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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

reader review

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Read: Reflections from Standing Rock and beyond

A couple and their dog sit facing away from the camera, and looking out at the sea.
Photo credit: Nathália Bariani

If you only read three items this weekend, make them these:

1. On the history behind the Standing Rock defense of the Missouri River and water supply in Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas

I don’t understand why we are expendable in America.” —LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, tribal historian of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack Comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre

Allard spoke with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now last weekend and her account of the Standing Rock nations, the United States military, and the Native intentions for the land are quite, quite powerful.

2. On the distraction and erasure of mass media reporting on #NODAPL

All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure.” —Kelly Hayes, Transformative Spaces, Chicago

Erased By False Victory: Obama Hasn’t Stopped DAPL

Hayes analyzes the patterns of media attention about the gathering of more than 100 Native tribes at Standing Rock. Social media energy has been building, and the conventional press is noticing. But, Hayes, argues, that just means the status quo moves to defuse activist concern: “This isn’t the victory it’s being billed as.”

3. Meanwhile, at a different scale: On the nourishment that devoted companionship can offer at life’s end

‘I’ve been coming here twice a day to be with my wife for nine years,’ he said. ‘She had a brain hemorrhage and hasn’t been communicative since then.’
I swallowed a lump in my throat thinking of that sort of love and devotion. Nine years. And while she might not be verbal anymore, the love and contentment she felt with him was clear from her body language.” —Daneen Akers, co-producer of Enough Room at the Table

Every so often, Daneen writes an email to the community that has supported her recent film projects (she’s been much better about this than I’ve been this year).

Her latest message reflects on the power of family and companionship to nourish someone through severe medical illnesses and the end of life stage—and ways our religious teachings make these periods unnecessarily complicated.

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Reader Review 12: Systems and Progress

The Reader Review series was a 2014 experiment in rounding up of some of the most thoughtful or provocative articles and videos I came across online. I’m still deciding whether to continue it in 2015, but either way, this will be the last edition of the year.

Thank you for reading along with me!

Brentin Mock draws a firm and clear connection between air pollution and state violence:
Why do Americans’ perspectives vary so much?

Grist: “Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests” (Brentin Mock)

The Grist has a wonderful writer in environmental justice activist Brentin Mock. In his latest column, Mock reflects on his own health, the Eric Garner case, and why environmentalists should recognize their stake in the protests against police brutality and racial inequity. Mock’s point on air quality disparities is one I learned about this March thanks to a Mother Jones article on controversial research that correlated air pollutants with race and class.

What I’m pleased about it is that Brentin isn’t the only writer to draw connections between climate action and racial justice concerns. The climate coalition 350.org published a similar case earlier this year in an article titled “Why the Climate Movement Must Stand with Ferguson.” Peterson Toscano, a performance artist who has been touring the country performing his one-man play on climate action, hope, and human resilience, also highlighted Brentin’s article on his podcast site earlier this week.

By the way, if you’re not yet subscribed to Peterson’s weekly podcast, Climate Stew, you’re missing out on a real treat: vivid characters and some powerful glimpses of our collective future. “Climate Stew,” Peterson says, “takes a serious look at global warming, but won’t scare the snot out of you. I want to give people space to think about the roles we’ll play in the new world that’s coming, how we will come together and what it’ll take to keep this a safe planet for humans, coffee, and pasta, not just for polar bears.”

And how about that #TortureReport? I can’t bear to read it.

Christine Amanpour, via Twitter
Christiane Amanpour on #TortureReport, via Twitter

I’m pretty close to oversaturated with stories of abuse, state violence whether local or federal, and non-accountability for human harm. I watched the Eric Garner video once, and that was once too many for me.

Yesterday morning it struck me that the common link between public executions, town picnics at lynchings, ISIS beheading videos, the Janae/Ray Rice photographs and recording, and the Garner photographs and video is our willingness to re-witness the moment of violence over and over and over again with no higher value than objectifying fascination.

I don’t want to participate in that. And that’s why although I couldn’t help but hear about the release of the report on US torture via the CIA, I haven’t gone that step further to read the full report for myself.

But I’ll refer you to a few people who have:

“The first question I asked when I saw the Abu Ghraib pictures was, ‘My god, where were the doctors when all this was going on? How did the government turn off the protests from the medical system?’ What I discovered instead was that the doctors and psychologists were built into the interrogational abuses. So it wasn’t a matter of turning off their protests, it was a matter of a structured system of complicity.” —Dr. Stephen Miles, Doctors Who Torture

I did notice which band of activists had been more or less silent about local torture via police #BlackLivesMatter but threw itself into full outrage over federal torture via the Agency in #TortureReport. And I found that baffling given the issues and stakes were the same, just expressed at different levels of government.

CREW’s Daniel Schuman asked, “Why isn’t the debate about the damage US torture created, not the concerns about its occurring becoming public?” Good question, Daniel.

Before the report was released, I wrote about the way the United States has instrumentalized human life and bodily integrity, considering state assaults “acceptable trades” in the course of statecraft and order-keeping. The observation only became more salient once activists began posting excerpts and footnotes from the CIA record.

But on Twitter I also raised the question of addressing the federal expression of violence and dismissing its local counterpart. Who benefits, I asked, from our addressing only one level of analysis and our reticence to draw connections across the levels of our system?

My guess is that the system has adapted to cynicism about it at federal level: we easily joke about a sluggish Congress and shrug about bought-and-paid-for legislators. These jokes and shrugs do not motivate deep change. The macro level of the system expects participant distrust and accounts for it.

But local engagement is much more threatening. This is the level at which most of us live our lives; most of us don’t get to work in Congress, the executive, or the judiciary. Most of us live our lives at the level of the supermarket, the cinema, the children’s schools, the city council, and our doctor’s office. When citizens engage governance at these levels, and when activists block activity at these levels, it is much harder to pretend that life is normal and all is well.

My hope is that those who get a taste for impact at the local level will begin to shift their cynicism about whether ordinary people can influence the other levels of our society.

If you want to learn more about analyzing several levels of a complex problem at once, read these examples.

In 1967, systems scientist C. West Churchman popularized the definition of “wicked problems”: problems in social systems where definitions were “ill-formulated,” where issues were nested or consequent to other problems, where information was not well-defined, where decision-makers did not share common values, where piecemeal approaches changed the system and produced unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern, and where the problem was either difficult or impossible to solve.

If that doesn’t describe recurring social questions like immigration, economic stability, policing strategy, climate change, and asymmetrical war, I don’t know what does.

So take a look at two articles. The first, an editorial from Elsevier’s Landscape and Urban Planning Journal, reviews the literature on wicked problems, notes that we seem to be co-evolving with wickedness or complexity in our environment, and highlights the AAA approach to these kinds of problems: awareness, acceptance, and adaptation. The second, a recent conference paper, is a careful example of multi-level systemic analysis applied to Mexico’s drug trade. The author maps the problem’s precipitating factors and the result looks like a hornet’s nest. That is entirely appropriate!

This is the kind of analysis that people who intend to produce deep change need to do, do early, and do often. There’s no dodging complexity by blocking out three-fourths of the realities involved and oversimplifying the remainder.

If you want deep change, you need deep perspective.

Also read or listen to these links.

  • Henry Giroux tracing state violence over the last 60 years. (TruthDig)
  • Tony Robbins on the interview tour for his new book on priorities and investing for results – this is a 2-part interview with Tim Ferriss. Read the comments on Amazon before you buy.
  • Nafeez Ahmed describing the DOD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which includes “strategic” study of Twitter accounts and social contagion. (London Guardian)
  • Chris Bragg about one of the attorneys who used to help disclose corporate influence in government and who now helps companies cover their tracks.
  • Forbes reviews Ed Catmull’s book about building Pixar and making peace with mistakes, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. My favorite quote: “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new… If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

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Reader Review 10

Fewer than 36 hours before the People’s Climate March in NYC!
But between that and the Scottish independence referendum (#indyref), there’s a lot of good writing to look over. Let this week’s long and short reads help you catch up.

Watch Disruption and inform yourself, but leave the fear behind

Climate Stew: Disruption Film and Review (Keisha McKenzie | @mackenzian)
I updated my review of 350.org’s documentary Disruption for the Climate Stew blog! Disruption is neither dispassionate nor impartial: it’s an issue film and includes several calls to action. During my first viewing, I made a list of over 25 organizations and researchers who I’m looking forward to following up with. I’ll share that list with you next week after the March.

City Lab: A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change (James West | @jameswest2010)

The world’s major economies are increasingly failing to do what’s needed to to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. That was the target agreed to by countries attending the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit… at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century—twice the agreed upon rate.

West points out that some countries have leaped into responsiveness and others (like the US) have lagged.

As the question of global climate is transnational, our responses must be transnational as well. But so far, political solutions continue to be floated as discrete national solutions, and so results vary widely as the PWC report shows. That’s not going to work: nature does not respect geopolitics.

We should have absorbed that insight back in the early days of acid rain. In the 1970s, researchers started to track acid deposits across the US and Canadian borders and the two nations began to negotiate a common policy. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway tell that story in their book on the denial industry, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Worth reading and asking yourself how much has changed.

Geopolitics and the referendum of the year

Politics.co.uk: Scottish Referendum: We have witnessed a total breakdown in political legitimacy (Ian Dunt | @iandunt)

The sharpest comment on the systemic implications of the referendum that I’ve seen so far. Dunt writes from the left political aisle, and directly addresses what happens when one political ideology (in this case, neoliberalism) overwhelms both the political proposals made by mainstream parties and also the media’s ability to ask the questions that the people need them to.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The turnout at #indyref—over 84%—has amazed those observers who’ve bought into the “Citizens Of Today Are So Apathetic” story line.

Scotland Decides: 84.6% is the highest turnout in the UK since women won equal voting rights in 1928.
(c) BBC News, via Twitter

My conclusion is simply this:

If you ask the People questions that matter to them in language they understand; if you support the People in grasping the stakes; and if you make their shared investment in outcomes clear, they will respond.

Is there any social change issue for which this isn’t true?

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Reader Review 8

Long and short reads for your next weekend review. May 2014 edition. 

Social Web Demographics Shift, and Bells Toll [Prematurely?] for Email, Facebook, and Twitter

Buzzfeed: What I Learned After Quitting Email For A Week (Charlie Warzel) < A whole week!
Deadspin: Facebook Is Dead (Drew Magary)
The Atlantic: A Eulogy for Twitter (Adrienne LaFrance, Robinson Meyer)

Core quotes: “Email doesn’t need to change, we do.” “Facebook is not about meeting new people, which is what the rest of the Internet is all about. [Facebook] helps you find old somebodies and then, after the rush of nostalgia is gone, it helps you use those people for something. And that is why it’s useless.”

The Twitter “eulogy” cites the temporary email quitter, and all three eulogies are premature. I see in these rants more “we now feel out of place on these platforms” than “these platforms are doomed because of design or market collapse.”

The question to ask now is whether platform stockholders will be shaken by these prophecies; their confidence is what usually determines whether platforms rise or fall. Facebook is the best example of a major moneymaker that does not privilege user comfort or preference and may never do so unless those users become a significant funding source themselves. Until such time, the audience to which Facebook yields is the advertiser.

Variances in Exposure to Environmental Toxins

Mother Jones: This Is How Racist Your Air Is: If you’re white, you’re probably breathing cleaner air. (Julia Lurie)

(c) Mother Jones
(c) Mother Jones

How ethnic minorities and poorer people are hyper-exposed to pollutants and under-served in court actions against polluters is not news to US-based environmental justice advocates. The Mother Jones article is based on a university study that correlated census data with rates of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, a product of combustion and energy manufacturing. Since “more than 5 million people of color live within 150 meters of a major US highway,” these results shouldn’t be surprising. The last town I lived in was halfway through a 5-year highway development project that cut through town. I noticed how pedestrian access and sound barriers were finished in richer and Whiter parts of the city long before they were started in the Black and Hispanic segment. As far as I know there are still no sound barriers up the street from where I used to live.

These disparities are part of the rarely acknowledged toll of poverty, which passes down from generation to generation. Last month, Al Jazeera reported on a different study that found genetic aging effects in children raised in poor households:

The scientists were surprised to find associations between the shortening of the boys’ telomeres and low family income, low levels of maternal education, family instability and a harsh parenting style, compared with boys who came from higher-income and more stable and nurturing backgrounds. In addition, disadvantaged boys who had a genetic sensitivity to dopamine and serotonin — neurotransmitters connected with happiness and feeling pleasure — experienced accelerated shortening of their telomeres, pushing them farther down the road toward stress and sickness.

Poverty and racialized urban and industrial development patterns raise complex questions, but these are the questions we need to consider. Bootstrapping opportunities one-by-one is not enough.

When the Body Alienates its Own

I’m not going to editorialize these stories—but if you care about the sustainability of your local congregation or international fellowship, they’re just the start of the stories you’ll benefit from listening to.

The First Female General Vice-President Offers Adventism a Path Out of Alienation

Adventist Review: Last Word: ‘Strength to Love’ (Ella Simmons)

Dr. Simmons prepared these remarks to close the General Conference’s closed-to-most summit on gender and sexuality in March this year. Her time to speak to attendees was abridged and so she was unable to deliver them in full. Appreciation to the editors of the church paper for releasing these remarks. Since they vary in some ways from what some attendees reported her to have said, it’s not clear what was pre-written and what was extemporaneous.

How will we affirm the rights of those with whom we disagree while maintaining our religious, theological, and spiritual identity?

Some among us believe that it is impossible to do this as respects our differing understandings of homosexuality and alternative sexualities. But the Scripture that shaped this community of faith teaches us to corporately and individually seek God when we meet these challenges. When faced with a leadership responsibility that seemed to him an impossibility, Solomon asked God for discernment and wisdom, and it was granted. James reminds us that if we ask for wisdom, God will surely give it to us (James 1:5).

Although it is not—and will not be—easy, we need not falter.

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Reader Review 05

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

Quakers examining core principles: non-violence and a returning Christ

QuakerQuaker: A Hermeneutic of Non-Violence (Randy Oftedahl)

QuakerQuaker is a site that collects posts from Friends (Quakers) from across the internet and allows members to discuss the points they raise. Quakers are well known for their “peace testimony,” a conviction and witness about peace-building and war that has expanded over generations. In this post, Oftedahl asks whether there is or should be a Quaker hermeneutic about non-violence: some kind of meaning and interpretation heuristic that helps Quakers identify and pursue peaceful options not just at the macro-state level but also at the micro-level of the person:

We live in an era when large scale State violence, though still very present, appears to be on wane while interpersonal, communal, and social violence, from the surveillance state to online bullying, is finding new venues in the technological age. A new “democratization of violence” is happening, as culture wars begin to look more and more like real wars. What might the Spirit require of us?

Should this [hermeneutic] include a willingness on the part of each one of us to examine and speak out against ALL forms of violence, in ourselves, in others, in our S/society, in our country, and in our world, whether inter-personal violence or cultural violence, whether in the form of militarism, or racism, or sexism, or classism, or economic exploitation, or religious prejudice, or any other form, whether historical by our ancestors or in ourselves today, whether blatant, or latent, or actively denied?—Randy Oftedahl

Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvas, 75 x 89.5 cm
“The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks, 1820

This is a question about how the identity-shaping practice of telling stories about a religious tradition and its historical advocacy might discourage an adherent from working out similar convictions in the present day, centuries removed from the contexts and concerns of their tradition’s founders.

In a sense, this is the classical “religious sustainability” question: how shall we honor our religious heritage while ensuring we’re expressing something of value in our time and passing on something valuable to those who will follow us?

I’m also mulling over a fantastic series on a Quakerly way to view the Second Coming, in terms of anticipation, transformation, and present intimacy: “Christ is come, and is coming—not Christ will come.” British Quaker and teacher Ben Pink Dandelion shared these ideas with the Canadian Yearly Meeting late last summer. The videos run about 5 hours in total.

My intent is to take a few months to revisit the concept of the peaceable kingdom, which I referred to in my talk at Loma Linda last month. I have a couple of books on my study list; if you have recommendations, please let me know.

Why Comparing Your LGBTI Children To Murderers Is Neither Supportive nor Progressive

Believe Out Loud: “If My Son Was A Murderer…” (Johnie J. Guerra)

Heard this one before? A child discloses they aren’t heterosexual. Their parent says “If you were a murderer, or in jail, or an alcoholic prostitute, I would visit you, and I would remember you in prayer, but I would mourn forever. That is what I’ll do with you now and I’ll never condone your choice.”

Nice.

The cutest kitten and puppy ever. (via Tumblr)
The cutest kitten and puppy ever. (via Tumblr)

Some Christian parents feel compelled to make some version of this speech to their LGBTI children—and while I’m sure it’s not an easy speech for the parents to deliver, it’s even more horrific for the children forced to hear and bear it. Johnie Guerra, a hetero Christian, explains in his Believe Out Loud piece why rhetoric like this just doesn’t work—and isn’t a necessary part of keeping the faith. I, too, hope his parents will adjust to his beliefs in time.

As another blogger wrote this week:

“We are complicated beings. Emotionally.  Sexually. Intellectually. Being in love can be complicated, as most of us know.
But supporting love is not complicated…

Love.  Acceptance.  Safety. Affection.  Respect… Giving another human being these things is not going to shred the very fabric of society, or ruin your children.

Your children will benefit from your willingness to get rid of those calluses and be open to more LOVE in the world. They may be one of those tender souls that the anti-gay movement is so viciously attacking.  It may be your vulnerable child you are burning painful scars into with your bigoted remarks and support of anti-gay rhetoric. It might be your child that will sit at the lunch counter and be refused service because of who they are.” —Megan P.

What’s Going on for Public Sphere Religion?

Salon: The dying right: Why Christian fundamentalists are in panic mode (CJ Werleman)
The Atlantic: How religious-freedom laws could come back to haunt the faithful (Jonathan Merritt)

Werleman reviews recent US surveys of religious adherence and whether people stay with childhood faiths over time. The Public Religion Research Institute’s survey, which CJ cites, is worth looking over:

Among its key findings for Millennials: that almost one-third of Millennials who leave their childhood church say they did so because of that church’s anti-LGBT policies. 14% said church anti-LGBT policies were a very important factor in their decision to leave, and 17% said it was somewhat important. On general perception, 70% of Millennials surveyed think religious groups’ anti-LGBT approach alienates people.

Similarly, “Majorities of Americans perceive three religious groups to be unfriendly to LGBT people: the Catholic Church (58%), the Mormon church (53%), and evangelical Christian churches (51%). Perceptions of non-evangelical Protestant churches, African-American churches and the Jewish religion are notably less negative.” As I’ve said many times, these are well-earned reputations; they’re not unfounded perceptions at all.

The Adventist denomination and North American Division both keep wondering what’s going to happen to their Millennial members. As even the GC’s Archives and Research office realizes, we can draw the lines between the church’s anti-LGBT work and my generation’s perceptions of it; what remains to be seen is whether we’ll change anything, or rather dig in and hope that Adventists trained to sustain the church’s current trajectory will carry the denomination into increasingly “pure” irrelevance over the next 25-40 years. Meanwhile those constituencies will also change and I can only hope that the denomination will adapt to them better than it has to its North American membership.

Werleman notes how some Christians affiliated with the right political wing have responded to and stoked these demographic trends: “These ‘religious freedom’ bills did not arrive here overnight,” he says; “they’re three decades in the making.” While Adventism was more hands-off in its public sphere work during the Moral Majority’s rise (1970s-1980s), it has still been affected by the MM/Religious Right’s approach. Even today, the church paper, the Adventist Review continues to promote columns and “analysis” from Albert Mohler (Southern Baptist Convention).

By contrast, Merritt, an evangelical columnist, recently took some hits for questioning the anti-LGBTI “religious freedom” discrimination laws being proposed across the US, in Kansas, Arizona, and Tennessee, for instance. In this column, he asks the question he shared on his website a week or two ago: “If Christians really believe they’re becoming marginalized, why would they disempower marginalized people in the marketplace?”

The thought that has recurred for me ever since this story cycle began was “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” But ethics of reciprocity are, as it turns out, low-hanging ethical fruit: even children know how to trade. Surely religious ethics can call one to something a little less self-centered than “better not persecute if we don’t want to be persecuted”?

Unfortunately this seems to be the beginners’ level we’re at right now.

What intolerance looks like outside the US: inter-religious violence in the Central African Republic

Washington Post: Christian vigilantes wielding machetes have killed scores of Muslims (Sudarsan Raghavan)
NPR: Jewels Lie Beneath The Violence In The Central African Republic (Gregory Warner)

Between these two articles from the Washington Post and NPR, we get a sense of how religion and economics and ethnocentrism and nurtured grudges can produce and maintain cycles of vicious violence, cycles that some religious people struggle to stop or don’t even wish to stop. I’m reminded of the 1990s genocides in Serbia and Rwanda, each fueled and coddled by different kinds of religious adherents.

I’m concerned that our moral outcomes are so mixed. I’m also concerned that contemporary moral arguments seem so tangled up with fiscal concerns rather than more fundamental human values: what we plan to do with minorities is evaluated in terms of legal and institutional policy impacts, not impacts to the human person. It can’t always be about the dollar: people will always matter more.

I’m keeping an eye on updates on the situation in CAR and will share when I see news. It unnerves me that it didn’t merit a mention at the Academy Awards this weekend when the Ukraine and Venezuela did. We have the capacity to attend to all critical issues, and I hope CAR and Uganda don’t get left behind.

[Update re. Uganda: Local civil society workers have published several concrete ways that concerned non-Ugandans can support them now. Hop over to GLAAD and check out their list. Note, too, that they don’t recommend general aid conditionality.]

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Reader Review #04

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

When spirituality gets corporatized: The commercial dharma

Tricycle Mag: Protesters crash Google talk on corporate mindfulness at Wisdom 2.0 conference (Alex Caring-Lobel)

Alex’ sharp critique of corporate spirituality—Buddhist-ish instruction of mindfulness to help corporations improve business effectiveness—prompted me to write on Twitter “The snark is strong with this one.”

And so it is, but perhaps no more than Zizek’s challenge to compassionate consumerism. Both Caring-Lobel and Zizek challenge the way that capitalism and corporatism have co-opted narratives of social concern and/or spiritual awareness. For Tricycle Mag and Curtis White, Google’s ability to sponsor a presentation at Wisdom 2.0 over local objections about its business impacts is a sign that mindfulness has been divorced from its religious roots and any responsibilities that those roots might challenge practitioners to address.

A January 2014 TIME cover reignited similar questions about how publications package and represent practices like yoga and meditation to Western readers—almost exclusively with photographs of thin, White women, and usually in terms of individual benefits and stress relief.

The RSA animated part of Zizek’s talk in 2010:

(A London Guardian columnist snapped back at Zizek quite hard the next year. The debate continues.)

If the Other feels forced to cover, we all lose out

Harvard Business Review: Fear of being different stifles talent (Kenji Yoshino and Christie Smith)

Yoshino and Smith surveyed 3,000 corporate employees and analyzed participants’ responses by demographic categories. They found that when employees felt pressured to “cover” or repress their differences to fit in with the corporate culture, they also reported feeling less committed to the organization, less self-assured, and less engaged.

I look forward to research that correlates these self-reports to more objective performance measures, and I suspect that the patterns will be similar: environments that encourage employee self-repression also purchase poorer employee performance. There is already some related research showing that stereotype threats undermine students’ performance in tests.

“Obeying God rather than men” on the left side of the political spectrum

Quaker Quaker: The case of 1st amendment vs. 1st commandment (Clem Gerdelmann)

A short reflection on how theocratic arguments can be made for people who are otherwise left-leaning. For instance, if the law of the land is pro-segregation, but you feel compelled to promote equality, you might just appeal to your deity as creator of all and consider human rights that deity’s legacy to all.

Gerdelmann doesn’t explain what we should do with this reasoning, whether we should think it valid or invalid; he simply offers it as a narrative that complicates the usual dichotomy of “constitutional permissions vs. moral imperatives.”

This morning another Quaker article caught my attention. Friend minister and theology professor Dr. Wess Daniels weighs the difference between denominational branding—PR marketing—and rearticulating denominational mission and impact as salt, light, and center of transformation. This mirrors some of the conversations I had with Seventh-day Adventists at this weekend’s panel on the future of the church and its relationship with Millennial members.

If someone tells you not to look in a box, do you look?

Vimeo: Bombay Sapphire’s Imagination Video series

The short film is a fantastic medium in the right hands. Imagination Video is a series of shorts based on the same script and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire. The three below are my favorites, and are all subtitled.

What to do about the US’ tolerance for violence against black men?

New York Times: Young, Black, and Male in America (Room for Debate Panel)

A nine-strong panel of commentators discusses black men, assumptions of criminality, education access, parenting, employment, multi-generational stigmatization, and low conviction rates for cases where people coded unarmed and non-aggressive people as a threat and killed them.

“Stand Your Ground” laws have received special attention since the Trayvon Martin case (2012) and similar cases since then (e.g. Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Jonathan Ferrell). Esther Armah also writes on the latest case in which a white man who shot at a car full of young black men has been convicted for shooting at several of them, but not convicted for actually killing one. She also framed that case in terms of social entitlement and the privileged expectation that Others will submit to one on demand.

While there are several articles reflecting on the violence trend, the NYT series links the outcome to possible sources elsewhere in society. Is it a pattern we can break?

HT for the NYT piece to Broderick Greer, a Virginia-based MDiv student and writer.
Related: Dr. L’Heureux Dumi Lewis-McCoy’s article on the PBS education documentary, American Promise, which focuses on two Black American boys’ experience with discipline and diagnosis in public-private education.

On the intern/no-hire cycle: for creatives, what’s the path forward?

Buzzfeed: Can the intern hamster wheel be stopped? (Doree Shafrir)

This is the article that inspired the #myinternship hashtag on Twitter this afternoon. Lots of stories and experiences from current and former interns there.

People who are on the internship hamster wheel for years need to think about whether these industries are right for them, and we who are now in charge need to figure out a way to be able to hire the brightest, most creative people if we want our industries to survive. Keeping the gates completely closed to young people—and their new ideas and perspectives—is probably the fastest way to ensure our collective irrelevance. —Doree Shafrir