January 7, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Dialogue, certainty, and change

“Dialogue is a conversation between adults the outcome of which is unknown.” I don’t know whether Buber ever wrote this: I couldn’t find a source text for it. But it’s a smart thought, and a hard thing to practice.

Enduring social debates range from whether to recognize climate change and take action to mitigate it to whether to acknowledge the LGBTQ members of the Church and, if so, how to make room for their participation in Church life.

Sometimes it’s hard not to imagine that all of these debates could be retired with vintage jerseys if only someone in the room, preferably the Other Guy, experienced what the early Quakers called convincement.

Christian theological contexts and the US public sphere are both set up for that moment when light dawns, a voice from above speaks, and a former antagonist switches sides, convinced by raw logic and shiny truth.

If only they would circle back and say to us, as Francis Hogwill once said, “My eyes were opened.”

But holding onto that hope for others, even if they are in fact dead wrong, isn’t a good basis for conversation. It doesn’t change minds or open hearts.

The idea remains solid in many movements that the path to change involves convincing people to change their minds… Philosophically, entering dialogue entails a willingness, however small, to be changed by the process.” —Miki Kashtan

What’s scary about this idea is the risk of change. As much as many activists want change, not many of us want to change. Our positions have been hard-won and we have the scars to show for them. Our antagonists have put us through hell. What’s the point of even sitting down with them, especially if we’re going to give up the hope that they might one day agree with us?

In a society that prefers convincement to walking with others toward the unknown, some of us will give up conversation altogether. I get that. In some of my relationships I’ve done it too.

That’s the thing about social currents: they flow around us and also through us, despite our ideals. We’re part of the world we want to change, not apart from it. And our work, as much as we try to nudge our societies in healthier directions, is to nudge ourselves in healthier directions too.

For me, that means being willing to explore how much I’m open to being changed in relationship with people I know who’ve been hostile and antagonistic and are sure that they’re right to be.

It’s terrible. I hate it. I’m doing it anyway.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

October 14, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Throwing our voices in public communications

The ventriloquist is an entertainer whose performance involves throwing their voice so that it appears to come from another source, like a puppet. Think Jeff Dunham.

The stage actor is an entertainer whose performance includes conducting conversations with peers on stage but projecting those conversations out into the theater audience. Think Shakespeare.

And then there’s the public communicator, a person whose aim isn’t to entertain at all, and whose actual audience may not be obvious either.

As Dr. Katharine Hayhoe explains in a talk with the Citizens Climate Lobby, sometimes the public conversations we have aren’t for the benefit of the people we’re ostensibly talking to.

Sometimes these conversations are for the people watching quietly, people who may never themselves speak publicly but who are engaged with the issues nevertheless. They’re open to interaction, willing to seek common ground where our values intersect, and merit even indirect dialogue as much as the people who prefer confrontational debates.

The filmed dialogue Enough Room at the Table is a good example of how this indirect communication can work.

Thirteen people gathered one weekend far from home to talk amongst ourselves and learn from each other about each other. We also gathered that weekend to talk to the audiences who watch our film, and to demonstrate in their asynchronous presence what quality dialogue can look like.

In the era of “fair and balanced” public conversations, moderators often set “both sides” of a question against each other as if they were peers. We’ve let this model of discourse loose on network news broadcasting for the last 60 years, current US election coverage is every bit a part of it, and we aren’t better informed or more socially cohesive for its influence.

What made Enough Room at the Table work as a conversation, filmed or not, was that it didn’t insist on the common foundation of false parity. It didn’t assume that all approaches to marginalized people are equal. We acknowledged that some approaches have caused and continue to cause harm, and we didn’t make room for the “freedom” to disparage or personally attack participants that’s so often accommodated elsewhere in the public sphere.

That made some parts of the conversation super awkward, and yet I thought that was just right: when we understand and accept the value of the people we speak with, we should wrestle with our customary words. We should hold conversation space as if it were sacred. Because it is. And the stakes are high.

When we throw our voices in this way, sharing what’s real and good with each other and with audiences we may never meet, we might be performing roles like ventriloquists and thespians, but we’re also helping our wider society to practice conversation beyond fruitless agonistic debate.

Even if the results are far less entertaining, they just might also be that much more whole. And that makes it worth it.

February 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

From actions to metaphors, language matters

Last year I read Connie Willis’ novel, Doomsday Book, a blend of historical research and character fiction set during 14th Century England’s bout with plague. It’s a terrifically disturbing book because it challenges the reader to engage a period of deep, legitimate, mortal fear and doesn’t offer characters or readers the usual mid-crisis escape hatches.

It wasn’t possible for the people of that time to detour into denial: death was visceral and ever-present. As much as some tried, they couldn’t use religion to block out reality: the plague and attendant violence and social chaos affected the religious and the non-religious without discrimination. And science and technology also failed them until the epidemics had run their course.

The only way for them to survive the experience was to be fully present and engaged, and then to rebuild their world with those who survived.

Deep engagement from people of faith is essential.

That’s how we’ve handled crises. We don’t want to have to do that on a global scale again if we don’t have to. And the scientists are telling us that we really don’t have to.

People and communities of faith seem to have had a major awakening about environmental stewardship over the last few years. More and more faith-based groups and coalitions are speaking to our ability to influence the health and stability of Earth, our ecological home.

Earlier this month, I returned to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington’s 2016 interfaith summit and participated in an end-of-the-day conversation about faith leadership and climate change.

The question we asked: What can people of faith uniquely contribute to the climate action movement?

Our answer was hope.

Hope is what people of faith can offer the world.

A group photo of the attendees of the 2016 DC Interfaith Leadership Summit. Keisha is in the first row, toward the bottom right. Everyone is smiling and holding up two fingers in the hand gesture for "peace." — The annual IFCMW Interfaith Leadership Summit attracts some of the most engaged people of faith I have ever met. (Image credit: IFCMW.)

So much of the discourse around climate change frames it as “crisis,” or “corruption,” or “conspiracy,” but people of faith are well-positioned to offer an alternate framework.

Faith and spirituality can generate an orientation of hope based on humanity’s capacity to not only create problems but also solve them, to not only break down order but also build new orders from periods of chaos.

People of faith can ground their hope in Christian teachings about human will and the divine inspiration that draws us toward the good; or Jewish teachings about our responsibility to safeguard human welfare and protect what future generations need to thrive; or Muslim teachings about the deen, the comprehensive religious duty that includes managing resources without waste or excess.

Hope drives coalitions like Blessed Tomorrow, a multi-faith advocate of environmental responsibility that offers faith-full responses to carbon pollution and climate change. Hope motivates Green Faith, which trains people of faith and encourages them to lead in their local communities on stewardship and justice issues like auditing the environmental sustainability of their congregations or working with other groups to lobby for more effective toxic chemicals regulations. And hope propels organizers like the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and Green Muslims to amplify their traditions’ historical teachings about our ecosystem and encourage faith institutions to make more progress.

Our language doesn’t always align with our motivations.

“People are motivated to make wise choices more by hope and opportunity than by fear, cynicism, hatred and despair.” —David Brooks, NYT (2/9/2016)

George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, have spent their careers studying how we think. In their classic book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson show that the figures of speech we use don’t simply color our conversation, they also “govern our everyday functioning, structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.”

The language we use shapes our thinking, with core concepts opening up some possibilities and foreclosing others. (I wrote about these linked ideas, what Lakoff and Johnson call entailments, last year in connection to Christian moral theology and exclusivism.)

How we analyze the raw facts of an complex issue like climate change isn’t the only thing that matters. The metaphors we use to discuss the issue and the casual language we use to describe the other people at the table also impact us more than we realize: “metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious,” and we also make significant decisions “on the basis of inferences we derive” from our metaphors.

One of my favorite extended examples from Lakoff and Johnson’s research is the metaphor of war:

This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.

It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments .We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground…

Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle… The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR…

Our conventional ways of talking about arguments presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of. The metaphor is not merely in the words we use—it is in our very concept of an argument. the language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or [theatrical]; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way—and we act according to the way we conceive of things. (pp. 4-5)

We act according to the way we conceive of things. Our metaphors and entailed language shape how we conceive of things. And therefore our language has real world, relational consequences. Language matters.

Image: Eight white doves fly over a stylized white ark, all on a blue background with the cross, crescent, and star of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, in the background. Text: "Once we shared the same boat. Can we ride together now?" — The El-Hibri Charitable Foundation and Clergy Beyond Borders have developed guidelines for inter-religious dialogue that may help us transcend ideological polarization.

We need both a values shift and a language shift.

As part of his fierce criticism of the Vietnam war in 1967, MLK proclaimed that the world needed a values revolution. He told the Riverside Church that the logics of war, surveillance, topsy-turvy budgeting, eroded communal trust, and systemic poverty and structural disadvantage were a “way of settling differences [that] is not just.” He argued that they drew energy away from constructive care for the vulnerable “like a demonic suction tube,” and, if they were not checked, they would lead to “spiritual death.”

King insisted that he would “study war no more”—and then he framed war itself as an “enemy of the poor,” and announced his plan to “attack it as such.”

This War On War has not helped the Pentagon; in fact the government allocated the military $598 billion last fiscal year. And it has not helped poor people; in fact income inequality is worse in 2016 than it was in 1967. It is more likely that children will grow up impoverished and no more likely that they will transcend their birth economic class, especially if they are children of color, and we persist in a perpetual state of national insecurity under the DOD and the DHS.

As Lakoff and Johnson explain, the metaphor of war travels through our thoughts with networks of dominance, pain, and power-over, all entailments that work against the equity, justice, and freedom from violence that we aim for. It’s just not worth using this cognitive bundle as we work toward a stable climate or the policymakers we share our world with.

“It is a sad commentary on our society if we cannot say that something important is at stake in a societal debate without resorting to the inflated rhetoric of warfare.” —James Childress

Wars On Social Problems aren’t wars that seem to end, though they do entail plenty of human casualties. The War on Poverty hasn’t ended; nor has the War on Drugs, and only God knows when the War on Terror will be over. In The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility [2001], James Childress explains the implications of the warfare metaphor in healthcare, HIV/AIDS response, and culture change. Our rhetorical wars have human, fiscal, and moral consequences, and as much as they entrain our thinking and problem-solving, they also heighten our fight/flight responses and limit our cognitive capacity to imagine more than we currently see.

We can use faith-based hope to answer the fruitless polarization of war.

Denial comes in more forms than the overt debates of a coal-funded think tank or a policymaker lobbying on behalf of his state’s export. Our casual language, especially in the context of politics, sometimes reveals our own reliance on polarized attack-and-defense at the very time we need trans-partisan cooperative action, not war.

Language can be as imperceptible as the consensual world of norms and customs that we’re all born into and operate in unconsciously every day. That social universe is as real as the rocks outside, and yet is more subject to our amendment than we realize: the great illusion of the social universe is that it’s less malleable than the physical universe that set us up to develop our societies in the first place.

We made our societies. We’ve made our wars. And we can get off the thought-train that requires us both to have “enemies” and to “defeat” them.
The fact is that we are one humanity on one planet, our political camps don’t exempt any of us, and we need the discipline of language from our best traditions to help us to remember the facts, cooperate, and resolve what challenges us all.

The Climate Reality Project | Climate 101: A man in a white lab coat stands back to the viewer and apparently writing on a wall. To his left is a white line-graph representing the sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since life began on Earth. The objects on the ground below the line represent major eras in human history, such as the pyramids and the space shuttle era. — **The Climate Reality Project** provides straightforward, accessible information about climate change facts and how we can transition to a low-carbon economy. Add them to your resources.

June 2, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

May-June Updates

May was an active month on this side of the screen: two major projects meant much less posting here and more offline doing. As always, you can reach and keep up with me on Twitter where I share links and thoughts on leadership, spiritual and relational wisdom, culture, social justice, and politics.

This coming week, look out for a 3-article series here on sexuality and my denomination of origin, the Seventh-day Adventist church. If you enjoy discussions of history, Christianity, sexuality, and culture, check back through the week and share your stories with me.

For now — some of the content I’ve been sharing this week:

1.

Sistas in STEM: Ebony magazine’s 3-page interview/response article with four young Black American women scientists. Their responses highlight the importance of mentorship, strong social networks, and encouragement from teachers.

2.

The Danger of Worldviews: Toranse at Somatic Strength weighs intention, impact, and what can happen when people with power universalize their perspectives. FYI: Toranse’s site carries a general trigger warning for its frank discussion of sexual, social, and religious abuse. (ht: Son of Baldwin)

“The best way to dehumanize someone while claiming you’re not is to believe you are just the same. You erase their experiences and perspective, their struggles and obstacles, their unique way of having to deal with those things in a world that also erases them…

You are not acknowledging someone’s personhood when you ignore the very things that make their lives different than yours.” —Toranse

3.

When US Evangelicals Love Uganda Too:

Okayafrica interviews “God Loves Uganda” director Roger Ross Williams on his documentary, his experiences with leading Uganda evangelists and citizens, and his thoughts on contemporary imperialism, religiously motivated anti-LGBT sentiment, and a government struggling with oil politics.

4.

Why Tumblr is Perfect for the Trans Community: Buzzfeed’s Thomas Page McBee describes ways that young trans people have used social media to self-define, self-describe, and build peer networks. McBee focuses especially on Yahoo’s micro-blogging platform, Tumblr, which hosts sites like NY-based bklyn boihood and London’s The Test Shot, as well as individual users from all over the world.

As rumored, Yahoo! bought Tumblr this week for $1.1bn; users met this news with a little anxiety. Forbes and WSJ think the site will be fine; Australia’s The Age has a few thoughts about Tumblr’s inventor, David Karp.

5.

On the IMF’s latest agreement with Jamaica: During my first year in the island the JA$-US$ exchange rate was 35:1. Today it is 99:1, the unemployment average is more than 14%, land taxes press the middle and working classes, and legislation related to international financing requirements will dominate the country’s parliamentary agenda. The IMF caught my eye when it described Jamaica’s recent economic progress as “pleasing“; also check out the Center for Economic Progress and Research on these developments.

More to come this week. See you in a few days.

April 22, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Speaking as Myself

My friend Teagan hosted a really powerful conversation this weekend about what it means to be an ally to a community and how to speak with its members rather than for or in place of them. [1]

I come into the ally/narrative conversation shaped not just by my direct experiences but also by the body of narratives that catalyzed the British and American anti-slavery movements.

Who May Speak for a Slave?

Narratives shaped the 18th-19thC conversation about slavery as a legal institution and cultural practice. Some of those narratives were written by former slaves and free people like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. These storytellers recorded their experiences, published them, and toured their respective countries to speak about them. Other narratives were written by slaveholders/plantation owners to describe plantation life from their point of view and to justify the slave economy in the face of nascent criticism. Still other narratives were written by abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Not surprisingly, while Britain and the United States wrestled with slavery, the narratives with the most popular credit belonged to White abolitionists, slaveholders, and a certain kind of former slave: a Black gentleman or gentlewoman with refined social manners, self-taught or classically educated as far as he or she could be, and publicly pious. These were the narratives given platform space and amplified.

I’ve seen a similar dynamic in every social movement since abolition: not all stories are equal; social norm-compliance buys airtime and social credit; allies can be contradictory and not all endorsements are consistent. Given this inconsistency, I’ve learned not to conflate “anti-slavery” and “pro-Black” or “anti-discrimination” and “pro-equality.” Objecting to legal discrimination or social cruelty is not the same as fully supporting a population, especially once that population expects to be judged on its own terms and not by the measure of other groups. So those who work against social and legal discrimination may still hold onto overt and subtle prejudices about the people we work with: being a community’s ally in one sense does not necessarily mean being its ally in all senses.

Conflicting Support

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1851-2) exemplifies this. Its author, a White woman, was an abolitionist and teacher. Building on the stories of former slaves, Beecher Stowe depicted “kind” and “cruel” slaveholders, and also featured Black slaves as major, sympathetic characters. [2] By the 1860s, her story was galvanizing abolitionists and helping to turn public sentiment against the worst of the slave economy.

At the same time, the book relied on an abridged and patronizing view of Black people, and its benevolently racist stereotypes still surface in US media and public sphere conversation 150+ years later: the noble-faithful Uncle Tom, the loyal, religious, and ever insightful maid and wetnurse, the wild child. Beecher Stowe didn’t invent these tropes; she merely built her story around them. I do not question that she was an anti-slavery ally, considered slavery immoral, and had good intentions for her art.

A story can have a positive impact in the short and long term while also collapsing audiences’ view of reality and their view of the subjects represented in that story. In the same way, it is possible for a story to open up an audience’s view of trans* or gender variant or LGB people while also using conceptual shortcuts and assumptions that don’t serve the wider community well. [3] This doesn’t mean that only some stories should be told. I think it means that more stories should be told overall, more thoughtfully, more assertively in some cases, and more humbly in others. Stories are powerful and some of them can cast a long, long shadow. That scares me sometimes, but it also helps me to be conscious about my impact on people and communities I care about and not focus only on my hopes and intentions on their or our behalf.

The Stories I Tell

As part of its community outreach program and at the invitation of local college professors, PFLAG-Lubbock has organized panels of members to talk with counselors and teachers-in-training about identity, diversity, family dynamics, being an ally, and ways to increase understanding of gender and sexual minorities. I joined my first panel about three years ago. It was the first time in a long, long time that anyone had asked me to tell my story, to share from my experience what the world looked like from where I stood, to speak as myself. Whenever I spoke, it felt good that I was never offering classes a “single story” about my communities because those panels were always set up to support a broad range of perspectives and experiences. There were times when panelists disagreed and yet we didn’t gloss over those differences: there are already too many spaces where disagreement is misconstrued as disloyalty. “Diversity” spaces don’t need to mimic that.

I still tell my own story more informally from time to time, and I also speak about my perception of others and their stories, but whenever I do either of these things, I do so knowing that a story changes in the telling no matter who it’s about. In the years I told stories in Texas and in print, I noticed how much my narratives changed as I did. I drew from a consistent file of characters and events, but my interpretations evolved, and I also began recounting some experiences less while talking about what I’d learned from them more. If stories that I know are sound can vary this much, how much more might there be a fidelity gap between the stories others tell about themselves and the way I’d render their narratives? Because of our psychological and experiential distance, I can’t tell The Story of You as well as you can, and you can’t tell The Story of Me as well as I can.

One of my life lessons is this: When I see and experience this world, I do so as me. I never do so as another soul, never as they’d see or experience this life, and never as they’d wish I’d see it. So whenever I speak outside my experiences, I necessarily project in some way; I’m perceiving, translating, re-framing, and then re-publishing. I’m in constant conversation with others, too, and we’re all shaping our stories together, Yet the only original story I can tell is my own.

I find it keeps me honest to recognize that this is what it means for me to tell stories about my life and about others’ lives; this is what it means to build knowledge and understanding with others. It also seems to help my peers and audiences to acknowledge that this is what we’re doing, because in coming to grips with this, we’re challenged not to seek a fixed and universal truth from the stories we tell to each other. For the Christian fundamentalists I know, that’s a tough sell, but then some of them also struggle with the premise that our particular experiences are not inferior to an idealized and universalized experience: universalized experiences, after all, are only a slice of the world used to colonize the rest.

When I do speak up on my own behalf or with others, my stories about myself and my perceptions aren’t less important than others’ stories and perceptions. Stories I’d tell about myself are not less important than those others will tell about me. But they are different. They can’t be substituted without loss. And the wider world often treats my stories as less important. It also treats the differences I naturally add to the mainstream as annoyances or something “more difficult” that we’ll all “get to later.” That approach has real relational consequences and we live those consequences every day. I think the whole is diminished because of this approach. So I speak up about that when possible.

I don’t believe any of this means we all need to stop telling stories or building knowledge together. I believe it means we need to tell more stories, not fewer. And all of us, the storytellers used to being sources of The Story, need to recognize that our special standing is a dysfunction that we can and should dismantle in all the ways we can.

[1] Today is the birthday of an ally who stood with me as I learned to speak as myself and for myself. I still hope to offer others the kind of wholeness she offered me. CKR: b. April 1954 – d. April 2010. C., thank you so much.
[2] The “kind” and “cruel” slaveholder distinction only makes sense on one side of the table—not my side!

March 6, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

The Way of Openness

“The Way of Openness” is a short documentary on a conversation series featuring a range of Los Angeles ministers including Hollywood Adventist pastor Ryan J. Bell. The conversations allowed these ministers to reflect on and share stories with each other in the aftermath of California’s Proposition 8 initiative. Prop 8 is under review at the Supreme Court this month via the case Hollingsworth v. Perry.

While we often hear institutional statements from churches and denominations about sexuality, we haven’t heard much from the point of view of ministers who had and still have active congregations in LA. I appreciated hearing from people across the spectrum on how damaging the acrimonious environment was, pre- and post-vote, and what the city’s way forward might be.

The Way of Openness | Human Relations Commission of the City of Los Angeles

Dr. Neil Thomas, Founders Metropolitan Community Church, Los Angeles: Most of us go into a conversation wanting to win. And when you come to the dawning that you don’t need to win, that there’s nothing to win… When you and I rub shoulders with each other, we realize that we have so much more in common that we could actually work together on that would change the face of this world.

Fr. Alexei Smith, Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese: And the opportunity for us is to realize that, and work to set aside certain dogmatic differences… and to work together for the common good. Think of what a marvelous effect it would have on the city of Los Angeles alone.

The dialogue and documentary were both sponsored by Los Angeles’ Human Relations Commission and the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy.