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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

racism

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Wedge politics

Two wooden-handled axes lie blade up and down, facing each other and forming a rectangle.
Photo credit: Felix Russell Saw

In all seriousness, as if the United States skipped abolition, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, and the last four decades of Reconstruction Part Deux, American Christians are debating whether White supremacists are the new outsider whom they’re compelled by grace to welcome.

It’s an odd scenario to represent as merely hypothetical when one of the last times Black church folks welcomed an actual White supremacist into their midst, he killed nine of them.

It’s also not hypothetical at all. US White supremacist groups have always included Christians. Some of those members have become police officers and prison guards, and others have graduated into long and quiet careers as pastors and priests.

Within a decade of burning crosses on the private and community property of Black and Jewish people, sending hate mail to Coretta Scott King, threatening to bomb Fort Meade, and getting sentenced to just 150 days in prison, William Aitcherson left the MidAtlantic, turned the page, and began a thirty-year ministerial career.

He served in three states. The diocese knew of his history. And his name and story is only public now because of a column on grace and redemption that he wrote for The Arlington Catholic Herald after Charlottesville’s supremacist mayhem last week (cached copy).

According to the Herald, Aitcherson has volunteered to “step away from public ministry.” Whether he’ll return—he’s just a few years short of retirement age now—isn’t yet clear. But his redemption narrative found a ready audience, as have other “former Neo-Nazis” calling for compassion and kindness this week.

I know called and qualified people across the US and at all stages of adulthood who can’t even be ordained because of their gender; others who’ve been hounded out of ministry or fellowship because their sexuality, their children’s sexuality, or their affirming theology; and still others who’ve had delayed congregational or ministry assignments because of their ethnicity. Welcome and inclusion don’t extend to them.

It’s fascinating. Some kinds of people may have “troubled youths” and write epistles about them later. Others will never touch the common table. I understand the early Christians’ skepticism about Paul in a new way now.

That’s just one uncomfortable pattern of inclusion I’ve dug into over the last week. I’ve also been reading about the White gay men who now have visible advocacy roles among contemporary supremacists. It’s a notable shift, which journalist Minkowitz describes as “outreach,” after several decades in which US White supremacists have smeared, physically attacked, and intentionally excluded non-heterosexual people.

But they’re learning from their European cousins, who’ve reached out to White cisgender gay men there and used them to drag supremacist and xenophobic ideology into the civic mainstream. Now, as under Ernst Röhm during WWII, that outreach has worked in both the United States and in Europe because White cisgender gay men have long harbored anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-fem[me], and anti-trans sentiments. You don’t have to trawl apps to find it. Just go to any public LGBTQIA site comment section—at The Advocate, OUT Magazine, even my own Believe Out Loud—and wait. It’s there, and it’s why we need active comment moderation.

So White supremacists haven’t invented anything here. They’re only leveraging the intra-community bigotry that has existed since the LGBTQIA community took its current form in the 1950s. And they’re building on anxieties surfacing now, post-marriage, as the community changes, as people of color and trans and nonbinary people become more visible, and as the donors and foundations that fund the community shift their investments toward equity and justice rather than to just equality and integration.

I’ve noted on Twitter that these dynamics merit a close reading, that it’s not good enough to dismiss all supremacists as racist, or cover the Church’s complicity with buzzwords like reconciliation.

There’s such mythology around the LGBTQIA community’s “inclusion.” It functions just like Christian myths about “unity”: to foreclose conversations about what inclusion and unity actually mean as we try to live them out, and who in each of our communities has to pay for these values with their well-being.

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Note: Contemporary White supremacists are discussed or quoted extensively in the articles below. Take care.

  • “If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy.” —Dr. Peter Simi in The Intercept (January 31, 2017)
  • “If the emergence of out gay white nationalists shows anything, it’s that LGBTQ people truly are everywhere.” —Donna Minkowitz in Slate (June 5, 2017)
  • “Remembering and memorializing are two different things.” —Maggie Penman in NPR’s Codeswitch (August 16, 2017)

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Without reservation

PUC student association's official post of its new diversity statement. Peace to Palestine and I rang...
PUC student association’s official post of its new diversity statement.

Student leaders at Pacific Union College (PUC) have published a remarkable statement affirming the diversity within their campus’ student body.

The undated statement, signed by twenty students who consider themselves “representatives of the future generations of leaders in the Seventh-day Adventist church,” commits them to standing on campus and in their communities with women, LGBT+ people, immigrants and refugees, Black people, and people of other faith traditions.

As the statement appears on the PUC Student Association website only as a graphic, I’ve transcribed it below as written.

LETTER FROM THE STUDENT LEADERS OF PACIFIC UNION COLLEGE

In these times of great controversy, disappointment, and fear, we the student leaders of Pacific Union College feel it necessary to make clear and official our stance on diversity within our academic community and the world at-large. We affirm the following statements not only in our capacity as student leaders, but as representatives of the future generation of leaders in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We affirm without reservation the full equality and empowerment of women. We pledge to support women in leadership, ministry, and academia. We embrace and support the rights and dignity of all women regardless of race, class, ability, religion, and sexual orientation.

We affirm without reservation the dignity, humanity, and rights of the LGBT+ community. We acknowledge that LGBT+ individuals are human beings deserving of respect and not a mere culmination of sexual acts. We affirm their rightful place within our campus, our church, and community. We reject and pledge to combat all forms of bullying, mistreatment, and ostracizing of members of the LGBT+ community. We believe that we are called to fully love and accept these individuals, not as “less than” but as true equals deserving full respect and freedom from judgment and condemnation.

We affirm without reservation that immigrants and refugees are welcome. We reject the ideological motivation behind mass deportations, and pledge to stand up for the rights of DACA students and those with family members who are undocumented. We acknowledge our moral and religious responsibilities to the immigrants and refugees who strengthen our communities and our country (Lev. 19:9-10, 33-34). We believe fully that we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves in the full gamut of interpretations and without exception (Gal. 5:14). It is our belief that immigrants do not harm or diminish, but strengthen our community with diversity of culture, experience and thought.

We affirm without reservation that black lives matter. We reject and pledge to combat racism in all forms, and to yield to the voices of racial and ethnic minority students on ways to improve our campus and ourselves in regard to acting and speaking in a respectful and Christ-like manner. We acknowledge both the history of racism within the Seventh-day Adventist church, as well as the improvements which have been made throughout our history. We also believe that there is always room for improvement and that we are called to live by Jesus’ example of empowering and giving voice to the oppressed at every opportunity (Luke 4:18). We pledge to preserve and protect the rights of not just black but all minority students to the best of our abilities within the realm of Seventh-day Adventist higher education and our communities at large.

We affirm without reservation that interfaith and intrafaith diversity strengthen us as a religious community. We acknowledge our inability to see and understand the full truth and extent of God’s message and character (1 Cor 13:12). We therefore pledge to welcome and give platform to the perspectives and experiences of all faith traditions, even those with whom we disagree, so that we may strengthen our own personal understandings of and relationships with God.

We vow to hold our college accountable and ensure that Pacific Union College remains respectful, truly welcoming, and supportive of the full spectrum of human diversity. We recognize that not all members of our campus community may agree with the aforementioned statements, and we pledge to preserve the rights of students to express themselves even in ways that may contradict our viewpoints. We further promise to commit ourselves to creating platforms for real constructive dialogue about issues faced by our fellow students and our community.

We affirm without reservation that there are no disclaimers to the love, salvation, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

ht: Herb Montgomery

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Blood on the bench

A cross-with-circle tombstone in the foreground and to the left of the photo. A traditional T-cross in the blurry background. The sun is very bright and the sky is light blue with a few low white clouds.
Photo credit: Simeon Muller

The story of the Arkansas 8 dominated Easter weekend.

Several men have been sentenced to die in Arkansas this month, and the governor of AR, “concerned” about the viability of the execution drugs, rush-scheduled a series of executions. Campaigners rallied to stop them, and have so far managed to hold off four.

But one of the eight, Ledell Lee, died yesterday after the newest Supreme Court Justice broke the Court’s tie and denied a final stay.

In this video, Bryan Stevenson, an attorney and ED of the Equal Justice Institute, speaks about one of the threads in this story: how difficult it is for minoritized people to receive just treatment in a legal system that values objectivity and universal reason while administered by people who’re brim-full of presumption, prejudices, and biases.

It’s a sobering clip.

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Hope and realism

A wooden footbridge on a very grey day.
Photo credit: Brage Neslein Korsnes

The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” —Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, via James Cone

Niebuhr wrote wrote this statement 25-30 years before the height of the civil rights movement. It suggests a clarity about US race relations that he perceived during the era of lynching but somehow couldn’t sustain while Christians resisted desegregation and police officers cracked protesters’ skulls on the street.

According to James Cone, Martin Luther King, Jr., once answered Niebuhr with the line, “It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.” Niebuhr presumed that marginalized people should be patient with the mainstream.

And that expectation doesn’t square with his conclusion in the quote above.

I’ve been struggling with the quote over the last few days, not just because I have moments when I think he was right, but also because he seems to promote the use of force—and I don’t believe there’s evidence that ethical evolution can be “forced.”

The history of the civil rights movement is a perfect example of the gap between legal compliance and ethical enlightenment.

Loving v. Virginia, the SCOTUS case that challenged laws banning interracial marriages, was settled in 1967. The case meant that White and non-White Americans could marry three years before most of their countrymen thought it should even be legal and almost thirty years before a simple majority of other residents “approved.”

Gallup’s polls showed this majority shift from disapproval to approval somewhere between 1994 and 1997: Loving v. Virginia created a bridge that most people in this country didn’t want to walk across themselves and didn’t think their children should walk either.

“Force” didn’t change them. I don’t know what did, but I don’t think it was the threat of state power or street pressure. I don’t know that it was moral maturity either: there’s been too much continuing institutional racism since the 1960s  for me to suggest the United States simply grew up. Still today, more White Americans than Black Americans disapprove of interracial marriage.

This is a question that I’m asking with others who work on long-term social change and not just temporary mass mobilization: what inspires deep change?

What really helps us to apply our hermeneutic of suspicion first to the casual assumptions we grew up with and only secondarily to other people? What makes it easier for us to trust one another to the point that we will dismantle oppressive institutions and will walk across the bridges new public policy builds for us?

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Good news for VA voters?

Close up of polling station doors.
Photo credit: Elliott Stallion
Depending on who you listen to, today the Supreme Court either ruled against racist gerrymandering or decided that it’s sometimes ok. Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, seems to think there’s good news in the result.

The case they’re referring to is Bethune-Hill et al. v. Virginia State Board of Elections et al. and SCOTUS released its opinion this morning. The opinion states, “The District Court employed an incorrect legal standard in determining that race did not predominate in 11 of the 12 districts,” which seems like a win. But it also states, “the record here supports the State’s conclusion that this was an instance where a 55% [Black Voting Age Population] was necessary for black voters to have a functional working majority.”

There should be some clearer reporting on what the ruling does and doesn’t mean by Thursday and in the meantime, all the documents are on SCOTUSblog.

Also Thursday: the Gavin Grimm case moves a few steps closer to its day on the docket. Gavin’s school board, also in Virginia, is busy trying to delay the scheduled hearing date.

On that, stay tuned.

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News from Michigan, Alabama, and Russia

A common thread of resistance and environmental racism links Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and Waller County, Texas, where residents are fighting, respectively, state negligence, corporate encroachment, and an unwanted landfill.

Phillip Luke Sintierre writes on the proposed landfill in Waller County for the African American Intellectual History Society:

Opposition to Green Group’s landfill proposal on the grounds of environmental racism relates to the work of environmental justice activist Benjamin Chavis, who defines environmental racism as “the deliberate targeting of people-of-color communities for hazardous waste facilities, such as landfills and incinerators, and the siting of polluting industries. [Environmental racism] is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of color.” —Phillip Luke Sintierre, December 18, 2016

For the LA Times, Ivan Perry reports on a town in Alabama where residents have faced an eight-year battle with state officials after a sulfur compound leaked into their soil and groundwater.

Residents of Bismarck, ND, were able to refuse the Dakota Access Pipeline but the residents of Standing Rock Reservation still have to warily eye pipeline construction lights and equipment. Last year, Porter Ranch, CA, suffered a methane leak and the state responded by evacuating residents until the leak had been plugged. Residents of Eight Mile, AL, have received no comparable consideration:

‘Our sense of smell is acutely sensitive to mercaptans,’ Jackson said. ‘They’re irritants. They irritate our eyes. They’re designed to smell bad, to be unpleasant.’

Dr. Jeffrey Nordella, an urgent care physician in Porter Ranch, said he has been conducting his own research on mercaptan’s health effects since the Aliso Canyon leak.

‘Mercaptan is toxic to the human body,’ Nordella said. ‘The question is exposure — how much and for how long?’ … The years of troubles in Eight Mile have led some residents to pack up and move. But most of the 3,000 residents don’t have the resources to leave.” —Ivan Perry, October 15, 2016

In the Detroit Free Press, Ryan Garza leads a multi-media appeal on behalf of Flint, Michigan, whose residents still don’t have drinkable tap water and just rebuffed the state’s attempt to stop delivering bottled water.

Don’t forget about Flint. It’s a sentiment we’ve heard since the national media and presidential campaigns swept through this city in crisis. As we approach 2017, the three-year anniversary of the start of Flint’s water crisis, it bears repeating.

Don’t forget what the people of Flint must do for clean water. Many are still using cases of bottled water to cook with, bathe in and drink.” —Ryan Garza, December 17, 2016

Finally, climate communicator Alex Steffen explores key influences on carbon policy, the climate change denial that will likely be a major part of the next US federal administration, and corporate construction of new carbon-fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access Pipeline. There’s a gap, Steffen writes, between how much items like oil and beachfront property are worth today and how sustainable they are in the long-run. He calls this gap “the carbon bubble.”

If we can’t burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can’t defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon...

For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.” —Alex Steffen, December 15, 2016

Researchers Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have written extensively about how public campaigns of science denial have worked, not just on climate change but also on tobacco, DDT, and acid rain. Read or watch their work and note how corporations and their think tank partners are using the same playbook on environmental and climate issues today.