solidarity : mackenzian

March 10, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Water is life and solidarity is essential

In the snowy rain today, hundreds of people from all traditions and ethnic backgrounds marched through downtown Washington, D.C., from the Government Accountability Office past the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue to LaFayette Square near the White House.

We were led by drummers from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the women of Indigenous Women Rise, and we chanted “Mni waconi! Water is life!” for much of the walk.

Native people insisted that the United States government honor the treaties it has made with indigenous nations and that it “keep the oil in the soil.” Others assured watching government workers that, though they were complicit with the administration, the crowds weren’t present to harm them.

Al Jazeera estimates that thousands of people walked together today. The atmosphere reminded me of the People’s Climate March: clear, direct, Native-led, and a vivid instance of cross-community, multi-issue solidarity.

Audre Lorde’s statement about our not living “single-issue lives” has felt more and more true for me the last few years. It has been almost impossible to keep up with every single social conflict, imagine creative ways to respond to each, and still get to bed at a reasonable hour!

I think the 400,000 people at the People’s Climate March fizzled after that day because we allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by the scope of the issues and limited individual capacity to respond. Some of us also tried to become experts in every issue rather than masters of general concepts and specialists of a single research topic. And so we gave up or moved on.

Today’s march modeled a different way.

Each group brought its own concerns to the megaphone and day’s agenda. Non-Native walkers literally got out of Natives’ way when a drumming circle shifted direction. We hushed when speakers began to share. We expressed gratitude that each another was present, despite the weather and despite the government’s recent actions. I came to accept that Native people cannot “move on”: they are fighting for their lives and the lives of all our descendants.

The lesson: Find your lane. Stay in it. Get out of others’ way to support their progress, not to withdraw attention or external pressure that would help them.

In this moment, solidarity with others is absolutely essential. We are “in this together” but that doesn’t mean our experiences and strategies are identical or should be.

Solidarity means learning to be with others without being dominant over them; to move back where we have been dominant so that marginalized people can move ahead. It also means working with people without necessarily getting a press mention out of the effort.

And so it means quite a different quality of leadership than many single-demographic activists are used to. But “water is life” and the stakes are high enough that we have to re-imagine how solidarity works for any of our movements to have a shot at success.

February 22, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The root of solidarity

All species and the Earth itself have interdependent roles within Creation. Humankind is not the species to whom all others are subservient, but one among many. All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere.” —Audrey Urry, in Quaker Faith and Practice (5th Ed.)

I’ve been reading through the essays in This Bridge Called My Back. A recurring theme in these essays, regardless of the authors’ identities, is their appeal for cross-community solidarity. Some authors describe the White women’s movement’s resistance to the concerns of women of color—a dynamic that has impacted contemporary groups like Pantsuit Nation and organizing communities like the Women’s March. Others explore diversities among women of color: class, sexuality, ethnicity, and national origin, for example.

When we’re in solidarity with one another, we will reach beyond our demographic or political groups and accompany others in their social change work. We don’t have to be immediately affected to act.

What makes this solidarity across lines and issues sensible is the sense of unity that Urry points to in Faith and Practice. There’s no reason we shouldn’t reach out to one another or act in each other’s favor if, as Rosario Morales writes, “We are all in the same boat.”

From all directions we get all the beliefs to go with these divisions we believe all kinds of things about: what real men really are what women must want what black people feel and smell like what white people do and deserve how rich people earn their comforts and cadillacs how poor people get what’s coming to them…

The basis of our unity is that in the most important way we are all in the same boat.” —Rosario Morales

I recently used the phrase “Earth-sized circle of concern” for an orientation to activism and problem-solving that’s broad enough to hold all life. I’ve been thinking about how this squares with the more popular neo-Stoic recommendation for people to shrink their circles of concern and focus instead on their circles of responsibility or action.

I still think there’s at least temporary utility in blocking out what’s beyond one’s control: I’ve experienced that usefulness personally. But it’s an individualistic, atomized way to approach the world long-term. It also makes sense that most of the people recommending it to me are part of the popular business and personal finance cultures.

Business and finance are two professions that have helped to build the world as we know it. Perhaps it’s time to try a new way.

February 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

We only make it together

This is the era of solidarity. The plucky independent soul might have had their heyday two or three centuries ago; that’s debatable. But their heyday is not today: every social group finds its fortunes tied to the fortunes of others and much more overtly so than previous movements had to demonstrate.

Part of my early political education was reading about the backstage disagreements of the mid-20th Century civil rights movement. I learned how activists spoke and wrote about one another and framed each other’s interests in comparison to their own. Today, Muslim Americans, Latinx immigrants, Black city residents, Yemeni shopkeepers, North African taxi-drivers, and migrants of every ethnicity and natal country find themselves tested by the new policy climate.

As each new executive order and sponsored bill inspires action and counter-response, I recall Bayard Rustin’s statement, “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” Disabled activists complicate that thought somewhat: “In order to successfully throw sand in the gears,” Carrie Wade writes, “we need as many people out there throwing it as possible — and that means a movement that includes all kinds of bodies and minds.”

So many frameworks could lead us toward such a movement. Jesus envisions a tree with enough branches for all the earth’s birds to eat from; Paul interprets community as the members of a body (not as the parts of a cadaver). Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality model inspires cross-category cooperation as well as closer looks at particular experiences with social oppression. The women’s movements’ has offered open, embracing group circles. And the imaginations of our science fiction and speculative writers hold us together.

adrienne marie brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood, is one of these writers. And I want to envision with her a “radical, global love” that leaves no one missing. That’s what deep change will take: all of us.

January 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Suffering and solidarity

a large dark chain lies on concrete. It appears to be daylight. — Photo credit: Kaley Dykstra

This week I’m reading a remarkable essay by Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker on the many, many ways that theologians and activists have explained redemptive suffering, punishment, and justice. It’s part of the old collection Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse.

What’s fascinating about the arguments I’ve read so far is that they’re more than 28 years old yet still sound so current. A lot can happen in three decades—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the evolution of the internet—but theological debates about responding patiently in the face of abuse haven’t moved much in that time.

Brown and Parker review classical penal, satisfaction, moral influence atonement theories as well as recent criticisms that challenge “that distant, impassive patriarch in the clouds who is beyond being affected by the turmoil below.” They point out that knowing others suffer with us can be encouraging but doesn’t change the situation that produced suffering in the first place.

“Bearing the burden with another,” they write, “does not take the burden away. Sympathetic companionship makes suffering more bearable, but the friendship between slaves, for example, does not stop the master from wielding the lash.”

This is a good self-check for those of us thinking about what it means to express solidarity with others in our relationships and work. Our solidarity with others, and others’ solidarity with us, has to be more than a synonym for shared trauma. Solidarity should provoke ethical action: the drive to transform relationships that deal domination and death into relationships where “abundant life” is experience and not merely hope.

Redemption happens when people refuse to relinquish respect and concern for others, when people refuse to relinquish fullness of feeling, when people refuse to give up seeing, experiencing, and being connected and affected by all of life… [The insistent zest for experiencing and responding] is what has the power to create community and sustain justice.” —Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker

December 3, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Copeland: How solidarity requires memory

I recently shared M. Shawn Copeland’s description of solidarity as a way of relating that has material consequences: it’s not just an ideal, it’s an ethic.

In this passage, Copeland explains how solidarity also relies on our memories of past ways of relating, specifically our memories of trauma and suffering.

Solidarity is an intentional moral and ethical task.

[It] begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history. This memory cannot be a pietistic or romantic memorial, for always intentional recovery and engagement of the histories of suffering are fraught with ambiguity and paradox. The victims of history are lost, but we are alive. We owe all that we have to our exploitation and enslavement, removal and extermination of despised others… Our recognition and regard for the victims of history and our shouldering responsibility for that history form the moral basis of Christian solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom

As Miroslav Volf has argued, we can remember in ways that aren’t helpful and that ultimately corrode our relationships with others. “Fake news” and “post-truth” accounts of the past are faulty ways of remembering, for example. In Volf’s view, memorials that end in resentment are also faulty.

Copeland explains that memory has an even more fundamental value: memory of past pain honors our connection with people who have been harmed. Even if we can’t change what has happened, we can honor it by taking alternate action today. “Solidarity,” she writes, ” mandates us to shoulder our responsibility to the past in the here-and-now in memory of the crucified Christ and all the victims of history.” We honor the past by engaging the present deeply.

The book of James suggests that the way we live proves our commitment to our beliefs. In the same way, how much we exercise solidarity as a practiced ethic and not merely as an ideal demonstrates just how connected we think we are to others and their lives. The astronauts’ “overview effect” gives them an instant planetary perspective on life. And with all of humanity’s squabbling over borders, we do need that.

We also need an organic view of life, one that highlights the inescapable interconnection of all things and wakes us up to our mutual impacts on and responsibilities for one another. If I can remember the heat that has burned you as keenly as I remember the heat that’s burned me, I might just be motivated enough to turn off the stove. But until I am so moved, phrases like “Never again” will always be more aspiration than resolve.

November 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The good news of solidarity

Part of my do list this week has been to develop materials for an organizational partner. When an organization is learning how to offer substantive support to LGBTQ employees and their families, it may need some guidance on identifying what “support” actually means.

Who defines the terms of support also matters: so much can go awry when programs grow without the input of the people designed to benefit from them. The organization is fortunate that its stakeholders are as engaged and receptive as they are. I hope it means that they’ll keep designing long-term solutions together.

What with network journalists soft-peddling the rise of overt White supremacist nationalism, and North Dakota police using hosed water in freezing temperatures as weapons against #NoDAPL water protectors, and Flint, MI, still being without clean municipal water, there are so many communities and causes to stand in solidarity with. And various traditions define solidarity in different ways.

M. Shawn Copeland notes that Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch defined solidarity as cosmic relationship—”relationship with God and human persons”— expressed through mutual service. Indigenous activists define solidarity even more directly:

Accomplices aren’t motivated by personal guilt or shame, they may have their own agenda but they are explicit.
Accomplices are realized through mutual consent and build trust. They don’t just have our backs, they are at our side, or in their own spaces confronting and unsettling colonialism. As accomplices we are compelled to become accountable and responsible to each other[;] that is the nature of trust.

Don’t wait around for anyone to proclaim you to be an accomplice, you certainly cannot proclaim it yourself. You just are or you are not. The lines of oppression are already drawn.” (Accomplices not allies: Abolishing the ally industrial complex, May 4, 2014)

Solidarity has material implications, then. Whether we express it through service, through attention, through practical work, or through money, solidarity has to move from notions of agreement (or shared aggrievement) to actions that move matter. It’s visible, Copeland argues, and it has “cognitive, affective, effective, constitutive, and communicative dimensions. It has implications for how we think about or perceive one another and our common situation, how we feel, how we acknowledge the effects we cause, how we arrange or rearrange our environment, and how we present our situation in conversation with one another. Solidarity doesn’t require us all to be alike. It moves to act with others, to serve, and to heal regardless.

That’s the kind of relationship that so many vulnerable people are seeking now. So when we talk about solidarity, this is what we need to be able to offer others. It’s also what many of us need to receive.