and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems
Time to Speak Up
As I wrote last year, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has planned a global summit on gender and sexuality for March 21-24 this year. The summit falls under the planning authority of Elder Pardon Mwansa, a GC vice-president and chair of the committee on “alternative sexuality practices” [sic] that will report to the church in session in 2015. He has been receiving a great deal of feedback on this summit far more graciously than most.
Despite recent criminalization initiatives in Nigeria and Uganda that were influenced in part by US-based Christian evangelicals and received limited on-continent pushback from local or international Adventists, the General Conference decided to host this meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa is one of 9 African nations that has embedded anti-discrimination principles in its law, but it also has a disturbing culture of sexual violence against women, especially women known or assumed to be non-heterosexual.
The summit schedule and presenter line-up has now been released and several observers have wondered how the global church can gain from excluding so many participants from a conversation that already affects them.
A Possible Approach to Conversation
I know several more people who have met with attendees or plan to do so ahead of the summit. If you’re among them, reflect on and/or pray about your approach before you do. I offer you a few items you might consider to help guide your thoughts:
- Concerns: What most concerns you about the summit given what you already know? What are you hearing from SDA Kinship, from the Seventh-Gay Adventists film community, and other sources? Believe Out Loud published an article on this today too; are your questions being answered? If not, what other questions do you have?
- Goals: What do you think the church wants to accomplish with the people it intends to gather? What might the church worker you reach out to be able to tell you about the denomination’s goals? What questions might you have about whatever they tell you?
- Your Own Story: What’s your personal stake in what happens at the summit? Does your contact already know about it? If not, how might you share your story with them in a brief, but relevant way? What about your biography and experience do you most want them to remember when they go to all the sessions at the summit and/or vote on any statements that result from it?
- This Friendship: How do you plan to keep in touch with this person after you talk? What if you might be able to share with them over the long term, no matter what their opinions are right now? Would that continued relationship be meaningful to you? If so, how can you let them know?
- Overall: Simply enjoy being one human sharing conversation with another: you and this person, regardless of their organizational status, are peers. Enjoy their company as much as you can and consider that they may be even less at ease with the conversation than you are! Whatever is said, however it’s said, offer them grace.
Climate Concerns
The climate for workers at the General Conference hasn’t been too open in the last few years. Some have shared with me that they feel hyper-monitored or even repressed because of informers and backlashes. They don’t want any drama; they want to keep working and serving, so they guard what they say to colleagues and church members, especially in sensitive cases like this. This is one of a few possible adaptations to a surveillance subculture
In this climate, should you have the chance to speak to a church worker, please do whatever you can do to show that you want to keep their confidences and honor their willingness to discuss freely with you. Also, the denomination is quite comfortable framing the “issue” in terms of arguments and decontextualized text debates. If conversants refocus their discussions on real people, their lives, families, and consciences instead, that’s likely to produce more effective and more humane outcomes all round.
My Thoughts
To be sure, as an individual, I have very strong opinions on the arguments and the last 40+ years of research and experiential evidence, and I continue to pursue my own inquiry about the subject. I could argue confidently about this with family and friends, but for the last several years, I’ve chosen not to. I don’t see these debates as a good use of my time or energy or as beneficial for the people involved in them. The Backfire Effect is real.
I also don’t accommodate these debates for the same reason that I wouldn’t debate a White supremacist about ethnic segregation. I don’t accept the core premise that the mainstream’s “approval” or “agreement” is required or appropriate in this case. If they don’t own the “standard” from which Others deviate, they also have no authority to police it.
We are each born into this life and come to know ourselves as one of billions. We’re not responsible for the demographic categories we occupy. We are responsible for the quality of relationship we nurture with people in and beyond those categories. That’s what guides me.
What about SDA Kinship?
As far as the SDA Kinship membership goes, I think there is an incredible, mostly latent power in its stories and in how widely members’ stories vary. I don’t think Kinship should respond to the denomination’s Single Story about LGBTI people (“Not a category of their own, just a broken, maladjusted subcategory of us!”) with a Single Story of its own (“Just like you, but with a twirl!”). At minimum, SDA Kinship is an LGBTI group and not just a “gay” one; not all members remain Adventist today—some have been chased out of membership and others have voluntarily moved on.
But beyond these basics, the organization shouldn’t agree to tell a Single Story because it’s not the Borg. It thrives because it isn’t. Members have different experiences, different beliefs, different approaches, and different strengths to bring to the organization’s table as well as to the commonly held table of their church. The under-acknowledged fact is that LGBTI people have co-built, co-funded, and co-staffed the Seventh-day Adventist church from its founding days and continue to do so. They don’t serve the church to claim any special stars in their crown; they serve because of their religious convictions and beliefs in improving the world and witnessing through healing work. For decades, LGBTI Adventists have worked alongside heterosexual members to advance the church’s mission regardless of those heterosexuals’ marital statuses—whether they are unmarried, married, or remarried, whether they are content, struggling, or suffering. And this will always be true.
The diversity of the people who have co-created the church as it stands today—that is what I think makes SDA Kinship such a powerful continuing witness to the mainstream, mainstreaming SDA church. Variance makes learning possible, but we have to be open to that variance in order to draw its best out of it. I do hope the church learns to listen to its own diversity: listening is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable.
Fortunately, the church will have plenty of opportunities to choose new directions for this and similar conversations in the near future: Kinship’s community and its growing cloud of witnesses and advocates isn’t likely to fall silent, and the LGBTI Adventists around the world won’t disappear.
It’s time to start learning; it’s time, they say, to speak up.
Speaking as Myself
My friend Teagan hosted a really powerful conversation this weekend about what it means to be an ally to a community and how to speak with its members rather than for or in place of them. [1]
I come into the ally/narrative conversation shaped not just by my direct experiences but also by the body of narratives that catalyzed the British and American anti-slavery movements.
Who May Speak for a Slave?
Narratives shaped the 18th-19thC conversation about slavery as a legal institution and cultural practice. Some of those narratives were written by former slaves and free people like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. These storytellers recorded their experiences, published them, and toured their respective countries to speak about them. Other narratives were written by slaveholders/plantation owners to describe plantation life from their point of view and to justify the slave economy in the face of nascent criticism. Still other narratives were written by abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Not surprisingly, while Britain and the United States wrestled with slavery, the narratives with the most popular credit belonged to White abolitionists, slaveholders, and a certain kind of former slave: a Black gentleman or gentlewoman with refined social manners, self-taught or classically educated as far as he or she could be, and publicly pious. These were the narratives given platform space and amplified.
I’ve seen a similar dynamic in every social movement since abolition: not all stories are equal; social norm-compliance buys airtime and social credit; allies can be contradictory and not all endorsements are consistent. Given this inconsistency, I’ve learned not to conflate “anti-slavery” and “pro-Black” or “anti-discrimination” and “pro-equality.” Objecting to legal discrimination or social cruelty is not the same as fully supporting a population, especially once that population expects to be judged on its own terms and not by the measure of other groups. So those who work against social and legal discrimination may still hold onto overt and subtle prejudices about the people we work with: being a community’s ally in one sense does not necessarily mean being its ally in all senses.
Conflicting Support
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1851-2) exemplifies this. Its author, a White woman, was an abolitionist and teacher. Building on the stories of former slaves, Beecher Stowe depicted “kind” and “cruel” slaveholders, and also featured Black slaves as major, sympathetic characters. [2] By the 1860s, her story was galvanizing abolitionists and helping to turn public sentiment against the worst of the slave economy.
At the same time, the book relied on an abridged and patronizing view of Black people, and its benevolently racist stereotypes still surface in US media and public sphere conversation 150+ years later: the noble-faithful Uncle Tom, the loyal, religious, and ever insightful maid and wetnurse, the wild child. Beecher Stowe didn’t invent these tropes; she merely built her story around them. I do not question that she was an anti-slavery ally, considered slavery immoral, and had good intentions for her art.
A story can have a positive impact in the short and long term while also collapsing audiences’ view of reality and their view of the subjects represented in that story. In the same way, it is possible for a story to open up an audience’s view of trans* or gender variant or LGB people while also using conceptual shortcuts and assumptions that don’t serve the wider community well. [3] This doesn’t mean that only some stories should be told. I think it means that more stories should be told overall, more thoughtfully, more assertively in some cases, and more humbly in others. Stories are powerful and some of them can cast a long, long shadow. That scares me sometimes, but it also helps me to be conscious about my impact on people and communities I care about and not focus only on my hopes and intentions on their or our behalf.
The Stories I Tell
As part of its community outreach program and at the invitation of local college professors, PFLAG-Lubbock has organized panels of members to talk with counselors and teachers-in-training about identity, diversity, family dynamics, being an ally, and ways to increase understanding of gender and sexual minorities. I joined my first panel about three years ago. It was the first time in a long, long time that anyone had asked me to tell my story, to share from my experience what the world looked like from where I stood, to speak as myself. Whenever I spoke, it felt good that I was never offering classes a “single story” about my communities because those panels were always set up to support a broad range of perspectives and experiences. There were times when panelists disagreed and yet we didn’t gloss over those differences: there are already too many spaces where disagreement is misconstrued as disloyalty. “Diversity” spaces don’t need to mimic that.
I still tell my own story more informally from time to time, and I also speak about my perception of others and their stories, but whenever I do either of these things, I do so knowing that a story changes in the telling no matter who it’s about. In the years I told stories in Texas and in print, I noticed how much my narratives changed as I did. I drew from a consistent file of characters and events, but my interpretations evolved, and I also began recounting some experiences less while talking about what I’d learned from them more. If stories that I know are sound can vary this much, how much more might there be a fidelity gap between the stories others tell about themselves and the way I’d render their narratives? Because of our psychological and experiential distance, I can’t tell The Story of You as well as you can, and you can’t tell The Story of Me as well as I can.
One of my life lessons is this: When I see and experience this world, I do so as me. I never do so as another soul, never as they’d see or experience this life, and never as they’d wish I’d see it. So whenever I speak outside my experiences, I necessarily project in some way; I’m perceiving, translating, re-framing, and then re-publishing. I’m in constant conversation with others, too, and we’re all shaping our stories together, Yet the only original story I can tell is my own.
I find it keeps me honest to recognize that this is what it means for me to tell stories about my life and about others’ lives; this is what it means to build knowledge and understanding with others. It also seems to help my peers and audiences to acknowledge that this is what we’re doing, because in coming to grips with this, we’re challenged not to seek a fixed and universal truth from the stories we tell to each other. For the Christian fundamentalists I know, that’s a tough sell, but then some of them also struggle with the premise that our particular experiences are not inferior to an idealized and universalized experience: universalized experiences, after all, are only a slice of the world used to colonize the rest.
When I do speak up on my own behalf or with others, my stories about myself and my perceptions aren’t less important than others’ stories and perceptions. Stories I’d tell about myself are not less important than those others will tell about me. But they are different. They can’t be substituted without loss. And the wider world often treats my stories as less important. It also treats the differences I naturally add to the mainstream as annoyances or something “more difficult” that we’ll all “get to later.” That approach has real relational consequences and we live those consequences every day. I think the whole is diminished because of this approach. So I speak up about that when possible.
I don’t believe any of this means we all need to stop telling stories or building knowledge together. I believe it means we need to tell more stories, not fewer. And all of us, the storytellers used to being sources of The Story, need to recognize that our special standing is a dysfunction that we can and should dismantle in all the ways we can.
[1] Today is the birthday of an ally who stood with me as I learned to speak as myself and for myself. I still hope to offer others the kind of wholeness she offered me. CKR: b. April 1954 – d. April 2010. C., thank you so much.
[2] The “kind” and “cruel” slaveholder distinction only makes sense on one side of the table—not my side!
Lorde on Silence
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I regretted most were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
… [Death] is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. — Audre Lorde
Janet Mock on the Power of Words
Janet Mock on the Power of Words
“Words are things,” Dr. Maya Angelou said during her 2011 Master’s Class on the Oprah Winfrey Network. “You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you. — Janet Mock
In this reflection, Mock explores the bigger picture: not just the dust-up, the slurs, and the script of Offense-MediaOutrage-I’mSorryIfYouWereOffended. She also raises the systemic questions about “selective outrage,” how some people’s social location and influence makes it easier for us to excuse their actions, and what it means to be a critical consumer.
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?