Umair Muhammad : mackenzian

February 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Participating in the change

In the last few pages of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad writes that deep social change doesn’t just require mass action. It also requires mass participation in sociopolitical institutions and the social movements that must see old institutions replaced.

It’s not enough, Muhammad argues, for scholars and critics to make radical claims without connecting them to concrete actions. It’s not enough for us to merely trim the edges of a consumptive economic system. The system itself has to go, along with all the structures and assumptions that prop it up. Apathy, which inhibits deep change, is the product of structures that preceded us and that we take for granted, and possibilities we assume are too “idealistic” to act on.

Muhammad ends this book by affirming popular participation—literally “democracy.” Ordinary people’s energy and lived commitment to a new, just world will allow that world to emerge. Justice won’t be imposed on us from above or without, and only through the process of working for it can we become the kinds of people worthy of living in it, the kinds of people we can trust with the only Planet Home we have, the kinds of people we can trust with one another.

Rather than continuing to just rely on sporadic flare-ups to create change, we are called on to work with institutional forms that can deliver protracted challenges to the status quo in pushing for progressive change… Protests, marches, and direct actions need not to be put on hold but they do need to be supplemented with organization building.” —Umair Muhammad

I’ve argued that beautiful things take time to grow. I still believe that’s true. It has taken time and all our energy over generations to threaten that flourishing and it will take as much time and energy to secure it.

I just worry about the people who are too vulnerable to be able to wait for the rest of us.

February 6, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A timely example: denial at work

At sunset, a purple-orange sky hangs over several large smokestcks and a lit industrial complex. Smoke billows left from them all.. — Photo credit: Viktor Kiryanov

The merchants of doubt are back in business.

Just as I wrote about denial in public controversies this weekend, London’s Daily Mail charged yet another climate science data conspiracy. The Daily Mail isn’t new to the game of “If you can’t lie, obfuscate,” but the public’s comprehension of and trust in climate science isn’t a game. The stakes include the survival of millions.

Some in the press have rushed to play chart-tennis with the newspaper and its Congressional allies’ latest accusations. But the facts really aren’t at issue here: if the critical spotlight weren’t on one data point it would be on another. As Lipstadt found of Holocaust deniers, at issue is the underlying ideology that fuels denial and shunts conspiracists from one obstructive criticism to another.

Umair Muhammad puts it bluntly when he writes, “The point is to make sure we do not in fact start to do what needs to be done.” It doesn’t matter how much mass confusion and diversions are needed to block action, so long as action is indeed blocked.

Muhammad refocuses on five specific actions that are worth taking:

Directly tax carbon to discourage its use
Kill the car and redesign residential and work areas to support other forms of transit
Reduce general consumption, including the resources used in manufacturing—not just individual, private consumption
Transform agricultural and cattle-raising
Modify energy-inefficient buildings and end outright the use of coal

Depending on how much sleep I’ve had, even I could feel a little overwhelmed by these action items. I can imagine why Members of Congress funded by the oil and gas industries might be more inclined to look for reasons not to accept human responsibility for climate change than to accept that “climate change is fundamentally a social problem and it requires a social solution.”

In real time, this is what denial does to us.

January 27, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Unbecoming activism

In the second chapter of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad recounts the United States’ role in the evolution of Somalian terrorist group al-Shabab. I wrote briefly about this group six weeks ago in an article on the recent film Eye in the Sky.

Like the other decentralized MENA terrorist group that need not be named, al-Shabab is a 30-year product of the US’ and UK’s Cold War proxy politics. The Cold War is now over (someone inform both Moscow and Washington), and a nation like Somalia shouldn’t have its people trapped between brutal authoritarianism on the one hand and drought-fueled famine on the other. But because it’s caught in the interests of much more powerful countries, al-Shabab emerged.

The same countries that criticize al-Shabab, Muhammad argues, created the conditions in which it thrives. And then he offers an icy analogy inspired by the writings of Peter Singer, the moral philosopher:

I should not push a child into a pond in which he will struggle to stay afloat, help to come up for air when I walk by once in a while, and act as if I am doing him a favor. I should, instead, stop pushing children into ponds. Likewise, those who benefit from the exploitation of others have a duty, first and foremost, to stop the ongoing exploitation. Simultaneously playing the roles of oppressor and savior is unbecoming.” —Umair Muhammad

It’s surreal to read about this this week. Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day when we remember immense tragedy. Today was also a day when the US government abruptly voided historical immigration policies and made permanent residents, students, and others from seven countries newly vulnerable.

Bloomberg has a hunch about why those seven countries have been singled out, and ProPublica has solid analysis of today’s executive order. But it’s The Intercept that came up with the baldest assessment of the administration’s logic: “If we bombed you, we ban you.” That’s not quite “playing the roles of oppressor and savior.” There’ll be no saving from this administration.

What about from the rest of us? We haven’t funded, armed, or inspired militant groups around the planet, not directly, not consciously. But we’ve repeatedly elected politicians who have, and we’ve just sworn in another.

January 24, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Normalization is normal after all

Two words I’ve heard plenty of in the last few months: resistance and normalization.

Advocates advise the public to resist the agenda of the new administration. Commentators worry that the administration’s unusual tactics (and more overt expressions of the same old tactics) might reset the typical center and become the US’ new normal.

But humans are nothing if we’re not adaptable. We can adjust to almost anything, and usually do. I came across Dostoyevsky’s line about the adaptable scoundrel today. According to Umair Muhammad, this society reveres “freedom of choice” but rarely encourages people to question the range of choices available. We typically won’t request biscuits if offered banana or an apple. Instead, we usually adjust to the terms provided—in that case, fruit.

US politics demonstrates this because it is currently structured as a debate between two options. Rather than seriously questioning why televised debates only include those two options and seeking to change that custom, we instead focus years of our time on which representatives of those two options should participate. One party offers a policy proposal; the other rebuts with its own ideological alternative; and there’s no room in the public square for options outside that range. We’ve normalized those binaries.

Having been conditioned with a certain set of expectations, individuals may be quite happy with meeting them. —Umair Muhammad, Confronting Injustice

Our unjust and consumptive society is an edifice that needs restructuring, but millions of dissatisfied people marching in major cities aren’t the proof. Our adaptability means that we’ll adapt to evil as well as to good: society would still need restructuring even if all those people were content with the status quo.

The conditions that society continually produces—the poverty, the violence, the hoarded resources—these are what prove it needs restructuring.

What we can count on is that if there are humans around, we will normalize the conditions available. We will normalize this next administration, and inasmuch as any of us lose our capacity to be surprised about what the new government does, we’ll know that we’ve finally adjusted.

But if we can’t avoid adjusting altogether, we can still do some good. Through independent media and beyond the A vs. B cable news issue format, we can keep working to keep the options broad: exploring kinship structures and not just marriages; life-long cooperative communities, not just a year or two of civil or military service after college; broad-based programs of education, training, and labor, not just unpaid internships and unemployment benefits.

The best thing we can ask at this time, then, is not “Is this normal?” but “Are there more options?”

Because the answer to that is always “Yes.”

January 14, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A poetic break

Low golden sunlight washes over a rocky and grassy mountainous landscape. A solitary figure stands on a rocky outcrop on the bottom right of the image. They are facing away from the camera. — Photo credit: David Marcu

My latest literary companion, Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice, features a sentence that was so arresting that I had to look up both the source and its author. (Get Confronting Injustice the way I did, via Haymarket Books.)

Eduardo Galeano wrote through the second half of the 20th Century about the political struggles of his native Uruguay. Celebrated across South America, Galeano appears in Muhammad’s book on individualism, neoliberalism, and climate change:

Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.” —Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

I wrote last fall about growing up in two subcultures in which no one around me spoke of or taught about non-heterosexual people. I therefore got through my first two decades with an unfinished map of myself and all of the people I lived with and went to school and church with: a culture’s symbolic blackouts affect everyone in that culture, not just the people they target.

It’s because of my experience that Galeano’s phrase “keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces” stood out to me today. The entire sentence is striking.

Perhaps more than 20th Century Uruguayan culture did, US culture thrives on the myth of the intrepid individual who forges alone into the wildness of life, or, in extreme cases, the actual wilderness.

As feminist writers pointed out in the 1980s, this culture’s success myths typically don’t include the network of people around the Great and Inventive Ones. In media profiles, we might learn about an entrepreneur’s favorite teacher, or a librarian who took extra time to nurture a budding scientist’s interests while they were in elementary school, or parents who doted and sacrificed to pay for a prodigy’s piano lessons.

But the rest of the genius’s support system—spouses and partners, training colleagues, secretaries and assistants, house staff and those delegated or relegated to tasks like laundry and cooking, let alone all who fund the public services that make unusual individual advancement possible—this support system remains background material. We’re used to phrases like “social construction” but they haven’t changed how we perceive the individual self. Confronting Injustice is a book-length objection to that.

I’m slowly cracking open this weekend and thinking about how my social networks have crafted my sense of who I am and the symbolic languages I use as I interact with the world. I’m also thinking about how my social networks have “kept silenced people from asking questions” about the philosophical foundations of our world and the spaces we allow for ourselves and others.

How might human culture be otherwise? What are the impacts of not changing? These are the questions Muhammed believes activists should be asking. We should be working to manifest our answers too, because without manifest alternatives to the way things are, we’re resigning ourselves to continuing generations of people silenced, judged, and solitary who have no inkling that what is isn’t all that can be.

The Book of Embraces is now on my wishlist.