Book Report: Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants

 

I was excited to read this text because of a post I saw on Twitter that talked about Gündoğdu locating the ultimate authority for human rights, not merely in the nation-states that allegedly protect them but in human beings themselves who demand those rights by migrating contrary to unjust law.  That definition of what it means to be human realigned all the ethical pieces in my head.  Mythologically, within my faith, those are exactly the stories I know and tell to relate my values.  Pharaoh seeks to do genocide to the Hebrew people.  With God as Deliverer, Moses, Miriam, and the Hebrew people walk out of Egypt to seek out a broad and spacious land for community life and conduct.  (The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary relates that this is literally how the Hebrew Bible defines “salvation.”)  Fleeing Herod’s edict to kill all children under two years of age, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus walk into Egypt for haven and sanctuary. 

To be human is to flee injustice in search of a broad space, haven, and sanctuary.  If you are a faith nerd, like me, you point to Psalm 23 as a way of recognizing that the most dearly beloved Psalm in Christian communities has echoes of this definition.  Maybe it is why we treasure Psalm 23.  Deep down, Psalm 23 tells us what it means to be a human being.  I want to come back to that. 

This book was a critique of the human rights theory of Hannah Arendt.  Coming out of World War II, international declarations were made about human rights.  Arendt, as a Jewish person living in Germany, became increasingly concerned about the antisemitism she saw escalating in her country.  She was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo and escaped to the United States where she became one of the most important political philosophers and theorists of the 20^th Century. 

Arendt wrote of a “right to have rights.”  In other words, how do we vest rights in such a way that they cannot be taken away when the political winds change?  When fiat or blame is leveled, how do we make sure that people or peoples become something less than human beings?  For when people are without voice, work, or labor, Arendt wrote, they are something less than human beings.  They are expulsed from humanity.  Arendt did not want the discourse of human rights to be something static or certain because, she believed, despots or governments would always find a way to maneuver around a concept that did not move with contingency. 

Here in the text was a word I had never encountered but now has become part of my lexicon.  Arendt thought the discourse on human rights should be “aporetic.”   If you are a regular reader to my blog (did I just hear an echo?), you know that I used this term in my Exodus/Wilderness sermon series.  Aporetic is a way of saying that we should work with Socratic questioning in ways that recognize some things always end up in perplexity.  If we keep at this process, however, we may find a path or a way where there was no path before.  We reexamine, “think without a bannister,” so that no trite or easy answers carry the day. 

Arendt makes it clear that human rights are not something that have any meaning outside of legal leverage and ongoing practices.  In fact, Arendt contends, that real legal codification and practice must be augmented to be real.  In our present day, this could not be any more clear.  Unless we augment rights around employment, voting, and fair housing, allowing those rights to remain static means they are eroded or taken away.  Gerrymandering seeks to take away the power of the vote.  Voting-by-mail is being regularly denigrated by President Trump.  Even the doubt cast on the electoral process may upend the presidential election process.  Augmentation is necessary as a way of meeting contingencies created by those who would subvert basic human rights. 

For Arendt, the basics of what it means to be human are about “cultivating a trust in the reality and regularity of life, establishing a relatively durable dwelling place, and creating public spaces to appear and act in the company of fellow human beings.” (p. 208)  My belief is that faith needs to actively incorporate such concepts into its teaching, preaching, and dialog.  Talking about God creating human beings without such real political and legal standing is romantic discourse without the everyday grit and substance faith should be about.  We should then challenge those in the halls of power who actively expulse others from humanity as people who have made themselves God’s adversaries.  If God created these people to be human beings, who are you to take away their voice, labor, and work, their dependable and routine life?

Gündoğdu relates the quandary Arendt faces as she struggles with rightlessness in an age of rights.  For if human rights are conferred by the nation-state through citizenship, what happens to human rights when people who are not citizens seek human rights?  Are immigrants and refugees not human beings because they have no path to citizenship?  Also, as citizenship is deflated, does it also mean that human rights are lost as well?  With economic inequality on the rise throughout the world, where do we vest human rights?

She references the sans-papieres movement as a way of establishing a “founding” of human rights by occupying a political space not open before, establishing new questions about equality and freedom (encapsulated in a term she references as “equaliberty”), and demanding their role as political subjects.  I think how young people have similarly done this through their legal and political work around climate change. 

This book was dense and a slog for me even as many of the concepts changed my worldview and had me recognizing I needed a more rigorous theology around what it means to be a human being.  Study is a spiritual practice for me because I experience joy in this kind of learning.  It may be that Gündoğdu is just ten times smarter than I am in a way that requires my whole brain for every sentence. 

In keeping with Arendt and Gündoğdu and their definition of what it means to be a human being, I had an incredible conversation with my daughter just the other day.  We talked about the basics of what it means to be a human being.  While voice, work, labor, the regularity and dependability of life, and the willingness to occupy political space are important characteristics of what we all should know as human beings, I do think some Biblical concepts should be added to the mix. 

Coming out of the Biblical Exile, Jewish prophets recognized that without human rights, they were building houses that they did not themselves live in or growing vineyards that they themselves did not eat the fruit of.  I think an investigation of “shalom” concepts like these are part of the ongoing, aporetic dialog that will lead us to a fuller understanding of human rights.  That sense of being able to weave together a community through construction and the growing of food and being able to enjoy the shelter and fruit of that labor are part of what it means to be a human being. 

Finally, one of the primary concepts of “shalom” that is found in Micah 4:4 and in Psalm 23 are key to what it means to be human.  That each of us might be able to sit underneath our own olive tree and find rest and leisure in God’s good creation are considered antidotes to imperial rule.  When there is a widespread sense that we do not have to be hypervigilant about what will happen next to find food or shelter, to avoid being killed by law enforcement, and that the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, we become more fully human.  That the Jewish people celebrate Passover every year, advised to recline in leisure as they eat the meal, is a reminder.  We are reminded that yes, trauma has come and may come, but there are times when our humanity is fully embraced in celebration, Sabbath, and rest. 

Book Report: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

 In the New York Times series, "1619," Matthew Desmond makes it clear just how important slavery was to the United States economy.  "[A]t the height of slavery," Desmond says, "the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation." (Episode 2:  The Economy that Slavery Built, 1619, The New York Times, August 30, 2019,  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/podcasts/1619-slavery-cotton-capitalism.html?showTranscript=1) Slavery moved the United States economy from a fledgling nation to a money-making powerhouse.  

Our country's prosperity was built on a brutal economy that was too big to fail.  When cotton farmers experienced a crippling economic downturn, banks were right there to loan them money and prop up the system of slavery.  This is the point Dr. Kendi makes in his incredible book.  Slavery and racism were intentional choices made to increase profits and promote a whole system that constructed and maintained "race."  In turn, United States policy and practice made Black people non human beings.  Taught, codified, mythologized, and even celebrated, some huge African-American pillars of Black history "housed" this oppression and death by suggesting that African culture and Black people  were "less than" and would need to evolve before their total freedom could be given.

My family knows me to be the most unnerving movie critic to relate how movies are the storytellers and myth makers for our age.  Not so much I guess.  One after another, Kendi shared plainly how movies that became iconic for our nation were a retelling of our racist narrative.  How could I not see "King Kong" or "Planet of the Apes" as part of that narrative?  Under Kendi's pen, I saw it clearly.

Kendi states that racism was borne out of self-interest.  It must come to an end out of self-interest.  I know that reality all too well.  My racism with the Native community was transformed and continues to be transformed as I realized the goodness that flowed to me as Native people, with all of their vices and virtues, moved on me.  That so many Native people consider me a friend when I know the history . . . I break into tears.  I cannot comprehend that.  My personal racism is broken recognizing how bringing an end to it benefits me as a whole.  I wish I could say I was more courageous.  

This text is so daunting that it took me several days to even contemplate writing this book report.  Kendi is relentless in maintaining focus so that we cannot avert our eyes from our country's long history of maintaining Black people as non humans.  I certainly knew of the critique of one of my heroes, Abraham Lincoln.  Kendi makes it clear that Lincoln certainly did not see Black people as equals.  

He also, however, takes on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Kendi devoted a whole section to W. E. B. Du Bois, recognizing that as one of the wisdom-givers of Black people in the United States, he really was not an anti-racist until much later in his life.   I found myself blinking at the critical eye he leveled at Du Bois.  At the same time, that unflinching criticism (for good or ill) gave Kendi's prose an integrity that was in keeping with one of his main categories.

He was not telling us the story of "the extraordinary Negro."  He did not want us to think that racism will disappear if we just show any number of African American people who were beyond reproach.  The primary drive of anti-racism is to give African-American people a space where they might be known as full human beings--capable of great virtue and great vice.  He also related the intersectionality of gender and its interplay with racism.  He praised Ida B. Wells as an anti-racist who did not get the platform she deserved.  He also lifted up Zora Neale Hurston and my favorite novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Kendi praised the book because it showed Black people as human beings--making mistakes, seeing beauty, and, I would say, finding love, sensuality, and heartache along the way.  

Though his categories may not be original to him, he has now lifted those categories in a way that will make them primary in the lexicon of racial discourse.  My only negative critique of the text was that although things like "moral suasion" have not created and will not create the necessary transformation around race, I believe we need to bring everything to the table to create the transformation.  I do think moral suasion has had some effect.  

Kendi is right though.  Race is defined by power.  So we will need, as he asserts, anti-racist people in power over a long period of time to create ongoing policy and practice that are anti-racist.  We have too long had virtue signaling toward race while keeping policy and practice in place.  Or leaders who seek to reach "middle ground" when one of the positions is that Black people are human beings.  There is no other side.  Black people are human beings.  Black lives matter.  

Kendi wants us to end racial discrimination in policy and practice.  We have the power to make that transformation.  Much like Abraham Lincoln ended slavery to save the Union, Kendi writes, we must now end racism out of our own self-interest.  I pray we are ready.  

I have just finished three different texts that discuss what it means to be a human being.  We need an incredible intersectional movement that seats people in power and demands of people in power that there is no compromise on that definition.  Jacob Blake's father kept repeating to us, "He's a human being!  He's a human being!"  He knows what so much State violence against the Black community means.  That it happens and we either ignore or sanction that violence means we do not understand Black people as human beings.  

Faith communities must make that a singular focus as they make meaning, critique power, and seek to do justice.  We must come to grips with that necessarily political endeavor.  And then rights must be extended to creation--animals, rivers, land--as subjects (acting on us) who are in relationship with us.  The Supreme Court made corporations human beings.   All they were doing was ratifying policies and practices we have long held in this country over and against peoples and planet.

Some of you know how angry I was at RBG for not affording asylum seekers equal protection under the law (in other words, they are not human beings).

Kendi keeps us focused in a text that is over 500 pages.  That is the power of this book.  My greatest prayer is that white folk will use this text to hold their own focus and work toward Kendi's counsel.

There are more poetic and certainly will be better histories told of race in our country.  Kendi's plain prose, however, has cultivated categories that will be the standards for time forward.  He has a lens that doesn't try to be groundbreaking so much as straightforward, truth-telling, and insistent.  As I read, I could almost recognize the voice of Dr. Kendi behind me, saying, "See?  Is it plain to you now?  This is inescapable."