perspective : mackenzian

April 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

From where we stand

Congregations across the US will sing the song “In Christ Alone” this weekend, just as mine did this morning. It’s an obvious choice for Easter weekend because its verses trace the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

A line midway through the song recently became a flashpoint for the last ten centuries of debate among Christians about how best to explain the atonement. Presbyterians felt so strongly about it that they excluded the song from their hymnal.

The line, “the wrath of God was satisfied,” draws on a pre-Reformation version of the penal substitution theory. It emphasizes God’s wrath against sin and sinners and mercy in making of Jesus “a way of escape” for believers, and the Presbyterians who excluded it aren’t the only ones who’ve challenged it over the last several decades.

This weekend, I’m reading women and womanist theologians for other perspectives on this season’s stories. What happens when attempts to retrofit the old explanations no longer work, when it’s no longer enough to simply substitute a phrase like “the love of God was magnified”?

It’s a long journey that some don’t feel they can discuss openly. But if we find ourselves gripped by the stories and ethics of our faith, despite fatigue, and despite disillusionment, it may be worth taking that trip.

As Jacquelyn Grant writes in White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, women from previous generations managed to nurture an enduring, nourishing sense of life’s connectedness and the transcendent even while being taught religion—and judged wanting—by slaveholders and abusers.

They learned to privilege direct revelation and inner wisdom because the scriptural revelation they were being taught was tainted by what Grant calls White ministers’ “oppressive interpretations.” Few of these women resolved the tension by rejecting the scriptures and their religion. Instead many of them reclaimed these texts and interpreted them in ways that supported life, freedom, and wholeness.

Womanists must, like Sojourner [Truth], ‘compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness’ in them. To do Womanist Theology, then, we must read and hear the Bible and engage it within the context of our own experience… Black women of the past did not hesitate in doing this and we must do no less.” —Jacquelyn Grant

March 30, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The change at hand

“All politics is local,” pundits have said for about 80 years now.

It may not be as complete a maxim this century.

Grassroots activism has surged back as a tactic, especially on national concerns: years of action on police and state violence, increased organizing on environmental justice and climate change, and massive mobilization around gender equity.

Perhaps local incidents inspire social energy but there’s also a tipping point where local attention takes off, one case threads to others, and themes emerge.

As I listened to North Carolinian legislators debate HB2 today, I realized that many of them are still shaped by the local politics theory. During a time of thick conflict, “local politics” can be a psychological refuge from complex and intractable (wicked) problems. It’s a shield made up of simpler times.

The local theory suggests that lawmakers can get along by doing what their district or region wants, even if that diverges from what would be most effective: they’d prefer to be accountable only to their local constituency. What they mean when they invoke “what the people want” is “what the people who most frequently call my offices want; I hope they’ll re-elect me.” All of the people in an area, people whom policies might directly affect, are secondary.

By contrast, social media is influential as an agenda-setting tool today, perhaps more so that individual local authority figures. Social media depends on people who may never meet one another face to face trading information and demonstrating mutual trust and reliability over time.

Non-local interactions shape how we interpret political events and talk to one another about them: the town priest or village doctor, who once held their authority because of their direct, personal connections with parishioners and patients, is no longer the sole arbiter for how we perceive or understand controversial subjects.

For more than 24 hours now, for instance, people from professors and preachers to Hillary Clinton have volunteered stories of their experiences as professional [Black] women facing workplace bias.

Brittany Packnett launched the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork to support Black women in telling their stories about racism and low peer or customer expectations on the job. (Some of these stories are challenging to read; fair warning.)

An entire day later, people are still story-telling and educating—two key elements of activism. And they’re doing it across platforms, not just on Facebook or Twitter, where the hashtag began. And even if their individual stories are local, their solidarity is not.

These participants have been inspired by the power of story. Their stories inspired them to breach the isolation of being marginalized and connect with others regardless of location.

The era of the parochial vision is over, and perhaps for good, but not everyone realizes it yet.

February 3, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A second look at failure

One of the tools I’ve been using this week to cope with the steady stream of chaotic political news is playing with scales of distance and time:

How many light-years between Earth and—oh, I don’t know—Pegasus.

How long human history is.

How short recorded history is in relation to the age of the Earth.

How much public discourse about marriage has changed since 2007.

How little public discourse about race has changed since 1957.

How the US electorate swings between major parties about every eight years.

How the last four years of my life have rushed by.

How the last two weeks feel like a lot longer than four years.

I get it when historians review the modulations of social change: slavery, then Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, then desegregation, then the dismantling of the commons and the public services that have been part of it.

Reviewing these moments and movements from a safe temporal distance, even if only for a little while, lets me zoom out from the people, whole people with textured lives whose experiences—and suffering—lie behind each neat era label.

At the same time, I also get the reminder that there is no linear progress.

Even when conditions are ideal, there’ll be gains and losses and plateaus and breakthroughs and none of them will be regular. “Scaling back” when a trainee meets their limit means giving their body time to reset and their trainer time to plan a new approach to their goals.

Perhaps turn-taking through time is also part of the social change process.

The US electorate’s latest swing has already meant suffering for many, many people. It also brings four to eight years in which we, if we survive, can plan new approaches to our goals, new ways to describe them to people who don’t share them yet, new ways to express our values, new coalitions to build, and new strategies for taking action together.

If we can’t avoid the moment, we might as well use it. What will we do with this time?

January 8, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Working to death

Ten years ago, an interview between Tavis Smiley and Will Smith went viral. When Smiley asked what set Smith apart toward the end of the session, Smith laughed and said:

The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill… I will not be outworked. Period.” —Will Smith (December 12, 2007 | PBS original segment 24:23; YouTube clip 6:22 | uncaptioned)

There’s something about hard work rhetoric that’s incredibly compelling in this culture. The United States, after all, has a workforce culture that promotes intense labor, even at the cost of workers’ health and well-being. In academia, it’s called the “eight days a week” effect, and whether workers are passionate about their research and teaching or have the hustle motive that Smith talks about, it can be deeply unsustainable for early career folks and those still in training.

But it’s still affirmed anyway, and rewarded in cash, opportunity, and social approval.

There are contrasting perspectives from the world of fitness, however. The Hairpin‘s recurring column on women’s weight training recently responded to a question about how to balance cardio and resistance workouts. Columnist Casey Johnston writes:

If your sense of Accomplished is inextricable from your sense of Busy, you need to untangle them, right now… It is not fitness to push yourself to the max constantly with no end in sight.” —Casey Johnston (January 3, 2017)

In other words: the domain that gave Smith his key metaphor disagrees with his approach. It’s not a question of being a lazy worker or a lax trainer. Instead, as Johnston carefully explains, it’s essential to work wisely, to balance work with rest, to allow time for recovery, to vary weight and pace, and not press so hard that one risks death on the conveyor belt.

When I was in grad school, my mother told me dry as ice that she was sure my university awarded posthumous degrees. The lesson, of course, was that such an award would be worthless to me.

So even as I admire what Smith and his family have accomplished through hustle and persistence, I think the rest of us need to supplement that wisdom with a few solid breaks between sets.

January 5, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Nostalgia is no way to build a life

Cropped portion of Andrew Jenkins' photo: full fir trees line the bottom of a photo of bright white and blue star-specks on a purple-grey night sky. — Photo credit: Andrew Jenkins

One of my favorite things is looking at the stars, especially in areas with low levels of light pollution.

When I lived in Jamaica, my grandparents still had an exposed balcony (we installed railings when my grandmother developed dementia). I would sometimes sit on the balcony, long after my grandparents had gone to bed. Their windy country roads would be quiet and I’d listen to frogs and crickets as the moon and stars inched across the sky.

Erykah Badu’s song “Orange Moon” captures the mood quite well: there’s just something about taking in our thin slice of space that fills me with wonder, imagination, and no small serving of nostalgia.

So I laughed tonight when I read a meme from a friend:

When you wish upon a star, you’re a few million light years late. That star is dead. Just like your dreams.”

The stars I notice when I melt into awe are no longer where I think they are. They’ve moved, most of them. Some of them are now dust and black holes, and they’re visible to me only because they once shimmered brightly right before collapsing.

Theologian Rita Nakashima Brock writes, “If we base an entire theological system either on a human longing for an unreal past or in hierarchical authority, we have a system based in nostalgia… A nostalgic system prevents honesty.”

Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Star” (1954) is one of the most haunting pieces of fiction I’ve read in my life, and it hinges on the horror of how much time and distance distort each other and skew the stories we craft to ease our discomfort with what’s physically or chronologically distant from us.

Read it now if you never have, and do everything you can to hold a healthier relationship to the past.

November 24, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

When the user can’t report what they’re looking for

User experience and usability studies are both parts of technical communication that I trained in as a graduate student. One of the articles I published during that period was about studying users in context and inviting them to teach others in order to demonstrate their own learning.

“Training the trainer” is easy enough when a user can recall the steps they use to navigate a process. But it’s not so easy when users aren’t reliable reporters.

This afternoon, I sat in a train carriage with several young people in their 20s and 30s and a very elderly man who was traveling alone. When the man boarded, a pair of young men sitting in front of me made room for him and put his suitcase overhead. Or so I learned later.

Fast forward three hours, and we were approaching the station where several of us planned to disembark. The gentleman couldn’t find his bag.

What did it look like, we asked him. It was red, he said.

We looked up and down the carriage for a red bag. There weren’t any.

“Are you sure?” we asked. “Yes,” he said. “Red.”

One of us went up-train to the next carriage and searched there. No bag.

His seatmate and I agreed that we’d notify the conductor at the next station, and a few of the other passengers started worrying about him losing his luggage: what would he do over the holiday weekend without his clothes?

Friends of the young men who’d sat next to him texted to confirm where they’d put the case at the start of the trip. Overhead, they replied.

And sure enough, there was a lonely bag above his seat.

It wasn’t red.

It was dark grey on every side except the one facing the ceiling, and that side was screen printed with a vintage Levi’s pop-art design.

The design was red, yellow, and black, and nothing at all like what I’d imagined based on the man’s initial description.

We’d all spent more than 20 minutes looking for something that hadn’t existed, and we did it because we assumed—wrongly—that our friend was an expert on his own stuff.

It’s hard to know in the moment whether a user is a reliable reporter. And so rather than depending solely on what they say, it’s worth also observing what they do.

By contacting the former seatmates of the man on the train, we were able to retrace his path through the carriages and “find” his bag the last place anyone had seen it. We were able to find it even though it didn’t match the expectations his account had shaped for us. As we leaned on his and others’ actions, and not just their accounts, we uncovered a fuller truth than “Yes, it’s red” could offer.

So it is sometimes. People will swear we want a service and then never sign up for it. Or we’ll interpret a whole suitcase in terms of a tiny part!

If you work with people of any age or background, just bear in mind that sometimes people are unreliable reporters, even about experiences and other things that they closely hold.