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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

empire

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Trace your training

A view of a pyramid in Egypt. The ground is dusty; the sky seems cloudy too.
Photo credit: Les Anderson

During my presentation at CityLights today, members shared some of their experiences working under the order of Pharaoh: the insatiable, grasping, perfectionist, reductive, and never-satisfied energy of imperialism.

Sometimes, I said, it’s not that we’re working for Pharaoh; it’s that we’ve become so accustomed the culture of Pharaoh that we enact its ideology on others and on ourselves. It’s the air we breathe and we don’t have to be instructed into it. Resistance takes much more work.

A group member reminded me that Pharaoh’s rules aren’t only in effect in the public and corporate sectors, among governments and business leaders. They also operate in the third sector, among non-profit heads and religious administrators.

It’s disconcerting to hear “I won’t give you straw. Get it yourselves wherever you can find it; but you’ll still have to make the same number of bricks as before” from the same people singing “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

But there’s a reason we hear those dissonant notes: just as Moses was trained to be a pharaoh before he was trained to be a shepherd, we’re members of mainstream society before we’re members of counter-cultural groups. We learn imperial logic and relational habits before we learn that there are viable alternatives, before we recognize we’re called to put flesh on our ideals and live those alternatives with other people.

Building prophetic community means acknowledging all the ways our prior training seeps into our new societies.

It means recognizing that when we confess with Brueggemann that “God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production [but] subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness,” we’re not just working against the currents of the external social world. We’re also working against the currents of the social world that flow through us.

Just for you

Download my handouts from today’s talk, “Sabbath: Rest and Resistance.” There’s a neat life design exercise on the second page.

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The Movement Moment: Change, Denial, and the Fall of Empire

A director at one of the organizations I support recently asked me what I thought “the movement moment” was.
What’s the spirit of this time? What’s rising up?

The movement, I said, is life.

The system demands we assimilate, and teaches us resistance is futile.
The movement is not about the right to assimilate.

The system calls us to worship the lone star. “Pull yourself up,” the system says. “Pull your pants up too.”
But the movement is not about rugged, respectable, individual survival.

The movement is far more expansive than the American Dream.
The movement is about justice.

It’s about quality of life in a diverse society.
Thriving as oneself in community.
The beauty of who you are. The richness of who we are.
Life beyond survival.

The movement is about race.
Poverty and wealth acquisition.
Freedom from violence and a criminal legal system.
Incarceration and voting access.

The movement is about housing.
Black lesbians with children in the South. Will not migrate. Shouldn’t have to.

The movement is about freedom.
Freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience in houses of worship.
It’s freedom from abuse. And it’s freedom to find love and belonging in a place called home.

The movement is about meaningful work and meaningful wages.
Gender expression, access to education, and professional mobility.
Food justice. Humane business.
Innovation. Climate action.

The movement is about the diversity of family.
The healing of faith. The focus of reason.
It’s fidelity to the human nation. Integrity. Hope.

The movement is about life dimensions beyond subsistence.
It’s opening to the full spectrum of life and full presence in life.
The movement is thriving. The movement is whole.

This is the movement and energy that inspires me, that I’m aligned with, and that I co-build with my clients and colleagues. This is the world that I want to live in: space for all people to be and create and progress and transform.

I’d like faith communities to be part of this movement, engaged as co-laborers and not as bystanders, and certainly not as obstacles that laborers have to work around. I’d especially like the faith community I grew up in to be part of the team I’m yoked with: can we really not just pull together?

What social change takes: change.

“Hope” and “change” and “movement” all easily lose their gloss with time. It’s not because leadership teams necessarily adopt reserved or centrist approaches to their work. It’s not even because movements hatching into institutions naturally become cautious. Ultimately, it’s because “hope” requires little disturbance in the Force, but “change” destabilizes everything. And more want change than want to change.

Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com
Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com

Every deep change in the last 10,000 years has inspired a counter-campaign of folks sure that the change they resisted would usher in the end of the world. The mass adoption of writing prompted philosophers to fret that children would lose intelligence, memory, and oral delivery skills. In Phaedrus (275), a Socratic dialogue, Plato has Socrates insist that writing is “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”: it’s an inferior tool that encourages writers to ape wisdom rather than practice it through dialogue, discussion, and feedback.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, UK slaveholders warned the country that abolition would irreparably harm the nation’s standing in global trade. “Our West-Indian and African Trades,” slave-holders wrote in 1749, “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on… the extensive Employment of our other Shipping in, to and from America, the great Brood of Seamen consequent thereupon, and the daily bread of the most considerable of our British Manufactures [sic], are owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes.”

And in the US, critics of the suffragettes accused the women’s movement of wrecking homes and undermining marriage. Campaign posters framed lobbyists as too ugly to be married, or man-eaters who dominated their husbands, or the kind of mothers who would abandon their toddlers to wash, clean, and fend for themselves.

The doomsday prophecies are valid in a way: the old worlds did fall. But that’s the whole point. We don’t promote change for Colossus to stay on his pedestal. We promote change to bring him and Rhodes down. So much labeled “innovation” is just dusting the pedestal of the status quo. If an initiative is genuinely innovative, it will summon the World’s Last Chance crowd and all the hand-wringing that humanity can drum up. And if it doesn’t, we’re doing it wrong.

Deep change means the end of the known world—and for the segment of mankind not nurtured by the present order, the end of the known world is way overdue! If we’re wise about what my colleague Peterson Toscano calls The Great Transition, we’ll survive it ready to rebuild. If we’re foolish about the opportunities we have, we’ll stop short, crying about the good old days and writing them into our revisions.

I may snark about this, but there’s a reasonable root under much fear around social change. Just this week, would-be presidential nominee Jeb Bush verbalized it when he told his base, “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed.” Speaking specifically about civil marriage, Bush said he found it “hard to imagine” what society might look like when people’s civil standing no longer rests on their maintaining “traditional” lifestyles. Change changes things, and our imaginations don’t always keep pace.

It’s also true that the rational reluctance to change can express irrationally. If we’re no longer trading in superiority complexes, it’s irrational to trade humane inclusion for familiar exclusion, and it’s irrational to fret about the pace of change when the status quo harms. The impulse to encourage slow tweaks has showed up in every justice movement I can name. It’s incurred stony glares from change-makers for just as long.

Even from those as sanitized as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Line caricature of Cecil John Rhodes, in a victorious wide-stance on a tilted African continent. Rhodes has one foot near Egypt and the other near South Africa. The cartoon mocks the traditional myth that the ancient Colossus of Rhodes was so large it had a foot on either side of the Rhodes port.
Cecil John Rhodes, colonialist. Artist: Edward Linley Sambourne (1892) in Punch, a British satirical weekly magazine. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

To his White Christian and Jewish colleagues, King once wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.'”

Some of us feel called to walk alongside people as they press through their discomfort. We can’t do that work effectively by encouraging people to live in denial about what yielding to that discomfort would mean for others. Earlier this year, I and my co-panelists at Creating Change reframed denial as a sign that someone has accurately judged how much is at stake. As such, denial’s a completely appropriate stage to start a journey in. It’s just no foundation for a life.

As change-makers, we know the stakes are high. And that’s why we press for substantive change in this world. We have no assurances that results will come in our lifetimes and we acknowledge there’s no inevitability in play. Yet we still work for good.

We know this world pets some lives and consumes others. We know it will do so as long as we permit it. And we’re saying enough: the end is nigh. Mourn the old parasitic order if you must: it will pass. It must pass.

Then, when you have mourned, help to topple Colossus.

Topple Colossus in your home.
Topple Colossus in your labor.
Topple Colossus in your faith community.
Topple Colossus in the town square.
Topple Colossus in city hall.
Topple Colossus in the chamber of commerce.
Topple Colossus in every sphere of life.
And from the rubble, build.

The first line in my Twitter bio is “for public good, social change.” It’s a simple, intentional phrase that represents my contributions to social justice, communal good, and the third sector—the voluntary, not-for-profit realm of action that’s neither primarily governmental nor primarily commercial. Even limited work in this sphere and small, consistent action in our interpersonal relationships can contribute to the emergence of a more whole and more just world.

If you’d like to add my professional energy to the work you’re doing in this area, please email me and let’s talk.

By

Two Brothers, One Colonial Church

This post began as a series of tweets. What do you mean you don’t follow me on Twitter?

All I did was google the symbol of the burning cross. I wanted to know where it started: how the primary Christian symbol ended up aflame and overshadowed by American racists.

I read that the Scottish once used the fiery cross, the Crann Tara, to summon allies during times of danger or war. Google then pointed me to Thomas Dixon, Jr., Baptist preacher and author of the Romantic (not romantic) novel The Clansman (1905).

The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was one of a series of novels on the post-Civil War South, the Klan, and treacherous Northern government. Within 10 years, The Clansman had become D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation, an earnest three-hour tour of the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and the key tropes of Southern racism:

  • besieged, mistreated Southern landowners;
  • power-hungry and manipulative Northern politicians;
  • helpless Southern White women;
  • bug-eyed, violent, predatory ‘Negro’ freemen—most of them White actors in blackface;
  • attempted rape of the Southern woman;
  • outraged noble townsmen;
  • community catharsis through lynching.

(Watch the full video at your own discretion.)

“Griffith and ‘The Birth of a Nation’ were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all.” —Roger Ebert, 2003

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Thomas Dixon, Jr., had a brother who was just five months younger than him. Amzi Clarence Dixon also preached in the Baptist tradition and wrote and edited several books of his own. Rather than American Romance novels, A.C. Dixon wrote Christian apologetics, and the most famous project he contributed to was The Fundamentals, a 1911 collection of essays identifying the non-negotiable tenets of the Christian faith.

The brother of the man who introduced the Klan to its modern terrorism symbol co-edited the main text of US fundamentalism. I had no idea. But it makes the most perverse sense.

Early this October, a modern Southern Klansman pled guilty to burning a cross in the yard of an interracial family: he actually was arrested and charged, underwent trial, pled guilty, and is subject to 20 years in jail. So are his accomplices. So some big picture items have changed in the last century!

But others haven’t.

When I look at where some of the most dogged prejudices persist in the public sphere, I’m seeing rows of preachers and pews of believers behind them.

I’m beginning to doubt that conventional Christianity’s institutions can recognize colonial reasoning patterns. And it may be that they can’t recognize colonial reasoning because they are themselves colonial. Christianity and colonialism have always been enmeshed.

When I saw the literal bond between Thomas Dixon Jr. (literature, pulpit, KKK) and A.C. Dixon (law, pulpit, fundamentalism), it pulled me up short. I didn’t stall because of the cortisol spike of surprise or stress, but because it was so dully monotonous: there it was again, the common law marriage of the cross and the sword.

Two facets of colonialism interest me most: the “go to all the earth” expansionist expression and within-the-borders internal functions: the definitions and constructed classes that stratify the colonizing group, the stratification processes, the rules of nobility and inter-class mobility, policy and law, and so on. Toni Morrison articulates several of these intra-border functions and their ability to distract the targets of colonialism in her classic 1975 lecture at Portland State.

But that moment made me wonder why the Dixons’ path was more familiar than shocking: why the same colonialist logic permits secular racism as permits religious domination. Both, I realized, depend on hatred for and exclusion of various forms of difference. Religious communities like the Dixons’ Southern Baptist denomination haven’t been subtle about transferring their founding logic from one minority (e.g. US Blacks) to others (e.g. LGBTQ people).

Thomas + A.C. Dixon’s father was a slave-owner who joined the Klan but later left it because he thought it corrupt, not because he found it wrong. The two brothers grew up during Reconstruction, when the U.S. was fumbling both abolition and Black emancipation and had no relatives or other elders to challenge the lessons their country was teaching them about who was of value and who was not.

They didn’t grow up with a sense of moral or intellectual equality between their people and other groups. The religion they adopted and that trained them to teach others didn’t teach them to recognize that equality either. It’s an incalculable waste of myths, rites, and ethics when a religion doesn’t even nudge a person toward growing up.

As it was, both brothers used the power of the written, spoken, and legal word to promote inequality between Whites and so-called “lesser races.” Thomas Dixon, Jr. advanced it through his pro-White fiction, while A.C. Dixon enshrined it through pro-fundamentalist speeches and the doctrines that still dominate the US public view of the Church today.

T. Dixon’s fiction inspired over a century of White nationalist racism, from The Clansman and Birth of a Nation to the hate organizations that still sputter along this century. A.C. Dixon’s doctrines mingled with the 1900s’ reaction against modernism, and in part because of that movement, we’re still forced to debate basic human rights with religious people.

As the legal tide slowly shifts, some groups are willing to concede denominational policies to racist, sexist, heterosexist, and/or ableist people and continue to debate only shared, civil law. That’s not a trade-off I’m comfortable making, and the reason why not is in the logic of colonial religion itself.

Colonial religion claims that it overrules limited civic authority. It represents itself as the universal truth. Colonial religion appeals to its god over all gods and proposes its standards are the First Law all other laws will ultimately fall subject to.

So if a believer’s universal Real True Morality is racist, sexist, heterosexist, or ableist, if that’s what the archetype of righteousness is, it doesn’t comfort me that the believer is willing to reserve the place of worship and religious institutions for herself and adopt a Prime Directive-style non-interference policy with regard to the rest of the planet. It may seem magnanimous for a time, but it becomes discomforting when weekend services include the message that one day, very soon, the believers’ god will return to enforce Real True Morality and smash the upstart state into oblivion.

When that’s the underlying religious story, that one day universal Real True Morality will trump localized accommodating state morality, I’m going to question the quality of those “universal” rules, policies, and doctrines. If they will govern me now or govern me later, what’s the point in waiting to question them?

Religious colonialism is opaque to many of those who exercise it, and even to some of those marginalized by it, because it is everywhere. Some groups have opted out of institutional state support and suffered persecution for it, but even these groups aren’t wholly free from colonialism, racism, or the marginalization of social minorities.

My invitation, especially for those from denominations that have historically been either marginal or tentative with the state, is that we recognize how we nevertheless act as agents of colonial marginalization in our own spheres.

“The beast” many of us have seen in the state isn’t Other to us. It is us. The questions we have to answer are whether we can recognize our own handiwork when it spills over in the town square and whether we can rewrite our own code, the ideological and perceptual code that drives our beast-like influence on the world.