Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good
This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws.
I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp.
The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?” —George Takei
Read it: “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” (Washington Post, November 18, 2016)
Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:
Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906
As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.
Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.
These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.
Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)
“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.
And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.
Nothing will change until we do.
“We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good… [This] ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very frightened and privatistic forms.
“The gospel very much wants us to think in terms of a neighborhood, in terms of being in solidarity with other people, in sharing our resources, and of living out beyond ourselves. The gospel contradicts the dominance values of our system, which encourages self-protection and self-sufficiency at the loss of the common good. The church is in some ways a reflection of those dominant values.” —Walter Brueggemann
I returned to this quote tonight after first seeing it almost two years ago. I love the idea that people might choose to live openhearted and in solidarity with each other, and I also love the challenge that Brueggemann brings to the doors of the Christian community.
I wrote a short article on electoral participation this week, explaining that Christianity is a practical religion, not merely a theoretical one. Given our essential oneness, we share mutual responsibilities with the rest of our world. But how can we make a neighborhood out of a global village of 7 billion people. What if our apartment complex is 2,000 residents large: how do we practice the solidarity Brueggemann writes about here?
An answer came to me from a long-ago post. Just as birds flock by attending to the birds on either side of or ahead of them, mass action is about aggregated local action. We progress not by steering our entire community at once, but by adjusting with the units immediately around us as needed.
Explore: What actions could you take this weekend to learn more about your and your immediate neighbors’ needs? What affirms the way you serve them?
The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us in ‘a vicious cycle of increasing immigration, decreasing formal employment, falling wages, and collapsing revenues.’
“We need thoroughgoing, practical, genuine, systemic change in the present global order. At the same time, we sense a need for something deeper and beyond the moral attention that social justice accords to the distribution of the material and cultural conditions for human living. That something deeper and beyond, I suggest, is solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom
Solidarity is that empathy for the Other that impels us to act with them and for our mutual good. It transcends formal charity too: the system will never be able to keep up with peer-to-peer solidarity.
Crowdfunding is a powerful a way to move resources through society outside of institutions. And the tax code is still light-years behind a crowdfunding system that’s now more than a decade old.
We’re not quite at tax prep season yet, but if you design or participate in a crowdfunding campaign, don’t get caught out.
I’m still processing some of the materials I worked through over the last few months to talk about trauma, resilience, nonviolence, and atonement. So I’m still reading Copeland’s work on embodiment and the value of human lives, and it’s echoing for me as I read headline upon headline of more Black death.
Over the weekend in Oklahoma. Today in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose chairman addressed the UN’s Human Rights Council today, still needs support in resisting the Dakota Access pipeline that will cut through Lakota/Dakota sovereign territory if not redirected.
All of these stories have common exploitative DNA and Copeland nails it here:
The new imperial disorder rises arrogantly over the bones of the bodies of conquered children, women, and men. The bodies of the indigenous peoples were the first to be sacrificed, eliminated, and contained; then the body of the earth was raped and mastered; finally, the bodies of yellow, brown, poorwhite [sic], and black children, women, and men, were squeezed through the winepress of ‘new’ empire-building.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being
[Read about the pipeline (pdf) and pitch in by funding the camp. Campers are preparing to stay through winter.]
When we’re convicted of the inherent value of life, we get to stand against every system that makes humans prey and that accommodates the destruction of the Earth.
I see no way to accommodate what’s happening. I can only glimpse a few ways for us to pause and be able to press through, acknowledging the taste of grief, creating regardless, reaching for joy wherever we can enter in, and holding our center.
“Being centered,” John Heider writes, “means having the ability to recover one’s balance, even in the midst of action. A centered person is not subject to passing whims or sudden excitements. Being grounded means being down-to-earth, having gravity or weight. I know where I stand, and I know what I stand for: that’s ground.”
Tonight, I value lives. I listen to music. I write. And I know where we stand.
When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“
When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving.
The culture of “unfollow, unfriend, and block” tells me that I should demonstrate self-respect by cutting people off. I see that as a possible emergency solution, but not a routine one.
If “we’re one,” cutting others off is like performing a live dissection and more torture than healing. I haven’t learned how to do it well. And I’m not sure that I wish to. I do think we should learn to close relational chapters well, but I don’t think that means carving others out of my life.
So what are my options? (Continuing mistreatment isn’t in the budget.)
I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of Jesus; after all, if anyone could speak to inner circle folks becoming life- and joy-threatening liabilities, he’d be the one.
In Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8, Jesus has just called his named disciples and is teaching the public. He has already stressed the Sabbath police, attracted regional crowds, and taught the parable of the sower—which is a parable about being generally accessible yet only selectively received.
Matthew and Luke are vague about Jesus’s family’s intentions, but Mark explicitly says that they’ve come to “take charge of him.” They’ve come to do an intervention, and someone tells him they’ve arrived.
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers,” he replies, a little more brusque than a Jamaican parent would have allowed. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).
Given the care with which Jesus engages his mother in his last life chapter, it makes no sense to see this saying as a cold block. It makes a lot more sense to see Jesus destabilizing the sacred definitions of kinship: divesting himself of his relatives so that he can re-invest in them in a new way.
Jesus lays down his parent and siblings so that he can form new kinship relationships that respect what he’s committed to. That new family system includes everyone aligned with his lifework, including his parents and siblings once they can gather themselves and drop the belief that he’s a walking demon-vessel.
It’s not much to ask, really, that your kin stop viewing you through the lens of their suspicion that you’re carrying water for Satan. It’s hard to do a road-trip (and life is one big road trip) with a suspicion that big in the middle seat.
How I’ve heard this saying taught is as permission to dissect a family into believer and unbeliever; into trustworthy and dangerous-and-waiting-to-draw-you-into-moral-deception.
I don’t see it that way. I see it as encouraging me, us, to reconsider the logic of our relationships, to value our deepest callings and integrity enough to invite those we love to participate with us, to accept their limitations enough to leave them in their lane if that’s what they prefer, and to revise the way we engage them, but not abandon them entirely. After all, our families, our kin, aren’t the only people we serve.
I draw comfort from our glimpses of Jesus’s parent close by at the end of his life, and of his relative James giving his energy to the early church.
We don’t know how long it took them to go from “He is out of his mind” to full-bodied commitment. But they made that journey. And only because Jesus was willing to allow the original relationships to dissolve so that new relationships could form.
I’m learning from the Master.
