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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

systems

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Serving the micro by changing the macro

"Freedom cuts its own path. And in a hostial system, your micro-status does not change the macro-rules." —@mackenzian

On the blog Ask A Manager, author Alison Green offers job-seekers and employees advice on interacting with their supervisors, managing relationships with colleagues, and developing their careers.

A few weeks ago, Green responded to a question from someone who had forbidden an employee from taking time off to attend their graduation. The letter-writer had granted other employees time to attend concerts, and accommodated substitutions that workers had arranged on their own, but refused their “go-to-person” the chance to celebrate their own achievement. The employee resigned.

Of course Green and the Ask A Manager community had a field day with this scenario: The letter-writer had failed to honor the employee’s loyalty and reliability, and had set aside their rules to accommodate others with much less significant commitments. The manager had no basis for denying the employee a release, and the employee was not the problem.

That employee, a first-generation college student and someone clearly committed to their job, had spent years working in a hostile system. But their environment only becomes completely intolerable when they need a few hours to celebrate their hard work and receive punishment instead of reasonable accommodation.

On my recent reading book list is M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. In the first few chapters, Copeland explains why we have to ground philosophy and theology right where we are, acknowledging our particularly embodied experiences and how bodies like ours have been framed through history.

She combs through first-person accounts of the United States’ system of enslavement to highlight not only the conditions of enslavement that Black people faced here, but also their resistance strategies: exercising faith, prayer, and hope independently of White people; educating themselves, often in secret; physically resisting assault attempts, even at the risk of retaliatory beatings, torture, and murder; undermining plantation work schedules or deploying sass; and obscuring or outright denying their desire for freedom.

Incarnate spirit refuses to be bound. Escaping to freedom, purchasing one’s own freedom or that of a loved one, fighting for freedom, offering up one’s own body for the life and freedom of another, and dying for freedom were acts of redemption that aimed to restore black bodily and psychic integrity. Living within a ‘system built on violence, disenfranchisement, and white supremacy’ surely pushed some enslaved people to respond…’with self-hatred, anger, and identification with the aggressor.’ Still, many other enslaved women stocked their arsenal with wit, cunning, verbal warfare, daring, physical strength, and so-called uppity behavior. Freedom was the prize; they put their hands to its plow, and held on.” —M. Shawn Copeland

The celebration of Juneteenth reminds us of the resilience of Black people who endured two extra years of enslavement because the good news of emancipation didn’t reach them. Copeland notes how one plantation owner deliberately resisted sharing that good news, and then abandoned the people he’d claimed to own without any of the resources they’d need to live independent lives as legally free people.

“Meeting the practical demands of freedom could be daunting,” Copeland writes. The practical demands of freedom include finding food to feed both oneself and dependents, maintaining shelter and regular work. An individual can enjoy none of the elements of a “free life” without money or the material support of the society around them. We aren’t really free if the system doesn’t allow for the conditions of freedom.

And this is why individual experiences, personal advantages, and private successes don’t change the nature of the system in which they occur. My ability to secure residency and create work over the last three years doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. immigration process is a nightmare. My education history wouldn’t especially protect me in an encounter with police or other armed state officers. My anecdotes don’t overrule the system’s logic or trends.

So much of the story of Black people in the West is the tale of people hustling up ways to be free, spinning the tricky webs of Anansi to carve out alternatives to the dominant storyline, and using wit, cunning, persistence, and pluck so our descendants can have a more whole, less harmful experience on Earth than we’ve had.

Whether we’re loyal or reliable or not, at some point we learn that we can’t depend on the rules or rule-enforcers, but that we still need to make lives in societies not designed for us. And some of us add to the righteous work of making our individual lives the more complex work of challenging the wider society in order to change it.

The logic of the wider society frames and often contracts our individual experiences. The newly freed people of the Adams plantation needed material resources to make good on the legal status Lincoln’s proclamation had given them. They didn’t get them because the White supremacist logic that had made them targets of enslavement and abuse hadn’t vanished with either the war or the 1863 executive order.

Today, Black people need work and wages that can support their health and households, freedom from fear, and freedom from violence. But the system’s logic, the logic that long ago pronounced Black people inferior and indolent still persists. It has changed form, as all systems do, but it still persists.

It can be hard to remember that the micro’s answers aren’t an adequate response to the system’s questions, but that’s the reminder that the ancestors’ stories give me. Unless we can change the system that frames our lives, we’d have to agree with them that “Freedom ain’t nothin, less you got somethin to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin on liberty is lak… livin on love. It just don’t work” (in Copeland, p. 47).

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Being right and doing wrong

Davontae Sanford gets to go home now.

After nine years trapped in the Michigan prison system after a false conviction, the 23-year-old gets to go home now.

‘It’s about time. It’s too bad nobody listened years ago… so this kid wouldn’t have to spend so much time in prison for a crime he didn’t do.’

“Until Tuesday, prosecutors had steadfastly insisted they’d convicted the right person for the killings on Runyon on Detroit’s east side, and they rejected any notion Sanford was innocent.”

The Detroit Free News has the full story.

Sometimes the distance between being right and doing right costs people years of their lives. State prosecutors were intent on building their case from implication through coerced confession to conviction. They were invested in “being right,” or more precisely, being seen to be right. They didn’t welcome evidence contrary to their case, even when that evidence was emphatic and their own evidence was thin.

Had the state been less invested in being right and more invested in doing right, Sanford could have spent his 15th year at home.

There’s a psychological bias that David McRaney of the You’re Not So Smart blog calls the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The idea: “Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.”

We’re all prone to this bias. It’s one of the reasons I’m still a Seventh-day Adventist and why it took me three moves and over 15 years to transfer my congregational membership out of my childhood church. Sunk costs were among the things that helped me to stay in my grad program during a particularly difficult period. This is a bias that motivates us to hang in there, and when what we’re hanging on to is worth something—perhaps an education, perhaps a marriage, perhaps a career path—that’s wonderful.

But what about when we’re wrong? We don’t like being wrong, and hanging in there is a fantastic way to avoid feeling like we’re wrong.

Yet not liking how it feels to be wrong doesn’t stop us from being wrong. Resistance to correction doesn’t guarantee accuracy.

And sometimes, the stakes are greater than our egos or resolved case ratios. Sometimes the stakes are a life, and there’s no real way to compensate Davontae Sanford for all he’s lost because people with power bet his last decade against their fear of being wrong.

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John Newton, Zacchaeus, and a Life Beyond Complicity

This year, I told Twitter, I want to stable Rudolph and his red nose. I don’t want to hear the angels talking about peace and goodwill. With a nation still unwilling to comprehensively address abusive policing and community distrust as youth have asked, angelic pronouncements about peace feel premature, if not presumptuous.

Over the weekend, I read through the goodwill messages that 70 or so nations sent to NASA in the 1960s for the Apollo 11 moon landing. NASA engraved these messages in a small silicon disc and the astronauts left it behind them in the dust of our only natural satellite.

“It is our earnest hope for mankind,” one message read, “that while we gain the moon, we shall not lose the world.”

That message came from Eric Williams, then Trinidad’s prime-minister. Williams was also one of the Caribbean’s preeminent historians. He’s now best known for his 1944 book, Capitalism and Slavery, one of the first studies to explicitly describe how the British slave trade thrived on its enmeshment with the Industrial Revolution and a blend of non-monopolistic capitalism and free or cheap human labor.

Just as US slavery adapted with the nation’s farming culture and favored crops—tobacco, cotton, and corn—and then later morphed with the rise of manufacturing, British slavery adapted with new markets in Asia and South America, and England enriched itself with the profits from that trade. Both American and British systems predicated their success and stability on the labor of certain kinds of human beings, and both societies continue to do so.

Some people are waking up from the system’s slumber, though.

I’ve written about David Gushee, an American evangelical who, earlier this year, wrote a book and a few well-placed articles on his changing theology and support for LGBT people. And then there’s Herb Montgomery, who uses the gospel stories and Girardian anthropology to teach Adventist audiences about Jesus’ new world.

I talked with Herb recently about the redemption myth of former slave trader John Newton. Many Christians know the tidy traditional story as told by evangelists like Wintley Phipps. At a Gaithers Band concert in 2002, Phipps told his audience that John Newton was a sailor and slave trader who converted to Christianity. Moved by the “amazing grace” that saved him, Newton then set his poem to the tune of a “Negro sorrow chant.”

“I believe God wanted that song written just the way it was,” Phipps says. “We’re connected by God’s amazing grace!” The audience whoops for this point.

But as I told Herb, Phipps’ story and the Amazing Grace myth it’s based on leaves a long forty years out of Newton’s tale. It actually took 40 years for Newton’s conversion to filter into his public stance on slavery—and in those 40 years he continued to buy and sell human beings or profit from their sale.

He became a Christian in 1748, yes, and he even served the Church of England as a priest, but he didn’t publish his Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade until 1788 after connecting with English politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce. Months before he died in 1807, Newton saw the British parliament abolish slave trading across its empire in 1807. The last boat of slaves docked in Jamaica that year.

While slave trading was now illegal, slave holding remained legal until the 1833 Abolition Act. Slaves forced into post-abolition “apprenticeship”—freedom training in theory and indentured servitude in fact—only became free in 1838. As slaves were finally emancipated, the government paid British slave-owners a total of £20 million in compensation for “lost property.” That grant would be worth over £989.8 million today (about US$1.5 billion). Former slaves received no such compensation for stolen liberty.

A corrupt system hates it when a body leaves its assigned place. When that body does leave, the system will come hunting for it in every possible way. It doesn’t matter whether your assigned place is farming as a slave, scraping by as a sharecropper, or running usurious and manipulative housing scams on people the banks won’t lend to; it really doesn’t matter. Unless you comply or cooperate with the system, unless you continue to be complicit, the system will come for you.

Knowing this makes Luke’s story about Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) somewhat incomplete for me.

Zacchaeus meets Jesus - Luke 19 (via Bible Gateway)
Zacchaeus meets Jesus – Luke 19 (via Bible Gateway)

Luke is the third gospel, traditionally described as the gospel that emphasizes interactions between Jesus and his culture’s outsiders, from non-Jewish people and children to women and tax collectors like Zacchaeus. Luke’s gospel is also the only one to mention Zacchaeus, a man who becomes rich through professional grift. Having stolen from the people as he ported money between them and the state, Zacchaeus was viewed as a “sinner” and therefore unworthy of Jesus’ time and company.

The story spins in an unexpected direction when Zacchaeus responds to Jesus with a restitution plan instead of pride, comparison, or dissociation: “Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Just for today, I’ll give Zacchaeus a pass on that word “if.” Twenty-first Century readers are all too accustomed to public apologies that throw the responsibility back on the interpreting, aggrieved audience.

“If I offended you…”

“If I hurt your feelings…”

“If I disappointed you, I’m sorry.”

But in this story, instead of becoming a character for us to be cynical about, Zacchaeus becomes a sympathetic figure. Zacchaeus is sympathetic not because he offers the community restitution but because no one had to ask him to. He doesn’t wait for Jesus’ permission to make things right. He doesn’t seek anyone’s permission at all: he knows what went wrong, and what his part in it was, and he announces ways he can restore good order.

I wish the Church—my Church—might be more like Zacchaeus at times like this. I wish it would acknowledge that its recent discoveries about racism, sexism, and heterosexism are still so late for so many, that it cannot hide in ignorance or empty disavowals, that it ought to be returning to its Earth community four times all that it’s taken. Perhaps we’d see a lot less self-congratulating about our latest revelations, and we’d carry several buckets more humility for the human costs of our tardiness.

I also wish Luke had chosen to report whether Zacchaeus followed through with his insight after that wild day. Or did his conviction fade as the crowd moved on to the next strange Jesus event and no one hung back to audit his promise? There’s a Clementine tradition that Zacchaeus earned a new name and joined the post-resurrection disciples as Matthias in Acts 1. But I don’t know. It may be just enough that this man survives in the tales of Luke as a wayshower for the well-intentioned souls in every age.

“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.” —Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

So Jesus sees this man in the tree he’s using to elevate himself above the masses. He calls him by his name and not his social position; he addresses him by the name that means “the pure, the innocent” and not by all the names that accurately label this man’s guilt. He calls him by his name, and invites him into relationship.

“I must stay at your house today.”

That’s the invitation to all tax collectors. To all who’re enmeshed with the enslavement and abuse of other human beings, Jesus says, “Come down immediately.”

To those who’ve been complicit with the violence of rank- and classism, Jesus says, “The new world has room for you; now you make room for me today.”

“You’re not a lost cause because you have been complicit. Come down from your lynching tree. Come down so we can commune; we can’t commune while you set yourself apart.”

I think it was in Paolo Freire’s writings that I first saw oppressors as humans being dehumanized through their own acts of oppression. And then when I reread the Hebrew Proverbs, I saw the lesson there too: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.”

If oppressing others degrades the self, then none are more in need of healing than those who harm others.

Zacchaeus climbs down from his tree and stands on level ground. His awakening doesn’t change his height, nor the press of the people blocking his path. Perhaps the hostile crowd around him makes him doubt his choice to abandon his old perch. The known life might have been lonely, but at least it was familiar. At least it paid. The promise of a shared meal with those he has stolen from only pays him a choice: will he choose complicity or communion?

Complicity secures ill-gotten privilege and protects one from the system—at least for a time. Communion makes us no such promises: it exposes us to others, and we sit around the common table awkward and unsure. There’s no script for this relationship, only invitation.

Merry Christmas, all of you.

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Reader Review 12: Systems and Progress

The Reader Review series was a 2014 experiment in rounding up of some of the most thoughtful or provocative articles and videos I came across online. I’m still deciding whether to continue it in 2015, but either way, this will be the last edition of the year.

Thank you for reading along with me!

Brentin Mock draws a firm and clear connection between air pollution and state violence:
Why do Americans’ perspectives vary so much?

Grist: “Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests” (Brentin Mock)

The Grist has a wonderful writer in environmental justice activist Brentin Mock. In his latest column, Mock reflects on his own health, the Eric Garner case, and why environmentalists should recognize their stake in the protests against police brutality and racial inequity. Mock’s point on air quality disparities is one I learned about this March thanks to a Mother Jones article on controversial research that correlated air pollutants with race and class.

What I’m pleased about it is that Brentin isn’t the only writer to draw connections between climate action and racial justice concerns. The climate coalition 350.org published a similar case earlier this year in an article titled “Why the Climate Movement Must Stand with Ferguson.” Peterson Toscano, a performance artist who has been touring the country performing his one-man play on climate action, hope, and human resilience, also highlighted Brentin’s article on his podcast site earlier this week.

By the way, if you’re not yet subscribed to Peterson’s weekly podcast, Climate Stew, you’re missing out on a real treat: vivid characters and some powerful glimpses of our collective future. “Climate Stew,” Peterson says, “takes a serious look at global warming, but won’t scare the snot out of you. I want to give people space to think about the roles we’ll play in the new world that’s coming, how we will come together and what it’ll take to keep this a safe planet for humans, coffee, and pasta, not just for polar bears.”

And how about that #TortureReport? I can’t bear to read it.

Christine Amanpour, via Twitter
Christiane Amanpour on #TortureReport, via Twitter

I’m pretty close to oversaturated with stories of abuse, state violence whether local or federal, and non-accountability for human harm. I watched the Eric Garner video once, and that was once too many for me.

Yesterday morning it struck me that the common link between public executions, town picnics at lynchings, ISIS beheading videos, the Janae/Ray Rice photographs and recording, and the Garner photographs and video is our willingness to re-witness the moment of violence over and over and over again with no higher value than objectifying fascination.

I don’t want to participate in that. And that’s why although I couldn’t help but hear about the release of the report on US torture via the CIA, I haven’t gone that step further to read the full report for myself.

But I’ll refer you to a few people who have:

“The first question I asked when I saw the Abu Ghraib pictures was, ‘My god, where were the doctors when all this was going on? How did the government turn off the protests from the medical system?’ What I discovered instead was that the doctors and psychologists were built into the interrogational abuses. So it wasn’t a matter of turning off their protests, it was a matter of a structured system of complicity.” —Dr. Stephen Miles, Doctors Who Torture

I did notice which band of activists had been more or less silent about local torture via police #BlackLivesMatter but threw itself into full outrage over federal torture via the Agency in #TortureReport. And I found that baffling given the issues and stakes were the same, just expressed at different levels of government.

CREW’s Daniel Schuman asked, “Why isn’t the debate about the damage US torture created, not the concerns about its occurring becoming public?” Good question, Daniel.

Before the report was released, I wrote about the way the United States has instrumentalized human life and bodily integrity, considering state assaults “acceptable trades” in the course of statecraft and order-keeping. The observation only became more salient once activists began posting excerpts and footnotes from the CIA record.

But on Twitter I also raised the question of addressing the federal expression of violence and dismissing its local counterpart. Who benefits, I asked, from our addressing only one level of analysis and our reticence to draw connections across the levels of our system?

My guess is that the system has adapted to cynicism about it at federal level: we easily joke about a sluggish Congress and shrug about bought-and-paid-for legislators. These jokes and shrugs do not motivate deep change. The macro level of the system expects participant distrust and accounts for it.

But local engagement is much more threatening. This is the level at which most of us live our lives; most of us don’t get to work in Congress, the executive, or the judiciary. Most of us live our lives at the level of the supermarket, the cinema, the children’s schools, the city council, and our doctor’s office. When citizens engage governance at these levels, and when activists block activity at these levels, it is much harder to pretend that life is normal and all is well.

My hope is that those who get a taste for impact at the local level will begin to shift their cynicism about whether ordinary people can influence the other levels of our society.

If you want to learn more about analyzing several levels of a complex problem at once, read these examples.

In 1967, systems scientist C. West Churchman popularized the definition of “wicked problems”: problems in social systems where definitions were “ill-formulated,” where issues were nested or consequent to other problems, where information was not well-defined, where decision-makers did not share common values, where piecemeal approaches changed the system and produced unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern, and where the problem was either difficult or impossible to solve.

If that doesn’t describe recurring social questions like immigration, economic stability, policing strategy, climate change, and asymmetrical war, I don’t know what does.

So take a look at two articles. The first, an editorial from Elsevier’s Landscape and Urban Planning Journal, reviews the literature on wicked problems, notes that we seem to be co-evolving with wickedness or complexity in our environment, and highlights the AAA approach to these kinds of problems: awareness, acceptance, and adaptation. The second, a recent conference paper, is a careful example of multi-level systemic analysis applied to Mexico’s drug trade. The author maps the problem’s precipitating factors and the result looks like a hornet’s nest. That is entirely appropriate!

This is the kind of analysis that people who intend to produce deep change need to do, do early, and do often. There’s no dodging complexity by blocking out three-fourths of the realities involved and oversimplifying the remainder.

If you want deep change, you need deep perspective.

Also read or listen to these links.

  • Henry Giroux tracing state violence over the last 60 years. (TruthDig)
  • Tony Robbins on the interview tour for his new book on priorities and investing for results – this is a 2-part interview with Tim Ferriss. Read the comments on Amazon before you buy.
  • Nafeez Ahmed describing the DOD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which includes “strategic” study of Twitter accounts and social contagion. (London Guardian)
  • Chris Bragg about one of the attorneys who used to help disclose corporate influence in government and who now helps companies cover their tracks.
  • Forbes reviews Ed Catmull’s book about building Pixar and making peace with mistakes, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. My favorite quote: “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new… If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

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On #NMOS14, Ferguson, and Rooting for a New World

National Moment of Silence 2014 Banner via Facebook and @feministajones
Image via the National Moment of Silence 2014 Facebook Page and @feministajones

This post took me three weeks to prepare. There’s so much to say, and the word-containers I’m drawing together feel far too narrow and too shallow to hold that “so much.” The community of Ferguson, MO, has been in grief since August 9, and that grief, first re-presented as aggression, then analyzed from afar, and dismissed by the detached at every turn, exploded into international spectacle within a week.

From mid-August:

A few days after I began following this situation, a Jamaican friend texted me a two-minute video of two constabulary officers beating a market seller with batons and shooting their pistols into the air to ward off the crowd. I asked my friend whether the clip had already made the local news. He told me it was too common an event to make the news. “Maybe it’s time to redesign civic policing,” I told Twitter. “This is not its finest hour.”  My frustration built quickly and I didn’t see an outlet for it. So much of the epistemology of power—expressed by police forces and institutional gatekeepers worldwide—requires sustained denial of the realities of disempowered people. It requires the denial of stories. The rejection of relationship. The building of policies and customs with so narrowly defined an Ideal Human. All of the above is power without legitimacy.

"British research on policing crowds confirms the strategic need for proactive relationship building by police." —Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter) [http://1.usa.gov/1lkpS7W]
Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter)

As common as it is for Jamaican police to bully the public, it’s just as common for us not to listen to our own experts when they recommend deep change. Ferguson, MO, didn’t become what it is by accident. And the rest of our world isn’t what it is by accident either. Dartmouth’s Paul Batalden often says “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” So if we don’t like our results, we have to change our design. We’ve designed a civic system based on studied ignorance, weak listening cultures, & ahistorical context framing. We keep spinning back around to the same social crises again and again—but of course. Our system isn’t learning because we don’t design it for learning. No one can learn by blocking new information. We can’t learn without listening to others beyond ourselves or experiences beyond our own. Nor can we learn without a sense of time or space, a location in space-time that situates us in relation to other people, other eras, other worlds. Instead we’ve built a system that mocks or resists research and specialists, that elevates the echo chamber, and that pretends every crisis is brand new. I do not believe this status quo is the best we can do.

Two children hold "Hands Up Don't Shoot" protest signs in Ferguson, MO
(via @VIVARonRon on Twitter, 8/14/2014)

Despite this design, a Midwestern community has responded to the pattern that gave them a dead son, and many of us outside the city have responded to a broader system that doesn’t seem to mind recapitulating this same story line every 28 hours. The protesters in Ferguson haven’t trafficked in ignorance; they’ve consistently and relentlessly reported ahead of the professional media from the start. The community isn’t stopping its ears and yelling “LaLaLaLaLa!” It’s engaged supporters and critics in real time, received outsiders willing to tell fair stories, and adapted as things have changed. The community refers to similar situations from recent history, domestic and international, but does not collapse them into its own. It knows its own context. And it’s building a new frame supported by new activists freshly engaged because the old frame has proven incapable of bearing the community and its children. Ferguson’s residents and youth, along with all the residents and youth in solidarity with them in the US and around the world, are among America’s finest system re-designers. They’re not going to let the systemic power structure slip back to ordinary. We can’t.  

On the evening of August 14, I drove to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown’s family, the Ferguson, MO, community, and other victims of violent policing nationwide including Eric Garner, John Crawford, Armand Bennett, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker. There were about 90 vigils around the country scheduled for 7 p.m. that night thanks to Feminista Jones and the #NMOS14 community on Facebook.

So I went to this local vigil to be in silence with other people who, like me, were tired and sad. I hoped that in the silence we were able to create, and in the sound we made when we spoke with one voice, we could remember that we’re not alone, that we have power as The People that we don’t exercise enough, that when one of us is cut down, it isn’t someone else’s problem, it’s ours. We have a better world to build together.

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As soon as I got into town, I noticed a higher and more visible police presence than I’ve ever seen, even during baseball games and other mass events. The police recorded everything from the sidelines; a lot of marchers took their photos and recorded them in return. A helicopter hovered throughout, and we saw snipers watching from the tops of city commercial buildings.

While I felt incredibly surveilled by the authorities, I was also grateful for the mix of people who participated and stayed engaged during the evening. I heard about a number of people who’ve died in the custody of Baltimore City police recently—these were stories I hadn’t heard before—and we told those stories until our convocation ended outside the commissioner’s building.

Overall those present with us were passionate but not aggressive. And the police, despite their surveillance posture, did assist us in moving around the streets near the Harbor without getting entangled with B’more traffic. About 200 people marched, and others joined along the way, all without bystander heckling or grumbling.

Part of what overwhelmed me as I walked was fatigue from the waning of a long, stubborn summer, from not being around many other people who were moved to act rather than simply posture or criticize, having few physical spaces to vent and build energy with, and not knowing the local landscape enough to see which groups were already working and could use my support. The news never offers this level of connection or insight into change:  rather it serves up and profits from a focus on problem-problem-problem and blood-blood-blood.

The morning after the march, I shared with my mother where I’d gone and why I cared. She listened quietly at first, but then invoked the “last days” of apocalyptic scripture: what else but the worsening of the human condition should we expect, she asked. She also reminded me of her experience in England with anti-black policing, racial protests, and riots during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I’m sure she meant to encourage me, but the prospect of repeating this narrative to my own baby cousins in 40 years doesn’t encourage me in the slightest. I don’t want them to be on the same hamster wheel that we’ve been on in the last few decades.

I want a different world for them.

A few days later I read a story about a woman in San Jose, CA, who died holding a cordless drill.

“Police and witnesses described the dramatic scene Thursday morning that ended with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman in front of her duplex on busy Blossom Hill Road, two blocks east of Oakridge Mall in South San Jose…”

“Police said the 911 call required a quick and strong response.

“‘We had a call, somebody with an Uzi threatening to kill family members,’ San Jose police spokesman Officer Albert Morales said. ‘It was a very serious situation, a very dangerous situation for our officers.'”

No one else was home with the woman. She was alone.

All the officers had were words, the words in the 911 call. And those words reframed completely what they might have seen in front of them. The “very dangerous situation” they believed they were part of was made so a priori by those words. And thus a drill became a gun and help became harm.

Words can so restructure reality that you will not see what is in front of you. If I find that frightening it is because of the quality of words that much of the world is shaped by. If I find it exciting it’s because I read and write words that could create a wholly different world. I only wonder if a wholly different world is the option that we’ll choose.

This post was not about a policeman or a teenager. It wasn’t even about an Uzi or a cordless drill. All of these are details that make no difference if fear has already degraded our ability to perceive accurately and investigate properly.

I don’t want to live in fear. I want to root for a new world, and I’m willing to help build it.

When I spoke to my mother that morning, I told her I believe that fatalism is corrosive. And I told her that I believe the discipline of caring regardless of outcome is good for us.

She nodded—a rare concession—and she told me she loved me.

By

Resource: The Berkana Institute’s Theory of Change

A reference tool for all change-makers:

Illustration of how changes emerge
via The Berkana Institute on Facebook | Art by Jennifer Shepherd of Living Tapestries

The Berkana Institute, founded by Margaret J. Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, works in communities to build their resilience while their group, environment, or society transitions from one social structure to another.

The short video below describes Berkana’s “two loop” theory of change. One thing I appreciate is their transparency about the trauma and harm that is part of system decline, particularly for under-served and marginalized populations.

How does this model tally with your experience? Share a story with me.