January 16, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Picking up the mantle

The best way to honor a mentor is to practice what they taught you.

It’s the application of the message that validates their work, not the affirmation or lionization they might attract. Their contribution to us all lies in what they taught and worked for during their lives, not in how we reinterpret them after they’ve died or been murdered.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading James Tabor’s book on the differences between Pauline Christianity and the teachings of Jesus and the Jerusalem church led by James and Peter.

In earnest since the 18th Century, biblical scholars and other students of religion have tried to recover the world and debates of the early church, because the principle seems to be that it doesn’t take long for a martyr’s convictions to fade and for their community’s mythology about them to overshadow their actual work.

I suspect that the legacy of outgoing President Barack Obama will be shaped in the same way: even when he was just a presidential candidate, the idea of Obama outshone much of his Congressional and local organizing records. Popular expectations did work in his favor to the tune of two terms as president, but perhaps popular disappointments would have been less severe if members of the public had been inspired to act more than we were inspired to idealize.

Writing about the contemporary legacy of Martin Luther King, the Rev. M. William Howard once said, “If [people] revere Martin, if they treasure his work, and his memory, then the next step is you resolve to pick up the mantle. There’s no way you can do that now without the capacity to analyze, and to strategize, and to be disciplined.”

Discipline, of course, is related to discipleship, the process of learning as if a pupil through association and practice with a mentor or teacher.

What we have of King today is his speeches, the reports of his contemporaries and relatives, and the multi-leader movement he participated in 50 years ago.

That movement has morphed as society has, but what hasn’t changed is that every era’s leaders leave a mantle of action and responsibility behind them, and our best way to honor them is to pick it up and wear it.

August 26, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

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

July 4, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

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.

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

May 19, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

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.

What I hear some churches saying is: We want innovation as long as its exactly the same way we have always done it.

— Roger Hernandez (@leadSU) May 12, 2015

“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

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.

Good Old Days: when men were gods, women were goods, POC were prey, and queer people were kindling. Excuse me if I’d rather not time travel.

— mackenzian (@mackenzian) May 12, 2015

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.

January 19, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

The Change We Want Is Not Inevitable

Today, several US states have observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The annual commemoration usually means anodyne reflections on love driving out hate, a corporate-friendly and mostly un-challenging King, and wholesale disregard of the fact that he died only because his countrymen and government considered him a threat.

But hashtags like #MLKAlsoSaid and #ReclaimMLK are providing a counter-narrative, with contributions from the speeches and writings that haven’t made the soundbite cut on TV or radio this week. This time last year, I wrote about being driven to act by internal conviction and hope, not by anticipated results or outcomes.

Today, I came across a transcript of one of King’s last speeches, given at Ohio Northern University in January 1968. King is absolutely clear on how “racism” breaks down into tangible and resolvable obstacles to the ability of Black Americans to inhabit the freedom that’s their birthright: police brutality, bias violence and vandalism, justice miscarriages, disproportionate poverty, substandard housing, and both un- and under-employment.

“There are all too many people who say that only time can solve the problem. They feel that there is something miraculous in the very flow of time that will cure all evils, and I’ve heard it a great deal. There are always those who will sincerely say to me and our allies in the white community and those of us who work in civil rights that we are pushing things too fast. They have a way of saying this: ‘Be patient, and just be nice and continue to pray and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.’

“I think that there is an answer to that myth, and it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I’m sad to say that I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation, the reactionaries of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So it is necessary to help time and to realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., at Ohio Northern University, January 11, 1968 (emphasis added)

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.

This morning I chatted with Peterson Toscano, the actor and principal writer behind the hopeful climate change podcast Climate Stew. Thanks to our reading of Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes/Conway) and Don’t Even Think About It (Marshall), we have an ongoing discussion about whether the climate movement benefits from debating economic doctrines like market regulation, subsidies, and which fuel sources to reduce or jettison. Must all of these debates be settled before we can take action? Can we afford “to wait?”

A green and white hand-lettered sign reads "We all need a healthy climate." The word "People" and the names of non-human species surround this text. — “We all need a healthy climate.” At Columbus Circle, NYC.

In their own way and for their own reasons, market advocates like The Economist are now proposing an end to fossil fuel subsidies—an outcome long proposed by traditional environmentalists who’ve worried that governments around the world have propped up an unsustainable fuel source and thus undercut the development of new and cleaner technologies and distribution infrastructure.

If these newer proposals find good soil among decision-makers who’ve been resistant to other arguments, then as infuriating as that turn might be, we’ll still benefit from it. We’ll benefit because this crisis isn’t a partisan one. Climate change affects us all of us in different ways, and so will the process of mitigating the worst impacts and adjusting to a new, more sustainable normal. Most of us aren’t just entangled with fossil fuel production by direct use; we’re also enmeshed with it because whole swathes of our lives are dependent on them too. Fossil fuels run the internet companies’ giant data and server complexes, and fuel the trucks that our food companies use to move our fresh vegetables from farmland to grocery stores every day. We can’t radically reshape our relationship to these products without radically reshaping our lives.

So disrupting the prime place of fossil fuels means whole-life disruption. But most of us find whole-life disruption frightening and repulsive. Denial can mitigate our discomfort with change, at least for a time, and yet when it comes to the Earth staying habitable and hospitable for our kind of life, time is the very thing we don’t have.

During our workshop at the Creating Change conference in Colorado next month, Peterson, Nancy Wilson, J Mase III, and I will guide a room of people into reflection on how we can face up to the ecological challenge in front of us without detouring into denial and without losing either hope or humor.

I’ll share more about our session in a few weeks!

September 29, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Transcript: Realism and Nonviolence

In May 1967, NBC reporter Sander Vanocur conducted a candid interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., about the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, and the impromptu “I have a dream” segment that became an iconic part of the 20th Century’s soundtrack. Today, King’s 1963 speech is remembered and replayed as a testament to optimism for the future. Each January, a minority of scholars reminds us that King’s legacy was much more complex than that saccharine dream.

But here is King in his own words, reflecting on the movement’s “superficial optimism” (via NBC). I’ve transcribed a short clip from the original 18-minute segment.

On Realism and Nonviolence

1967: Martin Luther King, Jr. is interviewed by Sander Vanocur.

Transcript

[clip from 1963 March on Washington “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963]
MLK, 1963: …Because I have a dream. [crowd applauds] That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! [crowd roars]

[with Sander Vanocur]
MLK, 1967: I must confess that, uh, that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope; I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments and I’ve come to see that, uh, that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little bit superficial. And now it must be tempered with a solid realism, and I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go, and that we are involved in a war on Asian soil, which if not checked and stopped can poison the very soul of our nation.

I’m not going to say that all of our problems would be solved if the war in Vietnam was ended, but I do say that the war makes it infinitely more difficult to deal with these problems. When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective and programs of social uplift suffer. This is just a fact of history, so that we do face many more difficulties as a result of the war. It’s much more difficult to really arouse a conscience during a time of war.

There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction and it brings into being bitterness, hatred, and violence.

I think that the biggest problem now is that we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything. In fact it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the vote to right established.

And now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars. Now I think this is where we are getting our greatest resistance. They may put it on many other things, but we can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something.

I feel that nonviolence is really the only way that we can follow because, uh, violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the Negro community than it solves. You can through violence burn down a building but you can’t establish justice. You can murder a murderer but you can’t murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater but you can’t murder hate. And what we’re trying to get rid of is hate and injustice and all of these other things that continue the long night of man’s inhumanity to man.

[cut back to the clip of the March on Washington “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963]
MLK, 1963: When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and White men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at Last [Yes!], free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” [crowd roars]

“I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve their problems in that way. In the case of peoples who have not obtained the ballot, and who cannot control their states, I again find in my own mind a division of opinion, which is not logical, but purely a rough practical judgment. My own forefathers got their political freedom by violence; that is to say, they overthrew the British crown and made themselves a free Republic. Also by violence they put an end to the enslavement of the black race on this continent.” —Upton Sinclair, in an interview with Rene Fulop-Miller (March 24, 1923)

What do you think? Does nonviolence have limits? Who should determine when and who exercises it?