Identity & Worth -The Unsaid Things

Among many of my professional and social groups, and certainly ‘at home’ in Memphis, I am one of those people who will say the unsaid thing. A lifetime of ministry has taught me the pastoral side of holding my tongue, not to avoid trouble but to respect a confidence. But when I was younger, I would often speak the unsaid things to shock or disrupt. I’ve learned that this agitation should be reserved as a strategy, and not used as a standard operating procedure, and in fact must be so in order to be effective.

Now, I am not alone in this, as frankly this sort of activity was encouraged throughout my childhood education by many of the teachers shared for a dozen years by about 25 of my friends from Memphis. I have become quite close with several of these folks over the decades, and something we all share is a willingness to say the unsaid things.

My mother always thought it was extraordinary that I attended two schools from 1st grade through my high school graduation, that it must have formed me in some significant way. Even my kindergarten was just across the street and down some from my elementary school, and many of us moved together from one to the other. 

Not everyone from the 6th grade stayed together, but we only went to 5 or 6 places, and the cohort that showed up to 7th grade together remained friends at least through those rocky middle years. My high school class was one of the last to attend both Junior High and Senior High on the same physical campus, and I am absolutely sure this is why school tours are always a popular class reunion activity for us. We were there a long time. A long time.

One of these people with whom I was always in school recently asked me if I thought there was something special in the water at our elementary school that made us all think we could change the world. It was a serious question.

Which again brought up the question of what kind of effect these relationships have had on me, and the common lived life among us. Has it affected my sense of self when I’ve realized much of what formed me is also shared? Yes, I think so but in a very solid and grounded way. It does not feed doubt or cause me to question any thought as unique. In fact, it’s helped me feel not quite so alone as I’ve wrestled with whatever injustice or committed myself to whichever fight.

Because until perhaps the last 7-10 years, I *was* the only person saying many of the things I regularly preached and taught. I’ve been talking about white privilege with my fellow white people since I first heard the term in the 1990s. I have been advocating for environmental justice and Creation Care since I was a child. I have been mocked, reprimanded, and punished for demanding higher standards in regards to keeping children and youth safe from predators. I was raised to believe that protest is the highest form of patriotism and faithfulness, and I have spoken out in various ways all my life. Often alone.

Of course other people were doing the same kinds of things over similar issues in other places, and I am good at finding allies in unusual spaces. All of these movements have only grown over the last decade, rolling slowly into cultural norms. But there was something particular that I enjoyed about being different, voicing an alternative view, speaking the unsaid thing.

It set me apart, and gave me an identity as on outsider even when I represented the establishment. And as a white American, I will always at some level represent the establishment. Agitating in that space *is* important, but it’s also the safest possible place within which to act. There is a kind of power and protection in the maverick archetype, the troublemaker persona. And there can be real effects to the ripples caused, but not always for the disruptor, especially a privileged one.

I have to let that piece of my identity go, because wrapped insidiously within it are several ways in which I cede my life to fear and scarcity. When I assume I must be the one to say the unsaid thing, I remove the possibility that role is another’s. When I walk into a space assuming I will be the only one with certain concerns, I remove the need to search for allies and accomplices. When I assume I will need to say the unsaid thing, I do not listen well enough to hear when it *is* said by another in a different way.

But most importantly, I have to stand separate from this as a part of how I think of myself, my sense of identity and worth. It. Is. Not. About. Me. My identity is grounded within my own heart and soul, within my relationship with God, and my worth cannot be parsed to data points, even if those be in the social or religious realms.

I will continue to say the unsaid things, because politeness is not a Gospel value and sometimes, adherence to love and justice requires these things be spoken out loud. While I may say all the unsaid things, I must challenge myself to also DO the undone things, and act outside of the paradigm in which we find ourselves. And I will continue to both lean on and seek out others who also say the unsaid things. 

Language and Control

I am a word nerd. I have an adversarial relationship with nouns, and they won’t stay in my head. But otherwise, I love language. I love its nuance, how 10 words can mean one thing but just a slightly different aspect of said thing. Or how one word can mean ten different things, depending only on context and use. Word choice matters greatly and has a significant impact in effect. Period. Sticks and stones may draw blood, sure, but words themselves DO have power. Power to illuminate and reveal, explain and describe -but also the power to obscure, deceive.

I grew up in the land of the subtle euphemism, the American South. I understand how carefully chosen words can soften a harsh reality -a terminal diagnosis or an expression of accountability. All our hearts are blessed regularly, and I also understand how seemingly polite words can hold deep barbs. And much to my surprise, I carry pieces of the Lost Cause narrative, a great example of how language and story are used to control. I’ll write about those revelations later in the month. 

I was getting a couple of degrees in the ‘90s when the term Political Correctness hit the mainstream conservative media. It was a term we in academia were using to describe an intentionally measured discourse, and it was a term the Left used as a self-critique. By application of that now well-known right media smear machine, ‘political correctness’ became the catch-all pejorative phrase for any pushback against racist, sexist, harassing, or otherwise oppressive language. 

But the movements towards excising cruelty from our language, and the emerging awarenesses of the power of naming, claiming, owning the wide diversity of our lives have only marched on, increased. It doesn’t really matter what mocking term Fox News used, the shifts were happening. These days, I even hear a backlash against the PC pushback itself by telling complainers not to be so sensitive about losing their ‘right’ to denigrate others, that changes in language aren’t an exercise of any thought police but rather a choice not to be an asshole. 

Although I do hear fellow leftists use it in an ironic way sometimes, so I suppose its use has come full circle.

I have been involved in the environmental movement since I was a child in the 1970s. I first started using the term Global Warming in the 1980s. By the late ‘90s, that same smear machine had begun to take Global Warming apart as a viably descriptive term. A few years later, it was reported widely as evidence Global Warming was a hoax for a sitting Senator to toss a snowball around the Senate chambers. Idiotic. 

Climate Change was a term more commonly used only within scientific communities. It was mostly about the various deltas, that is changes, in metrics and crucial data points, some of which have driven our comprehension of climate for centuries. Weather patterns. Rainfall. Snowfall. Air temperature. Ocean rise. Water temperature. Harvests and soil health. Infant mortality. As our ability to measure has become more sophisticated, we have captured more information. As we have more information, we can more accurately predict what kinds of changes are before us, and where those tipping points might be. 

The primary pushback against Climate Change seems to be an intentional confusion of weather and climate. Weather can change hourly. A place’s climate, the long term patterns of weather alongside all those other metrics, generally does not change noticeably in one’s lifetime. Michigan would be shocking with a new tropical zone and snow in Miami would shut South Beach down.

About ten years ago, the USDA recategorized Colorado as the slightly warmer 5b planting zone, although there are various zones throughout the state. This happened all over the US and another published change is anticipated. These shifts affect all manner of planting and harvesting, from massive industrial agriculture to your backyard garden. 

Floods and fires are increasing throughout the country, and as predicted the frequency and severity of storms is rising. And it snowed in Texas this year. Climate scientist Kathryn Hayhoe brilliantly upends the mockable Global Warming and calls it all Global Weirding, a phrase that’s accessible, funny, and true.

Which brings me to the topic that got me started thinking about words this week, about the use of language to control the narrative, to shift the perception of the truth. Of course, I mean the soon to be outlawed Critical Race Theory. And yes, it’s the same playbook all over again. An idea debated in academia, concepts studied as a framework for years as a way to describe lived experience, made its way into the common discourse and was vilified by the churn of the right wing media that simply cannot tolerate truth, and the required nuance of history.

We are right now experiencing an attempt by nearly a dozen state legislatures around the country to ban the use of teaching actual history, apparently because it makes some white people feel bad about themselves. And I get it. It’s intimidating to face. And for many, this fear traps them, keeps them from facing toxic remnants of history, structures of our institutions and systems that keep us bound, and the fatal and punitive realities of day to day life for nonwhite people in America. Unfortunately, these fearful people in such deep denial make public policy.

Many are right to fear this movement towards a more honest comprehension of our American History and how it forms us now. Education is dangerous for fear and denial and these are tools that address many aspects of our national history that we have never taught.  Most white people do not know about mass graves of Indigenous children, massacres of large Black populations, or the destruction of several Black economic centers. Interventions like reparations begin to make sense when you understand the long term patterns of intentional disenfranchisement and destruction.  And so they are clamping down, trying to make it illegal to discuss anything that challenges our whitewashed national narrative.

Words matter, and how we teach our national history matters. I am angry every time I discover a huge chunk that I honestly feel was intentionally kept from me in order to perpetuate a toxic system that benefits only me. I can’t understand being okay with not knowing the real stories as much as possible, and choosing a comfortable mythology.

I pray that good educators, anti-racism trainers, truthful curriculum writers, and members of Boards of Education with integrity will figure out a way around these capricious bans through the creative use of language. But honestly, it’s important to pushback against the co-opting of truth and education, especially because children and young people are involved. When we count on attrition or death to hasten cultural shifts (we all do this -all groups), we forget the kids. We forget that modeling continually instructs and that children repeat what they hear, ingest what they are fed.