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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Making stuff up

Epigenetics is a useful word if you don't know what's going on—if you do, you use something else. —Sir Adrian Bird

I took an extra year to finish college for health reasons. That year taught me a lot about myself, and it also gave me front-line exposure to the uncertainty and ambiguity that’s a normal part of conventional medicine.

Take the adjective idiopathic. It’s used to describe conditions or symptoms that seem to arise in individuals from nowhere and for no apparent reason instead of through environmental triggers or genetic predispositions. It’s a way for medics to say “something’s happening here, but we don’t know what caused it.”

The term idiopathic was accurate for me: my doctors didn’t know what caused my symptoms. But seeing “idiopathic” as a patient made me roll my eyes.

Whenever my specialists didn’t have an answer, they pointed me to clunky categories like undifferentiated primary disease and idiopathic secondary symptom. Each of these categories sounded quite authoritative and clarified very little.

So I laughed on reading one of the Genetic Literacy Project’s latest posts: medicine isn’t the only scientific specialty where this happens.

Reviewing popular articles on epigenetics and Lamarckian evolution, the GLP explains that some of the sociologists and journalists who invoke epigenetics are doing it inaccurately and with much more certainty than the underlying science merits:

While there is some evidence that stress can induce epigenetic changes, most of it comes from studies of people who went through severe trauma or stress (like the Holocaust)… [Epigenetic] changes are also reversible and shift throughout a person’s life. This means that an epigenetic modification linked to a disease (e.g. obesity or depression) that arises during childhood will not necessarily persist for a person’s lifetime. Scientists are not clear under what conditions epigenetic tags persist or are removed.” —Nicholas Staropoli, April 11, 2017, emphasis added

It’s not necessarily the case that Grandma’s experiences overdetermine mine. They might contribute to my life context, my disposition, or the tools I naturally use to deal with my life experiences, but I can still adapt beyond whatever she left behind.

Scientists will need to keep correcting us no matter which concept we’re garbling this time: there may be no preemptive defense against the human impulse to neaten ambiguous details and to tell stories where life has proven idiosyncratic or unruly.

We are Homo narrativus, and we make things up.

We should probably be careful with that.

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Truth-telling through a comic frame

A photo of the 125th/Lenox subway station.
Photo credit: Jim Henderson

I somehow skipped the comic book/graphic novel stage during childhood, but encountered this mode of storytelling one summer afternoon in the stacks of a London university library.

Since then, the comic book industry has enjoyed a popular renaissance, and both the theaters and the web streaming services are full of comic adaptations.

Luke Cage is one of them. It’s set in my new neighborhood, it’s gritty and violent, and it features a villain who obsessively quotes the judgment and vengeance verses of the Bible.

As I’ve worked through the first season, I find myself remembering two other Bible-obsessive film villains: Julius from Pulp Fiction and the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption.

Hearing the Christian scriptures tumble from the mouths of cruel, manipulative, and sadistic characters was jolting twenty years ago, and it should have been.

In the second decade of the 2000s, however, it’s a little less so. It might even be increasingly realistic, and as a Christian and person of faith, I’m wrestling with why.

What about the way religion and religious people function in this society makes this kind of character so easy for our screenwriters to write? What about my community’s practice of our religion has diminished our surprise at religiously rationalized violence not far away but right here, and not by Others but by Us?

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The strategy of visibility

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. —Junot Diaz

About two years ago I wrote about how the “monsters” of Halloween give people a way to explore their own shadows. I’ve also written several times about various forms of demonization and dehumanization: how some people with power chip away at other people’s humanity by rendering them malevolent and monstrous.

But there are other ways to become monstrous than masked play and projection. Cultural invisibility is one of them. Though I had a nourishing community around me during my first two decades, I experienced cultural invisibility and later had to actively counter it for my own health.

Writer Junot Diaz once shared how not seeing people like him in literature or mass media affected how he saw himself:

‘You guys know about vampires?’ Diaz asked. ‘You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?’ And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”

It can feel good to open up a news magazine and see your people there. But if that representation is based on malicious stereotypes, it can do more damage than good.

Riz Ahmed is a British Asian actor who has traversed the Atlantic for work for about a decade. In that time, he’s discovered that being part of a hyper-visible demographic in post-9/11 UK and US border control processing rooms and auditions means that “you are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens; you are a signifier before you are a person; you are back at stage one.” Ahmed nevertheless hopes that his art can change how the security state perceives him and others like him.

According to Cherrie Moraga, visibility is “the most effective strategy to quell the rising tide of discrimination.” Social activists from 19th Century abolitionists to the contemporary disability justice movement have used it as an effective, humanizing strategy.

People seem to need to know Others’ stories before they’ll grant them “neighbor” status and offer compassionate care or impartial service. I used to imagine that being invisible could be a superpower, but it turns out it’s more of an Achilles’ heel. Poor representation costs minoritized people dearly, and that’s why good stories told well matter so much, especially for people who rarely see the social spotlight.

Read Ahmed’s reflection in the London Guardian. It’s well worth the read.

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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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Who tells your story?

Paolo Uccello's "St. George and the Dragon." (Public domain)
Paolo Uccello’s “St. George and the Dragon.” (Public domain)

Early on in high school, my English teacher introduced our class to U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem, “Not My Best Side.” It’s a snarky modern piece inspired by Paolo Uccello’s painting of St. George and the Dragon, and it features the perspectives of St. George, the damsel he aims to rescue, and the dragon who brings them together.

Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string?” —The dragon

So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
… –
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.” —The damsel

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.” —St. George

Who tells your story for you determines the kind and qualiy of story it is. In her book Our Lives Matter, Pamela Lightsey explains that minoritized groups need to speak their own stories, not just for their own sake but for all of us:

No one person can be that privileged voice for any group of people/culture. Every class is made up of different ways of being… Even with the best intentions, womanist scholarship has rarely put its finger on the pulse of what it means to be a Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender [person] living in America.”

If people don’t tell their own stories, Lightsey argues, “we run the risk of our people’s history and theology being shaped primarily by our allies.”

Vantage point can both reveal and obscure. So it does matter that the winners narrate history, and that the stories of the Canaanites, Moabites, and Ninevites are still largely told by their Israelite peers and not read with their own priorities in mind.

Fanthorpe’s poem recognizes the possible motives of each main painting character. Each becomes more sympathetic or less so, and the standard myths and assumptions about each one are overturned because we learn their perspective on the scene.

How do we read each other’s stories, and how do we ensure that ours are rightly told?

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Truth through those who’ve lived it

Photo of display at Woodlawn Stone Barn Visitor Center, Montgomery County, Maryland.

No one understands history like those who have lived it. Oral histories are recorded or transcribed memories—often of everyday people—that capture unique personal perspectives available nowhere else. These valuable records reveal facets of history that are not recorded elsewhere, like the daily lives and struggles of formerly enslaved men and women who were rarely allowed to learn to read or write.” —At the Woodlawn Stone Barn Visitor Center, Montgomery County, Maryland

Due soon in the first issue of The Porch Magazine is an article I wrote about local history. The quote above is displayed at Woodlawn Stone Barn Vistor Center, one of several local historical sites that communicates stories and presents artifacts from the 18th and 19th Centuries.

When Maryland was still a state in which humans enslaved other humans, slaveholders didn’t want to hear the stories of the people they snatched and sold. But years later, we can read these stories from the vantage point of those who lived them. The dry facts become embodied. The histories become real again.

Truth becomes perceptible and accessible through direct experience and accounts of the direct experiences of others, and there’s no substitute for these knowledge sources. Simply: we can know more as we pay closer attention to the stories our predecessors have left behind.