truth : mackenzian

May 3, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Why it can be so hard to change our minds

Left: A new concept with legs. Right: A brain with bug eyes and gaping mouth waving a sword in each hand. Speech bubble: “Have no fear. I will kill it with swords!”

If you’ve ever scribbled a rough denial in the margin of a book that challenged your core beliefs, you’ve experienced some of the emotional turmoil that the backfire effect relies on.

The last time I wrote about this psychological defense mechanism, I was myself in a state of mild resistance to the concept. No one working on public education or social change loves the idea that people are more likely to reject new information than they are to accept it.

Furthermore, in the era of viral falsehood, researchers are discovering that repeatedly exposing people to nonsense helps to build its popular credibility. People are also more likely to believe nonsense they see friends share alongside fact, and debunking lies doesn’t help.

Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects, and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves… Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it.” —Maria Konnikova, January 2017

It’s the amygdala’s resist-or-run response that can make encountering new information risky business. Read The Oatmeal’s account of the backfire effect for more.

April 2, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

On Truth

Truthiness, post-fact, and BS have all become jargon terms in political communication. I’m not sure any of us expected that from the new millennium seventeen years ago.

But then we lived through presidential perjury (Clinton), yellowcake uranium (Powell), and an entire decade of popular distrust for the state. We haven’t recovered.

That brings me to the successful campaign of No. 45 and the ongoing decline of a fourth estate that’s proven ill-equipped for misinformation, disinformation, or a public that sees conspiracy even in accurate statistics.

Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt has been writing about truth and BS since 2005 (I received one of his monographs as a graduation present a few years ago).

Sincerity is no measure of fact, Frankfurt argues in both of his books. It doesn’t matter whether all the crowds around the emperor sincerely imagine him clothed. What matters is whether he’s clothed or not; what matters—especially for the sake of social community—is the climate he’s created that discourages people from recognizing what’s real or speaking openly about it. That matters.

In On Truth, Frankfurt explains that maintaining a sense of reality is what allows reason and logical reasoning to stand. Without truth or fact, the process of tying premises to evidence or evidence to conclusion becomes the process of telling another story in a world of fireside stories—but without the solid ground of shared meaning that mythology usually relies on.

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.” —Harry Frankfurt, On [BS]

Not everyone is constrained by reality in this way, but Frankfurt argues that everyone should be and we collectively suffer as long as everyone isn’t.

[The BS-er] is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

At the root of BS, then, is capriciousness and self-interest—and a healthy society can’t be built on these foundation stones.

Read more from Frankfurt on truth and its alternatives, and if you’d like to dig into related science, listen to David McRaney’s podcast with Gordon Pennycook (no transcript available).

July 2, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Taking a holiday from mythology

A sparkler shines with a purple glow. It is night time and the photo appears to be in a garden. — Photo credit: Y. S. Elliott

National holidays can be a great break from the daily routine for those who get to hit pause on the workday clock. They’re also another time when society pumps energy and attention into the old, old myths that the status quo tells itself so it can sleep well at night.

We don’t have to comply.

This weekend churches around the US will include remarks and prayers about “this great country” and “liberty” and how many people “came to this country in search of freedom.”

There’s a much deeper collective story than that, and it’s up to us to choose to tell it, especially when it’s awkward to tell, especially during the holidays.

What if, rather than singing a one-verse hymn about grateful, voluntary immigrants fleeing Cuba or European economic quicksand, churches this weekend shared a more complex song?

What if we said something like this:

This weekend the nation will pause to remember our war of independence from Great Britain and King George III. This weekend, we’ll gather with our families and talk of greatness and freedom and opportunity and hope.

But not all of us came here to find freedom. Many of us were crushed in the great vice of the colonial militias and United States army. Many of us are here because our neighbors’ ancestors stripped our elders of their freedom, ripped them from their homes, and dragged them to a new hemisphere.

We and our ancestors before us have always struggled to live up to the ideals that we recite and teach our children—that the truth of our value is self-evident, that all of us are equal, that our rights are inalienable, that none of us are really alien, that all of us are welcome, that all of us are free.

We struggle to live up to those ideals. But we’re here now together. And we have so much work still to do to build the nation that we dream of, that generations before ours wrote about, and taught their children, who taught their children, who taught their children, who taught us.

They declared independence in a moment, but the work of living freedom in this world of interdependence and soft boundaries between nations is a much deeper work.

We dare not take imperial might for granted, as they did. We dare not take the righteousness of the nation-state for granted, as they did.

And we dare not march forward without reckoning with the Native people among us. They preceded us all by 12,000 years, and this is their land, no matter our doctrines and our laws. Our independence is a debt we owe to them.

As people who claim “citizenship” in the kingdom of God, belonging beyond our membership in shifting, fickle, and fragile nation-states, we need wisdom to recognize the responsibilities that freedom demands of us.

Freedom means we accept that our ancestors used God and church as a weapon against the vulnerable, that they bound themselves with the abuse they inflicted on others. They weren’t free.

Freedom means we acknowledge how we today follow in their tracks, using God and church as a weapon against the vulnerable, and binding ourselves. Where we oppress, we aren’t free.

Freedom means we face the gap between our mythology and the muck of the lives we live. Freedom means we get to choose what we sow in the world now.

It’s not easy. It’s not festive. But it’s true.

One of my all-time favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, includes a scene that I remember every Fourth of July.

[If you haven’t seen this movie, why not? The next paragraph includes a spoiler; so sorry. You should see the movie anyway.]

The lead character, Andy, makes his escape from prison under the cover of a vicious nighttime lightning storm. There’s torrential rain, thunder, and crashing lightning, and he strikes a sewer pipe with every crack of lightning. This grand, gorgeous story plays out in the heavens, while Andy splashes about in the prison sewage down below.

Andy is the United States when it realizes it can’t get free without wading through its sewage. The process won’t be easy and it won’t be festive, but even with the holiday fireworks bursting overhead, we can still tell the truth.

May 28, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The truth is enough.

Matthew 5:33-37, part of the gospels’ summary of Jesus’s teachings, challenges the way we handle the truth.

And it’s a necessary challenge. Truth, embellishments, hedges, and avoidances all make business and interpersonal relationships that much more complicated. We’ve learned to distrust marketers and their advertising claims, and “Just give it to me straight” is a thrown gauntlet: Should I really tell them what I think? How will things change when I do?

Insecurity unsettles us, and so we embellish our speech. We lie. I’ve texted, “On my way” before I’ve been on my way because I expected disappointment for leaving later than expected. I’ve talked in circles about my beliefs on politics and religion because I don’t trust the motives of the people asking. I’ve lived and worked and loved as if my Yes and No are insufficient.

In this space between two people comes the Wise One, teaching: “Say ‘Yes’ when you mean yes, and ‘No’ when you mean no, and ‘I don’t know’ when you really don’t know. Anything beyond that is an attempt to exert power and control.”

There’s no need for fancy mess. The truth is enough.

It can also be terrifying, if vulnerability is involved. The truth might be “I don’t think this role fits for me anymore and I need to step down.” Or “Yes, I do want us to work together on money. I’m tired of trying to figure it out on my own.” Or “I know you don’t understand who I am. I’m sorry you’re missing out on my life, and I wish things were different. But they aren’t.”

The truth being true doesn’t imply anything about what others might do or say in response. But it does let you shed unnecessary weight: all the footnotes and explainers and explain-away-ers that you need to prop up embellishments and dodges. It does allow you to choose the simplest words, the ones you don’t have to memorize in advance because they are true.

The good news? The good news is that we can begin again. Wherever we are—at home or at work or on the streets—whenever we notice insecurity rising, whenever our tongues curl around an extra word or story, we can swallow gently and choose a different way. Because a world we build on any other ground than the truth is not worth living in.

Take a moment: self-check. Where has insecurity guided you lately? What beliefs have you been building your relationships on? Are those beliefs worth switching out for more honesty more often?

June 29, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

All Our Euphemisms Are Like Filthy Rags

Note: This article features Anansi, the Akan spider-man. And because I love you, it includes no images of actual spiders. —KM

Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag while on the flagpole outside the South Carolina state capitol building. Photo via @Bipartisanism. — Bree Newsome waves the Confederate battle flag from atop the flagpole outside South Carolina’s Capitol Building. Photo: Adam Anderson via Bipartisan Report, Twitter.

A lot of people I know skipped church last weekend. A lot of Black people I know skipped church last weekend.

A sprinkling of days after a young White racist slaughtered nine praying Black people in the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, a lot of sweet souls skipped church, and I was tempted to be one of them.

Brokenhearted, I was tempted to crawl back under my summer blanket and wail in the timeless language of tea and chocolate and fitful sleep. Instead I rose and put on a dress shirt instead of sackcloth, and I went to the morning service at my congregation.

I left the sanctuary as empty as I’d entered it. In fact, I left even emptier than I’d entered it. I’d walked into the building with two mites of hope, and my offering dissipated in an unrelated sermon series and two nods to Charleston: one reference to “somber feelings” and one “racial…uh…stuff.”

The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist's attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 23, 2015). Art credit: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence — The Emanuel 9: killed in a White supremacist’s attack on Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC (June 17, 2015). Illustration: Sarah Green, Artists Against Police Violence

Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old.
Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old.
DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49 years old.
Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old.
Myra Thompson, 59 years old.
Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old.
Daniel Simmons Sr., 74 years old.
Susie Jackson, 87 years old.

Their bodies will be buried this week. Black churches are burning across the South. And the most my congregation could say was “racial stuff.” We couldn’t even say their names.

At Rev. Pinckney’s memorial service on June 26, President Barack Obama praised him as a good man who gave his prime years to religious and public leadership, to both preaching and protest. The president noted what inspired Pinckney to serve the communities beyond his congregation: the Black Church has always sent its servants out into the world.

“To put our faith in action is more than individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation… to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society.”

Pinckney’s persistent faith, Obama said, drew on the same spirit that inspires the U.S. to expand its freedoms and policies of care, and to account for a wider circle, not a narrower one. The faith and grace of God is in that movement. Obama unsteadily sang “Amazing Grace”; the organist helped him, and the church said Amen.

Last weekend, I couldn’t have sung with them. This weekend, the release of song still feels alien. As I watched the C-SPAN funeral feed on Friday night, it hit me that Clementa Pinckney was the same age as my sister. Six days after that supremacist killed him and the other Emanuel members, a third member of my sister’s generation, a friend, mother, wife, and the senior minister of one of my churches, “put on invisibility” and passed away.

In my fatigue over the last 10 months of relentless Black Death, and my sadness at the passing of my friend and mentor, I find myself far less awed by the “amazing grace” invoked at the Pinckney funeral and far more amazed at the apathy of the faithful.

It was amazing apathy, not grace, that kept John Newton comfortable in both slavery investments and Christian preaching for forty years before an English politician introduced him to abolitionism. How was it that the word he preached failed to awaken him to the sacred life of his African siblings?

And the AME denomination, the oldest independent Black denomination in the world—how is it that the word that the AME denomination has preached since 1816 hasn’t yet transformed it into an advocate for all Black lives, not just some? The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered equal access to civil marriage, and LGBT-antagonist church folk struck up apocalyptic mourning chants as soon as the decision hit SCOTUSblog.

Wanted to take refuge in the Black Church last weekend. Not even slightly tempted this weekend. #BlackChurchSex

— mackenzian (@mackenzian) June 26, 2015

The Emanuel 9 deserved more than limp euphemism. We deserve more than apathy in the face of inequity.

This Saturday as I ventured out to church again, Bree Newsome and James Ian Tyson brought the Confederate battle flag down from its mast in front of the South Carolina Capitol complex. Shortly after their arrest, two Capitol employees raised it again. One of the flag-raisers was Black.

After Newsome’s and Tyson’s arrest, South Carolina residents rallied outside the capitol to “Defend the Flag.” The scripture-quoting pole-climbing film-making Black activist woman and the man who spotted her on the pole had never allowed the battle flag to touch the ground: they offered the Confederate soldiers’ emblem far more respect than the secessionist movement ever claimed for them. As South Carolina’s flag came down, battle flags west of SC went up: Alabama crowds drunk on nostalgia took to the streets to declare that they, too, matter and they wished they were in Dixie.

As I saw the stories about Newsome, Tyson, and the battle flag coming down, the flag action bail fund ticked past $30,000, $40,000, $60,000, then $100,000. I saw the spirit of Anansi at work.

Kwaku Anansi is the trickster, shapeshifter, and storykeeper of the Akan diaspora. He brings wily, situational wisdom, prudence, and cunning skill to the inequitable world of the animals, that world where Tiger is king and expectations of spiders are low. The Greeks called Anansi’s gifts metis, but I grew up seeing empire-identified critics fretting over whether we should tell Anansi tales to children and blaming the spider-man for inspiring social fraud and corruption.

They were wrong. Anansi is worthy of honor. And when spun into action like spiders’ silk, Anansi’s metis is a beautiful and powerful thing.

In one story, Anansi wonders how to undermine Tiger and draw some of the boastful king’s power to himself. Tiger challenges Anansi to earn renown by besting Snake. Anansi doesn’t attack anyone. He fails at first with a conventional trap. And so our hero “goes home to think.”

“A trap will never work,” Anansi said to himself. “Snake can climb trees and slither and slide away, so I’ll have to outsmart him. And I’m the smartest fellow there is!”

And so he uses his intelligence to find a way. He appeals to Snake’s beliefs about himself, and with all his wits and hearts and guts, Anansi gets what he wants.

“You come against me with hate and oppression and violence,” Newsome shouted from the middle of the flagpole. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” And it came down. Anansi targets Tiger’s and Snake’s false pride and no one is harmed. A scripture-quoting woman climbed a pole and made the SC Capitol and its sluggish legislators look foolish.

It was the most straightforward solution I think she could have found, and it had good precedent. Not allowed to eat at a restaurant? Go sit at the counter and wait out patrons’ fury. Banned from the front of the bus? Don’t use any buses until you’re free to sit where you please on any of them. Tired of legislators stalling and want the secessionist battle flag to come down? Go up and get it yourself, and wear safety gear.

In the late 1940s, theologian and activist Howard Thurman described trickster wisdom as “perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong” (Deception, Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 58-69). As he points out, “deception” only appears in unequal relationships and in groups and societies that resist overt challenge to their symbols and structures. Thurman didn’t advocate deception: he feared that double meanings, duplicity, and feints degraded marginalized people and put them at risk for moral compromise.

But the cunning surprises that worried Thurman aren’t the only quality Anansi brings with him. The adaptability and resourcefulness of metis also showed up in Newsome’s and Tyson’s direct action yesterday. Both activists were absolutely measured, calm, and intentional, and they confounded the expectations of a system that has responded to #TakeItDown/#KeepItDown with “We’ll discuss it next legislative session.” In the meantime, the system only recognizes passive compliance and submission.

Passive compliance will not do in this season. Newsome and Tyson cooperated with police but were never once out of control. They made the pole-climb a craft (technê). Their team documented the action meticulously. And they promise there will be more to come.

All through our history we’ve seen that Anansi’s wisdom doesn’t surface on a plane of equals. And this is the challenge of marginalized people:

We immunize ourselves against fear.
We know that we are the children of heaven and earth, that we belong, that we merit existence.
We know that self-hate is worse than death and that even death cannot conquer our story.

All the while, we live in contexts that deny our humanity, our magic, and our trauma; that expect us to keep producing through pain; and that have the gall to fly supremacists’ battle flags over our coffins. One hundred and fifty-two years after emancipation, the system still hasn’t digested that we are no one’s inferior. And so we use the gifts of Anansi.

Euphemism can’t get us to clarity now. A teacher told me last week that every new headline of murder or arson is another call to know and speak the truth. She was right. Choosing the filthy rags of euphemism over the salve of truth can only delay our healing: all our euphemism is like filthy rags, and if there’s any social institution that should understand what this means for our “salvation” as a country, it’s the Christian church.

A sector of the US Adventist church recently apologized for the racism that launched it 70 years ago. Current leaders recognized that though they were not culpable for their predecessors’ wrongs, they were responsible for the system they inherited and steward today. That’s part of what knowing and speaking the truth can do.

While I kept up with the flag action on Saturday, I also saw that the National Cathedral’s dean had called for the removal of two Civil War stained windows. The National Cathedral is one of my favorite churches in the world: it took more than eight decades to build and the designs of its windows reflect that history.

I can’t agree with the dean that we should remove these panes. I do agree with him that we need historians to help us re-frame the windows with a thoughtful contextual display. As I said on Saturday, the natural fractures exposed during the Civil War persist in new forms in contemporary US politics and politicians. We can’t gut living history and think no one will notice. Racism is neither dead nor extreme, and we have to tell the truth about it.

Dear Lord, I thank You for the faith that frees,
The love that knows it cannot lose its own;
The love that, looking through the shadows, sees
That You and he and I are ever one! —James Dillet Freeman