Mind Games

"The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. 

I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation." 

-  James Baldwin, 1962. (From a Letter From a Region in My Mind) 

An Ikea Dresser

Begin by envisioning something you have worked on. A paper you wrote, a recipe you were following, a painting or drawing, a piece of Ikea furniture you put together, maybe some computer code, anything that requires sewing. Fill in the blank if your interests are less crafty.

What happens when you make a mistake while building something? You can't find a source for one of the main arguments in your paper. You sewed on a sleeve inside out. You put the bottom panel of the dresser drawers in upside down and now the screw holes don't line up. You realize you left out the eggs when the cake is already in the oven.

Some things are ruined, some things can be fixed. If you can fix it - let's use the Ikea furniture example - it will require dismantling part of what you've built in order to correct the mistake. Multiple parts must shift so that one part can be changed.

What happens when we want to or have to change our ideas? Our beliefs and our perception of the world and our systems for processing information are like the dresser components that go together to shape who we are and how we interact in the world. In this analogy, we are Ikea dressers. It requires a partial dismantling of self to flip the drawer bottoms into the correct position. It is perilous, destabilizing work when the structural integrity of the dresser - your self - is at stake. Sometimes we decide we can live with the drawer bottoms in upside down. But maybe after you've been shoving clothes in for a few months, they start to sag, and the left side of the center drawer keeps popping out because there's no screw in there. If you want the dresser to work better, you have to put in the work to fix it, which will require some destruction in the process.

It's hard work to transcend beliefs you've held for a long time. Things we believe over a long period of time can become foundational in the way we see the world, and the way we conduct our lives. If those foundational beliefs are questioned, we might question our identity, and that can be very unsettling. It calls everything we've not had to think about (and considered "settled") into question, and that can be overwhelming. It can cause tension in relationships and spaces that view questions as threats.

If you really tackle the question of "Is God good?" you may find that a lot of other beliefs hang in the balance. If you ask new questions about your sexuality, you may find that some of your interaction with the world is called into question too. If you question the narrative of your nationality, you may find yourself adrift in darkened waters. You may also find that people who share in the structure of your foundational beliefs push back when you take a chisel to the pillars.

Questioning our foundational beliefs can also be very freeing. There is space in the way we define ourselves for growth, change, and movement. When I am open to shifting foundational beliefs of my own, I feel the fear and instability of uncertainty, but it also gives me hope that my identity could be freed from entrenched destruction. That the dresser could be put back together, better.


I Believe You

I am comfortable believing that injustice is a footnote in society as I related to it. Well, comfortable enough that I tend not to do the work of deconstructing my foundational beliefs in order to be deeply aware of injustice as a cancer that is gnawing at my neighbor, and it's coming for me. 

How can I stop believing that it's someone else's problem, and a small problem at that? I've been practicing saying, simply, "I believe you." This started with a real person and a real story. Relationship is, for me, a powerful tool in the changing of minds and hearts. I talked with a Black neighbor about her experience in our neighborhood and with the police in her home, with her family. This conversation did not come about through any effort on my part, but because I accidentally came into the position of trying to mitigate professional risk. I was so uncomfortable and ashamed and helpless that I was shaken, and because of that, I believed my neighbor. Despite the fact that I don't understand it and didn't see it with my own eyes, I believed her.

Something about believing without seeing took a sledgehammer to the Ikea dresser, so to speak. I can't stop saying, "I believe you", and it changes everything. I recall Romans 12:2, "but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." This transformation isn't so much about information as it is about posture. A posture of belief becomes a compulsion to help. To love. And I know that other people can sense the difference between an "I believe you" and a "whatever you say" in my mind. One leads to sisterhood, and the other does not.

James Baldwin wrote, "one can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving."

Belief isn't as simple as we sometimes make it out to be. It's typically not "like flipping a switch." Nothing about choosing to dismantle foundational beliefs is simple. It requires risking ourselves. However, to build the practice and posture of "I believe you" into our relationships with people and alternate realities (meaning how other people experience a system differently than we experience it), it's helpful to make a distinction between "I believe you" and "I agree with you."

We are so aware of what we don't agree with. If you don't already have training in agreement wars from your spiritual or racial background, you've probably experienced it on the internet. There are times when disagreement is not only okay, but imperative. But the level of things that I've been taught to disagree with sews a minefield between "the world" (anyone who doesn't already live according to extremely specific interpretations of scripture) and Jesus. You don't have to agree with everyone you believe. You also don't have to say that you don't agree.

Saying (or posturing), "I believe you", removes the internal conflict over looking like I might be "supporting things I don't agree with". This is an important thing to understand if you, like me, have the teaching or the urge to add, "I'm not sure I agree" to interacting with people who act in ways that are outside of the foundations of our moral fabric. In my religious background (which I distinguish from my beliefs today, but won't elaborate on here), anything having to do with gender or baby making falls into this category. Sex before marriage? Disagree. Sex between the same gender? Disagree. Abortion? Disagree. Police as a corrupt institution? Disagree.

As James Baldwin put it, Christianity as we typically see it playing out "is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness." 

"I agree (or disagree)" is about ideas. "I believe you (or don't believe you)" is about people. Agreeing is nice, but it's not paramount. I doubt Jesus agrees with me on everything. But I feel his love for me in spite of our differences of opinion.

You were born gay? I believe you. You were born one gender but you now identify as another? I believe you. I hurt you? I believe you. The police don't see you as human? I believe you. Even, even, You're not a racist? I believe you.

In all of these examples, whether or not I agree with someone else's experience or choice makes no difference to them. The only thing that is served by voicing my agreement (or lack there of) is my own voice. Does me not believing that the police are unjust toward you make you feel better treated by police? No it does not. Even if I could interpret your experience differently than you have, it doesn't help you for me to explain what I think you really experienced or what you really meant.

In the past when I've felt wronged (occasionally due to my gender), it would have been great to hear, "I believe you" instead of, "actually, that's not what happened." Whether or not anyone could "prove" my experience one way or another. There's not much that we get to prove in this life, and the things we think we've proven aren't proof to everyone. That's why belief is important, and belief is a choice.

Posturing "I believe you" is important to me because it leads to love. Disagreement is often my ticket to exclusion. I can easily dismiss people experiencing something I don't believe is real. After all, their refusal to see my truth is their problem, now that I've presented them with my disagreement. 

To say, instead, "I believe you" (internally: "even if I disagree"), becomes an I love you. It becomes, "I see what you are saying, and I will help you and be helped by you." 1 Corinthians 13:7 is often read as "Love never loses faith", but the ESV translates it, "Love believes all things." The agreement clause of my structural identity has so often pulled me out of situations before I really listened. And that's one way that we find ourselves in this position, as white people, as a church, where we're shocked by reality because we didn't see it before.

Miki Kim

Suspense 

What if you don't believe someone? That's real, and it should be considered a valid scenario.
Maybe we can practice, first, "I can suspend my belief so that I can hear you".

We know that we can't believe everything we see or read. Our impulse is to distrust what we view as outrageous. We also seem to distrust sources that we believe have "an agenda" (maybe we can unpack that another time). We also know that we lean toward believing things that confirm what we already believe. We can go a long time relatively unhindered by that one corner of the drawer bottom popping out occasionally. After all, it still holds most of the clothing.

What does it mean to suspend belief? One definition is, "an intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal." 

I say this gently to us, to myself: If it feels like seeing life through Black eyes requires us to suspend belief, perhaps we're not all wrong. It's hard to start believing something that doesn't seem logical to us out of sheer will. I think it is only surreal and illogical to us because we have not believed or experienced it before. Isn't not believing also a suspension of belief? Isn't a refusal to engage in dismantling systems of oppression with our own bodies and a refusal to believe that the police, as a system, are a destructive force an intentional avoidance of critical thinking?

How could something so horrifying - so out there - as centuries of targeted murder in which the murderers are called heroes, be real? If we believe it, what does that mean about us and about other people? What does it mean that we've been able to avoid that view on reality?

Maybe it's not out there, though. Maybe many, many people have said it. Maybe they've been saying it for generations. Maybe I view systemic oppression and my body as the fabric of that system as a surrealist exaggeration because believing it would require a seismic shift in my foundation, not because it's not believable.

If you are a Christian, you already believe something that you can't prove. We don't believe because we are ignorant, but because we've made a choice and continue making that choice. How can we choose not to believe something that we can see, then? We only choose not to believe it if we don't see it. And we can only avoid seeing it if we keep saying we don't believe.

How do you believe something if you have no evidence? Dismantling the dresser in order to repair it requires choice. I am making the choice to believe something new or different primarily through an act of will, and now I am on a quest to gather the evidence to repair my foundations around these altered pillars. Isn't that convenient, you might ask? Yes it is. But the things I believe already are no different. I chose or was handed the other foundational beliefs I already operate under a long time ago, and refusal to shift those beliefs is nothing more than a continual gathering of evidence supporting what I already believed and refuting or ignoring what I did not believe.

For example, it is at some risk to myself (at least any notion of being considered sane within the institutions that I generally run in) that I take a vocal stance on the dismantling of the police as we know them in the United States. I've had experiences with police that amount to personal evidence both that I benefit (not just generally, but specifically) from police and that police are a localized arm of the military, sanctioned by the state to terrorize civilians. Remember, you don't have to agree with me. But you can believe me, if you choose to.

Prior to the last month or two, my beliefs and opinions and feelings toward police in America were maybe slightly less trustful than that of the average white women (due in large part to my knowledge and experience of police in China and Thailand) but in general they were not an institution I'd given much attention to as a whole. Because doing so affected me very little.

In short, while it is a choice, it costs me very little to believe my neighbor suffers unjustly at the hands of police who then face no repercussions whatsoever. Believing that is supported by an abundance of other material which suddenly seems remarkably large to have ever been disregarded by me before. I believe that not every police officer is corrupt and oppressive, but that's a separate conversation. I do believe the police system to be irreconcilably flawed, however, and I believe that in part because my sisters and brothers tell me so. And I believe them.

My old belief served me only passively, and I have no particular attachment to it. My new belief does little to disadvantage me, and I hope everything to affirm my neighbor, both my literal neighbor and my neighbors at large. I have been safe from the police because I have virtually no contact with them. That alone is privilege, and not much of a platform from which to shout that the police are interested in my well-being. I do, however, have the category for lack of safety if I were to challenge police authority, including the authority to terrorize. I believe that injustice toward someone removed from me that goes unchallenged by me is merely an injustice that has not reached me yet.

If we can not repair our beliefs for someone else's sake, we can do it selfishly, to save ourselves.

I don't know if any of this makes any sense to anyone but me. This is a tutorial on how I change my own mind, after all. It may seem as if I'm engaged in extreme mental gymnastics in order to come to radical new conclusions. And that is my point precisely.