I'm a reluctant traveller but there's something about the 'liminal space' of an airport that captures my imagination, drawn as it easily is towards questions of order and chaos, boundaries and negotiation, norms and transgression, "exclusion and embrace" (see, e.g., Volf), etc. As such – and helped by the fact that my dread of missing flights tends to leave me with above-average amounts of waiting time to fill – the process of flight travel has emerged as a recurring theme among my recent poem attempts.
Except ... well, even before I was done admiring my latest effort, the whole exercise struck me as grimly ironic. Just how much unheeding privilege does it take to find an airport 'interesting'?! Where I see symbols of the status quo (inviting my imagined metaphorical subversion), other people are experiencing the oppressively, dehumanisingly tangible outworkings of it. [1]
So (a bit like a cryptography researcher who proposes a secure scheme at one conference and then breaks it at the next) I wrote this, in self-response.
I need to do better at noticing the ways in which society as currently structured gives me unearned advantages over other people. Not so that I feel guilty, or by way of devaluing individual agency and effort, but in the hope of participating in the huge re-structuring that is needed before all of us have equal opportunity to flourish by said efforts, in community together. It is a downright and evil lie that we each have what we have because we have earned it, and that to have less is evidence of deserving less. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this lie is popular among those of us who happen to have a lot, because not only does it flatter us, it also reassures us that neither we nor the social framework need to change.
The shorthand 'privilege' stands in for a reality that is relative, and complicated, and multi-dimensional, and sits alongside experiences of structural disadvantage. And so yes, I'm a woman and no, sexism absolutely hasn't gone away and yes, its impact on me persists in spite of my otherwise cosy situation. And no, please, aargh, this is not a competition for the title of 'most disadvantaged', like it sometimes risks sounding. But don't even get me started on the ways that certain expressions of feminism go about leveraging white and cisgender and class and educational privilege to secure power for women like me whilst multiplying the hardships loaded onto women who also have (for example) racism, and/or Islamophobia, and/or poverty, and/or disability, and/or the direct impacts of climate change, and/or war, and/or homophobia, and/or transphobia to contend with.
It is bad news for all women everywhere [2] when sportswomen of colour are effectively punished for being too good at their sport; when individual women rise to top positions of authority only to inflict poverty and precarity and the threat of deportation on other women and vulnerable people; when movements begun by and for women of colour gain widespread media attention only after being appropriated by white women; when some women deploy vicious and dehumanising words and actions to campaign against the rights and safety and basic dignity and recognition of other women (who, after all, are typically among the most structurally vulnerable of us to begin with) [3]; when legal models designed to regulate or curtail sex work are championed as liberating to women despite stark evidence that they actually endanger and marginalise sex workers even more whilst failing to address the separate issue of people trafficking.
"Victories" like these embed misogyny (along with other injustices), making women and feminists complicit in it. And, to poorly paraphrase a superb talk of Akala's that I attended, it is squarely in the interests of the status quo for disadvantaged and disempowered groups to scapegoat or otherwise turn on other/smaller disempowered (sub)groups. Rather this than that they notice and collectively challenge the privileged elite who are actually responsible for placing and reinforcing societal obstacles and threats to begin with.
Which brings me on to conservative evangelicalism, and its (predominately white) "husband, father, pastor" keepers. Too many of whom seem to be literally on a mission to disprove the existence of structural injustice and resist efforts to address it. Nearly 5k leaders signed the notorious and grievously racism-denying Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel last year. More recently, a tweeted advert for a panel discussion between five white men on the "Dangers of Social Justice for Evangelicalism" at a Southern Baptist event attracted understandable horror, scorn and weariness from other Christian quarters. In response, one panel member reassured critics that "We are not "ill-positioned" to discuss the subject of social justice which includes a multifaceted and wide array of issues / categories including ethnic division. Why not? It has nothing to do with our skin color or life experience. We have the sufficient Word of God."
Aside from the fact that they are necessarily interpreting that "sufficient Word" – while interpretation itself is (I believe) something that we can only hope to do well in inclusive and diverse community together – it takes a pretty astonishingly reductive and selective reading of scripture to come to the conclusion that structural injustice doesn't exist and/or that the good news about Jesus doesn't imply (and involve us in) its dismantling. "[And] and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’" (Luke 4:17-19)
I appreciate that the resistance of some Christians to the suggestion that personal salvation has a corporate outworking not unlike what many would call "social justice" is underpinned by more doctrinal and scriptural and theological wranglings than I can hope to overturn in a few quoted verses. And to unpack and respond to them fully here and now would be more than one blog post could hold, even if I thought I could do it. If you are one of those Christians, though (or indeed anyone who is similarly dismissive of social justice "agendas"), I'd encourage you as much as possible to exercise your imagination, as I failed to do in the airport. No single person's experience is representative of all of humanity – that much should be obvious – and we often choose our friends from among those we most effortlessly relate to. So, read some books by people who are unlike you in ways that might give them a different perspective [4]. Follow some twitter accounts [5]. Watch some films/television [6]. Think about your own encounters with the world, and whether your scepticism regarding "systemic injustice" might, after all, be rooted in your relative privilege within society's structures.
Especially, if you're a Christian, ask what your interpretation and application of scripture looks like for people not like you. (Men, that includes women – no sarcasm intended, I really do fear that some of you forget we are people). Does it hear from them? Does it speak to them? Does it honour their full humanity and equality with you in the eyes of a just and loving creator God, or does it make them subservient to or dependent on you? Does it lay on them burdens that you yourself would not lift a finger for? (Matt 23:4) For example, how do your ideas about gender roles play out in families where there is sickness, or abuse, or where both parents have to go out to work to make ends meet, or where both parents go out to work and they still can't make ends meet? Too often, complementarian ideals advocated by educated and financially stable women and men can be seen to multiply the hardship and vulnerability of wives relative to husbands under less empowered circumstances – dressing it up (it seems to me) as women's "sacrificial love".
In your search for biblical truth do you remember to refer back to the actual (complex, and in context) text, or are you content to rely on the translations and interpretations of an established religious elite who confidently claim their (often exclusive) authority from it as they tell you what it means? Is it possible that those panels of white men, those bookshelves collapsing under the weight of the theological insights of more of the same, those "every man for himself" pop psychologists alarmingly popular in Christian circles – that they are just telling you the one-dimensional story that appeals to them (maybe also to you) because (wittingly or not) it legitimises their advantage and keeps their position secure? Is it possible that the reason you haven't seen any evidence of systemic injustice is precisely because you're systematically looking where it isn't, and dismissing as "non-authoritative" the pleas of those trying desperately to call your attention to it?
In short, are you sure it's always truth you are so keenly protecting, and not, to a greater or lesser extent, the status quo?
"Each one should carry their own load," writes Paul (Gal 6:5), to the resounding cheers of the conservatively-inclined among us. Amen to personal salvation and individual responsibility! And yet, mere sentences before, and with no hint of incongruity or conflict, "Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal 6:2). As so often, the Bible turns out to be way better at holding things in tension than those of us who claim it as our pattern for living. It isn't either/or, it's both-and. Individual responsibility and collective reconfiguration, and in all of it the hope of rest and gentle welcome that Jesus promises to "all who are weary and burdened" (see Matt 11:28-30) when we reject the dehumanising terms of what bell hooks calls "imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy" and enter instead into grace-filled, status-quo-upending life in company with him.
[1] See, for example, the reported experiences of many Muslim passengers. I think also of people of colour, transgender and gender non-conforming people, those without much money, or with the wrong paperwork, disabled people, neurodiverse people, and most especially displaced people and asylum seekers who are forced to attempt entry by alternative and far more dangerous routes.
[2] I'm reminded of those oft-quoted words attributed by Lilla Watson to the collective work of the Aboriginal activists group in 1970s Queensland: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
[3] Trans-exclusionary feminists have garnered a lot of media attention lately but they are by no means representative of all feminism, see e.g. this Buzzfeed article: Meet the Feminist Academics Championing Trans Rights.
[4] This and the following lists are personal to me, off the top of my head, and reflect my own starting point as well as (inevitably) my biases and gaps. Feel free to help me correct those! Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire; Wilda Gafney, Womanist Midrash; James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Owen Jones, Chavs; Vicky Beeching, Undivided; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (and everything else she's ever written); Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, bell hooks, The Will to Change; Nikesh Shukla et al., The Good Immigrant, Nella Larsen, Passing; Octavia Butler, Kindred ...
[5] E.g. Jack Monroe, Ann Memmott, @Being_Brent, Natalie Collins, @Stroopwaffle, Tanya Marlow, Molly Smith, Stormzy, Dr. Sunny Singh, Laura Jean Truman, Rev. Rachel Mann, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Broderick Greer, Qasim Rashid, Esq., Sally Phillips ...
[6] E.g. Blindspotting, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, Sorry to Bother You, Hidden Figures, Get Out, Moonlight, I, Daniel Blake, Pride, The Florida Project, Paris is Burning, Orange is the New Black, Vice, O.J.: Made in America, BlacKkKlansman ...
[Thumbnail image cc. from Doug Waldron on Flickr.]
Except ... well, even before I was done admiring my latest effort, the whole exercise struck me as grimly ironic. Just how much unheeding privilege does it take to find an airport 'interesting'?! Where I see symbols of the status quo (inviting my imagined metaphorical subversion), other people are experiencing the oppressively, dehumanisingly tangible outworkings of it. [1]
So (a bit like a cryptography researcher who proposes a secure scheme at one conference and then breaks it at the next) I wrote this, in self-response.
AN AIRPORT, AS THIS POET SEES IT
Is a metaphor for something, always;
My imagination knows no bounds.
It does not know of being taken
To one side (again) “at random”
(No relation to the colour of my skin),
Or bracing for the body scan,
And all the queries and the eyebrows
I am over seeing raised;
It does not shore up for a torrent of
Interrogation, in a language that
I do not speak, from someone who
Does not attempt to say my name;
It does not craft an apt refrain
To prove my means in case I’m asked;
It does not shrink me in anticipation.
Neither do my flights of fancy take me
Home, where I am safe; nor home,
Because enough of this; nor home,
Because I can’t afford the ticket.
And they do not cast me out upon
The open waters, with my children,
Having sold my home for somewhere
Self-defined by my exclusion.
My imagination knows no bounds;
It wanders freely where
An othered woman fears to tread,
And carries a concealed tear
To get me off the figurative hook.
And it is just as well for my conceit –
For it would break down into
Dust
Beneath the unimaginable
Weight
Of all that unimagined
Concrete.
Carolyn Whitnall, 2019.
I need to do better at noticing the ways in which society as currently structured gives me unearned advantages over other people. Not so that I feel guilty, or by way of devaluing individual agency and effort, but in the hope of participating in the huge re-structuring that is needed before all of us have equal opportunity to flourish by said efforts, in community together. It is a downright and evil lie that we each have what we have because we have earned it, and that to have less is evidence of deserving less. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this lie is popular among those of us who happen to have a lot, because not only does it flatter us, it also reassures us that neither we nor the social framework need to change.
The shorthand 'privilege' stands in for a reality that is relative, and complicated, and multi-dimensional, and sits alongside experiences of structural disadvantage. And so yes, I'm a woman and no, sexism absolutely hasn't gone away and yes, its impact on me persists in spite of my otherwise cosy situation. And no, please, aargh, this is not a competition for the title of 'most disadvantaged', like it sometimes risks sounding. But don't even get me started on the ways that certain expressions of feminism go about leveraging white and cisgender and class and educational privilege to secure power for women like me whilst multiplying the hardships loaded onto women who also have (for example) racism, and/or Islamophobia, and/or poverty, and/or disability, and/or the direct impacts of climate change, and/or war, and/or homophobia, and/or transphobia to contend with.
It is bad news for all women everywhere [2] when sportswomen of colour are effectively punished for being too good at their sport; when individual women rise to top positions of authority only to inflict poverty and precarity and the threat of deportation on other women and vulnerable people; when movements begun by and for women of colour gain widespread media attention only after being appropriated by white women; when some women deploy vicious and dehumanising words and actions to campaign against the rights and safety and basic dignity and recognition of other women (who, after all, are typically among the most structurally vulnerable of us to begin with) [3]; when legal models designed to regulate or curtail sex work are championed as liberating to women despite stark evidence that they actually endanger and marginalise sex workers even more whilst failing to address the separate issue of people trafficking.
"Victories" like these embed misogyny (along with other injustices), making women and feminists complicit in it. And, to poorly paraphrase a superb talk of Akala's that I attended, it is squarely in the interests of the status quo for disadvantaged and disempowered groups to scapegoat or otherwise turn on other/smaller disempowered (sub)groups. Rather this than that they notice and collectively challenge the privileged elite who are actually responsible for placing and reinforcing societal obstacles and threats to begin with.
Which brings me on to conservative evangelicalism, and its (predominately white) "husband, father, pastor" keepers. Too many of whom seem to be literally on a mission to disprove the existence of structural injustice and resist efforts to address it. Nearly 5k leaders signed the notorious and grievously racism-denying Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel last year. More recently, a tweeted advert for a panel discussion between five white men on the "Dangers of Social Justice for Evangelicalism" at a Southern Baptist event attracted understandable horror, scorn and weariness from other Christian quarters. In response, one panel member reassured critics that "We are not "ill-positioned" to discuss the subject of social justice which includes a multifaceted and wide array of issues / categories including ethnic division. Why not? It has nothing to do with our skin color or life experience. We have the sufficient Word of God."
Aside from the fact that they are necessarily interpreting that "sufficient Word" – while interpretation itself is (I believe) something that we can only hope to do well in inclusive and diverse community together – it takes a pretty astonishingly reductive and selective reading of scripture to come to the conclusion that structural injustice doesn't exist and/or that the good news about Jesus doesn't imply (and involve us in) its dismantling. "[And] and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’" (Luke 4:17-19)
I appreciate that the resistance of some Christians to the suggestion that personal salvation has a corporate outworking not unlike what many would call "social justice" is underpinned by more doctrinal and scriptural and theological wranglings than I can hope to overturn in a few quoted verses. And to unpack and respond to them fully here and now would be more than one blog post could hold, even if I thought I could do it. If you are one of those Christians, though (or indeed anyone who is similarly dismissive of social justice "agendas"), I'd encourage you as much as possible to exercise your imagination, as I failed to do in the airport. No single person's experience is representative of all of humanity – that much should be obvious – and we often choose our friends from among those we most effortlessly relate to. So, read some books by people who are unlike you in ways that might give them a different perspective [4]. Follow some twitter accounts [5]. Watch some films/television [6]. Think about your own encounters with the world, and whether your scepticism regarding "systemic injustice" might, after all, be rooted in your relative privilege within society's structures.
Especially, if you're a Christian, ask what your interpretation and application of scripture looks like for people not like you. (Men, that includes women – no sarcasm intended, I really do fear that some of you forget we are people). Does it hear from them? Does it speak to them? Does it honour their full humanity and equality with you in the eyes of a just and loving creator God, or does it make them subservient to or dependent on you? Does it lay on them burdens that you yourself would not lift a finger for? (Matt 23:4) For example, how do your ideas about gender roles play out in families where there is sickness, or abuse, or where both parents have to go out to work to make ends meet, or where both parents go out to work and they still can't make ends meet? Too often, complementarian ideals advocated by educated and financially stable women and men can be seen to multiply the hardship and vulnerability of wives relative to husbands under less empowered circumstances – dressing it up (it seems to me) as women's "sacrificial love".
In short, are you sure it's always truth you are so keenly protecting, and not, to a greater or lesser extent, the status quo?
"Each one should carry their own load," writes Paul (Gal 6:5), to the resounding cheers of the conservatively-inclined among us. Amen to personal salvation and individual responsibility! And yet, mere sentences before, and with no hint of incongruity or conflict, "Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal 6:2). As so often, the Bible turns out to be way better at holding things in tension than those of us who claim it as our pattern for living. It isn't either/or, it's both-and. Individual responsibility and collective reconfiguration, and in all of it the hope of rest and gentle welcome that Jesus promises to "all who are weary and burdened" (see Matt 11:28-30) when we reject the dehumanising terms of what bell hooks calls "imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy" and enter instead into grace-filled, status-quo-upending life in company with him.
[1] See, for example, the reported experiences of many Muslim passengers. I think also of people of colour, transgender and gender non-conforming people, those without much money, or with the wrong paperwork, disabled people, neurodiverse people, and most especially displaced people and asylum seekers who are forced to attempt entry by alternative and far more dangerous routes.
[2] I'm reminded of those oft-quoted words attributed by Lilla Watson to the collective work of the Aboriginal activists group in 1970s Queensland: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
[3] Trans-exclusionary feminists have garnered a lot of media attention lately but they are by no means representative of all feminism, see e.g. this Buzzfeed article: Meet the Feminist Academics Championing Trans Rights.
[4] This and the following lists are personal to me, off the top of my head, and reflect my own starting point as well as (inevitably) my biases and gaps. Feel free to help me correct those! Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire; Wilda Gafney, Womanist Midrash; James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Owen Jones, Chavs; Vicky Beeching, Undivided; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (and everything else she's ever written); Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, bell hooks, The Will to Change; Nikesh Shukla et al., The Good Immigrant, Nella Larsen, Passing; Octavia Butler, Kindred ...
[5] E.g. Jack Monroe, Ann Memmott, @Being_Brent, Natalie Collins, @Stroopwaffle, Tanya Marlow, Molly Smith, Stormzy, Dr. Sunny Singh, Laura Jean Truman, Rev. Rachel Mann, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Broderick Greer, Qasim Rashid, Esq., Sally Phillips ...
[6] E.g. Blindspotting, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, Sorry to Bother You, Hidden Figures, Get Out, Moonlight, I, Daniel Blake, Pride, The Florida Project, Paris is Burning, Orange is the New Black, Vice, O.J.: Made in America, BlacKkKlansman ...
[Thumbnail image cc. from Doug Waldron on Flickr.]
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