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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

M. Shawn Copeland

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Copeland: How solidarity requires memory

M. Shawn Copeland's book, Enfleshing Freedom, is about theologies of embodiment.

I recently shared M. Shawn Copeland’s description of solidarity as a way of relating that has material consequences: it’s not just an ideal, it’s an ethic.

In this passage, Copeland explains how solidarity also relies on our memories of past ways of relating, specifically our memories of trauma and suffering.

Solidarity is an intentional moral and ethical task.

[It] begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history. This memory cannot be a pietistic or romantic memorial, for always intentional recovery and engagement of the histories of suffering are fraught with ambiguity and paradox. The victims of history are lost, but we are alive. We owe all that we have to our exploitation and enslavement, removal and extermination of despised others… Our recognition and regard for the victims of history and our shouldering responsibility for that history form the moral basis of Christian solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom

As Miroslav Volf has argued, we can remember in ways that aren’t helpful and that ultimately corrode our relationships with others. “Fake news” and “post-truth” accounts of the past are faulty ways of remembering, for example. In Volf’s view, memorials that end in resentment are also faulty.

Copeland explains that memory has an even more fundamental value: memory of past pain honors our connection with people who have been harmed. Even if we can’t change what has happened, we can honor it by taking alternate action today. “Solidarity,” she writes, ” mandates us to shoulder our responsibility to the past in the here-and-now in memory of the crucified Christ and all the victims of history.” We honor the past by engaging the present deeply.

The book of James suggests that the way we live proves our commitment to our beliefs. In the same way, how much we exercise solidarity as a practiced ethic and not merely as an ideal demonstrates just how connected we think we are to others and their lives. The astronauts’ “overview effect” gives them an instant planetary perspective on life. And with all of humanity’s squabbling over borders, we do need that.

We also need an organic view of life, one that highlights the inescapable interconnection of all things and wakes us up to our mutual impacts on and responsibilities for one another. If I can remember the heat that has burned you as keenly as I remember the heat that’s burned me, I might just be motivated enough to turn off the stove. But until I am so moved, phrases like “Never again” will always be more aspiration than resolve.

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What’s underfoot

A few months ago I began listening closely to the lyrics of the Laura Mvula song “Diamonds.”

“Sometimes the grass ain’t greener on the other side,” Mvula sings. “But you’ve got diamonds under your feet.”

These lyrics remind me of a saying sometimes attributed to James Oppenheim: “The foolish seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.”

I’ve been reading books on embodiment and Christian theology on and off for several months now. I’m in the middle of M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom; this morning I started Karen Baker-Fletcher’s Dancing with God; and I’m reading through James D. Tabor’s Paul and Jesus with Renewed Heart Ministries’ advisory board.

Tabor’s book is interesting: according to the author, Paul anticipated believers would receive new, “spiritual” bodies after death. He didn’t predict that their physical bodies would be restored and reanimated. According to Tabor, then, Paul’s hope was to be “raised” after death, not to be resuscitated with other believers in bodies that break down. He rather hoped to be “glorified” with other believers in a new level of embodiment beyond the ordinary and physical.

Whether we share the beliefs of the ancient Paul or adopt the interpretations of contemporary scholars, the question underlying it all is “Do we matter?”

Not just our consciousness, not just our affiliations, but also our personalities and unique material forms and identities: do these things matter? Resurrection as resuscitation is an argument that they matter to the point that the cosmos puts all these life pieces back together in some way on the flip side of death. By contrast, as Tabor explains it, resurrection as “being raised” is an argument that they don’t matter to that degree, that there is a “spirit realm” that transcends and is more significant than anything material, and that that realm is where we should invest our attention and energy.

Theologies of embodiment engage arguments like these. They’re part of that multi-century debate between those who cleave “spirit” from “flesh” and rank them distinctly. (The debate won’t be solved in this post.) A common phrase in the readings I’ve seen so far, many of them womanist and otherwise progressive, is “Black and brown bodies.” It’s a figure of speech, a synecdoche, a way of using the part (e.g. bodies or voices) to stand in for the whole (e.g people).

But because of Toni Morrison’s influence on me, I’ve begun to wonder about this phrase. Just as Morrison counts off grains of rice and enslaved people in the ledgers of the trans-Atlantic trade, I wonder how easily we’re counting off inert bodies and not whole humans as we analyze the social movements of minoritized people.

I’m yet to hear “bodies” used to refer to socially empowered White people, yet I hear it often to describe Black and Brown people, especially those who suffer what Baker-Fletcher calls “unnecessary violence.” I’m mulling over why that’s the case and what it implies for the “bodies” that, at least socially, are “underfoot.”

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Copeland: Deeper change is needed

The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us in ‘a vicious cycle of increasing immigration, decreasing formal employment, falling wages, and collapsing revenues.’

“We need thoroughgoing, practical, genuine, systemic change in the present global order. At the same time, we sense a need for something deeper and beyond the moral attention that social justice accords to the distribution of the material and cultural conditions for human living. That something deeper and beyond, I suggest, is solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom

Solidarity is that empathy for the Other that impels us to act with them and for our mutual good. It transcends formal charity too: the system will never be able to keep up with peer-to-peer solidarity.

Crowdfunding is a powerful a way to move resources through society outside of institutions. And the tax code is still light-years behind a crowdfunding system that’s now more than a decade old.

We’re not quite at tax prep season yet, but if you design or participate in a crowdfunding campaign, don’t get caught out.

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Quote: What we’re freed for

From M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom:

Freedom from enslavement was freedom for being human. Only by analogy could the words of the Emancipation Proclamation change the order of creation, but it did remove God’s black human creatures from the plantation ledger.

Statutory freedom amended the social and political status of the enslaved people. It was now possible for enslaved women and men to begin to exercise essential freedom. The freed people now had the possibility of taking up the responsibility of human living without restraint.

In sum, that responsibility was this: to be a human subject, to be a person; to be [one who] consciously and intentionally in word and in deed assumes and affirms [their] own personhood and humanity…

Freedom from enslavement was freedom for loving without restraint… Freedom from enslavement was freedom for community and solidarity, for being human together.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 48-49, emphasis added.

We’re not merely freed. We’re freed for life.

Any rule that limits freedom or encourages enslavement, that denigrates love or corrodes community, is an attempt to undermine the divine creative act and diminish the human person, and is thus illegitimate.