March 19, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Vanishing into convention

I first saw the musical Wicked about seven years ago. I saw it again this weekend having forgotten the story line. Like the X-Men franchise, Wicked includes moral messages about how the mainstream treats those who are visibly different and whether oppression buys victims the right to seek revenge.

This time, I left the theater conflicted about the story’s ending. It’s both a “happy ending” for two characters and a bittersweet ending for others. (If you haven’t yet seen this show, which tells the story of Oz and its residents before Dorothy’s arrival, try it.)

Among the many challenges that minoritized communities face is their visible elders and role models vanishing into convention. Conventional arcs might involve upward class mobility, such as a hero escaping the “hood” to become successful in mainstream education, sport, or entertainment. They might also include more extreme body modifications like skin bleaching, which allow dark-skinned people all over the world to comply with White supremacy’s beauty standards at their own expense.

Whether in film, on stage, or in life, conventional stories may offer audiences a few atypical characters and relationships. But the characters either pay a tax for their difference, or are somehow written out of Exception and back into Rule. The latter happens in Wicked.

Early in the musical, the lead character sings about her dream of meeting the wizard of Oz and being relieved of her overt differences.

And one day, he’ll say to me, ‘Elphaba,
A girl who is so superior,
Shouldn’t a girl who’s so good inside
Have a matching exterior?
And since folks here to an absurd degree
Seem fixated on your verdigris
Would it be all right by you
If I de-greenified you?’

And though of course,
That’s not important to me
‘All right, why not?’ I’ll reply…” —Elphaba, “The Wizard and I,” Wicked

Later on in the story, this dream is less vivid, and yet the writers still create an ending where this character is removed from the community. Community members struggle through each act to hold space for difference, and they ultimately fail: the Different leave (or are forced to leave), and so the mainstream never has to grow beyond its resentment or rejecting posture.

It’s comparatively easy to imagine what vanishing into convention does to individuals who might be able to “pass” and to individuals who can’t. I’m also curious about how this process of absorption and exclusion impoverishes a community itself.

March 26, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Reader Review #7

Discover Magazine: Grandma’s Experiences Leave Epigenetic Mark on Your Genes (Dan Hurley)

Before the 1970s, genes were the fixed limits of life. With DNA as boss and RNA the secretary, combinations of genes produced a certain physiological outcome and it wasn’t clear what made one gene express and another not. But over the last 40 years, through independent research as well as massive collaborations like the Human Genome Project, we’ve learned the number, location, and functions of more than 20,000 genes and the hormones and processes that trigger them.

Now that the HGP is over, more scientists are looking at how experiences shape gene expression during the life cycle and across generations. That’s what the hybrid field of epigenetics is all about. This article from the pop science magazine Discover takes a closer look at two leading epigeneticists and the methylation of DNA—how methyl and aceytl molecules adjacent to DNA strands influences selective protein development, how something as simple as a regular gym practice can change the DNA a person was born with, and which traumas and bonding experiences can trigger epigenetic change.

Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding… The mechanisms of behavioral epigenetics underlie not only deficits and weaknesses but strengths and resiliencies, too. —Dan Hurley

Beguine Again: Of Dead-Weasel Toupees And Homophobia (James R. Cowles)

If you object to the series of public service discrimination laws recently proposed in four US states and vetoed in a fifth, why? What’s your legal basis? Does it matter to you whether a citizen’s attributes are chosen?

Jim Cowles argues that a completely different question—objective harm—provides a more stable legal basis for evaluating competing rights and the merits, if any, of discrimination against an entire class. The SCOTUS-level reviews of Proposition 8 and DOMA during 2012-2013 also focused on objective harms rather than choice.

As I said to Jim: “I was raised in a particular religious tradition and didn’t have any influence on that environment. But I remain with that tradition by choice, not mandate. I could abandon it; I could choose another tradition; and whether I did or not would still not validate discrimination against me on the grounds of my religion.”

Religion is a protected category in this country, but what if it wasn’t? It would still be to our collective advantage not to use individual choice as the basis for validating whole-class discrimination.

Related: Comicbook Bin: Nightcrawler and the Demonization of Homosexuality (J. Skyler) #LongRead

J. Skyler, a #qfaith participant, shared this essay with the group this week. It’s a long read that’s worth the effort, and fills out some of the rhetorical moves behind recent anti-LGBTI legislation. If you’re unfamiliar with the content, you’ll see plenty to research on your own.

Blind devotion to cultural misconceptions is a plague unto itself.”

Faith, freedom, religious schools, and value conflicts

Religions News Service: Leadership changes at Cedarville University point to conservative direction (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)
Anthony B Susan: I will not suffer a woman (Sarah Jones)
Christian Post: Christian College Solidifies Complementarian Stance (Ruth Moon)

The RNS report updates readers on how one North Carolina university has handled value diversity within its faculty, among its students, and from its off-campus stakeholders: the Southern Baptist constituency has replaced Cedarville University’s senior administration and the new president has begun making course-level changes. I referenced Cedarville in a series on faith and freedom on this site last quarter.

Religious colleges and universities sometimes struggle to host respectful campus conversations about controversial beliefs without resorting to “Agree or Resign.” I think this struggle intensifies when schools can operate as if isolated from the world around them. Legally, of course, religious institutions have a lot of latitude to self-govern based on governance statements and denominational requirements. At the same time, off-campus publicity can and sometimes does motivate institutions to act according to their highest ethics rather than just the most expedient ones.

Wall Street Journal: Success Outside the Dress Code (Shirley S. Wang) [Subscribers-only as of 2018]
Wang sums up some research on group dynamics: how nonconformists mark their difference through clothing selections or language variations, and how other group members interpret these differences. An interesting finding: if group members think someone varies from a norm by accident, the nonconformist gets no status points. Only variations perceived as deliberate are read as additive status markers.

People veer from what’s expected after they’ve built up enough trust within a group. [But] acting differently risks losing the benefits that come with conforming, such as shared group identity and automatic group trust…

Willingness to deviate can be useful for groups as well, particularly when it comes to decision-making… The person who brings up alternative points of view to make sure the group has sufficiently examined all options can help the group reach a better decision. If the group trusts the individual’s intentions, this perspective will be considered seriously and the individual will still be considered part of the group.

I was most intrigued by this finding on trust. It’s trust that allows a group to reap the benefits of nonconformity, but if a group distrusts people who vary from its norms, it won’t accept what they contribute and won’t reap benefits from them.

Framing nonconformists as disloyal to the group undermines trust. So does exclusion.

Exercising One’s Moral Imagination

Temple of the Future (Patheos): How to check your privilege in 5 excruciating steps (James Croft)

I cannot stress how important the development of the moral imagination is for all aspects of ethical discourse and discernment, particularly in cases where you are making ethical judgments regarding experiences you have never had, and never will have.” —James Croft

This is a read-and-reflect kind of article. I look forward to hearing what my network has to say about it.

One of the things that’s missing from much of the moral-ethical discussion in my denomination at the moment is a strong sense of particularity: that we are, as individuals and as members of a larger culture, grounded in a specific body, time, and place, and that this temporal-spatial location constrains what we see in the world and how we interpret what we see.

The insight of particularity is 40-50 years old in social science research, but only just being attended to in evangelical-fundamentalist theological circles. I think it’s one reason why we’ve preferred to pronounce our opinions than listen to the experiences of others.

Taking a Literary Break

Schomburg Center: Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith

Adichie and Smith offer a wonderful conversation about identity and writing and womanhood in this video (uncaptioned). I resonate with both women: Smith because of our common UK-Jamaican heritage and experience, and Adichie because of her insights into the Black immigrant’s insider-outsider view of the United States and America’s continuing challenge with the Other.

The Schomburg Center’s recording device lost signal at around the 37 min mark, but hang in there for about 40 seconds and it does resume.

August 26, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

From Milton’s Areopagitica

Sometimes it’s the 400-year-old articles that speak most clearly.

John Milton’s Areopagitica, a treatise from the early days of the English parliament, was inspired by a 1643 law that required new books, pamphlets, and papers to be reviewed and licensed by the new English government before publication and reprinted only when approved. In this tract, Milton, argues that censorship stifles communal debate, learning, and knowledge-making, undermines a people’s search for truth, and binds them to state-authorized conclusions.

via Southern Methodist University's Bridwell Library. — First page of *Areopagitica,* via Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library

When Milton wrote, England was in the midst of its second civil war and developing the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy over the tradition of divinely appointed monarchy. Parliament was controlled by Protestants, Presbyterians specifically, and their chief antagonists were Catholic and Puritan. King Charles I, enthroned at the time, had a Catholic wife and was perceived as unsupportive of the Protestant Reformation in mainland Europe.

Milton references Catholic churchmen and rulers uncharitably throughout Areopagitica, playing to readers’ prejudices in order to increase their support (the Christian epistle to the Romans does the same). But these references also work to describe a particular kind of governance: people of all and no religious background have presided over tyranny and the non-Catholic king was accused of doing so throughout his reign until Parliament had him executed in 1649 as a traitor. The Parliament that passed the Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing was not Catholic, but Protestant, and in this pamphlet Milton describes them as grasping, controlling, and well out of their rightful lane.

In the passages below, Milton explains why open discussion is essential and why prejudging variant opinions and those who are different is both unwise policy and philosophically weak.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men…

And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? — seeing no man who hath tasted learning but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who, not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage, and set forth new positions to the world. And were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serve to polish and brighten the armoury of Truth, even for that respect they were not utterly to be cast away. But if they be of those whom God hath fitted for the special use of these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among the priests nor among the pharisees, and we in the haste of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; no less than woe to us, while thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors. —John Milton

Howard Chandler Christy's "Scene at Signing of the Constitution of the United States" (1940) — “Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States” (1940) by Howard Chandler Christy

History is recursive when we fail to learn its lessons. The British aren’t the only people to have faced state censorship; they are again today, and so is the United States. But the United States was born more than a century after the English Civil Wars and the 1643 ordinance to “regulate” publishing. The US’ founders were no stranger to English history or the religious, political and ideological persecutions that run through it.

So it was no accident that the Western hemisphere’s newest republic diverged from England on its definition of “treason,” provided that “no religious test” could qualify a person for state office, and ranked as fundamental the rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, free assembly, and a free press.

In England, the principle of a free press was not secured until 50 years after Areopagitica, yet there are questions about both individual censorship and press freedom in the UK today. (Also see this summary of the UK’s reach from AP.) And these questions are not just for professional commentators and specialists, but also for every ordinary person who values liberty—their nation’s and their own.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. —John Milton