, I associate it with the sour history of big bank participation in both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the German-Jewish Holocaust. It’s not just a small-business-friendly bank. It’s also a bank that’s nourished itself on blood. And it’s unusual only in the sense that it’s publicly acknowledged this history.

Working with any centuries-old institution means becoming part of its stories. When the institution’s stories involve oppression and blood, that means our stories will too. We, too, become entangled; we, too, become enrolled.

There’s no living in this region, on this land, under these flags, on this planet, and still having clean hands. Yet only some of us seem to get a choice about how much dirt gets under our fingernails.

It’s expensive to be poor, and not just in money but also in options: what makes wealth most meaningful, after we’ve gained the ability to survive and assure our fundamental needs, is our ability to choose more of the social stories that we participate in.

When only a handful of banks are accessible, and each bank punishes the public with fees for using competitors’ services in a pinch, people have a much more limited capacity to choose whether they’ll partner with an institution that grew rich from seizing Jews’ assets or from turning enslaved people into debt securities. Even when these organizations have verbally apologized, their contemporary position rests on them leveraging the wealth they gained once upon a wicked time.

I don’t know what to tell you about how to choose when we’re all one or two degrees away from evil or when we ourselves are the portal through which injustice flows. I can’t tell you, for instance, to eschew every major bank and retreat to credit unions, though I know people who have. Many of us participate in the stock market in some way, directly or indirectly, and evem when we abandon certain banks on principle, the health of our portfolios is still bound up with theirs.

We can’t withdraw from the “network of mutuality,” even when we want to. We can only strive for a world in which individuals and institutions alike have meaningful choices and the rough places of our collective pasts are “made plain” through much more just relationships. The past took centuries of intention to create, and so will the divergent future that I’d prefer to live in. It’s a future where there’s room for all, and all may choose.

August 26, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Being connected means… being connected.

Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie. A "Beware of crocodile. Don't swim" sign painted in white on black board by a rigger with high bank grasses and thick woods on the far side. The sign is nailed to a tree. — Crocodile warning, Jamaica, 2009. Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie

One of my favorite concepts from Martin Luther King’s last few years is the concept of interdependence. King wrote and spoke about it in both his letter from Birmingham’s city jail (1963) and the Christmas sermon he delivered to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967.

In the Birmingham letter he responded to criticisms of his multi-state activism. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” he wrote, “tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

In the sermon four years later, he repeated two of these sentences, but argued that it was more than organizing strategy: it was an ontological principle: “All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., December 1967

I remembered these quotes this week while working on a small editing project for a client. He’s been stewarding a book on fiscal responsibility. I edited the original manuscript about eight or nine years ago, and he recently updated a few sections of it.

Part of the update included new endorsements from local church administrators. No problem.

However, I recently stumbled across a newspaper article that cited one of those administrators as well as a former college peer of mine. Both argued for the continued criminalization and stigmatization of LGBTI people in Jamaica, and it caught me off guard to read that argument from an age-mate. As I wrote then and reiterated yesterday, bigotry doesn’t age out, especially not when your job depends on your promoting it and the job means that much to you.

So this week I found myself looking at the writing of one of the administrators in that article. It was writing that served the interest of my client: an endorsement for a project I’ve supported for almost a decade now and continue to affirm. It was writing that needed my contribution, and despite its writer, I gave it my full attention.

I doubt he’ll ever know who refined his work. I’ll certainly never tell him.

For the first time, I waived my client’s fee.

This wasn’t the kind of dilemma I expected at the start of the week. But given the “basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality,” I’m in the muck of this dilemma every single day, and I should expect to think carefully about my responses to people and systems. I’m more closely connected with more people than I imagine. We all are.

Interdependence isn’t abstract. As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm.

Whatever choices we each make about our voluntary group memberships, we live in one world where we can get coltan from the DRC and phones assembled in China, where our hard earned money pays taxes that fund Medicare as well as the military’s M4 rifles. Complicity is inescapable and we’re all enrolled in this collective story. There’s no way to live in this world and come up clean.

Yet somehow we manage to live daily as if that isn’t the case.

There was another saying I remembered this week: “Yu cyaan siddung pahn cow bak cuss cow kin.”
It’s about the folly of cursing people while they’re supporting you, of shaking hands with one hand and stabbing backs with another.

Ultimately, we’re connected and can’t choose not to be. But we can decide whether to learn to treat one another with respect despite our differences or to keep fraying the only garment of destiny humankind will ever wear. As King realized nearly 60 years ago, the only possible outcome of continued fraying is war.

If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power…Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., December 1967

June 10, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Discipline, inertia, and change

Every decision is a vote cast for the future we wish to live in… Every action we take should be a vote for the Beloved Community we wish to create.” —Hugh Hollowell

There’s a conundrum I’ve been turning over that’s reinforced for me every time I go to a park like Muir Woods or the Grand Canyon. The trees and the rocks and the quiet away from the city and the suburbs remind me just how young humans are, how brief our lives, how short our eras are in the grand scheme. This is a question of scale and perspective.

I also work with a number of social change initiatives. I enjoy learning about how history informs the present and I’m attentive to the contemporary conditions that we’re asking one another to live and grow in now. No matter how long a person’s life, no matter how comfortable their social location, they’re unique and meaningful simply because they’re here. I’ve never recovered from the first genocide I ever saw in my lifetime. It was one too many, and every genocide and war since has been one too many as well. This, too, is a question of scale and perspective, and it’s also a question of collective effort.

It takes all of us in one way or another to keep the status quo humming along. Just a few months ago, I paid a good chunk of federal taxes, and as a small business owner, I have to do so again next week. I have no qualms about 59% of that money supporting social programs, but I’m not at peace with the entire budget. My labor and revenue fund domestic and foreign policies I think are imperial, immoral, and incompatible with justice, humanitarianism, and sustainability.

So every time I pay in, I’m putting a few more hundred dollars into the way that things are, as do we all, not just when we pay federal or state taxes, but also as we buy and sell locally. A few hundred dollars might not be much of $3.7 trillion, but there are millions of us paying in. We’re why the Department of Defense can afford “fast, resilient microdrones that can be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach .9.” We’re why there are funds, however few, to allocate to the National Science Foundation’s research grant accounts, and to buy FEMA more tents, and to maintain NOAA’s satellites.

Social change work is like running up the down escalator.

When asked about his work ethic, actor Will Smith once replied, “I am not afraid to die on a treadmill.” When I heard that, I laughed, but it’s also probably true. He has drive, he’s persistent, and I’m not sure anyone could stop him from achieving something he was determined to do. Any projects he’s passionate about will reap from that.

What about me? If things are moving the way they are thanks to the combined efforts of millions, and I’m also paying into the way things are as a dutiful resident and community member, how much discipline do I and my co-conspirators need to make genuine progress on new pathways, progress that pans out longer than an election cycle, longer than a life, longer than an era?

Hugh Hollowell is the executive director of Love Wins Ministries, a non-profit in Raleigh, North Carolina that builds community with unhoused people. He might also be the strongest critic of the snooze button I know. Around the time I met him, he wrote, “I am up against people who wake up at 6 a.m. and decide which minority group they are gonna screw over today. Why did I sleep in?” A few years later, he said, “While you were sleeping in, some CEO got up on time, ate his Wheaties, and planned a layoff or something.”

I laughed at that too, but it was a drier laugh.

I knew that those working against the perpetual motion machine of injustice have to have discipline.

We have to be focused.

We have to manage our energy.

I won’t say we have to get up at 6 a.m. (I’m still in denial!), but Hugh and I agree that we each need to figure out our best daily hours and deploy them in the service of all that’s good.

We get to bring our social compassion home to ourselves and our families.

We also get to eat and sleep and play, no less than others gifted life on our planet.

And somehow, we have to sustain a patience that the status quo doesn’t deserve, a patience that depends on someone somewhere still suffering in some way while we find the escalator’s emergency stop button and get all our people onto the right flight of moving stairs. I hate that.

I also know that without discipline and consistency, there can be no progress.

And while my daily schedule might seem like a tiny thing in the long shadow of life here, I’m beginning to suspect that Hugh is right, and the consistent will inherit the Earth.

January 14, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Privacy and anti-LGBTI Legislation

Throughout history most women have had little privacy. Since autonomy and liberty—as well as certain kinds of creativity and self-expression—are almost impossible without it, establishing its place in a woman’s life is a primary task of any bid for equality. —Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters

In the last few weeks we’ve been hearing about laws passed in Nigeria and Uganda banning the free assembly, association, and consensual relationships of LGBTI people, and instituting multi-year prison terms or even a death penalty for “offenses.” While the draft Ugandan bill has been circulating for more than 2 years, we don’t have firm information on which versions of which provisions actually passed.

Warren Throckmorton is a psychology researcher who has reported on the Ugandan law alongside local workers like Dr. Frank Mugisha since it was introduced. But when he asked the Ugandan parliament to confirm the passed law, they sent him the 2011 version of the bill. This is discomforting.

Despite the uncertainty, an organization that supports LGBTI current and former Adventists across Africa and around the world released a new statement about these laws this weekend. Yesterday, the US State Department also expressed “deep concern.” Arrests have already been made in northern Nigeria, and human rights organizations are alleging torture and intimidation. These bills in West and East Africa follow a marginalizing pattern similar to those at work in India and Russia: India and Russia passed laws restricting the behavior and speech of LGBTI and LGBTI-supportive people last year.

Nigerians protesting outside their embassy in NY. Pictured: two young adult women holding signs: "We are not ILLEGAL. We are full Citizens of Nigeria." and "STOP THE BILL! Consensual Adult love is not a Crime! — In December 2011, NY-based Nigerians protested the law signed by President Goodluck Jonathan. “Z” (left) had recently founded the site SOGI Naija (Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity in Nigerians). SOGI Naija is no longer accessible.

I’ve seen legal analyses of the new Nigerian law but haven’t yet seen articles focusing on how such anti-LGBTI norms and laws especially impact women, whatever their gender identities or orientations. As Malamud Smith argues, women’s privacy is an essential part of our self-awareness and creativity. But so are the rights to associate freely with peers and communities of choice and to speak openly of and for oneself: these freedoms are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and influence our capacity for individual and social organization, innovation, collaboration, and advancement. Communities that cannot interact or exchange ideas or emotional support without the threats of physical violence, restricted freedom, or social estrangement will suffer.

I take it for granted that the collective suffering of minorities is one motive behind so many versions of these laws around the world. And I include the United Kingdom in that judgment since the UK only repealed its no-“promotion” law in 2003 and it remains ambivalent about making British civil society a space in which non-heterosexuals can share heterosexuals’ ability to live, work, and run their families in peace without having to first lobby for the opportunity.

My hunch is that women suffer under these norms and laws regardless of whether they’re targeted directly, as same-gender loving and cis, or trans- or non gender-conforming people, or more indirectly as the partners, relatives, and allies of those that the legal system harasses. Insofar as anti-LGBTI norms and laws depend on binary, exclusivist, and male-centric views of gender and sexuality, women won’t and can’t be well-served by them. And verbal, legal, social, religious, and physical violence against so-called “offenders” warns everyone else not to breach the rules—that is how terrorism works.

There’s a section toward the end of Privacy Matters where Malamud Smith describes two impacts of legalized terrorism: there is the fear, grief, and violation of the population addressed by violence, but then there’s also a perceptual cloud that covers the rest of a society that fails to connect the dots between individual instances of violence and the social context that makes violence possible or likely. Referring to the case of John Salvi, who murdered receptionists Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney at clinics in December 1994, Malamud Smith writes:

I was driving to a store when word came over the radio… I parked the car and listened in horror. My grief was visceral, unconsidered, unintended. I felt traumatized. Other women, I learned later, all over the city felt similarly. Terrorism uses violence against one person to inspire fear in all who feel kinship with the victim. The gunman shot particular people, but his gun was aimed at any woman who had ever counted too many days since her last period. It didn’t matter if you had never visited a clinic.

Subsequent stories portrayed the killer as a troubled man acting alone. This assessment was literally true, but emotionally speaking, he was acting on behalf of others… Societies have much in common with a line of wobbly kids playing crack-the-whip. Whenever issues get heated, extremists tend to shoot out wildly, carried by the group’s intention beyond its common range. Bystanders, watching only a lone child speeding along, might think she had propelled herself. So too with John Salvi, the murderer. Until you appreciate the context that propels him, he resembles a man acting alone. —Janna Malamud Smith

But none of the extremists who arise when discrimination and prejudice was worked into law have really “acted alone.” I’m troubled by how easily we disclaim our connection and complicity with the social and legal context of such extremism at times like this. As Nigerian writer Ayo Sogunro has said: “It’s easier to sit down and criticize other bigots in history—but do nothing when faced with a similar situation [in the present]… Your individual silence in the face of such an injustice is a tacit approval of its execution.”

If you’ve seen any recent articles that address how anti-LGBT legislation impacts women, particularly in postcolonial nations, please share them with me in the comments below or via Twitter. I will share a summary of anything that comes in.