Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

solidarity

By

One of us

“One of us.”

One of us. One of ours. Our own. We claim them. We look out for them. We protect them.

When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, ‘The handle is one of us.'”

The apostle Paul writes, “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel.” Zora Neale Hurston’s version is similar: “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.”

And all three sayings acknowledge in their own contexts the distance between demographics and community.

A person can be part of a demographic category without participating in the world of experience that members of their demographic create. A tool may be composed of the same wood as a forest yet become part of the forest’s destruction.

Jewish functionaries in the Third Reich’s concentration camps shared the same backgrounds as the Jews they governed on behalf of the SS: they were prisoners too, just prisoners with privileges, responsibilities, and the ability to cause others occasional benefits and grave harms.

“One of us” sold off villages during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. “One of us” argued against integration on the basis that the races were not equal and shouldn’t seek to be. “One of us” sits on the Supreme Court today, denying that racism still impacts Black people in this country.

“One of us” and “one of ours” are no comfort at all unless they can mean something more substantive than the accidents of birth and proximity that compose “common identity.”

When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.

So what does it mean for a humanist to insist that all people are valuable when all people don’t believe that, demonstrate through policy, word, and action that they don’t believe it, and may never believe it?

"'When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us"' Sometimes kinship isn't solidarity." —@mackenzian

By

We’re not all alike, and that’s not a problem

We’re in this life together and substantive solidarity is important.

A NASA color image of Earth from space: the Americas are visible under wispy white clouds. The background is deep black.
NASA captured this image of Earth from one million miles using its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera. (Learn more.)

We share one planet, and if we kick one another off the rock, there is nowhere else for us to go.

But we’re not all alike.

There are differences between social groups that can make social solidarity challenging, and there are also differences within social groups that can make rough-cut rules based on single identity factors remarkably unhelpful.

The analytical model of intersectionality emerged from Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s studies of anti-discrimination case law and feminist and anti-racist activism. Why do well-intentioned social interventions consistently leave some group members wounded in the traffic intersection? What are the designers of these interventions missing?

In “Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color,” Crenshaw shows how intra-group differences can yield big variations in group members’ outcomes: in one case, Black men and Black women experienced different degrees of discrimination in a company whose policies penalized employees who weren’t male as well as employees who weren’t White.

Crenshaw also explains that race and gender aren’t the only axes of difference that we need to account for as we engage intra-group differences:

“The organized identity groups in which we find ourselves are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed… With identity thus reconceptualized, it may be easier to understand the need for and to summon the courage to challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, ‘home’ to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few.” (Emphasis added.)

Over the last few weeks, Herb Montgomery of Renewed Heart Ministries has been working through the Sayings Gospel Q and encountering anew Jesus’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teachings about engaging oppressors and oppression (Herb is a friend and client).

As Herb has explained to his readers, both Jesus and King addressed their communities from within, not from without. They were addressing their peers, not imposing norms from above them, and knowing this should help us to better understand the tone and content of their teachings.

Some Christians like to say “The ground is level at the foot of the cross.” The ground is not level at the base of a social pyramid: intra-group variations mean that it’s sometimes less oppressive to hear a norming message from someone in a different social group from yours if they share other facets of your experience.

Martin Luther King was a Black American Christian who spoke out of the Black America church tradition first to other Black people and thence to the leaders and other U.S. citizens regardless of their ethnicity. He was also a middle-class, highly educated, charismatic man who drew public authority from his position as a member of the clergy.

As a minister, King had social influence that the best cook in the country couldn’t have had. As a man, his public work and time away from family for the common good attracted far less criticism than the work of his female colleagues. That includes his wife: most people don’t know that Coretta Scott King was an activist in her own right and began her anti-segregationist work before meeting the man who became her husband.

So intra-group differences make a difference: we can’t assume solidarity or common experience with another person on the basis of a single characteristic like age or ethnicity or religion or sexuality. People who seem similar can have entirely different priorities (compare Professor Imani Perry and Justice Clarence Thomas or Jane Elliott and Phyllis Schlafly), and people who seem very different can build coalitions to meet their mutual goals (compare Urvashi Vaid and Dean Spade or Ted Olson and David Boies).

Take no shortcuts when it comes to understanding who people are and the social vision they’re working towards, and you’ll make a better teammate for other people who realize that not only is this the one rock we have to live on but also we don’t all have to be alike to live here.

Also Read

By

What Renovating My Website Taught Me About Climate Change

Oblique view of wall mixed media installation at Atlanta's Center for Civil and Human Rights
2014 (c) Keisha E. McKenzie

You may have noticed some radical changes to this site in the last month.

Yes, I’m renovating! Please excuse the dust.

Last winter, I reviewed all of my web spaces, culled a few, downgraded others, and created an upgrade plan for this one. I literally drew out several new pages with fine-tip Sharpies and hand-lettered captions, set some goals for the site, and revised the content structure.

But I didn’t implement the upgrade plan.

“Stay in your lane” can be a noble excuse for inaction.

I didn’t implement the plan because I didn’t think I was qualified to. I thought it would be too technically complicated for the time I had to spend. And I figured it’d be smarter to outsource the project and focus on the communication and development work that was making me money. I know what it’s like to train for years in an area and then watch a total naif try to out-expert you. I didn’t want to be that naif.

So for much of last year, I swept up around the site’s edges, maintained the installed software—something I taught myself 2 years ago—and periodically wondered if the universe would send me someone else to create the new site. I have several friends and friends-of-friends who are trained web developers, and it seemed wise to call on their expertise.

The specialists know, right?

Around mid-year, I asked one of these specialists to take on the job, not as a freebie but as a paid project. But specialists are busy specializing and nothing else happened after “Yes, I’ll get back to you.”

This January, I dusted off my old drawings, reminded myself of why the reboot would a good idea, yet still didn’t implement it. Friends suggested new developers and I followed up with a referral from a client. But that second developer also failed to respond.

“I can do this myself with time,” I now told Facebook. “I don’t want to do it myself, which is why I’m looking for a developer to do it for me.” I also decided that if I couldn’t find someone by March, I’d spend the budget on myself.

Well.

I didn’t contract with someone, and I didn’t wait until March after all. Instead I did my own work and my reward is the budget I would have used to pay a specialist. A very merry unbirthday to me.

“If you want a job well-done, do it yourself” only works in some conditions.

When I was a child, I learned the phrase “If you want a job well-done, do it yourself.” The adults around me set it to a catchy tune and it also involved whistling. I haven’t heard it for years but it bubbled past my lips several times once I decided to take action to improve my site.

I bought into the Genesis Framework and StudioPress, selected two themes for comparison, narrowed down to one based on a features analysis, installed it, compared the demo site to my designs, added new widgets and plug-ins, researched how-tos, and did with reasonable ease what just a few weeks beforehand I’d hoped that someone else, anyone else, would have done on my behalf.

We can, many of us, do a lot more by ourselves than we think we can. When we’re looking at well-defined, concrete problems, it’s usually not that hard, and the only variable is time. Either the plug-in installs properly or it doesn’t. Either the site loads or it doesn’t. Change the default color. Shuffle the menu order. Upload new sidebar text.

When problems are more complex, ill-defined, or wicked, even the most intrepid individual will flounder.

I shared the classic definition of “wicked problems” in December: when we’re talking about wicked problems,

  • issues are “nested or consequent to other problems”
  • information is “not well-defined”
  • decision-makers don’t “share common values”
  • piecemeal approaches “change the system and [produce] unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern” and
  • “the problem [is] either difficult or impossible to solve.” (Churchman, 1967)

Climate change is a wicked problem in every possible sense. It’s global, but affects different global regions in different ways and to different degrees—literally. It’s rooted in scientific processes and engineering outcomes, but is also the child of several thick socio-political problems: uneven resource distribution, multi-generational poverty, markets of privatized profit and shared risk, technology developed without long-term human impact assessments, scapegoating, marginalization, and various forms of racism. Along the way, it also intersects with problems like emergency planning, disaster mitigation, political scapegoating, food production and distribution, water and waste management, and urban and suburban design.

No single person, no matter how brilliant, trained, or determined, could resolve the human- and other bio-impacts of climate change on their own. No one would have the right to. The challenge is too big. Too complicated. Spans too much territory. Affects too many people.

In these cases, we can’t outsource action to the specialists, and we can’t throw up our hands and do it alone.

We have to work with others.

The frontline of the People's Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
The frontline of the People’s Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance

About 10 years ago, I was working in a civil engineering ethics program when two of my colleagues asked me to work with them on an environmental rhetoric project. We were in West Texas at the time, a region of the US that’s suffering from a shrinking water table, an expanding population, and strong values-based resistance to environmental science. (Climate scientist Dr. Katherine Hayhoe talks about these regional concerns in Years of Living Dangerously.)

So the three of us—a philosopher, a science rhetorician, and a technical communicator—started to explore how people’s values influenced their approach to the environment. “Creation care” wasn’t yet hot, but I did discover that my denomination had published two position statements promoting responsible human engagement with the rest of the natural world. And they were quite pointed statements too.

I quoted from those statements last weekend during a panel workshop with Peterson Toscano (Climate Stew), J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson (Metropolitan Community Churches) at the 2015 Creating Change conference in Denver, CO.

We talked about the knowledge, skills, and competencies that LGBTQ people have developed over the years:

  • the power to push through stubborn political and religious denial and the many deaths that silence and complicity can bring
  • the ability to self-educate, build solidarity movements, and strengthen humane care networks that support the most vulnerable
  • knowledge of how to base sustainable action on healthy self-affirmation rather than fear
  • attunement to justice, access, structures of privilege and oppression, and what it takes to include and mobilize the whole of a community, not just the favored, moneyed few; and
  • concern for people beyond our cliques: pandemics, genocides, and super-storms have no respect for geopolitical borders, and so-called fictive kinship (what we call “chosen family”) saves our lives and boosts our well-being whether we’re in the midst of crisis or not.

We asked the other people in the room who they called on for support during crisis, and what motivated them to care about climate change. They found it much easier to respond to the first question than the second, and there may be a lesson in that.

People move people: people respond to others and people need others. “Who I’d call if I needed help evacuating my town” isn’t an abstract question. It’s a high-risk scenario, and may be scary to think about, but it’s also quite easy to answer because it forces us to imagine the faces of our friends and those we care about.

Over the last few years, climate change activists have moved away from featuring fluffy and carnivorous polar bears because we live and choose how to live with our families, friends, and fellow humans in mind. It’s people who motivate us—for better or worse—and when we see the “human side” of an issue, that’s when it becomes real to us.

I’m not sorry I went ahead and did my website update myself: I strengthened my confidence and stretched myself. I have no less respect for the specialists who can do this work faster or more fluidly. And yet it reminded me that the independence that works well at the level of the simple or linear problem may be a massive liability on complex issues, and on the things that matter most, I can’t afford to go it alone. None of us can.

Lately, there haven’t been many rewards for people who work across borders and social boundaries for the good of all people—but whether the topic is police violence or climate change, that’s precisely what we’ll need much more of.

“To change everything, we need everyone.” —350.org

That’s absolutely right.

By

Silent Friends

Every so often, MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” makes the social media rounds again. This weekend on Twitter and FB a few folks have shared the quote, “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

That letter is one of my favorites. When I was looking at it again the other day I realized that the common title, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” keeps pop attention on where King physically was when he wrote it. The letter’s actual argument, intended audience, and wider context gets obscured.

The letter was also printed under the title “The Negro is Your Brother” and was published in excerpts and in full with and without King’s permission between 1963 and 1964. It responded to eight so-called moderate clergymen who, while sympathetic to the logic of the equality movement, viewed equality activists as “naturally impatient” troublemakers who should defer to the courts and not press their concerns or stir up the calm locals. They’d published two open letters that year criticizing “outsiders” and appealing for “law and order,” and King responded to all of that noise head on.

We rarely hear about their responses to King’s reply. 🙂 One of the 8 had allowed local civil rights workers to worship at his church; his congregation fractured over race after the minister moved away two years later. Another become a strong public advocate for equality, and his church peers accused him of being a communist and heretic. At least two of the 8 were offended by King’s letter, one calling it “propaganda” in his memoirs, and the other only criticizing it after King’s death.

A More Personal Reflection 

Nearly 4 years ago, I moved back to the Southwest after several months in the DC region. The congregation I attended that first Sabbath back in town hosted a minister from a neighboring state.

This minister pitched his sermon on spiritual warfare against every possible boogeyman: Catholics, feminists, intellectuals, LGBT people, atheists and non-Christians. I can no longer remember whether I was more dismayed by the sermon’s spiritualized prejudice or by the congregation’s casual affirmation of it.

I took a sabbatical from that congregation, and later made that sabbatical permanent.

Since then I’ve moved away and found a church that does not promote or justify prejudice, but occasionally I’m reminded that this is an unusual congregational feature.

Today, thanks to the internet, I overheard a Sabbath School conversation in which visible LGBT people were represented as a sign of the degenerate end times. If any class participant disagreed with that claim, none of them rebutted it, so it hung in the air as if valid.

In pulpits and on talk shows, too, any believer or preacher can freely tie an Other’s visibility to the power of Satan and the rapidly approaching end of the age. “Free speech” might be free for the speaker but often has high costs for the subject, and it’s rarely challenged in the moment where it counts most. We have too many silent friends.

I’ve been a silent friend before. I’ve also been a silent Other. But both roles support and sustain prejudice, alienation, and fear. Neither role benefits me or those I love. Neither role helps to create the world that I want to live in as an adult. I’ve moved on and am grateful for the organizations that have helped me find more sustainable roles to play.

Have you ever been a silent friend? How did it feel? Why were you silent? Did you tell yourself it wasn’t the right time to speak up? How do you know what “the right time” is? Do you believe it’s ever more important to guard a speaker’s soapbox than it is to challenge false witnessing against the people he or she is speaking about? Is silence acceptance, and critique an attack?