slavery : mackenzian

October 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The ability to choose

As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm… There’s no way to live in this world and come up clean.” —Me, in August

When I visit new places, I like to pay attention to which kinds of commercial resources are in the area. I look at the ratio of banks to check cashing places and the financial terms those institutions offer in that zip code. I check out the kinds of grocery and restaurant options available. I notice which public transit services residents have accessible to them. All of these and other things tell me a story about the community and how invested its governments are in the people who live in there.

I walked around today in a part of New York that has Chase Bank signs every few blocks. New York City is JP Morgan Chase Bank’s home base, and one of its recent merging partners, Bank of the Manhattan Company, has operated on that part of the NY archipelago for 217 years.

Contemporary Chase advertising may be fresh, trendy, and blue, but whenever I see the company’s name, I associate it with the sour history of big bank participation in both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the German-Jewish Holocaust. It’s not just a small-business-friendly bank. It’s also a bank that’s nourished itself on blood. And it’s unusual only in the sense that it’s publicly acknowledged this history.

Working with any centuries-old institution means becoming part of its stories. When the institution’s stories involve oppression and blood, that means our stories will too. We, too, become entangled; we, too, become enrolled.

There’s no living in this region, on this land, under these flags, on this planet, and still having clean hands. Yet only some of us seem to get a choice about how much dirt gets under our fingernails.

It’s expensive to be poor, and not just in money but also in options: what makes wealth most meaningful, after we’ve gained the ability to survive and assure our fundamental needs, is our ability to choose more of the social stories that we participate in.

When only a handful of banks are accessible, and each bank punishes the public with fees for using competitors’ services in a pinch, people have a much more limited capacity to choose whether they’ll partner with an institution that grew rich from seizing Jews’ assets or from turning enslaved people into debt securities. Even when these organizations have verbally apologized, their contemporary position rests on them leveraging the wealth they gained once upon a wicked time.

I don’t know what to tell you about how to choose when we’re all one or two degrees away from evil or when we ourselves are the portal through which injustice flows. I can’t tell you, for instance, to eschew every major bank and retreat to credit unions, though I know people who have. Many of us participate in the stock market in some way, directly or indirectly, and evem when we abandon certain banks on principle, the health of our portfolios is still bound up with theirs.

We can’t withdraw from the “network of mutuality,” even when we want to. We can only strive for a world in which individuals and institutions alike have meaningful choices and the rough places of our collective pasts are “made plain” through much more just relationships. The past took centuries of intention to create, and so will the divergent future that I’d prefer to live in. It’s a future where there’s room for all, and all may choose.

October 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Resisting conventional waste

Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

“These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.” —Me, in June

I’m preparing to move a few states north (details soon, I promise). So I spent several hours this weekend walking around my next work city, reviewing housing options, and learning more than I ever expected about urban apartments.

I also had thoughts how this culture structures itself around plenty, but in so doing, often produces wastefulness.

The first all-you-can-eat buffet I went to in this country was a chain diner in Texas. For so many dollars per meal, one could have as many entrees as one had fingers, and as many different kinds of food as one had toes.

That first time, I piled plates as high as I wanted, and it seemed cost effective until I realized that my wide eyes weren’t soundly judging my actual hunger. The structure of the restaurant made it easy to overestimate how much fuel I could spoon into my body and how much value an all-I-could-eat meal ticket could reasonably give me. I eventually grew disgusted about the meal scraps that restaurant staffers later threw away.

I thought of that diner recently while exploring a 60 year old high-rise with a mandatory heating plan. The building’s management company administers the heat. Residents automatically receive central heat, but can’t customize or modulate it. So, physics being what it is, the top of the building swelters, only the mid-level floors get reasonable temperatures, and no one can opt out.

This sort of plan is attractive to people trying to save cash: how sweet not to have to worry about heat. But I balked quite hard when our tour guide recommended opening windows to let excess heat out. It assumes that waste is normal. Energy conservation, apparently, is not.

Focusing on the micro picture, i.e. how an apartment’s chosen approach allows individuals to rebalance their budget, can sometimes undermine the macro picture: that we are where we are because of both individual and collective choices, that we can stand to be more careful with each other, that we can be more conscious of how whatever works for some of us might nevertheless impact others of us downstream.

“I’m having a really strong reaction to this heat,” I said, sweating.

But the macro picture of collective wastefulness remains whatever I do or don’t do. There’s a structure operating in this and other complex scenarios that is much greater than my own scruples. That structure doesn’t bend because of individual components. We have to learn to deal well anyway.

July 21, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Resistance

A white/translucent jellyish stretches out in a bright blue lit tank. Gorgeous with a sting: Jellyfish at the National Aquarium, Maryland. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie — Gorgeous with a sting: Jellyfish at the National Aquarium, MD. Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie

An ex-slave woman told of the doctrine of resistance passed onto her by her slave mother, who refused to be whipped by slave owners.

The daughter claimed that: ‘…The one doctrine of my mother’s teaching which was branded upon my senses was that I should never let anyone abuse me.’

The heart of the slave mother’s doctrine of resistance was this: ‘Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick; if you can’t kick, then bite.'” —Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk

Contemporary Christians taught not to resist evil may struggle with narratives like this. Hollywood typically depicts enslaved people complying with White supremacist terror.

Only occasionally, as in Nate Parker’s forthcoming The Birth of the Nation and WGN America’s TV series Underground, do we get to see stories rooted in the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people, stories where they use their agency to resist the dominant order in both overt and subtle ways.

These stories are often violent, as the system was violent. They include incredible cruelty, as the system did. I still think it’s important that we have them.

We who’ve been taught not to resist not have to figure out ways to exercise our agency in this world.

We don’t all have Super-PAC degrees of wealth. We don’t all have the ability to vote. But we all have some measure of agency.

And, whatever our circumstances, we all have to figure out effective ways to use it, to resist the temptation to believe that we don’t matter, that our choices don’t count, and that we can only live in a world that others build.

With the electoral choices my American friends have this year, and with so much turmoil at all levels of society: “Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick; if you can’t kick, then bite.”

July 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Serving the micro by changing the macro

On the blog Ask A Manager, author Alison Green offers job-seekers and employees advice on interacting with their supervisors, managing relationships with colleagues, and developing their careers.

A few weeks ago, Green responded to a question from someone who had forbidden an employee from taking time off to attend their graduation. The letter-writer had granted other employees time to attend concerts, and accommodated substitutions that workers had arranged on their own, but refused their “go-to-person” the chance to celebrate their own achievement. The employee resigned.

Of course Green and the Ask A Manager community had a field day with this scenario: The letter-writer had failed to honor the employee’s loyalty and reliability, and had set aside their rules to accommodate others with much less significant commitments. The manager had no basis for denying the employee a release, and the employee was not the problem.

That employee, a first-generation college student and someone clearly committed to their job, had spent years working in a hostile system. But their environment only becomes completely intolerable when they need a few hours to celebrate their hard work and receive punishment instead of reasonable accommodation.

On my recent reading book list is M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. In the first few chapters, Copeland explains why we have to ground philosophy and theology right where we are, acknowledging our particularly embodied experiences and how bodies like ours have been framed through history.

She combs through first-person accounts of the United States’ system of enslavement to highlight not only the conditions of enslavement that Black people faced here, but also their resistance strategies: exercising faith, prayer, and hope independently of White people; educating themselves, often in secret; physically resisting assault attempts, even at the risk of retaliatory beatings, torture, and murder; undermining plantation work schedules or deploying sass; and obscuring or outright denying their desire for freedom.

Incarnate spirit refuses to be bound. Escaping to freedom, purchasing one’s own freedom or that of a loved one, fighting for freedom, offering up one’s own body for the life and freedom of another, and dying for freedom were acts of redemption that aimed to restore black bodily and psychic integrity. Living within a ‘system built on violence, disenfranchisement, and white supremacy’ surely pushed some enslaved people to respond…’with self-hatred, anger, and identification with the aggressor.’ Still, many other enslaved women stocked their arsenal with wit, cunning, verbal warfare, daring, physical strength, and so-called uppity behavior. Freedom was the prize; they put their hands to its plow, and held on.” —M. Shawn Copeland

The celebration of Juneteenth reminds us of the resilience of Black people who endured two extra years of enslavement because the good news of emancipation didn’t reach them. Copeland notes how one plantation owner deliberately resisted sharing that good news, and then abandoned the people he’d claimed to own without any of the resources they’d need to live independent lives as legally free people.

“Meeting the practical demands of freedom could be daunting,” Copeland writes. The practical demands of freedom include finding food to feed both oneself and dependents, maintaining shelter and regular work. An individual can enjoy none of the elements of a “free life” without money or the material support of the society around them. We aren’t really free if the system doesn’t allow for the conditions of freedom.

And this is why individual experiences, personal advantages, and private successes don’t change the nature of the system in which they occur. My ability to secure residency and create work over the last three years doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. immigration process is a nightmare. My education history wouldn’t especially protect me in an encounter with police or other armed state officers. My anecdotes don’t overrule the system’s logic or trends.

So much of the story of Black people in the West is the tale of people hustling up ways to be free, spinning the tricky webs of Anansi to carve out alternatives to the dominant storyline, and using wit, cunning, persistence, and pluck so our descendants can have a more whole, less harmful experience on Earth than we’ve had.

Whether we’re loyal or reliable or not, at some point we learn that we can’t depend on the rules or rule-enforcers, but that we still need to make lives in societies not designed for us. And some of us add to the righteous work of making our individual lives the more complex work of challenging the wider society in order to change it.

The logic of the wider society frames and often contracts our individual experiences. The newly freed people of the Adams plantation needed material resources to make good on the legal status Lincoln’s proclamation had given them. They didn’t get them because the White supremacist logic that had made them targets of enslavement and abuse hadn’t vanished with either the war or the 1863 executive order.

Today, Black people need work and wages that can support their health and households, freedom from fear, and freedom from violence. But the system’s logic, the logic that long ago pronounced Black people inferior and indolent still persists. It has changed form, as all systems do, but it still persists.

It can be hard to remember that the micro’s answers aren’t an adequate response to the system’s questions, but that’s the reminder that the ancestors’ stories give me. Unless we can change the system that frames our lives, we’d have to agree with them that “Freedom ain’t nothin, less you got somethin to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin on liberty is lak… livin on love. It just don’t work” (in Copeland, p. 47).

June 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Freedom delayed isn’t freedom.

I’d never even heard of Juneteenth until I started living in Texas. The international mythology around US abolitionism and emancipation is, like British abolitionist mythology, so thick that no one had ever told me it took the enslaved people of Texas two and half years to discover that President Lincoln’s executive order had taken effect in January 1863.

They spent two and a half extra years in slavery.
White Texans spent two and a half extra years deluded about their supremacy.
Two and a half years. Maybe a century and a half more, if we account for the life and death of James Byrd, Jr. (CN: lynching.)

I might not have believed the story of Juneteenth if I hadn’t seen the historical evidence for it, because it’s such a perversely perfect story premise: the people of Galveston are people forgotten in a network of soul-destroying laws and customs whose time has already gone. They don’t know they’re living in the future.

When the sun rises on January 1, 1863, nothing changes for them, and no one brings them the news that could help them to change their lives themselves. The war is over; they don’t know it. Their freedom is recovered; they have no inkling. Life continues as it always has, crushing them one by one.

This morning at work, the choir closed service with Jill Scott’s song “Golden.” (The lyrics are fairly simple.)

This song was playing in the background as I read President Obama describing Juneteenth as “a time to recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone.”

It’s that. It’s also a time to reflect on all of the ways we’re still waiting to inhabit freedom and wholeness we already are, freedom and wholeness undermined in contexts that would rather we be fragmented and compliant, not flourishing, not creative.

In the shadow of 103 of my siblings—LGBTQ, Latinx, Black—I can’t avoid seeing how easily my freedom and safety can be snatched if the raiders have enough brute force, enough fire power, enough doctrinal authority. I hate that something so fundamental to me can be so fragile.

And I’m looking for that news from DC that hasn’t yet made it to my life’s Galvestons. I’m looking for the word that restores the original blessings that are mine. If I’m part of communities that are free but don’t know it and therefore can’t experience the fullness of freedom, the very word, freedom, begins to lose its substance. As much as I’m embodied, as much as you can map my location and trace my life in time, my freedom has to be more than an abstract thing. Our freedom can’t be a theory. It has to be lived, material, as enfleshed and well-formed as we are.

Freedom has to filter into the very same policies, customs, channels, and systems that supremacism and enslavement did. Otherwise we can’t live free. That’s what restoration means: not that we port ourselves into disembodied space where everything’s alright and there are no worries, but that we restructure the world that is until it is the world it can be.

I’m cautioning myself, in the name of my ancestors, to stop looking to people and organizations for permissions that they don’t have the authority to grant or deny, and I’m authorizing myself. I’m not focusing on the ways that the world is committed to my limits; I’m focusing on the steps I can take, the new work I can begin, the facts that I haven’t yet seen because I’ve taken others’ stories about me for granted and haven’t fully claimed my own stories:

I am responsible.
I am capable.
I am free.

The work that remains undone is the manifestation of a world in which we can all flourish, in which we’re all free. Our visionaries have long proclaimed us free, but we still have to get that news to Galveston.

March 6, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

Breaking Out of Holidays, Breaking into Life

The start of the 2015 Lenten season coincided with the birthdays of writers Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Audre Lorde (b. 1934). Lorde died in 1992, just a year before Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Had she survived breast cancer, Lorde would have been 81 years old this year. Morrison is now 84. Both of them lived through the all-too-short public career of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, still better known to the world as Malcolm X. Many of us remembered Malik’s life and the 50th anniversary of his assassination on Saturday, February 21.

All three of these elders leave a legacy of full-throttle freedom, a world upturned and reordered through the creative, active word. All three also remind me of C.S. Lewis’ Aslan: unapologetic, unbought, uncaged.

I don’t come from a faith tradition that observes either Lent or Easter, but I did grow up in England where Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras) was also known as Pancake Day. As a seasonal nod, my mother sometimes made us pancakes. My favorite kind had batter mixed with pureed apples from the trees in our garden.

Now I’m far from that home, a new immigrant in a society shaped by the best and worst of faith, and a Seventh-day Adventist occupying the limen of my denomination, I’ve been reflecting on this season. What does it mean to learn from Lent here in the US? The calendar here is a long list of corporatized holidays.

Christmas doesn’t pass before pink paper hearts and chocolates adorn the stores. We barely have time to flee the Valentine’s ball before the Easter pastels rush into the spaces we leave behind. We all but save the nation through our spending and production—and stores and media platforms are all happy to sanctify our rites.

It made sense to me that by the evening of Mardi Gras, some countered with the sobriety of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten weeks. I saw several social media announcements about people’s plans to fast from Facebook or other social media platforms. As well as 40-day fasts, there were also hundreds of “giv* up [X] for Lent” announcements on Twitter. “The ‘giving up [X] for Lent’ tweets,” I wrote, “are a pretty interesting data set.”

As Verdell Wright noted, these tweets are ripe for quantitative analysis: what percentage of users are giving up traditional items—meat, fat, flour—or making modern Lenten sacrifices—alcohol, sugar, television, social media? How many aren’t participating at all, but rather ride the wave of conversation and meta humor about it all?

There are also qualitative notes to play. Richard Thomas, for example, tackles the oppression hidden in plain sight in popular celebrations of Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras beads—also used during LGBT Pride season—are manufactured outside the US in Chinese factories that don’t prioritize workers’ freedom or equity. So annual festivities on Bourbon Street, NOLA, are enmeshed with worker oppression 7,300 miles away in the manufacturing city of Fuzhou, China. David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China tells this story.

Thomas, however, uses Augustinian theology to assess America’s Mardi Gras: he argues that the festival masks economic relationships that aren’t free or equal, that undermine a telos (end or purpose) of increased human equality, freedom, and dignity. Thomas also focuses exclusively on Christians. Whereas I would universalize these proposed ends—Christians don’t merit a more beneficial end than other humans do—I question whether Augustine would’ve yielded his seat at the More Equal Than You table for new bosses on Animal Farm. (Other readers are more hopeful.)

The beneficial end that accrues to all people is an end that doesn’t rest on membership in Christian organizations or compliance with consensus. Mere existence and unconditioned humanity has to be enough. A “dignity” and “protection from exploitation” that only applied to some humans would be no more worth defending than the Christian slave-trading of John Newton.

"What if I told you... holidays are like caged revolution?" —@mackenzian — Original image based on still from the Warner Bros’ Matrix (1999).

So what if I told you that Lent wasn’t the only holiday period when oppression marries piety? Each November we see angst about stores open on Thanksgiving Day and excesses on Black Friday. I know that a great deal of the backlash is sincere. Much of it concentrates on a few short days between Labor Day and Christmas, on the micro-actions of ordinary people looking for deals for themselves or their loved ones, and others who can’t afford not to work. So little focus on the system and customary social order that Thanksgiving allows us to escape.

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary… We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” —Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Empire is dangerous because it morphs just enough to still govern you while you sing nostalgic lullabies about its decline or observe the anniversaries of its death. Oh, I wish I lived in Dixie—hooray, hooray! For the great achievement of not recognizing that the old world has merely changed form and not passed away, we gain rest and family time we can’t otherwise afford to take. Paid holidays are breaks from a wearying routine, a life in which profits may be private but risks and costs are common goods.

The holidays prompt some talk about restructuring daily life. And perhaps, like the New Year’s Resolution, they also encourage people to make small, meaningful, and, we hope, sustainable changes.

The holidays also function as a steam vent, channeling personal and popular energy that might otherwise overturn the Temple or the Senate. Gil told us that the revolution would not be televised. It also won’t happen during paid vacation time.

Many of us benefit, if we work in traditional jobs, from the 40-hour labor week and the principle of the workless weekend. Progressive Christianity admires the debt forgiveness of the Hebrew Jubilee: land at rest, debts quashed, and slaves freed every 7th and 50th year (Lev. 25:1-55; Deut. 15:1-23). And the weekly Sabbath also suggests a telos, but is it a taste of liberty from a corrupt order on one day of the week? Or can we aim for lives of liberty and freedom no matter who we are and no matter which day it is?

But Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Fred Clark sat with this verse last quarter. Jesus’ phrasing echoes Deuteronomy 15, the chapter that outlines how jubilee would work among the new Israelite nation.

There will be no poor among you; for the Lord will bless you in the land…if only you will strictly obey the voice of the Lord.

If only. The implication is that inequity will persist only with sustained disobedience and disregard for the Israelites’ structures around labor, farming, indentured servitude and slavery, multi-generational debt, and wealth gained through the indebtedness of others. Yet even these laws and practices didn’t apply universally: Deuteronomy 15 shows that the new law would give very different protections to the Hebrew and “the foreigner among you.” This revolution is not for the entire human family.

The gospels’ writers make Jesus’ first major scripture reading a portion of Isaiah 61. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Isaiah and Jesus say in chorus, “because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

“You were bought with a price,” the free-born Paul later writes; “Do not become slaves of men.” Yet he also writes, “Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. If you gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity…. in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”

Freedom and favor for the prophets’ people. For all others, metaphysical freedom. Not everyone’s enslavement merits the song of Moses.

I’ve taken to using the hashtag “Get Free” when the status quo presses in and the yearning of my ancestors haunts me. This morning, for example, I remembered Bob Marley’s 1976 song, “One Drop.” It ended my dreamtime and stayed with me through the day.

Feel this drumbeat as it beats within
Playing a rhythm resisting against the system…

Give us the teachings of His Majesty
A-we no want no devil philosophy.

When my ancestors sought their freedom, they received the teachings of the kings, queens, and ruling class that didn’t prioritize their interests. In their name, Bob says instead “Rather than the teachings of a regional king, give us a more universal philosophy. Give us those teachings that enliven us and testify to our power in this life, not just in the world to come. We want no devil philosophy, none of the philosophy and ideology that encodes our subordination and empowers the ruling class.”

In some performances, Bob sings the imperative request, “Give us the teachings.” In others, he describes a continuous action: “You give us the teachings…” (“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?”) Either way, he contrasts the teachings and philosophy of the temporal Crown with the teachings of the Creator.

As we become more aware, as we wake up, we naturally choose what enlivens us and shed whatever chains remain. These days, those who nourish me are those who read this world with an eye for life, presence, and liberty; sense that there’s more than the already manifest; and aren’t willing to leave any sibling stranded outside. This is my community: those who’re pulling rights from wrong and healing this world as they go.

“There is a notion of paradise that says that the lion lays down with the lamb… By the way this is not natural. It ain’t natural, for the lion and lamb—because one of them eats the other.

“For the lion to lay down with the lamb means that the lion has to divest him/herself of its predatory nature. And the lamb must divest itself of [victimhood]. That’s when paradise happens. We look for a day when all the children are safe because all the children are our children.” —Bishop Yvette Flunder [40:26]

If the holiday is a caged revolution, then we reclaim all time as holy. If the approved revolution frees only a few, then the un-televised revolution throws open the gates to the world. We don’t know exactly what this degree of openness looks like, and we don’t yet have the usual authorities on board.

But some of us are feeling the rhythm beating within, and we’re breaking further into life every waking day.