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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

society

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Proximity does not make a community

A bible on a podium; background is out of focus; appears to be a church.
Photo credit: Stephen Radford

I’m not going to watch the breaking of the second seal in Washington, D.C., tomorrow.

Instead, I’m preparing to host two training sessions this weekend, and I’m thinking about what constitutes sound community. Among people who consider themselves progressive, those committed to the deep social transformation that actively creates space for typically marginalized people to breathe and be, what does community mean?

In the first chapter of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad explores John Dewey’s definitions of community as a social arrangement beyond mere proximity, one that requires members to assertively support the common good and refrain from turning each other into instruments or means to an end.

Dewey notes that many aspects of our social arrangement cannot be described as societal: ‘Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used.’… The only way to ensure that individuals are not abused by the collective, but instead have their development and freedom expanded, is to have power be equally distributed among individuals.” —Umair Muhammad

Who gets to use others as characters in their narratives is one way power expresses in social relationships. The way people might be used as cautionary tales, often without their consent, highlights how the storyteller assumes power to deploy their representations of others, whether or not those representations are accurate: in a power-over relationship, if the representations serve the narrator’s purposes, that’s all that counts.

Consider this principle next time you hear a speaker share anecdotes about colleagues or adversaries and the next time you hear sermon illustrations. How does the speaker refer to other people? Do these others show up with their own voices, or are they characters on the speaker’s stage?

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A poetic break

Low golden sunlight washes over a rocky and grassy mountainous landscape. A solitary figure stands on a rocky outcrop on the bottom right of the image. They are facing away from the camera.
Photo credit: David Marcu

My latest literary companion, Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice, features a sentence that was so arresting that I had to look up both the source and its author. (Get Confronting Injustice the way I did, via Haymarket Books.)

Eduardo Galeano wrote through the second half of the 20th Century about the political struggles of his native Uruguay. Celebrated across South America, Galeano appears in Muhammad’s book on individualism, neoliberalism, and climate change:

Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.” —Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

I wrote last fall about growing up in two subcultures in which no one around me spoke of or taught about non-heterosexual people. I therefore got through my first two decades with an unfinished map of myself and all of the people I lived with and went to school and church with: a culture’s symbolic blackouts affect everyone in that culture, not just the people they target.

It’s because of my experience that Galeano’s phrase “keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces” stood out to me today. The entire sentence is striking.

Perhaps more than 20th Century Uruguayan culture did, US culture thrives on the myth of the intrepid individual who forges alone into the wildness of life, or, in extreme cases, the actual wilderness.

As feminist writers pointed out in the 1980s, this culture’s success myths typically don’t include the network of people around the Great and Inventive Ones. In media profiles, we might learn about an entrepreneur’s favorite teacher, or a librarian who took extra time to nurture a budding scientist’s interests while they were in elementary school, or parents who doted and sacrificed to pay for a prodigy’s piano lessons.

But the rest of the genius’s support system—spouses and partners, training colleagues, secretaries and assistants, house staff and those delegated or relegated to tasks like laundry and cooking, let alone all who fund the public services that make unusual individual advancement possible—this support system remains background material. We’re used to phrases like “social construction” but they haven’t changed how we perceive the individual self. Confronting Injustice is a book-length objection to that.

I’m slowly cracking open this weekend and thinking about how my social networks have crafted my sense of who I am and the symbolic languages I use as I interact with the world. I’m also thinking about how my social networks have “kept silenced people from asking questions” about the philosophical foundations of our world and the spaces we allow for ourselves and others.

How might human culture be otherwise? What are the impacts of not changing? These are the questions Muhammed believes activists should be asking. We should be working to manifest our answers too, because without manifest alternatives to the way things are, we’re resigning ourselves to continuing generations of people silenced, judged, and solitary who have no inkling that what is isn’t all that can be.

The Book of Embraces is now on my wishlist.

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On #NMOS14, Ferguson, and Rooting for a New World

National Moment of Silence 2014 Banner via Facebook and @feministajones
Image via the National Moment of Silence 2014 Facebook Page and @feministajones

This post took me three weeks to prepare. There’s so much to say, and the word-containers I’m drawing together feel far too narrow and too shallow to hold that “so much.” The community of Ferguson, MO, has been in grief since August 9, and that grief, first re-presented as aggression, then analyzed from afar, and dismissed by the detached at every turn, exploded into international spectacle within a week.

From mid-August:

A few days after I began following this situation, a Jamaican friend texted me a two-minute video of two constabulary officers beating a market seller with batons and shooting their pistols into the air to ward off the crowd. I asked my friend whether the clip had already made the local news. He told me it was too common an event to make the news. “Maybe it’s time to redesign civic policing,” I told Twitter. “This is not its finest hour.”  My frustration built quickly and I didn’t see an outlet for it. So much of the epistemology of power—expressed by police forces and institutional gatekeepers worldwide—requires sustained denial of the realities of disempowered people. It requires the denial of stories. The rejection of relationship. The building of policies and customs with so narrowly defined an Ideal Human. All of the above is power without legitimacy.

"British research on policing crowds confirms the strategic need for proactive relationship building by police." —Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter) [http://1.usa.gov/1lkpS7W]
Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter)

As common as it is for Jamaican police to bully the public, it’s just as common for us not to listen to our own experts when they recommend deep change. Ferguson, MO, didn’t become what it is by accident. And the rest of our world isn’t what it is by accident either. Dartmouth’s Paul Batalden often says “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” So if we don’t like our results, we have to change our design. We’ve designed a civic system based on studied ignorance, weak listening cultures, & ahistorical context framing. We keep spinning back around to the same social crises again and again—but of course. Our system isn’t learning because we don’t design it for learning. No one can learn by blocking new information. We can’t learn without listening to others beyond ourselves or experiences beyond our own. Nor can we learn without a sense of time or space, a location in space-time that situates us in relation to other people, other eras, other worlds. Instead we’ve built a system that mocks or resists research and specialists, that elevates the echo chamber, and that pretends every crisis is brand new. I do not believe this status quo is the best we can do.

Two children hold "Hands Up Don't Shoot" protest signs in Ferguson, MO
(via @VIVARonRon on Twitter, 8/14/2014)

Despite this design, a Midwestern community has responded to the pattern that gave them a dead son, and many of us outside the city have responded to a broader system that doesn’t seem to mind recapitulating this same story line every 28 hours. The protesters in Ferguson haven’t trafficked in ignorance; they’ve consistently and relentlessly reported ahead of the professional media from the start. The community isn’t stopping its ears and yelling “LaLaLaLaLa!” It’s engaged supporters and critics in real time, received outsiders willing to tell fair stories, and adapted as things have changed. The community refers to similar situations from recent history, domestic and international, but does not collapse them into its own. It knows its own context. And it’s building a new frame supported by new activists freshly engaged because the old frame has proven incapable of bearing the community and its children. Ferguson’s residents and youth, along with all the residents and youth in solidarity with them in the US and around the world, are among America’s finest system re-designers. They’re not going to let the systemic power structure slip back to ordinary. We can’t.  

On the evening of August 14, I drove to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown’s family, the Ferguson, MO, community, and other victims of violent policing nationwide including Eric Garner, John Crawford, Armand Bennett, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker. There were about 90 vigils around the country scheduled for 7 p.m. that night thanks to Feminista Jones and the #NMOS14 community on Facebook.

So I went to this local vigil to be in silence with other people who, like me, were tired and sad. I hoped that in the silence we were able to create, and in the sound we made when we spoke with one voice, we could remember that we’re not alone, that we have power as The People that we don’t exercise enough, that when one of us is cut down, it isn’t someone else’s problem, it’s ours. We have a better world to build together.

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As soon as I got into town, I noticed a higher and more visible police presence than I’ve ever seen, even during baseball games and other mass events. The police recorded everything from the sidelines; a lot of marchers took their photos and recorded them in return. A helicopter hovered throughout, and we saw snipers watching from the tops of city commercial buildings.

While I felt incredibly surveilled by the authorities, I was also grateful for the mix of people who participated and stayed engaged during the evening. I heard about a number of people who’ve died in the custody of Baltimore City police recently—these were stories I hadn’t heard before—and we told those stories until our convocation ended outside the commissioner’s building.

Overall those present with us were passionate but not aggressive. And the police, despite their surveillance posture, did assist us in moving around the streets near the Harbor without getting entangled with B’more traffic. About 200 people marched, and others joined along the way, all without bystander heckling or grumbling.

Part of what overwhelmed me as I walked was fatigue from the waning of a long, stubborn summer, from not being around many other people who were moved to act rather than simply posture or criticize, having few physical spaces to vent and build energy with, and not knowing the local landscape enough to see which groups were already working and could use my support. The news never offers this level of connection or insight into change:  rather it serves up and profits from a focus on problem-problem-problem and blood-blood-blood.

The morning after the march, I shared with my mother where I’d gone and why I cared. She listened quietly at first, but then invoked the “last days” of apocalyptic scripture: what else but the worsening of the human condition should we expect, she asked. She also reminded me of her experience in England with anti-black policing, racial protests, and riots during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I’m sure she meant to encourage me, but the prospect of repeating this narrative to my own baby cousins in 40 years doesn’t encourage me in the slightest. I don’t want them to be on the same hamster wheel that we’ve been on in the last few decades.

I want a different world for them.

A few days later I read a story about a woman in San Jose, CA, who died holding a cordless drill.

“Police and witnesses described the dramatic scene Thursday morning that ended with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman in front of her duplex on busy Blossom Hill Road, two blocks east of Oakridge Mall in South San Jose…”

“Police said the 911 call required a quick and strong response.

“‘We had a call, somebody with an Uzi threatening to kill family members,’ San Jose police spokesman Officer Albert Morales said. ‘It was a very serious situation, a very dangerous situation for our officers.'”

No one else was home with the woman. She was alone.

All the officers had were words, the words in the 911 call. And those words reframed completely what they might have seen in front of them. The “very dangerous situation” they believed they were part of was made so a priori by those words. And thus a drill became a gun and help became harm.

Words can so restructure reality that you will not see what is in front of you. If I find that frightening it is because of the quality of words that much of the world is shaped by. If I find it exciting it’s because I read and write words that could create a wholly different world. I only wonder if a wholly different world is the option that we’ll choose.

This post was not about a policeman or a teenager. It wasn’t even about an Uzi or a cordless drill. All of these are details that make no difference if fear has already degraded our ability to perceive accurately and investigate properly.

I don’t want to live in fear. I want to root for a new world, and I’m willing to help build it.

When I spoke to my mother that morning, I told her I believe that fatalism is corrosive. And I told her that I believe the discipline of caring regardless of outcome is good for us.

She nodded—a rare concession—and she told me she loved me.

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Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975

Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison

Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream.

“A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, turpentine, and humans, Morrison highlights the inhumanity of American slavery, the studied ignorance and skew of contemporary social sciences, and opportunities for Black artists to write and speak to their own community rather than write as educators for curious White audiences.

This weekend I sat down to listen to the 2-hour audio recording and transcribe Morrison’s presentation and responses during the Q&A. She discusses aspects of historical and contemporary racism, the economic roots of the racism tree, and uses racial epithets while describing how specific populations buy their way out of limiting social positions—literally using their creativity to become indispensable to local markets.

Download the transcript in Rich Text Format or in PDF.

Since Portland State’s Soundcloud recording remains free, please don’t sell/resell this transcript or access to it. And to honor Morrison’s argument and intellectual legacy, please do use this content to fuel your own research, self-education, and art.

Please send any transcription corrections via my contact form. I’ll update the links above with the latest versions.

[Latest transcripts: 7/7/2014]

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Raise a Fist: On Saluting the Humane

Real peace is more than the absence of war. Rather, we need to change the culture, situations, and systems that lead to violence. —American Friends Service Committee

Five years ago

I’m sitting behind the bar of a House of Representatives committee room, Washington, D.C. It’s a mark up day, when the committee meets to comment on, pass, or dismiss amendments to new legislation. Bills have to survive this gauntlet before they can get to the floor of the House for a vote.

On the agenda today is the 2009 edition of the federal hate crimes bill. The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, beaten to death and chained to a fence in Wyoming, and James Byrd, Jr., chained to a pickup truck, dragged, and decapitated in Jasper, TX. But it includes sexual orientation and gender identity as well as race and religion, so some quarters of the House are in full opposition mode. I breathe out through my mouth quietly.

I look away from the representatives and into the public section of the room. Two women sit about 7 meters to my right, visibly wincing while Congressmen grandstand for the press and lob zingers they and their staff hope will hit the following day’s headlines.

Claiming to want to protect fetuses, and veterans, and elderly women, and clergy, but not “sexual deviants,” representatives propose to exclude pedophiles from the bill (as if they are germane), change the law’s name to the “Thought Crimes Prevention Act of 2009” (as if individuals’ thoughts are under legal attack), and protect pastors’ speech (as if the bill will make it illegal to be a vocal Christian).

None of these objections are based in fact. All of them smear LGBT people and incite religious fear against them.

Present day

Uganda passed its anti-LGBT legislation in December; Nigerian LGBT people now risk 14 years in jail for social meetings; and the Russian government has prohibited “propaganda” about LGBT people. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, progress under that cloud of protest and dismissal.

I snuggle with blankets on my couch watching a young Czech snowboarder tear up the hillside with 540° rotations and incredibly clean landings. I watch her wipe out before she can skate into the finals; she cracks her helmet and bounces down the hill like a Cabbage Patch Kid. She isn’t harmed. Twitter directs me to LGBT-supportive protest commercials from Canada and Norway. The Norwegian clip already has over 2.2M views; the Canadian one, 4.6M.

1968, Mexico City

It’s five years after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, three years after El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is assassinated, and the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated. South African apartheid is in full swing. Adventist racially separated conferences are 24 years old, and so is my mother.

Two Black US track Olympians, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, stand on the winners’ podium in Mexico City and salute human rights while their national anthem plays.

Their protest is reported instead as a “Black power salute” and the photos become iconic. The American public is outraged.

Three medalists standing on the winners' dais. Left, a White Australian, center and right, two black Americans. The Americans each have their fists high in the air. Two white officials stand below them.
John Carlos and Tommie Smith raise gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Australian Peter Norman wears an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity with them. (Photo credit: AP)

The year before this photo is taken, John Carlos (right) and Tommie Smith (center) form the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group that protests US segregation, South African apartheid, and racism in sport. Several American and non-American athletes also support this group, including Australian sprinter Peter Norman, who wins the silver medal in their 200m race and joins Carlos and Smith on the stand.

Carlos and Smith are vilified for “making sport political.” Few accept that sport already is political, that silence is political and indifference is political, and speaking up or acting up when one has the privilege to be seen or heard is the least a person can do to honor their conscience.

Present day

The Nation asks Carlos whether he would do the Olympic protest again. “If I had to stand tomorrow, I would stand tomorrow,” he says. “The only regret you have is that you didn’t have a whole bunch of people around you standing out doing the same thing. You know, that’s what made me stand out: it’s because so many others chose to take the low road as opposed to the high road.”

The same month this interview is posted, a triad of older, unmarried Adventist men presents a 6-part series at a church youth conference on the “dangers” of homosexuality. One tells the audience, “If we allow homosexuals to bring their lovers into church, and we start letting them teach Sabbath school, you’re allowing demons to come in with them and to engage with your children.”

This is present day. Not the mid-1960s.

Last week

On my way back from Riverside, CA, during Superbowl weekend, I stop in Salt Lake City, UT. One of our aunts has terminal cancer and we visit with her for a few days. By her chair is a copy of the latest Adventist Review. I’ve written for the world edition of the Review before, so I pick it up and leaf through.

A few pages in, under “evangelism,” is a hagiographic write up of that same youth conference. The section on the sexuality series tells readers that the triad “offered attendees insights about reaching out to homosexuals… [and] described how the church can both uphold biblical truths about sexuality while reaching out with compassion.”

I return the magazine to the side table.

Present day

With everything else that’s happening, it takes a few days for my awe to rise. When it does, Twitter hears me first.

When some church members start asking GYC to withdraw the presentations, I download all 6 sessions. I don’t know if they’ll bother to pull them. Instead I worry about the memory hole sucking away evidence that we’re not playing at victim, that we’re not imagining being called the child-endangering hosts of demons in 2014. I want there to be proof, not just my word, about what church-promoted speakers say and what they mean when they speak.

Later, with friends, I process. And I realize that I’m not objecting to the triad’s tone. I’m objecting to their content.

I don’t care whether they’re smooth or strident, genteel or ungracious. I care that their teachings explicitly and intentionally demonize the LGBTI community, and I care that the church endorses that demonization by doctrine, policy, and promotion. It bothers me that it takes the phrase “under the control of demons” to spark the same awareness that euphemisms like “not in God’s will” and “contrary to God’s plan” trigger for LGBTI Adventists at home and in churches all year round.

Like acid on iron, the church dismantles heterosexual people’s ability to see God’s unblemished image in non-hetero people as non-hetero people rather than as “broken” or “deceived” straight souls who need to “turn around” [repent]. The church selects non-hetero people to front its corrosive messages for it while it spreads the word in other ways.

A raised dark-skinned fist with multi-colored bangles around its wrist and forearm.Perhaps if I were younger and less weary, I might foresee a time when there’s no serious Adventist debate about the full humanity and unblemished God-image of LGBT people. I’m uncertain about seeing that vision manifested in my lifetime. And it’s true, as my friend Daneen Akers says, that “we don’t all have to agree” about this. No one has to accept my full humanity if for whatever reason they feel they can’t.

But if we’re going to be in relationship, then because I’m not a sitting duck, there’s a baseline. Supremacism damages the supremacist just as much as it damages me, but even if the supremacist never objects, I must. I stand, saluting natural, human, humane rights—including my own.

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Event Update: The Future of Adventism

Adventist Today has posted an updated announcement for the panel discussion on the Millennial Generation and Adventist Faith next month at Loma Linda University:

AToday2

I’m looking forward to talking with Edgar Momplaisir, Alfredo Lee, Pr. Courtney Ray, Syd Shook, Monte Sahlin, and Ryan Bell about our denomination’s future (if not its “arc”!).

When I have my presentation ready, I’ll share it with you. You can make sure you’ll see it by becoming a mackenzian.com site subscriber. Add your email to the Get New Posts By Email box to the right of this post.

Thanks for reading!