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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

poverty

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Take a side

A muddy group of rugby players about to turn over the ball.
Photo credit: Quino Al

The prophets take a side.

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann explains how the ancient Hebrew prophets diverged from the imperial courts of Pharaoh and the royal courts of the later Israelite kings. As well as imagining new ways for society to take shape, he says, the prophets took sides. They were partisan because their God and highest ideal was partisan.

[The God of the prophets] is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests. It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and, by being tolerant, to cast eternal votes for the way things are…

Empire prefers reasoned voices who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the public good… In an empire no god is for anyone. They are old gods who don’t care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues.” —Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

I chuckled at that last line. For more than a decade and a half, I’ve been studying how organizations talk about themselves and handle information, new ideas, and constituents, and I have never read a more succinct comment on the institutional drive to form committees.

While committees could be a way for these organizations to learn over time, they more often function as a way to stall discovery and change. Organizations use these structures to stand in place rather than search for new branches of the knowledge tree to explore. Shifts in framing and practice are minimal. And people can burn out tugging their groups forward or waiting for change.

It occurred to me, though, that even the capacity to become cynical, to have expectations that sour into disappointments, and to have a limited imagination for alternatives—these are all signs that many of us are more invested in our organizations and the current order than we realize.

“We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns,” Brueggemman writes. Skepticism shrinks our sense of what could be different.

The prophets in religions and in the rest of civic society are pushing against that limited imagination every day. To resolve climate change, for example, we not only have to accept that the climate is changing, but we also have to accept that our culture’s normals—transportation options, urban design, housing sizes, energy supplies—must change too.

With poor people disproportionately impacted by rising sea levels and least likely to have cash for modifications, the prophets of our time will have to take a side: with those whose self-advocacy is not typically acknowledged.

Reformers who merely hope to tweak the status quo back into right order won’t be radical enough.

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Some pay in blood: The silence of the coal

Two Silencio Blanco cast members in all-black demonstrate puppets. The puppets are white with coal dust over them. They sit or stand on a wooden prop. An audience member with face turned away from the camera points at one of the puppets. The cast member on the left looks down at him.
Silencio Blanco puppeteers demonstrate the puppets of Chiflón, El Silencio del Carbón, and talk with audience members after the show. (Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie)

Silencio Blanco is a touring company of seven puppeteers from Santiago, Chile. Their latest work, Chiflón, El Silencio del Carbón, (The Silence of the Coal), is a haunting, tightly choreographed performance that invites audiences into the lives of generations of coal miners—parents, spouses, and children—and the worlds that literally cave in on them.

Baldomero Lillo researched the book Chiflón del Diablo (The Devil’s Blast) by talking with miners in the small town of Lota, Chile. Silencio Blanco’s cofounders, Santiago Tobar and Dominga Gutiérrez, were inspired by Lillo to stay in Lota and learn about mining from the people there. Their newspaper, wire, and tape puppets are based on real people, Lota miners and their relatives.

As a former mining town, Lota’s fortunes have risen and plummeted with the fortunes and crashes of carbon-based energy and global markets. Violent political regimes and earthquakes both had their way with the coalmines during the 1970s and 1980s, and “free trade” competition from cheaper sources outside of Chile in the 1990s finished them off. The town has not had an active mine since 1997, and former miners now guide tourists through the caverns underground.

All around the world, generations of families in small towns commit their bodies and lives to the production and delivery of fossil fuels. While we all pay for this in some way, some people pay in blood.

I’m someone who lives between a major city and quiet suburbs. I’ve never seen a mine and never touched an oil rig: by the time these fuels are repackaged and marketed to me as “clean,” I don’t see what they really cost. Artists like Silencio Blanco translate fuel workers’ experiences into art and help to breach that silence.

These puppets move around the stage with only lights, sound effects, wood props, and gestures to convey moods and meaning. Three puppeteers handle each puppet at a time, and as I watched them coordinate a coal shower, an argument, meal preparation, and a tender hug between characters, I couldn’t help but think of the coordination of social forces, company profits, and popular demand that allow people slices of intimacy and connection yet also runs generations and generations of them into the ground.

The show runs 50 minutes. If it tours near you, go and see it.

Chiflón, el silencio del carbón (teaser HD) from silencioblanco on Vimeo.

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Bishops and kings

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be. --Terry Pratchett

Last spring a large group gathered in Washington, D.C. to talk about the long shadow of poverty. The Declaration Initiative is the vision of Dr. Claire Gaudiani and aims to end poverty nationwide by 2026, the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Americans want schools, homes and public amenities that prepare and sustain them to be productive. They want a national economy focused on future needs that offers jobs and assures goods that will make their communities healthy, vital and prosperous. American families want voice and agency with their business and governmental counterparts to plan for families that are functional, communities that are relational and systems that work together to ensure opportunity now and for the future…

To imagine America without persistent, generational poverty, communities will need to invest in creating local leaders that can learn together skills balancing self interests and organizational interests, communicating vision and values, ensuring honesty and dependability to plan for ‘a time of no longer and time of not yet.'” — Claire Gaudiani

Intersections International called a large, multi-faith contingent of people to gather around that core vision and imagine a world where people’s life chances aren’t tied to their family’s income or location.

But systemic racism and discrimination stressors confound the work, and at the heart of the struggle against poverty is the prevalence of infant mortality.

In a recent Nation article on racial disparities in infant mortality, doctors and researchers explain how several social patterns combine to create an environment where poor and Black children face illness, early and sudden death, and “failure to thrive.”

All of these effects together create what scientists call ‘allostatic load,’ or ‘the cumulative wear and tear on the body’s systems owing to repeated adaptation to stressors… ‘We literally embody, biologically, the societal and ecological conditions in which we grow up and develop and live,’ said Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University. ‘Infant mortality is affected by not only the immediate conditions in which the infant is conceived and born, but also the health status of the mother and, some evidence indicates the father as well.'” (February 15, 2017)

It’s been so gratifying to see some lay Christians and clergy members notice these trends and feel compelled to speak up, act up, and organize with others.

Some faith communities respond to them dismissively (“You should be evangelizing! Spiritual body over physical body!”). Other activists fail to apply their concern for poor people to concern for migrants or non-heterosexual people, for example, as if “poor people” are all “American” and all “heterosexual.”

These responses suggest a lack of imagination on the part of our religious communities, and a lack of imagination on our own part as activists. It’s easier to reverse-engineer the status quo, tweak a few things, and call that social justice than to imagine most broadly. But tweaking locks us into the logic of the king on the chessboard: moving just one square at a time.

We need more. Terry Pratchett’s saying about the bishop and the king points to the “tell it slant” principle that Emily Dickinson once wrote about: operating with a broader range than the current order assigns to us and moving on the diagonal in a world that expects us to move only in crossed lines and right angles.

Could we be more successful by reserving the ability to surprise? Could that surprise come from actually working for justice for all people rather than continuing to find someone to other and keep out of our fold as the system has always done?

The status quo relies on minoritized people jockeying to leave one another behind. Erring on the side of “all of us” instead will be the more sustainable choice.