Two very different and very similar speakers, teachers, and change-makers: author Toni Morrison delivering her 1993 Nobel Lecture on December 7, 1993, and Dark Matter’s Alok Vaid-Menon, breaking down “success” and complicity at TEDxMiddlebury, twenty Decembers later.
Toni Morrison on Violence and Story-telling
Oppressive language does more than represent violence—it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge—it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek, it must be rejected, altered, and exposed…
Art (c) Keturah Ariel
‘You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow.
We know you can never do it properly—once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.’ —Toni Morrison
“Who is invited to speak about a movement, and who must die for it? I was so concerned with being a successful researcher that I glossed over the parts of the work that were the most important, the hard and invisible parts of building trust, empathy, and solidarity.” —Alok Vaid-Menon
Before the 1970s, genes were the fixed limits of life. With DNA as boss and RNA the secretary, combinations of genes produced a certain physiological outcome and it wasn’t clear what made one gene express and another not. But over the last 40 years, through independent research as well as massive collaborations like the Human Genome Project, we’ve learned the number, location, and functions of more than 20,000 genes and the hormones and processes that trigger them.
Now that the HGP is over, more scientists are looking at how experiences shape gene expression during the life cycle and across generations. That’s what the hybrid field of epigenetics is all about. This article from the pop science magazine Discover takes a closer look at two leading epigeneticists and the methylation of DNA—how methyl and aceytl molecules adjacent to DNA strands influences selective protein development, how something as simple as a regular gym practice can change the DNA a person was born with, and which traumas and bonding experiences can trigger epigenetic change.
Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding… The mechanisms of behavioral epigenetics underlie not only deficits and weaknesses but strengths and resiliencies, too. —Dan Hurley
If you object to the series of public service discrimination laws recently proposed in four US states and vetoed in a fifth, why? What’s your legal basis? Does it matter to you whether a citizen’s attributes are chosen?
Jim Cowles argues that a completely different question—objective harm—provides a more stable legal basis for evaluating competing rights and the merits, if any, of discrimination against an entire class. The SCOTUS-level reviews of Proposition 8 and DOMA during 2012-2013 also focused on objective harms rather than choice.
As I said to Jim: “I was raised in a particular religious tradition and didn’t have any influence on that environment. But I remain with that tradition by choice, not mandate. I could abandon it; I could choose another tradition; and whether I did or not would still not validate discrimination against me on the grounds of my religion.”
Religion is a protected category in this country, but what if it wasn’t? It would still be to our collective advantage not to use individual choice as the basis for validating whole-class discrimination.
J. Skyler, a #qfaith participant, shared this essay with the group this week. It’s a long read that’s worth the effort, and fills out some of the rhetorical moves behind recent anti-LGBTI legislation. If you’re unfamiliar with the content, you’ll see plenty to research on your own.
Blind devotion to cultural misconceptions is a plague unto itself.”
Faith, freedom, religious schools, and value conflicts
The RNS report updates readers on how one North Carolina university has handled value diversity within its faculty, among its students, and from its off-campus stakeholders: the Southern Baptist constituency has replaced Cedarville University’s senior administration and the new president has begun making course-level changes. I referenced Cedarville in a series on faith and freedom on this site last quarter.
Religious colleges and universities sometimes struggle to host respectful campus conversations about controversial beliefs without resorting to “Agree or Resign.” I think this struggle intensifies when schools can operate as if isolated from the world around them. Legally, of course, religious institutions have a lot of latitude to self-govern based on governance statements and denominational requirements. At the same time, off-campus publicity can and sometimes does motivate institutions to act according to their highest ethics rather than just the most expedient ones.
Wall Street Journal:Success Outside the Dress Code (Shirley S. Wang) [Subscribers-only as of 2018]
Wang sums up some research on group dynamics: how nonconformists mark their difference through clothing selections or language variations, and how other group members interpret these differences. An interesting finding: if group members think someone varies from a norm by accident, the nonconformist gets no status points. Only variations perceived as deliberate are read as additive status markers.
People veer from what’s expected after they’ve built up enough trust within a group. [But] acting differently risks losing the benefits that come with conforming, such as shared group identity and automatic group trust…
Willingness to deviate can be useful for groups as well, particularly when it comes to decision-making… The person who brings up alternative points of view to make sure the group has sufficiently examined all options can help the group reach a better decision. If the group trusts the individual’s intentions, this perspective will be considered seriously and the individual will still be considered part of the group.
I was most intrigued by this finding on trust. It’s trust that allows a group to reap the benefits of nonconformity, but if a group distrusts people who vary from its norms, it won’t accept what they contribute and won’t reap benefits from them.
Framing nonconformists as disloyal to the group undermines trust. So does exclusion.
I cannot stress how important the development of the moral imagination is for all aspects of ethical discourse and discernment, particularly in cases where you are making ethical judgments regarding experiences you have never had, and never will have.” —James Croft
This is a read-and-reflect kind of article. I look forward to hearing what my network has to say about it.
One of the things that’s missing from much of the moral-ethical discussion in my denomination at the moment is a strong sense of particularity: that we are, as individuals and as members of a larger culture, grounded in a specific body, time, and place, and that this temporal-spatial location constrains what we see in the world and how we interpret what we see.
The insight of particularity is 40-50 years old in social science research, but only just being attended to in evangelical-fundamentalist theological circles. I think it’s one reason why we’ve preferred to pronounce our opinions than listen to the experiences of others.
Adichie and Smith offer a wonderful conversation about identity and writing and womanhood in this video (uncaptioned). I resonate with both women: Smith because of our common UK-Jamaican heritage and experience, and Adichie because of her insights into the Black immigrant’s insider-outsider view of the United States and America’s continuing challenge with the Other.
The Schomburg Center’s recording device lost signal at around the 37 min mark, but hang in there for about 40 seconds and it does resume.
In case you missed it: the PBS tribute to James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. (Length: 1:25:12)
What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here, almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress? —James Baldwin
I grew up in a home with at least two of Baldwin’s books, each thin republications. On one I remember a line drawing of his face in peach and purple pencil; on the other, a black-and-white photo.
James Baldwin | TIME magazine, 1963
I saw them on the shelves, picked them off and looked at them, but never read them. I had no context for him. No one told me stories about him. Oh, they told me that he wrote; they told me what he did. But they never told me about who he was. They didn’t tell me about his life, about his consciousness, about his wholeness, about his many faces, about those faces that looked like mine.
Twenty years pass. I discover the internet and YouTube. The internet includes his articles, and YouTube hosts his interviews. I read and hear and see this young black man with fire in his eyes and piercing clarity in his mind. I see this wrinkled graying sage who never fathered children but fathered many of us nevertheless. I watch him projected from the memories of his friends… Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Ishmael Reed.
It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7, to realize that the flag to which you have pledged along with everybody else has not pledged allegiance to you. —James Baldwin
and
I’ve loved a few men, I’ve loved a few women. And a few people have loved me, and that’s, I suppose, all that’s saved my life. —James Baldwin
