Othering : mackenzian

March 10, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

When justice is really for you

I read a section of Isaiah 56 with some colleagues today.

It’s a favorite passage for a lot of people I know. From the Hebrews’ post-captivity period, the chapter includes phrases about not desecrating the Sabbath and drawing people to a “house of prayer for all nations.” Spaces like the National Cathedral use the latter in their marketing.

As my colleagues and I discussed this passage, we saw in it counsel to resist nationalism and exclusivism, and to lay aside the temptation to traffic in xenophobia or close our communities to those different from us.

One verse in that chapter especially stood out to me:

I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered.” —Isaiah 56:8

The Others are coming.

The Others, the Othered, those who represent in our time what eunuchs and foreigners once did in the biblical writers’ day—those people are coming, Isaiah writes. And “the Sovereign Lord” affirms it, too so we know it’s serious.

They aren’t just neighbors who already fit into our communities, the kinds of people we’d choose based on our criteria, the kinds of people we already routinely choose. These aren’t members of the just-like-us nation.

They’re different in a substantive way, and that’s why, when the Others come (there are always Others, and they always come), they so often find a thin welcome.

It can be easy to frame welcome as a gift we give to them. It’s much harder to recognize how exclusion harms an in-group by keeping it in the muck of self-sufficiency, separated from the people, experiences, and perspectives it needs to grow.

Treating Those People with dignity and respect does benefit them but I’m beginning to think that it might benefit us more.

November 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

More on the Japanese internment

This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws.

I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp.

The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?” —George Takei

Read it: “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” (Washington Post, November 18, 2016)

November 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:

Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906

As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.

Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.

These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.

Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)

“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.

And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.

Nothing will change until we do.

September 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

How reaction can restrict us

White flower on Black background. Photo credit: Sean Allison — Photo credit: Sean Allison

A friend shared this quote from Gloria Anzaldúa this week:

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence… All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against… At some point on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two moral combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. The possibilities are numerous once we decided to act and not react.” —Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness” (emphasis added)

All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting to.

Sooner or later, every social movement reckons with its relationship to the status quo, its enmeshment with the guardians of the way things are, and the temptation to build action around what some avatar of power has said or done.

For years, I advised one organization not to even name one of their ideological opponents in publications or press releases. I encouraged them to address the movement’s core issues, and to refute the weak critiques others frequently made of it. But I discouraged the organization from handing out free mentions of those rallying against it and also advised leaders against elevating those latecomers to peer stature by engaging them in named debate.

It was a controversial strategy at the time, and Anzaldúa’s point in this quote reminds me of it.

There’s something about battling an Other that’s consumptive rather than creative. Ultimately, identities based on dissociation from What We’re Not require an Other. The perpetual presence of that Other makes us feel whole and secure and functions as the ground where our What We Are makes sense.

With time, dueling with Others becomes something like the 20th Century Cold War: the United States obsesses about the USSR to the degree that it rewrites its civic pledge, redesigns its money, regulates patriotic customs for schoolchildren, expands the reach of its domestic and international surveillance programs, and generally stares back at a gaping abyss.

We can instead focus on what we can create and contribute, not just the people critiquing the work we do. “The possibilities are numerous once we decided to act and not react.”

Toni Morrison’s 1975 argument that we ought to focus on our unique work rather than the vicissitudes of others covers very similar ground. If it’s been a while since you’ve read Morrison at Portland State, do so now.