July 29, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Why information fails

A close-up photo of a wide grey rope tangled on the floor. — Photo credit: Tim Boote

Last month, the London Guardian reported that the mantra of the Brexit campaigners was “Facts don’t work… You have got to connect with people emotionally.”

MSNBC’s Maddow Show contributors also fretted about this political information approach spreading to Europe from the United States. But emotion-heavy, data-light appeals have long been part of British and continental European politics: propaganda isn’t an American invention!

Is this really what we’re exporting? Assurances that ‘facts don’t work,’ ‘the Trump success’ is a model worthy of emulation, and subject-matter experts are better left ignored?'” —Steven Benen

I invested eight years in learning the arts and science of informing people. Technical communication is about effective information; rhetoric is about effective persuasion. And while the two fields are so related I could take coursework in the same program and from the same cohort of instructors, they are distinct.

We learn from both fields to handle information with respect and not to use information structures to mislead, obscure, or harm. There’s something deeply unsettling about graduating out of such a program and into a public sphere that does not seem to value “facts.”

But there are psychological reasons why people prefer pathos (emotional appeals) and ethos (credibility markers) to logos (logical argument, data, and fact), and it’s probably not going to change.

On the blog You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney describes several ways our intuitions and habits of thought betray us. The Backfire Effect is one such betrayal based on the fact that we usually treat our beliefs like prized property and guard them more carefully than we do our own homes.

Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.—David McRaney

This is why a site like the Washington Post has ended its debunking column: readers absorbed only initial misinformation. Clarifying myths or correcting partial truths only seemed to entrench people’s prior commitment to stories and claims later proven wrong. Facts weren’t working, and misinformation sticks.

Psychologist and writer M. Scott Peck wrote about this in his own way decades ago. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck explains how we set up homeland security not only around single beliefs but also around our larger belief systems:

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”
M. Scott Peck

Peck argues that we have to be “dedicated to reality” in order to stay healthy, to make sound decisions, and to make progress that benefits us and others. How we relate to facts makes all the difference: we can be healthy when we’re continuously relating. Establishing a once-for-all-time relation as if the world is a closed, fixed system doesn’t work. And yet we demonstrate the backfire effect as we resist new facts and undermine the reform that information often requires of us.

People working on issues like climate change are taking this information on board, and rather than simply offering people “the facts” are sharing stories that allow members of the public to engage emotionally, leading with the issues with their values and priorities, not just logically with charts and graphs. LGBTQ organizers are doing likewise.

Why did Britain’s Remain campaign not do that?

How can you engage more than the raw facts when you have opportunities to inform and persuade others in your own career?

June 7, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

When authenticity is thought foolish, it matters most.

I just wrote about how authority, authorship, and authenticity are etymologically related and can improve the way we interact with each other.

And then there’s a New York Times op-ed talking about, “Well actually, that’s a terrible idea and only works if you’re Oprah.”

"Oh no. Oh no, no, no." (Screenshot via VH1 and Twitter) — “Oh no. Oh no, no, no.” (Screenshot via VH1 and Twitter)

In the Times article, Adam Grant, who teaches psychology at Wharton’s School of Business, argues that society should promote sincerity rather than authenticity on the assumption that sincerity doesn’t involve self-revealing without regard for others or failure to self-monitor but is rather “being the person you claim to be.”

No one wants to hear everything that’s in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out your mouth.” —Adam M. Grant, New York Times, June 5, 2016

I agree that some discussions of “being yourself” seem to assume there’s a core, fixed Self to be uncovered or promoted, and that’s incredibly Platonic. A more Aristotelian view would include the idea that there’s not a fixed Self but we rather show up in a given moment and are accountable for how we present ourselves there and then.

But even with that shift of perspective on the Self, I couldn’t see how Grant’s distinction between what’s genuine and what’s consistent added to what authenticity researchers have actually said. In fact, what I’ve read from Brené Brown and others suggests that doing what we commit to do is fundamental to authentic life, relationships, and work. Authenticity is the consequence of setting up relationships that respect us and others, not just others, and not just us.

Fallacy Ref makes interpreting deductions and inferences a lot more interesting. (Credit: Glen Welch)

I spent some time talking about the article on Twitter this Sunday, and I wasn’t the only one who left it with a furrowed brow. So it was great to see Brené Brown engage the op-ed on her LinkedIn page. She specifically challenged the way Grant had used her research:

The definition of authenticity that I use in my work (The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly) is long and nuanced. Grant pulled nine words out of context. Why? Because using the central part of my definition of authenticity would have bankrupted his entire argument that authenticity is the mindless spewing of whatever you’re thinking regardless of how your words affect other people.

In my research I found that the core of authenticity is the courage to be imperfect, vulnerable, and to set boundaries…

“Don’t be yourself” is terrible advice. Trying to weaponize authenticity feels gimmicky and opportunistic. Quoting my definition was a choice. So was perverting it. Grant’s question is relevant, but his conclusions and the presentation of those ideas lack both authenticity and sincerity.” —Brené Brown, June 5, 2016

Grant, following Aristotelian philosophy, sees virtues as the moderate median “between deficiency and excess,” and worries about the extremes. Brown, based on her research, argues that the construct of authenticity has bounds. Authenticity is like white “chocolate”: once you take the chocolate out, it’s not chocolate anymore.

Words have meanings, she says, and so do constructs like authenticity, so if we misunderstand those meanings, we can’t properly address issues that people experience while applying a construct in the relational world.

For people in most of my demographic categories, this isn’t a world that rewards genuineness, transparency, honesty, or sincerity. This is a world that rather rewards selective presentation and unquestioning norm compliance. We can’t fit in. But we can make ourselves sick trying, and should any of us succeed, even superficially, we’re praised for the shine on our bootstraps.

Who do we grant the liberty to choose emotional honesty, even when that means saying, “I don’t know,” “I’m not ready,” or “I can’t do what you want, so let’s work on an alternative?” So many people from so many slices of society have connected with Brown’s research because she offers an alternative to the usual way, a world in which leaders especially never say “I don’t know,” “I’m afraid,” or “I have doubts” and are framed as naive or ineffective if they do.

Fortune praises deception as a “leadership skill,” while Forbes describes it as a competence marker. That’s the climate of business, entrepreneurship, moving, and shaking in which Grant wonders about “too much authenticity.” But out where the rest of us live, there’s rather a shortage of trust. We expect leaders to lie to us—because they do—and we distrust what they say and how they manage information because we’re learning and they’re teaching us that they don’t prize integrity and consider it a disadvantage.

This is a cycle of doom. We have to scratch our way out, daily choice by daily choice and redesign by redesign, even if, at least for now, others stand on the sidelines and call us foolish.

February 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

From actions to metaphors, language matters

Last year I read Connie Willis’ novel, Doomsday Book, a blend of historical research and character fiction set during 14th Century England’s bout with plague. It’s a terrifically disturbing book because it challenges the reader to engage a period of deep, legitimate, mortal fear and doesn’t offer characters or readers the usual mid-crisis escape hatches.

It wasn’t possible for the people of that time to detour into denial: death was visceral and ever-present. As much as some tried, they couldn’t use religion to block out reality: the plague and attendant violence and social chaos affected the religious and the non-religious without discrimination. And science and technology also failed them until the epidemics had run their course.

The only way for them to survive the experience was to be fully present and engaged, and then to rebuild their world with those who survived.

Deep engagement from people of faith is essential.

That’s how we’ve handled crises. We don’t want to have to do that on a global scale again if we don’t have to. And the scientists are telling us that we really don’t have to.

People and communities of faith seem to have had a major awakening about environmental stewardship over the last few years. More and more faith-based groups and coalitions are speaking to our ability to influence the health and stability of Earth, our ecological home.

Earlier this month, I returned to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington’s 2016 interfaith summit and participated in an end-of-the-day conversation about faith leadership and climate change.

The question we asked: What can people of faith uniquely contribute to the climate action movement?

Our answer was hope.

Hope is what people of faith can offer the world.

A group photo of the attendees of the 2016 DC Interfaith Leadership Summit. Keisha is in the first row, toward the bottom right. Everyone is smiling and holding up two fingers in the hand gesture for "peace." — The annual IFCMW Interfaith Leadership Summit attracts some of the most engaged people of faith I have ever met. (Image credit: IFCMW.)

So much of the discourse around climate change frames it as “crisis,” or “corruption,” or “conspiracy,” but people of faith are well-positioned to offer an alternate framework.

Faith and spirituality can generate an orientation of hope based on humanity’s capacity to not only create problems but also solve them, to not only break down order but also build new orders from periods of chaos.

People of faith can ground their hope in Christian teachings about human will and the divine inspiration that draws us toward the good; or Jewish teachings about our responsibility to safeguard human welfare and protect what future generations need to thrive; or Muslim teachings about the deen, the comprehensive religious duty that includes managing resources without waste or excess.

Hope drives coalitions like Blessed Tomorrow, a multi-faith advocate of environmental responsibility that offers faith-full responses to carbon pollution and climate change. Hope motivates Green Faith, which trains people of faith and encourages them to lead in their local communities on stewardship and justice issues like auditing the environmental sustainability of their congregations or working with other groups to lobby for more effective toxic chemicals regulations. And hope propels organizers like the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and Green Muslims to amplify their traditions’ historical teachings about our ecosystem and encourage faith institutions to make more progress.

Our language doesn’t always align with our motivations.

“People are motivated to make wise choices more by hope and opportunity than by fear, cynicism, hatred and despair.” —David Brooks, NYT (2/9/2016)

George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, have spent their careers studying how we think. In their classic book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson show that the figures of speech we use don’t simply color our conversation, they also “govern our everyday functioning, structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.”

The language we use shapes our thinking, with core concepts opening up some possibilities and foreclosing others. (I wrote about these linked ideas, what Lakoff and Johnson call entailments, last year in connection to Christian moral theology and exclusivism.)

How we analyze the raw facts of an complex issue like climate change isn’t the only thing that matters. The metaphors we use to discuss the issue and the casual language we use to describe the other people at the table also impact us more than we realize: “metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious,” and we also make significant decisions “on the basis of inferences we derive” from our metaphors.

One of my favorite extended examples from Lakoff and Johnson’s research is the metaphor of war:

This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.

It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments .We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground…

Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle… The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR…

Our conventional ways of talking about arguments presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of. The metaphor is not merely in the words we use—it is in our very concept of an argument. the language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or [theatrical]; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way—and we act according to the way we conceive of things. (pp. 4-5)

We act according to the way we conceive of things. Our metaphors and entailed language shape how we conceive of things. And therefore our language has real world, relational consequences. Language matters.

Image: Eight white doves fly over a stylized white ark, all on a blue background with the cross, crescent, and star of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, in the background. Text: "Once we shared the same boat. Can we ride together now?" — The El-Hibri Charitable Foundation and Clergy Beyond Borders have developed guidelines for inter-religious dialogue that may help us transcend ideological polarization.

We need both a values shift and a language shift.

As part of his fierce criticism of the Vietnam war in 1967, MLK proclaimed that the world needed a values revolution. He told the Riverside Church that the logics of war, surveillance, topsy-turvy budgeting, eroded communal trust, and systemic poverty and structural disadvantage were a “way of settling differences [that] is not just.” He argued that they drew energy away from constructive care for the vulnerable “like a demonic suction tube,” and, if they were not checked, they would lead to “spiritual death.”

King insisted that he would “study war no more”—and then he framed war itself as an “enemy of the poor,” and announced his plan to “attack it as such.”

This War On War has not helped the Pentagon; in fact the government allocated the military $598 billion last fiscal year. And it has not helped poor people; in fact income inequality is worse in 2016 than it was in 1967. It is more likely that children will grow up impoverished and no more likely that they will transcend their birth economic class, especially if they are children of color, and we persist in a perpetual state of national insecurity under the DOD and the DHS.

As Lakoff and Johnson explain, the metaphor of war travels through our thoughts with networks of dominance, pain, and power-over, all entailments that work against the equity, justice, and freedom from violence that we aim for. It’s just not worth using this cognitive bundle as we work toward a stable climate or the policymakers we share our world with.

“It is a sad commentary on our society if we cannot say that something important is at stake in a societal debate without resorting to the inflated rhetoric of warfare.” —James Childress

Wars On Social Problems aren’t wars that seem to end, though they do entail plenty of human casualties. The War on Poverty hasn’t ended; nor has the War on Drugs, and only God knows when the War on Terror will be over. In The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility [2001], James Childress explains the implications of the warfare metaphor in healthcare, HIV/AIDS response, and culture change. Our rhetorical wars have human, fiscal, and moral consequences, and as much as they entrain our thinking and problem-solving, they also heighten our fight/flight responses and limit our cognitive capacity to imagine more than we currently see.

We can use faith-based hope to answer the fruitless polarization of war.

Denial comes in more forms than the overt debates of a coal-funded think tank or a policymaker lobbying on behalf of his state’s export. Our casual language, especially in the context of politics, sometimes reveals our own reliance on polarized attack-and-defense at the very time we need trans-partisan cooperative action, not war.

Language can be as imperceptible as the consensual world of norms and customs that we’re all born into and operate in unconsciously every day. That social universe is as real as the rocks outside, and yet is more subject to our amendment than we realize: the great illusion of the social universe is that it’s less malleable than the physical universe that set us up to develop our societies in the first place.

We made our societies. We’ve made our wars. And we can get off the thought-train that requires us both to have “enemies” and to “defeat” them.
The fact is that we are one humanity on one planet, our political camps don’t exempt any of us, and we need the discipline of language from our best traditions to help us to remember the facts, cooperate, and resolve what challenges us all.

The Climate Reality Project | Climate 101: A man in a white lab coat stands back to the viewer and apparently writing on a wall. To his left is a white line-graph representing the sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since life began on Earth. The objects on the ground below the line represent major eras in human history, such as the pyramids and the space shuttle era. — **The Climate Reality Project** provides straightforward, accessible information about climate change facts and how we can transition to a low-carbon economy. Add them to your resources.

February 6, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Editing Means Reality Shaping

Black History Month means unearthing grainy black-and-white photos of Black people from archives, backrooms, and attics everywhere.

The New York Times played this storyline literally this year, announcing a month-long series of photos never before published in the print newspaper or digital site.

Tweet screenshot: "NYT on excavating photos of Black subjects from its archives." —@mackenzian | Article title: "Unpublished Black History - U.S." — The New York Times launches a series on previously unpublished archival photos of Black Americans during February 2016. (Twitter)

The newspaper’s photographers once wandered Black neighborhoods and followed Black civil rights leaders and artists from event to event. They froze each photo subject on film, perhaps hoping that their work would help illuminate the lives of Black people in a society that otherwise refused to acknowledge them.

Today the Times‘ editors explain that previous teams had been too small to process all the images, that the newspaper’s publication focus had been on text journalism rather than on image-based reporting, and that editorial bias limited stories featuring Black people. All this at what was the nation’s flagship’s newspaper for most of the 20th Century.

It was a microcosm of what we all do in different ways every day.

Every archived photo and every editorial choice asks us to question whose lives and concerns are worth recognition and whose eyes we see those people through, not just historically but also in our own time.

Secondary rhetoric is an analytical term for persuasive communication about persuasive communication. We do secondary rhetoric quite naturally when we explain communication events to people who weren’t present. Recounting a past sermon over potluck is secondary rhetoric. So is live-tweeting a conference talk, or talking to siblings about a conversation with your parents.

These acts of retelling and recounting are all more than merely noting and sharing someone else’s words. They also mean making substantive choices about how to represent a communicator’s messages, the atmosphere in the location, the context for the moment, and the role that the original speaker played with their first audience.

None of these choices are neutral because meaning-making isn’t neutral. The stories we tell build up our world, framing both how we understand ourselves and how we interact with others, who we foreground and who we leave in the archives. unpublished.

Our stories are powerful reality-shaping tools that impact us and the people around us, in some cases for generations. How we handle them matters.

Worth Reading

Kay Siebler’s study of Sojourner Truth’s speech to Ohioan women’s suffrage activists in 1851, “Far from the truth.” (In Pedagogy, 10(3): 511-533, DOI: 10.1215/15314200-2010-005)

June 29, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

All Our Euphemisms Are Like Filthy Rags

Note: This article features Anansi, the Akan spider-man. And because I love you, it includes no images of actual spiders. —KM

Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag while on the flagpole outside the South Carolina state capitol building. Photo via @Bipartisanism. — Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag from atop the flagpole outside South Carolina’s Capitol Building. Photo: Adam Anderson via Bipartisan Report, Twitter.

A lot of people I know skipped church last weekend. A lot of Black people I know skipped church last weekend.

A sprinkling of days after a young White racist slaughtered nine praying Black people in the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, a lot of sweet souls skipped church, and I was tempted to be one of them.

Brokenhearted, I was tempted to crawl back under my summer blanket and wail in the timeless language of tea and chocolate and fitful sleep. Instead I rose and put on a dress shirt instead of sackcloth, and I went to the morning service at my congregation.

I left the sanctuary as empty as I’d entered it. In fact, I left even emptier than I’d entered it. I’d walked into the building with two mites of hope, and my offering dissipated in an unrelated sermon series and two nods to Charleston: one reference to “somber feelings” and one “racial…uh…stuff.”

The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist's attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 23, 2015). Art credit: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence — The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist’s attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 17, 2015). Illustration: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence

Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old.
Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old.
DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49 years old.
Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old.
Myra Thompson, 59 years old.
Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old.
Daniel Simmons Sr., 74 years old.
Susie Jackson, 87 years old.

Their bodies will be buried this week. Black churches are burning across the South. And the most my congregation could say was “racial stuff.” We couldn’t even say their names.

At Rev. Pinckney’s memorial service on June 26, President Barack Obama praised him as a good man who gave his prime years to religious and public leadership, to both preaching and protest. The president noted what inspired Pinckney to serve the communities beyond his congregation: the Black Church has always sent its servants out into the world.

“To put our faith in action is more than individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation… to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society.”

Pinckney’s persistent faith, Obama said, drew on the same spirit that inspires the U.S. to expand its freedoms and policies of care, and to account for a wider circle, not a narrower one. The faith and grace of God is in that movement. Obama unsteadily sang “Amazing Grace”; the organist helped him, and the church said Amen.

Last weekend, I couldn’t have sung with them. This weekend, the release of song still feels alien. As I watched the C-SPAN funeral feed on Friday night, it hit me that Clementa Pinckney was the same age as my sister. Six days after that supremacist killed him and the other Emanuel members, a third member of my sister’s generation, a friend, mother, wife, and the senior minister of one of my churches, “put on invisibility” and passed away.

In my fatigue over the last 10 months of relentless Black Death, and my sadness at the passing of my friend and mentor, I find myself far less awed by the “amazing grace” invoked at the Pinckney funeral and far more amazed at the apathy of the faithful.

It was amazing apathy, not grace, that kept John Newton comfortable in both slavery investments and Christian preaching for forty years before an English politician introduced him to abolitionism. How was it that the word he preached failed to awaken him to the sacred life of his African siblings?

And the AME denomination, the oldest independent Black denomination in the world—how is it that the word that the AME denomination has preached since 1816 hasn’t yet transformed it into an advocate for all Black lives, not just some? The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered equal access to civil marriage, and LGBT-antagonist church folk struck up apocalyptic mourning chants as soon as the decision hit SCOTUSblog.

Wanted to take refuge in the Black Church last weekend. Not even slightly tempted this weekend. #BlackChurchSex

— mackenzian (@mackenzian) June 26, 2015

The Emanuel 9 deserved more than limp euphemism. We deserve more than apathy in the face of inequity.

This Saturday as I ventured out to church again, Bree Newsome and James Ian Tyson brought the Confederate battle flag down from its mast in front of the South Carolina Capitol complex. Shortly after their arrest, two Capitol employees raised it again. One of the flag-raisers was Black.

After Newsome’s and Tyson’s arrest, South Carolina residents rallied outside the capitol to “Defend the Flag.” The scripture-quoting pole-climbing film-making Black activist woman and the man who spotted her on the pole had never allowed the battle flag to touch the ground: they offered the Confederate soldiers’ emblem far more respect than the secessionist movement ever claimed for them. As South Carolina’s flag came down, battle flags west of SC went up: Alabama crowds drunk on nostalgia took to the streets to declare that they, too, matter and they wished they were in Dixie.

As I saw the stories about Newsome, Tyson, and the battle flag coming down, the flag action bail fund ticked past $30,000, $40,000, $60,000, then $100,000. I saw the spirit of Anansi at work.

Kwaku Anansi is the trickster, shapeshifter, and storykeeper of the Akan diaspora. He brings wily, situational wisdom, prudence, and cunning skill to the inequitable world of the animals, that world where Tiger is king and expectations of spiders are low. The Greeks called Anansi’s gifts metis, but I grew up seeing empire-identified critics fretting over whether we should tell Anansi tales to children and blaming the spider-man for inspiring social fraud and corruption.

They were wrong. Anansi is worthy of honor. And when spun into action like spiders’ silk, Anansi’s metis is a beautiful and powerful thing.

In one story, Anansi wonders how to undermine Tiger and draw some of the boastful king’s power to himself. Tiger challenges Anansi to earn renown by besting Snake. Anansi doesn’t attack anyone. He fails at first with a conventional trap. And so our hero “goes home to think.”

“A trap will never work,” Anansi said to himself. “Snake can climb trees and slither and slide away, so I’ll have to outsmart him. And I’m the smartest fellow there is!”

And so he uses his intelligence to find a way. He appeals to Snake’s beliefs about himself, and with all his wits and hearts and guts, Anansi gets what he wants.

“You come against me with hate and oppression and violence,” Newsome shouted from the middle of the flagpole. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” And it came down. Anansi targets Tiger’s and Snake’s false pride and no one is harmed. A scripture-quoting woman climbed a pole and made the SC Capitol and its sluggish legislators look foolish.

It was the most straightforward solution I think she could have found, and it had good precedent. Not allowed to eat at a restaurant? Go sit at the counter and wait out patrons’ fury. Banned from the front of the bus? Don’t use any buses until you’re free to sit where you please on any of them. Tired of legislators stalling and want the secessionist battle flag to come down? Go up and get it yourself, and wear safety gear.

In the late 1940s, theologian and activist Howard Thurman described trickster wisdom as “perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong” (Deception, Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 58-69). As he points out, “deception” only appears in unequal relationships and in groups and societies that resist overt challenge to their symbols and structures. Thurman didn’t advocate deception: he feared that double meanings, duplicity, and feints degraded marginalized people and put them at risk for moral compromise.

But the cunning surprises that worried Thurman aren’t the only quality Anansi brings with him. The adaptability and resourcefulness of metis also showed up in Newsome’s and Tyson’s direct action yesterday. Both activists were absolutely measured, calm, and intentional, and they confounded the expectations of a system that has responded to #TakeItDown/#KeepItDown with “We’ll discuss it next legislative session.” In the meantime, the system only recognizes passive compliance and submission.

Passive compliance will not do in this season. Newsome and Tyson cooperated with police but were never once out of control. They made the pole-climb a craft (technê). Their team documented the action meticulously. And they promise there will be more to come.

All through our history we’ve seen that Anansi’s wisdom doesn’t surface on a plane of equals. And this is the challenge of marginalized people:

We immunize ourselves against fear.
We know that we are the children of heaven and earth, that we belong, that we merit existence.
We know that self-hate is worse than death and that even death cannot conquer our story.

All the while, we live in contexts that deny our humanity, our magic, and our trauma; that expect us to keep producing through pain; and that have the gall to fly supremacists’ battle flags over our coffins. One hundred and fifty-two years after emancipation, the system still hasn’t digested that we are no one’s inferior. And so we use the gifts of Anansi.

Euphemism can’t get us to clarity now. A teacher told me last week that every new headline of murder or arson is another call to know and speak the truth. She was right. Choosing the filthy rags of euphemism over the salve of truth can only delay our healing: all our euphemism is like filthy rags, and if there’s any social institution that should understand what this means for our “salvation” as a country, it’s the Christian church.

A sector of the US Adventist church recently apologized for the racism that launched it 70 years ago. Current leaders recognized that though they were not culpable for their predecessors’ wrongs, they were responsible for the system they inherited and steward today. That’s part of what knowing and speaking the truth can do.

While I kept up with the flag action on Saturday, I also saw that the National Cathedral’s dean had called for the removal of two Civil War stained windows. The National Cathedral is one of my favorite churches in the world: it took more than eight decades to build and the designs of its windows reflect that history.

I can’t agree with the dean that we should remove these panes. I do agree with him that we need historians to help us re-frame the windows with a thoughtful contextual display. As I said on Saturday, the natural fractures exposed during the Civil War persist in new forms in contemporary US politics and politicians. We can’t gut living history and think no one will notice. Racism is neither dead nor extreme, and we have to tell the truth about it.

Dear Lord, I thank You for the faith that frees,
The love that knows it cannot lose its own;
The love that, looking through the shadows, sees
That You and he and I are ever one! —James Dillet Freeman

April 9, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

Philanthropy, Misanthropy, and Outrage

If there were a stock for outrage, conventional media, 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 non-profit and lobbying groups, and fundraising platforms would be mutual investors. Outrage is hot right now, and it’s making some people hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Earlier this month I shared an Indiegogo campaign that closed having raised over $17,000 for a Chicago youth homelessness project. The student-led campaign, still not matched or complemented by the students’ campus, generated a great deal of media attention and nearly 400 unique donors contributed before it closed.¹

If you were one of these donors, thank you.

Screenshot of the Aull4One campaign as of midnight April 8, 2015.

Crowd-supported campaigns excite me.

I work with organizations as they raise funds, and I’m energized by the heart of philanthropy, the love of humankind. Grassroots activists have always thrown block parties and passed the hat at meetings or services to engage community supporters, but only in the last decade has internet-based crowdfunding mated with social media platforms, and this match scales far more rapidly than a neighborhood party or offering plate could.

The result: fundraising companies like Kickstarter, Razoo, CauseVox, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, and payment services like Stripe, WePay, and PayPal that organizations and individuals can use to connect directly with audiences, post quick updates, and receive money online— all with not much more than the skills they’d use to build a common social networking page.

This technology puts the request in front of more and more people, and the social sharing uses social proofs to sell the cause, but the heart of the phenomenon is what it always was. Third parties like grant-making foundations, local and national government agencies, religious communities, and larger non-profit groups will always support public giving, but organizations’ trump card is still the ability to serve a community and inspire that community’s direct investment. With that ability, even small, local non-profits can stay independent enough to focus on their mission and adapt with their audience rather than balance community concerns against sponsors’ priorities.

Yet there’s an underbelly to this shift.

There’s a thread of misanthropy in this philanthropy.

Not all of those deploying web crowdfunding platforms tap into the love of humankind. Several major fundraisers have sprung up in the last three years that have trafficked less in philanthropy and more in misanthropy.

George Zimmerman earned over $130,000 from web fundraising after shooting and killing Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL in 2012. Two fundraisers launched the week after Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, last year raised just under $500,000 for the officer while he was still receiving a full public salary.

When Indiana restaurant Memories Pizza reaped criticism for announcing that it would serve LGBT people but not cater their weddings, a talk radio host inspired 29,161 people to give $842,442 in less than a week. A bakery that refused to bake a cake iced with an anti-LGBT message was crowd-funded to the tune of $14,549 in 6 days. And a campaign that, like the Andrews University students’ fundraiser, will support a youth homelessness program, has raised more than $132,000 in 5 days.

Funding needs are being met.
The fundraising platforms benefit as well.

I checked out GoFundMe’s terms this week: the company gleans 5% from each donation made in the United States, the fundraiser pays a 3% transaction fee, and the remaining 92% goes to the cause. A ninety-two percent net gain isn’t bad, and 8% pays GoFundMe et al. for facilitating donors’ wish to give. Under these terms, fundraising brokers earned more than $67,000 in fees from the first Memories Pizza fundraiser. If #Pizza4Equality does as well, GoFundMe and WePay will have earned more than $134,000 from facilitating outrage-based giving in just two campaigns.

During the 20th Century, the archetypal Neutral Broker was Switzerland. In our century, the crowdfunding and payment services industry has adopted that role, and online giving fueled by outrage and disgust is making these companies very tidy profits.

Disgust works, but at a cost.

Three weeks ago, I listened to writing, tech, science, and risk communication researchers describe how their students study poverty and other civic issues. They shared how a citizen campaign failed to stop the US Navy from wiping Port Chicago off the map (Sam Dragga² and Gwendolyn Gong), how much grant-seeking scientists struggle to engage the public as equals (Sarah Perrault), and how ordinary people debate the merits of hydraulic fracturing on web forums (Brian Ballentine).

Connie Mick (Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers
) explained the “politics of disgust” that undergird the enduring myth of the “welfare queen.” These politics separate the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving,” drive public policies and regulations that carve up the public into acceptable and unacceptable classes, and then reward only the former.

In the same session, Dragga and Gong recounted the 1944 military explosion in Port Chicago, CA. Port Chicago’s community activists failed to overrule the Navy’s claim over their land, and their campaign didn’t produce a complete accounting of sailors or residents killed, injured, bankrupted, or made homeless by the military accident. In that incident the Navy asserted an eminent domain claim over one town, but today, landowners around the nation are being asked to yield surface land and mineral rights to natural gas companies for fracking programs. Some residents resist out of disgust for corporate encroachment on family property, and others cooperate.

Each study presented in that session made me think of the balance of power among organizations, citizens, governments, and interest groups, and the disgust rhetorics that drive racist violence, LGBT-antagonistic policies, and discrimination against people based on beliefs, assumptions, and fears about their social groups.

At a psychological level, disgust reduces to revulsion, and it triggers reflexes like withdrawal, dissociation, and avoidance. Applied to people, disgust marks the border between “alive” and “dead,” “safe” and “dangerous,” our group and theirs, and the contamination risked when the boundaries between Us and Other soften. As Daniel Bitton writes, “People are compelled to force others to cease disgusting behaviour in others, and to humiliate or do violence to people with disgusting personality traits.” Disgust has social consequences.

Because disgust affects how we perceive and respond to people, so does triggering that emotion through rhetoric: there are human/humane costs to using metaphors and arguments that tie social groups to our disgust reflex, and yet the strategy is so common in political rhetoric, in the cable news cycle, in internet comment sections, and in non-profit fundraising campaigns. I once warned a non-profit organization that I would never donate again if they sent me another reactive outrage solicitation. I doubt my email stopped them from publishing that kind of rhetoric elsewhere, but it did stop them from continuing to inflict it on me!

If it’s true that disgust is reflexive and operates at a more “primal” neurological level than complex thought, how helpful is it to invoke it in public discussions? Does deploying disgust preempt a thorough debate? Who benefits when it becomes a routine part of communication or fundraising strategies? I wonder, too, if we adjust to outrage and disgust strategies in public communications and whether we notice if an organization divests, giving up disgust as a way to mobilize its supporters.

Disgust is legal. It doesn’t breach fundraising ethics codes. And it works.
Can it get us the results we want?

The values and ethics codes of the Association for Fundraising Professionals, CFRE International (the leading fundraising certifier), and the Society for Technical Communication (which governs technical communicators and rhetoricians like me) don’t have much to say about deploying disgust in public fundraising communications. Of course, professional codes don’t constrain non-professionals like those who use GoFundMe, but professional norms can define the behavior boundaries in which lay people choose and act.

The AFP ethics code, for example, requires AFP members not to “engage in activities that harm the members’ organizations, clients or profession or knowingly bring the profession into disrepute,” and insists that solicitations be “accurate.” It doesn’t otherwise limit the kinds of solicitations that fundraisers can make or the language they use to invite donors to give. Members may not “disparage competitors” and must describe their organizations’ services truthfully, but they aren’t bound to restrict the use of stereotypes or biased language and metaphors in development communications.

By contrast, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy’s professional conduct statement does include an explicit requirement that members respect “all individuals without regard to race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.” However AHP members honor this rule in their routine choices, respect and revulsion cannot coexist, and only respect can nurture a culture in which the love of humankind becomes the air we breathe.

When I looked at the distribution of small donations to large on the Indiegogo and GoFundMe sites I referred to at the start of this article, I noticed how many of these donations were small, one-time amounts: $10, $20, $50, $100, $200. Each federal election cycle, there’s excitement about the small donor’s power to combine with hundreds of thousands of other small donors and influence legislators through crowd force. Compare this more realistic analysis of Obama’s 2008 campaign income: Politico frets that the era of small contributions “appears to be ending before it ever fully took hold”.

I share Politico’s concern about mega-donors gaining disproportionate influence over the legislative process. Yet I’m not so cynical as to imagine that a culture of philanthropy can thrive without either the exceptionally wealthy or the exceptionally poor. A generous giving culture involves us all, no matter who we are, and no matter how much money we have to share. A generous giving culture also challenges us to reconsider our definitions of wealth as well as our implicit or explicit rules about who’s “deserving” enough to give and receive.

These rules aren’t set above our pay grade.

In the end, as specialists and as community members, we decide who may join us in our ideal world.
And only we can decide whether disgust is the best possible strategy we have for getting there.

1. This week, Andrews University president Dr. Niels-Erik Andreasen announced a new taskforce “to help us gain greater understanding of this problem [LGBT youth homelessness] and propose helpful responses to the needs of these young people.” The university is receiving comments on this at suggestions@andrews.edu.
Andreasen’s letter includes no timeline for the new study, for assessing proposals, or for implementing action.

2. Sam Dragga (Texas Tech University), one of the co-presenters at the CCCC 2015 panel I refer to here, supervised my doctoral research on the organizational structure, competing values, and government staff that influenced the British government’s case for war in Iraq in 2002.

rhetoric