Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

interdependence

By

The root of solidarity

A root system photographed from above, with three orange and yellow leaves in each vertical third of the image.
Photo credit: Marta Pawlik

All species and the Earth itself have interdependent roles within Creation. Humankind is not the species to whom all others are subservient, but one among many. All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere.” —Audrey Urry, in Quaker Faith and Practice (5th Ed.)

I’ve been reading through the essays in This Bridge Called My Back. A recurring theme in these essays, regardless of the authors’ identities, is their appeal for cross-community solidarity. Some authors describe the White women’s movement’s resistance to the concerns of women of color—a dynamic that has impacted contemporary groups like Pantsuit Nation and organizing communities like the Women’s March. Others explore diversities among women of color: class, sexuality, ethnicity, and national origin, for example.

When we’re in solidarity with one another, we will reach beyond our demographic or political groups and accompany others in their social change work. We don’t have to be immediately affected to act.

What makes this solidarity across lines and issues sensible is the sense of unity that Urry points to in Faith and Practice. There’s no reason we shouldn’t reach out to one another or act in each other’s favor if, as Rosario Morales writes, “We are all in the same boat.”

From all directions we get all the beliefs to go with these divisions we believe all kinds of things about: what real men really are     what women must want     what black people feel and smell like     what white people do and deserve     how rich people earn their comforts and cadillacs     how poor people get what’s coming to them…

The basis of our unity is that in the most important way we are all in the same boat.” —Rosario Morales

I recently used the phrase “Earth-sized circle of concern” for an orientation to activism and problem-solving that’s broad enough to hold all life. I’ve been thinking about how this squares with the more popular neo-Stoic recommendation for people to shrink their circles of concern and focus instead on their circles of responsibility or action.

I still think there’s at least temporary utility in blocking out what’s beyond one’s control: I’ve experienced that usefulness personally. But it’s an individualistic, atomized way to approach the world long-term. It also makes sense that most of the people recommending it to me are part of the popular business and personal finance cultures.

Business and finance are two professions that have helped to build the world as we know it. Perhaps it’s time to try a new way.

By

Just degrees removed

From above, clusters of people sit around round tables in a brightly light and white-tiled atrium.
Photo credit: Daria Shevtsova

For the last twenty years, Hollywood’s cliché has been that everybody’s somehow connected to the actor Kevin Bacon. Tracing the six or fewer degrees between community nodes like Bacon and other community members can be a fun way to prove that Disney was right: It’s a small world, after all.

I’m two degrees removed from the US Senate chaplain who, at the inaugural luncheon last week, prayed for the president’s success at his “God-appointed duties.”

I’m one degree removed from one of the drafters of the reauthorized PATRIOT and FREEDOM Acts (the FREEDOM Act, Congress’ attempt at a do-over after Snowden, limited the government’s automatic access to US consumers’ phone records but allows the government to access records from our telecom companies with prior judicial approval).

And not only is my social network full of people directly and indirectly affected by Friday’s executive order on immigration, but I also discovered tonight that I know at least one of the House of Representatives staffers who signed non-disclosure agreements with the current administration to help write it.

That’s the tightness of human relationship in a world of 7.89 billion.1 We are never far from each other.

They, whomever they are, are always closer than we imagine: the queer Muslim niece, the limited government staffer who wants to be loyal to their party, the pastor praying, as he’s described it, like a lamb among wolves.

There are times, like this week, when I’d rather deny my proximity to those a few degrees across community nodes from me. But that’s not possible, nor wise.

I hope that confronting this reality again tonight will make me more conscious about how I talk about the people who are Other to me, different from me, vastly unlike me by circumstance or by practice. And I hope that, somehow, some of them—especially the ones writing executive orders this winter—will remember too: we’re just degrees removed, not different in kind.

  1. This is an oddly specific over-estimate. I guessed. I meant to look it up before I published this post, and forgot. The current number of people on Earth is just under 7.5 billion. [Back to text: ◄]

By

Staying centered, staying focused

E pluribus unum: despite distractions, remember what's true. Out of many, one.

The 44th President of the United States used the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum in his pre-2009 speeches. He used it to encourage audiences to recognize their part in his “we.” When he said “we the people” and “yes we can,” he wanted people to imagine themselves in the number. Out of many, one, he said, insisting on our interconnection and mutual responsibility.

These aren’t ideals that the US has ever fully manifested, and the nation certainly didn’t manifest them during the Obama era.

But they’re still ideals worth leaning into, even in the era of No. 45 and perhaps now especially so.

After singing a round based on this motto today at noon, I looked up its history and came across this thought from Pythagoras and Cicero: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.”

These ancient philosophers had much to say about friendship in a well-ordered society; Aristotle even later wrote that friendship was about the reuniting of separated souls. But here Cicero suggests that the basis of friendship is love, and not a facile, selfish kind of love, but a love that’s invested in the well-being of the other.

These philosophers also imagined that such a love could coexist with perennial colonization and enslavement. They were mistaken.

In our own time, we have the amazing opportunity now to allow all distractions and drama to pass us by, and to focus instead on what’s true. No part of society can hide away from macro trends. Wealth inequity impacts the janitor and the dentist in different ways but it affects them both. The prison system affects detainees and guards in different ways but dehumanizes them all.

And we’re entering into a time when some members of our society might be tempted to imagine that policies directed at others won’t ever sweep them up too. They’ll be mistaken.

What’s true is that we’re connected. We may vary in our demographics and our circumstances but inasmuch as we’re part of a society together, we are one.

Let that truth ground your actions through the next 100 days, the next 4-8 years, and whatever else may come.

By

Being connected means… being connected.

Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie. A "Beware of crocodile. Don't swim" sign painted in white on black board by a rigger with high bank grasses and thick woods on the far side. The sign is nailed to a tree.
Crocodile warning, Jamaica, 2009. Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie

One of my favorite concepts from Martin Luther King’s last few years is the concept of interdependence. King wrote and spoke about it in both his letter from Birmingham’s city jail (1963) and the Christmas sermon he delivered to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967.

In the Birmingham letter he responded to criticisms of his multi-state activism. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” he wrote, “tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

In the sermon four years later, he repeated two of these sentences, but argued that it was more than organizing strategy: it was an ontological principle: “All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., December 1967

I remembered these quotes this week while working on a small editing project for a client. He’s been stewarding a book on fiscal responsibility. I edited the original manuscript about eight or nine years ago, and he recently updated a few sections of it.

Part of the update included new endorsements from local church administrators. No problem.

However, I recently stumbled across a newspaper article that cited one of those administrators as well as a former college peer of mine. Both argued for the continued criminalization and stigmatization of LGBTI people in Jamaica, and it caught me off guard to read that argument from an age-mate. As I wrote then and reiterated yesterday, bigotry doesn’t age out, especially not when your job depends on your promoting it and the job means that much to you.

So this week I found myself looking at the writing of one of the administrators in that article. It was writing that served the interest of my client: an endorsement for a project I’ve supported for almost a decade now and continue to affirm. It was writing that needed my contribution, and despite its writer, I gave it my full attention.

I doubt he’ll ever know who refined his work. I’ll certainly never tell him.

For the first time, I waived my client’s fee.

This wasn’t the kind of dilemma I expected at the start of the week. But given the “basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality,” I’m in the muck of this dilemma every single day, and I should expect to think carefully about my responses to people and systems. I’m more closely connected with more people than I imagine. We all are.

Interdependence isn’t abstract. As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm.

Whatever choices we each make about our voluntary group memberships, we live in one world where we can get coltan from the DRC and phones assembled in China, where our hard earned money pays taxes that fund Medicare as well as the military’s M4 rifles. Complicity is inescapable and we’re all enrolled in this collective story. There’s no way to live in this world and come up clean.

Yet somehow we manage to live daily as if that isn’t the case.

There was another saying I remembered this week: “Yu cyaan siddung pahn cow bak cuss cow kin.”
It’s about the folly of cursing people while they’re supporting you, of shaking hands with one hand and stabbing backs with another.

Ultimately, we’re connected and can’t choose not to be. But we can decide whether to learn to treat one another with respect despite our differences or to keep fraying the only garment of destiny humankind will ever wear. As King realized nearly 60 years ago, the only possible outcome of continued fraying is war.

If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power…Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., December 1967

By

Interdependence Day

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’re dependent on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy Interdependence Day.

Image credit: Kevin Morris
Image credit: Kevin Morris

Resources

Mark Charles reflects on the legacy of the Declaration of Independence and the nation-state that built its house on this foundation:

There is one part of our history that we have no idea what to do with. Our colonialism.” —Mark Charles

Listen to James Earl Jones read Frederick Douglass’ 1852 July 4th speech (transcript and audio):

The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” —Frederick Douglass

Why did the Declaration’s writers use the words they use? Robert Parkinson explains the historical context:

Upon hearing the news that the Congress had just declared American independence, a group of people gathered in the tiny village of Huntington, N.Y., to observe the occasion by creating an effigy of King George. But before torching the tyrant, the Long Islanders did something odd, at least to us. According to a report in a New York City newspaper, first they blackened his face, and then, alongside his wooden crown, they stuck his head ‘full of feathers’ like ‘savages,’ wrapped his body in the Union Jack, lined it with gunpowder and then set it ablaze.” —Robert Parkinson

The relationship between the evolving U.S. pledge of allegiance and the nation’s domestic and foreign wars:

The Pledge of Allegiance actually comes into play in the late 19th century. It was devised in no small measure because the United States had only recently fought the bitter Civil War, where upwards of 700,000 people were slaughtered on battlefields and in their houses. And it was thought that this artificially-constructed former slaveholders’ republic needed some kind of glue to help to bring disparate elements together.” —Gerald Horne