social change : mackenzian

April 6, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Fire, smoke, and dreams (with Arundhati Roy)

In The End of Imagination, Arundhati Roy describes with exquisite pacing what nationalism, fundamentalism, and militarism have yielded across India and Pakistan over the last thirty years.

As she recounts the mayhem (including murder, staged terrorism, and activist intimidation in the countryside and on college campuses), Roy also writes of alternatives:

An altogether different coalition of castes, one that is constituted from the ground up, instead of organized and administered from the top down: Dalit-Bahujanism instead of Brahminism. A powerful movement, contemporary and yet rooted in India’s unique social cultural context… A movement that challenges patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, that dreams of a casteless, classless society, whose poets would be the poets of the people… A movement whose comrades would include those from the privileged castes who no longer want to claim their privileges. A movement spiritually generous enough to embrace all those who believe in justice, whatever their creed or religion.” —Arundhati Roy, “My Seditious Heart”

A vision like this threatens all forms of domination. Advocates know it; that’s why they believe so strongly in it. And autocrats know it, which is why they’ll spare no strategy to stamp it out and isolate its proponents.

“What do you do with an idea that has begun to drift around like smoke?” Roy asks. “You try and snuff it out at its source.”

All too often in global politics, “snuffing out” the sources of ideas literally means arresting or assassinating people. That’s one of the themes of Easter! But assassination isn’t the only way to attack a threatening vision.

An idea is vulnerable to misinterpretation and misapplication because it can’t defend or represent itself. People generate ideas, and people have to re-articulate and share them.

So an idea’s ability to survive over time depends not just on its own merits but also on people being willing to reframe and translate it for new communities and communities being willing to receive and integrate concepts that either seem foreign or actually are.

Ideas will wither if a regime puts enough effort into surrounding it with hostility or chasing it with violence.

The latter is what Roy argues Indian nationalists have done to those they deem “anti-national,” and she asks a series of questions that are just as intriguing for religious contexts as they are for political ones:

What if some of us dream instead [of compelled state membership] of creating a society to which people long to belong? What if some of us dream of living in a society that people… are not forced to be part? What if some of us don’t have colonialist, imperialist dreams? What if some of us dream instead of justice? Is it a criminal offense?”

In exclusive societies and subcultures, it can certainly feel like a crime. But what if we keep dreaming anyway?

March 12, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Hope and realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 20, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Bishops and kings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Participating in the change

In the last few pages of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad writes that deep social change doesn’t just require mass action. It also requires mass participation in sociopolitical institutions and the social movements that must see old institutions replaced.

It’s not enough, Muhammad argues, for scholars and critics to make radical claims without connecting them to concrete actions. It’s not enough for us to merely trim the edges of a consumptive economic system. The system itself has to go, along with all the structures and assumptions that prop it up. Apathy, which inhibits deep change, is the product of structures that preceded us and that we take for granted, and possibilities we assume are too “idealistic” to act on.

Muhammad ends this book by affirming popular participation—literally “democracy.” Ordinary people’s energy and lived commitment to a new, just world will allow that world to emerge. Justice won’t be imposed on us from above or without, and only through the process of working for it can we become the kinds of people worthy of living in it, the kinds of people we can trust with the only Planet Home we have, the kinds of people we can trust with one another.

Rather than continuing to just rely on sporadic flare-ups to create change, we are called on to work with institutional forms that can deliver protracted challenges to the status quo in pushing for progressive change… Protests, marches, and direct actions need not to be put on hold but they do need to be supplemented with organization building.” —Umair Muhammad

I’ve argued that beautiful things take time to grow. I still believe that’s true. It has taken time and all our energy over generations to threaten that flourishing and it will take as much time and energy to secure it.

I just worry about the people who are too vulnerable to be able to wait for the rest of us.