Holding on to our Humanity

Week 1 of Advent

Dirty Dub Disaster by Lukas Feireiss

Justice work is the dream that all people would be given the opportunity to live, and to live with dignity.

Mass Incarceration

Hunger

Poverty

War

Domestic Violence

Racism

Name a system of injustice, and you will find a system that has decided that a particular group of people is less human and hence, disposable. 

Palestinians, trans folks, dalit people, Indigenous women. Statistics and health outcomes will show that there is a system based on this group being deemed as having less value, being less human, and hence disposable. 

This is not actually the hard part to grasp.

The hard part is recognizing that as we fight for justice, we often bring this system of disposability with us. 

People who don’t agree with us are disposable. 

People who don’t use a specific word are disposable. 

People who aren’t focussed on the same issue are disposable. 

I see this vibe cultivated on social media a great deal. 

And it concerns me. 

We can not build a new world, or a just world, or even a slightly better world, if all we are doing is changing around who we consider disposable. We have to find another way. 

I spent most of the 90’s leading out of a model of justice work that was deeply white centered and uninterested in systemic change. So I understand the aversion to being overly relational. I’m deeply acquainted with the tendency to coddle the privileged. But rejecting an ethic of disposability does not have to become a toothless form of justice. We need to find a third way. And the truth is, we can not escape that justice work is not disembodied ideological work, it is human work. Not just the humans we are fighting for, but the humans are fighting against, and the humans we are hoping to convince. 

If injustice is based on seeing some people as less than human, then justice work must be built on a commitment to honoring the humanity in all people, including those we are fighting. That doesn’t mean agreeing with all people, or coddling all people, but it forces us to confront our own internalized tendency to want to treat people as other and as disposable.

Grace Lee Boggs- Pioneering Chinese American Activist

In her book The Next American Revolution Grace Lee Boggs says, “I have been privileged to participate in most of the great humanizing movements of the past seventy years- the labor, civil rights, Black Power, women’s, Asian American, environmental, and anti-war movements. Each of these has been a tremendously transformative experience for me, expanding my understanding of what it means to be both an American and a human being, while challenging me to keep deepening my thinking about how to bring about radical social change.”

It is so telling that she speaks of each of these movements as “humanizing movements.” Capitalism, racism, white supremacy, patriarchy all move to dehumanize a certain group of people. We are often compelled and moved by those who are victims of these systems, but we must also consider our view those perpetuating the systems, and those who are sitting on the sidelines with ambivalence in the face of these systems. Will we let our rage against the systems lead us to dehumanize them?

For me, it is a sacred work to see the humanity in others, including those I deeply disagree with. The online space does not lend itself to this. I try to remember that the work is not just about what you believe, but challenging the the assumptions of how we treat those we disagree with. And as someone’s whose justice work is based on an ethic shaped by Jesus and Christianity*, I believe that every human is made in the image of Creator. And all of creation is in the image of Creator, and we are to treat it as kin. 

I am not arguing for our queer and trans kin to stay in spaces that endanger them. Or other vulnerable and maginalized folks to endanger themselves. The place that I see this dynamic happening most often is by folks who are taking ideological stances, not folks who are directly impacted. White folks who won’t talk to other white folks anymore. Non-Palestinian folks cancelling people who aren’t speaking up in the way they deem correct. In my experience, people who are directly impacted by these systems of harm don’t tend to be the most rigid, it is those who put some form of their identity in being seen as a social justice person.

On both the progressive and conservative end of the spectrum, it is those who are least directly impacted, but have their identity rooted in their ideological purity, that are most rigid and cruel. The far ends of the spectrum end up running that is quite parallel.

Advent is a reminder that humans, in their tiny, vulnerable flesh containers are sacred. Creator came into humanity. Became a part of humanity. Embraced humanity by being a human. Colonial Christianity pretends that Jesus’ main focus was to punish, and we must reject this premise and all the ways it would seep into our lives. For the vast majority of his life Jesus simply lived, as a human, in his community, and in a body.

The invitation of Advent is to protect our belief in the sacredness of humanity. Not to let grief and trauma, war and violence, mold us into its image. It is a sacred practice to stay tender. To stay human. To see humanity in another person. To honor our own fragile human-ness.

As we enter into this season, how can we cultivate an ethic that sees the sacred humanity in each person?

*It makes me cringe to use the word Christian in reference to myself. Especially as I watch a white supremacist and nationalist distortion of Christianity wreak havoc on this country. I have little interest in the institutions of Christianity. BUT- since many Christian Nationalists are doing things I find antithetical to the life and teaching of Jesus, I refuse to give up the term. Institutional Christianity is a dumpster fire. But it is the dumpster fire that raised me, and so I am going to stake a claim and have an opinion about what it does. And particularly as Christian Zionism works to fund and animate so much settler violence in Palestine, I want to name myself as a Christian in the United States that stands against this. I reject the theology of Christian Zionism. I reject the extermination of the Palestinian people. I reject it being done in my name as an American and as a Christian. And I see and claim my Christian kin in Palestine.

I claim the term to push against these systems and theologies.