May 13, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Becoming a modern patron

The artists who made the Renaissance the Renaissance were well-funded by European merchants and city rulers who’d made their fortunes through war, commerce, and taxes.

Today, it doesn’t take multi-generational assets to become a patron. Anyone with a few dollars can support good art now.

And there’s a new opportunity to help.

Filmmaker Leslie Foster has spent the last year working and creating as an art fellow with Level Ground. He and the Level Ground staff have funded the development of eleven experimental films featuring actors living at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and spirituality.

“59” was created to explore the result of constraints on the creative process and to celebrate voices that are often ignored within the film industry and broader society… Production on the final film was completed in March. The full project, which includes people of color, queer, trans, and non-binary artists, will premiere as a gallery installation at the Urban Outfitter’s Gallery (Space 15 Twenty) in Hollywood May 26th – 28th.” —Samantha Curley

59 is due to reach its first gallery showing for this piece within the next two weeks. Click to donate the full cost of the installation, or share any amount available to you.

March 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The portal of language

I’m a few chapters into the recent film Arrival. (I intend to finish watching over the next two weeks so if you’ve seen it and are going to see me, please: no spoilers!)

The story begins with Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics college professor who’s in class the day that 12 giant pods from an extraterrestrial civilization touch down at random points around the world. The US military recruits Banks to interpret communications from the visitors, and so she joins technicians and scientists in the US and in other countries to engage the aliens, parse their responses,and figure out what they’re doing on Earth.

Early on in the story, Dr. Banks and her scientist colleague Ian Donnelly banter about Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, two linguists whose work is often collapsed into the phrase “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”

This so-called hypothesis is a network of 20th Century neurolinguistic theories codified and even strawmanned after Sapir’s and Whorf’s death. They didn’t formulate it together, and researchers disagree on whether they formulated at all, but the hypothesis named after them includes the ideas that language shapes or even determines cognition, and linguistic differences between groups (especially cultures) represent cognitive differences between them.

In the original researchers’ words:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.” —Benjamin Whorf

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group.” —Edward Sapir

These ideas have attracted counterarguments and criticisms since the 1930s and 1940s when Sapir and Whorf published and the skeptics have ground to stand on.

It must not be entirely impossible for people to communicate across language groups or conceptual differences. Though we may struggle when we try, we do actually do it, and we do it every day.

None of us perceives colors in the same way, but we can still have transcendent moments with others about an vivid rainbow.

Twenty-eight Adventists describing the denomination’s 28 “fundamental beliefs” would offer as many distinct interpretations of these beliefs as people in the room. Despite these variations, we’d still share the category “Adventist,” as well as some common practices inspired by our tradition.

What Arrival does is represent language as a portal into thought. Inky circles with tails and flecks represent complex meanings and not a mere transcription of sound. Its characters interpret this graphic language and the creatures who use it, and suggest that my cultures’ language, symbols, and structure have sculpted me too.

These matters apply to much more than formal language group. They apply to culture, which is why multicultural communities are often so rich in both creativity and conflict. They also apply to professional and disciplinary communities: contemporary business and military writers now encourage workers to form cross-function teams and teams-of-teams to ensure that they don’t silo either information or organizational meanings.

It’s so easy to take much about the communication process for granted, including how our primary languages lock us into specific ways of thinking and articulating. What more I might learn about people, about life, or even about myself, from studying graphic languages and other symbol systems unlike my native tongue?

February 5, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Denial and opinions

There are two films called “Denial” out this year.

One, a documentary, features climate change and the US energy system. I watched the other, a quiet drama based on a book about Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt’s legal confrontation with Holocaust denier David Irving.

In 1994, Lipstadt was traveling around the US speaking about her recent book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. This is where the movie begins: with Lipstadt in religion classrooms and university lecture halls explaining the components of Holocaust denial, why denialism persists, and why she chooses not to debate deniers on the facts.

Denying the Holocaust mentioned Irving by name and also sharply criticized his historical arguments. Two years after Lipstadt’s press and book tour, Irving launched a libel suit against her in British courts. British law requires the person accused of libel to prove that their claims are justified or true, and so Lipstadt was forced to disrupt her teaching schedule and go to England to persuade a judge that she’d been right, that Irving had distorted the historical facts to prop up his anti-Jewish ideology.

I came across Irving’s work around the time of this case. In the early-to-mid 1990s, I was in high school and I was an avid history student. World War II cast such a shadow over British education and the UK’s orientation to mainland Europe that I couldn’t fathom anyone intentionally declaring that the Third Reich had never committed genocide.

But within a few more years, I came across people who took a similar approach to denialism about the trans-Atlantic slave trade: the Europeans didn’t enslave and export that many African people, or when they did they didn’t treat them so badly, or even if they did, what about the Irish?

Still later, I learned about those who believe that LGBTQ people don’t really face homo-, bi-, or transphobic antagonism or violence and that, in the name of tolerance, LGBTQ people conspire to corrupt and confuse children… all of whom are heterosexual, of course.

People are serious about these opinions, too.

Lipstadt recently told the LA Times that she didn’t think of Denial or her research as a volley in the game of changing made-up minds—not Irving’s and not others’. Instead she said, “What this [film] can do is confront the people who think that it’s ok to change facts as long as you call them ‘opinions’… We’ll never do away with racism,” she continued. “All we can control is how we answer it.”

Much of my work these days includes opportunities to answer people who would like me to debate them on gender, sexuality, and religion. Typically, like Lipstadt, I choose not to. I choose not to, not because I can’t, but because I’m not willing to presume any moral parity between, say, “I’m a child of God; neither my gender nor my sexuality diminish me; and I deserve to live a whole life free from violence, discrimination, and abuse” and “LGBTQ people should not live openly as heterosexuals do; should have no expectation of loving, supportive relationships in this life; and will not exist in the afterlife.”

I don’t find these opinions comparable at all. So I don’t argue about them.

Not everyone in our community declines debate, but I’m happy to leave it to those who feel called. And I take this approach to so-called controversies about several issues: orientation, slavery, sexism, climate change, and all of the scientific and technical controversies addressed in Oreskes’ and Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt.

As a person of conscience, I accept that respectful conversation has standards that include the principles of “no fraud” and “no harm.” It does minoritized people no good to spend most of our energy swatting at malicious fables as Lipstadt had to do. Our collective time is far better spent exploring how to build and maintain an equitable, plural society, not arguing about whether we should have one.

Does this mean foreclosing some debates before all parties are satisfied? Perhaps in some cases it does.

If those parties are a David Irving, a Russell Moore, or No. 45’s latest cabinet nominee, I have to believe they’ll live: their minds are already made up and we have plenty of work to do whether their denial’s resolved or not. The more social power a denier has, the more important it is that the rest of us not build our lives on legitimized lies about each other or the history we share.

We owe ourselves reality, and denial can’t get us there no matter who its purveyors are.

September 15, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Watch Disruption and Listen to Climate Stew

If you have 53 minutes today or at any time this week, you have the time to watch 350.org’s film, Disruption. It’s captioned in English.

“DISRUPTION” – a film by KELLY NYKS & JARED P. SCOTT from Watch Disruption on Vimeo.

“Climate change exacerbates every kind of social injustice that faith communities have fought against for centuries.” —Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director for Green Faith (@greenfaithworld)

My Response

What I like about Disruption: it foregrounds the broad spectrum of people engaged with climate justice right now.
What I don’t like: the soundtrack is very thriller-ish. And I don’t think it’s needed (I don’t think fear is a sound motivator anyway).

The visual editing of Disruption clarifies the significance and stakes well enough. I’m all for emotional impact, I just don’t think fear and anxiety are viable emotions to build a long-term change movement on.
The US alone has spent the last 13 years in perma-fear. What have we been able to accomplish in that time? I don’t see point in adding to it.

I agree that the time for talk is over, that it’s time for personal, community, local governmental, national, and international action. And I’d like to contribute not only to the disruption of apathy but also to the disruption of fear-based engagement. I hope we can do both.

“We didn’t want to leave it to world leaders: their track record isn’t very good in dealing with this question.” —Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), co-founder of 350.org (@350)

Since we can’t expect elected/selected political leaders to abandon fear as strategy, it’s going to fall to us.

Think you’re up for it? Check out the new Climate Stew podcast for a light-spirited look at how to engage without fear.

"It's not just about the environment. It's about the community. It's about public health. It's about jobs. It's about justice." —Eddie Bautista, NY Environmental Justice Alliance — Eddie Bautista (NY Environmental Justice Alliance) on the wider significance of climate change. Image via Twitter.

April 11, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

News: The Record Keeper’s Now Dead

The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.

“There are no secrets.” And now there is no Record Keeper.

The Adventist News Network and other Adventist sources report today that the General Conference will not release The Record Keeper project: The Record Keeper is dead. The GC’s April 11 press release states that the project is “suspended” and “similar creative outreach projects” might be possible in future.

Back in January I wrote about efforts to save The Record Keeper and updated my post with Williams Costa’s statement that the GC was “not considering stepping away from the Record Keeper project.” Today’s announcement to the contrary will make it hard for church advocates to deny that Seventh-day Adventism struggles to support creativity in form and complexity in thought: our fundamentalism makes us a poor ally to art.

If we have a certainty bias that makes us hostile to new forms of thinking, seeing, and understanding, then we have a massive and possibly insurmountable challenge for those Adventists in each generation who want to drink deeply from theology and philosophy thanks to their love of literature and film. Story isn’t tidy and truth has many faces—when will we learn?

I feel sad today not just for Jason Satterlund, Garrett Caldwell, and the rest of the TRK team but also for the thousands of youth at Adventist colleges and academies who’ve already screened the entire series and were looking forward to sharing it with new viewers. I also think of those baptized during evangelistic screenings of TRK last year who are now seeing a church nervously disclaiming the tools that brought them into Adventism.

I am not concerned about the money that’s been spent. The Adventist denomination isn’t short on funds and didn’t waste them by funding or developing The Record Keeper. I am concerned about the message the GC is sending by abandoning this project, the creatives behind it, and the audiences that have already responded to it.

And yet the statement claims the GC’s “strong endorsement for creative outreach.” No, no.

That The Record Keeper has become the 21st Century’s Rise of the Minions is a loss for all of us.

April 9, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

About Noah—and What Happens After Trauma

This post mashes up a lot of things, including descriptions of violence, genocide, religious hatred, and religious apathy; literature and Christian hermeneutics; and mild spoilers for the new movie Noah (2014, Darren Aronofsky and Ari Mendel).

Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the film yet and still intend to. Also don’t read if you’ve been struggling with the Rwanda retrospectives across Western media this weekend—like those from the New York Times and the New Yorker (publicly accessible through July 4).