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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Creating Change

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Self-care among activists

a golden retriever lies on a bed, paws off the edge.
If only working like a dog meant resting like one too. Photo credit: Jacob Ufkes

I’m in Philadelphia this week with a few thousand organizers for the 29th annual Creating Change conference.

The first time I attended, in Denver, CO, I co-presented on the intersections of climate change, faith, and sexual orientation and gender identity with Peterson Toscano, J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson.

This time around, the conference is in Philly. I’ve already fallen in love with the city’s downtown area, and I’m also envious of its Amtrak station (New York Penn station is nothing if not chaotic!).

The first full day of Creating Change features a racial justice institute: an opportunity for attendees to dig into models of the cycles of oppression, socialization, and liberation, share coping and resistance techniques, explore each others’ stories about being raced in this society, and practice new strategies for participating in frank conversations about race, racism, and racial justice.

A major part of racial justice work for people of color is the work of self-care, and that’s what I focused on today.

The small group I participated in reflected on statements such as “Self-care is a divine responsibility” as well as Audre Lorde’s classic definition in A Burst of Light of self-care as both “self-preservation” and “an act of political warfare.”

Lorde, I learned a few years ago, died in her late 50s from breast cancer.

If the US had a healthcare system that allowed people to nurture their health proactively and receive sound, affordable care when needed, Lorde might still be with us. She might also be with us today if all of the communities in which she worked—academic, artistic, and activist—held in common a vision of “work” that didn’t consume workers’ lives but rather provided them with space to imagine and contribute and recover from labor at a humane pace.

This is an element of contemporary activist culture that still needs a lot of attention. People are working relentlessly on issue after issue year after year and there are structural reasons why: workplace culture, movement culture, precarious jobs and the over-performing that often accompanies precarity, as well as the passion and compassion that drive many activists to keep pressing for justice even when they aren’t compensated.

These factors aren’t about individual will to live and die on the treadmill. I’d bet that most of us aren’t conscious about the demands our routines make on us: we’re only conscious that we don’t wake up rested, or keep contracting colds, or feel overwhelm altogether too often.

Spaces like the room I spent this afternoon in are a rare chance to reassess that common routine. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be revisiting my routine, the obligations I’ve taken on, and those I’ve created for myself—including my daily writing practice.

I encourage you to review your routine too. Even if you’re sure that “everything is fine,” sometimes “fine” is not good, and we can do better.

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What Renovating My Website Taught Me About Climate Change

Oblique view of wall mixed media installation at Atlanta's Center for Civil and Human Rights
2014 (c) Keisha E. McKenzie

You may have noticed some radical changes to this site in the last month.

Yes, I’m renovating! Please excuse the dust.

Last winter, I reviewed all of my web spaces, culled a few, downgraded others, and created an upgrade plan for this one. I literally drew out several new pages with fine-tip Sharpies and hand-lettered captions, set some goals for the site, and revised the content structure.

But I didn’t implement the upgrade plan.

“Stay in your lane” can be a noble excuse for inaction.

I didn’t implement the plan because I didn’t think I was qualified to. I thought it would be too technically complicated for the time I had to spend. And I figured it’d be smarter to outsource the project and focus on the communication and development work that was making me money. I know what it’s like to train for years in an area and then watch a total naif try to out-expert you. I didn’t want to be that naif.

So for much of last year, I swept up around the site’s edges, maintained the installed software—something I taught myself 2 years ago—and periodically wondered if the universe would send me someone else to create the new site. I have several friends and friends-of-friends who are trained web developers, and it seemed wise to call on their expertise.

The specialists know, right?

Around mid-year, I asked one of these specialists to take on the job, not as a freebie but as a paid project. But specialists are busy specializing and nothing else happened after “Yes, I’ll get back to you.”

This January, I dusted off my old drawings, reminded myself of why the reboot would a good idea, yet still didn’t implement it. Friends suggested new developers and I followed up with a referral from a client. But that second developer also failed to respond.

“I can do this myself with time,” I now told Facebook. “I don’t want to do it myself, which is why I’m looking for a developer to do it for me.” I also decided that if I couldn’t find someone by March, I’d spend the budget on myself.

Well.

I didn’t contract with someone, and I didn’t wait until March after all. Instead I did my own work and my reward is the budget I would have used to pay a specialist. A very merry unbirthday to me.

“If you want a job well-done, do it yourself” only works in some conditions.

When I was a child, I learned the phrase “If you want a job well-done, do it yourself.” The adults around me set it to a catchy tune and it also involved whistling. I haven’t heard it for years but it bubbled past my lips several times once I decided to take action to improve my site.

I bought into the Genesis Framework and StudioPress, selected two themes for comparison, narrowed down to one based on a features analysis, installed it, compared the demo site to my designs, added new widgets and plug-ins, researched how-tos, and did with reasonable ease what just a few weeks beforehand I’d hoped that someone else, anyone else, would have done on my behalf.

We can, many of us, do a lot more by ourselves than we think we can. When we’re looking at well-defined, concrete problems, it’s usually not that hard, and the only variable is time. Either the plug-in installs properly or it doesn’t. Either the site loads or it doesn’t. Change the default color. Shuffle the menu order. Upload new sidebar text.

When problems are more complex, ill-defined, or wicked, even the most intrepid individual will flounder.

I shared the classic definition of “wicked problems” in December: when we’re talking about wicked problems,

  • issues are “nested or consequent to other problems”
  • information is “not well-defined”
  • decision-makers don’t “share common values”
  • piecemeal approaches “change the system and [produce] unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern” and
  • “the problem [is] either difficult or impossible to solve.” (Churchman, 1967)

Climate change is a wicked problem in every possible sense. It’s global, but affects different global regions in different ways and to different degrees—literally. It’s rooted in scientific processes and engineering outcomes, but is also the child of several thick socio-political problems: uneven resource distribution, multi-generational poverty, markets of privatized profit and shared risk, technology developed without long-term human impact assessments, scapegoating, marginalization, and various forms of racism. Along the way, it also intersects with problems like emergency planning, disaster mitigation, political scapegoating, food production and distribution, water and waste management, and urban and suburban design.

No single person, no matter how brilliant, trained, or determined, could resolve the human- and other bio-impacts of climate change on their own. No one would have the right to. The challenge is too big. Too complicated. Spans too much territory. Affects too many people.

In these cases, we can’t outsource action to the specialists, and we can’t throw up our hands and do it alone.

We have to work with others.

The frontline of the People's Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
The frontline of the People’s Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance

About 10 years ago, I was working in a civil engineering ethics program when two of my colleagues asked me to work with them on an environmental rhetoric project. We were in West Texas at the time, a region of the US that’s suffering from a shrinking water table, an expanding population, and strong values-based resistance to environmental science. (Climate scientist Dr. Katherine Hayhoe talks about these regional concerns in Years of Living Dangerously.)

So the three of us—a philosopher, a science rhetorician, and a technical communicator—started to explore how people’s values influenced their approach to the environment. “Creation care” wasn’t yet hot, but I did discover that my denomination had published two position statements promoting responsible human engagement with the rest of the natural world. And they were quite pointed statements too.

I quoted from those statements last weekend during a panel workshop with Peterson Toscano (Climate Stew), J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson (Metropolitan Community Churches) at the 2015 Creating Change conference in Denver, CO.

We talked about the knowledge, skills, and competencies that LGBTQ people have developed over the years:

  • the power to push through stubborn political and religious denial and the many deaths that silence and complicity can bring
  • the ability to self-educate, build solidarity movements, and strengthen humane care networks that support the most vulnerable
  • knowledge of how to base sustainable action on healthy self-affirmation rather than fear
  • attunement to justice, access, structures of privilege and oppression, and what it takes to include and mobilize the whole of a community, not just the favored, moneyed few; and
  • concern for people beyond our cliques: pandemics, genocides, and super-storms have no respect for geopolitical borders, and so-called fictive kinship (what we call “chosen family”) saves our lives and boosts our well-being whether we’re in the midst of crisis or not.

We asked the other people in the room who they called on for support during crisis, and what motivated them to care about climate change. They found it much easier to respond to the first question than the second, and there may be a lesson in that.

People move people: people respond to others and people need others. “Who I’d call if I needed help evacuating my town” isn’t an abstract question. It’s a high-risk scenario, and may be scary to think about, but it’s also quite easy to answer because it forces us to imagine the faces of our friends and those we care about.

Over the last few years, climate change activists have moved away from featuring fluffy and carnivorous polar bears because we live and choose how to live with our families, friends, and fellow humans in mind. It’s people who motivate us—for better or worse—and when we see the “human side” of an issue, that’s when it becomes real to us.

I’m not sorry I went ahead and did my website update myself: I strengthened my confidence and stretched myself. I have no less respect for the specialists who can do this work faster or more fluidly. And yet it reminded me that the independence that works well at the level of the simple or linear problem may be a massive liability on complex issues, and on the things that matter most, I can’t afford to go it alone. None of us can.

Lately, there haven’t been many rewards for people who work across borders and social boundaries for the good of all people—but whether the topic is police violence or climate change, that’s precisely what we’ll need much more of.

“To change everything, we need everyone.” —350.org

That’s absolutely right.

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The Change We Want Is Not Inevitable

Today, several US states have observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The annual commemoration usually means anodyne reflections on love driving out hate, a corporate-friendly and mostly un-challenging King, and wholesale disregard of the fact that he died only because his countrymen and government considered him a threat.

But hashtags like #MLKAlsoSaid and #ReclaimMLK are providing a counter-narrative, with contributions from the speeches and writings that haven’t made the soundbite cut on TV or radio this week. This time last year, I wrote about being driven to act by internal conviction and hope, not by anticipated results or outcomes.

Today, I came across a transcript of one of King’s last speeches, given at Ohio Northern University in January 1968. King is absolutely clear on how “racism” breaks down into tangible and resolvable obstacles to the ability of Black Americans to inhabit the freedom that’s their birthright: police brutality, bias violence and vandalism, justice miscarriages, disproportionate poverty, substandard housing, and both un- and under-employment.

“There are all too many people who say that only time can solve the problem. They feel that there is something miraculous in the very flow of time that will cure all evils, and I’ve heard it a great deal. There are always those who will sincerely say to me and our allies in the white community and those of us who work in civil rights that we are pushing things too fast. They have a way of saying this: ‘Be patient, and just be nice and continue to pray and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.’

“I think that there is an answer to that myth, and it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I’m sad to say that I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation, the reactionaries of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So it is necessary to help time and to realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., at Ohio Northern University, January 11, 1968 (emphasis added)

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.

This morning I chatted with Peterson Toscano, the actor and principal writer behind the hopeful climate change podcast Climate Stew. Thanks to our reading of Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes/Conway) and Don’t Even Think About It (Marshall), we have an ongoing discussion about whether the climate movement benefits from debating economic doctrines like market regulation, subsidies, and which fuel sources to reduce or jettison. Must all of these debates be settled before we can take action? Can we afford “to wait?”

A green and white hand-lettered sign reads "We all need a healthy climate." The word "People" and the names of non-human species surround this text.
“We all need a healthy climate.” At Columbus Circle, NYC.
In their own way and for their own reasons, market advocates like The Economist are now proposing an end to fossil fuel subsidies—an outcome long proposed by traditional environmentalists who’ve worried that governments around the world have propped up an unsustainable fuel source and thus undercut the development of new and cleaner technologies and distribution infrastructure.

If these newer proposals find good soil among decision-makers who’ve been resistant to other arguments, then as infuriating as that turn might be, we’ll still benefit from it. We’ll benefit because this crisis isn’t a partisan one. Climate change affects us all of us in different ways, and so will the process of mitigating the worst impacts and adjusting to a new, more sustainable normal. Most of us aren’t just entangled with fossil fuel production by direct use; we’re also enmeshed with it because whole swathes of our lives are dependent on them too. Fossil fuels run the internet companies’ giant data and server complexes, and fuel the trucks that our food companies use to move our fresh vegetables from farmland to grocery stores every day. We can’t radically reshape our relationship to these products without radically reshaping our lives.

So disrupting the prime place of fossil fuels means whole-life disruption. But most of us find whole-life disruption frightening and repulsive. Denial can mitigate our discomfort with change, at least for a time, and yet when it comes to the Earth staying habitable and hospitable for our kind of life, time is the very thing we don’t have.

During our workshop at the Creating Change conference in Colorado next month, Peterson, Nancy Wilson, J Mase III, and I will guide a room of people into reflection on how we can face up to the ecological challenge in front of us without detouring into denial and without losing either hope or humor.

I’ll share more about our session in a few weeks!