A Task From Which We Cannot Flinch: Remembering Dr. Zee
-Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director
I am not alone in my sharp awareness each day of terrible violence, injustice and inequity both far away and close at hand. I squint in something close to disbelief at the absolute disregard for life north and south of the equator. I’m also aware of the long, complex roots of greed and fear morphed into poverty and all the shapes of bigotry.
This week I shook my head again, not so much in disbelief, but in sad recognition of dogged resistance to liberatory thought and change evidenced by questions directed at U.S. supreme court nominee Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson, questions involving children’s books about racism, the definition of the word, woman, and how religious Judge Jackson is, on a scale of 1-to-10.
It grieves me to know that liberation is and has ever been a threat, that the truth of history or the changing face of humanity is enough to justify the fundamental disrespect on display in those questions. I can only imagine that Judge Brown felt something akin and much older than my own grief and exhaustion when she met those questions with deep sighs and long seconds of silence before she answered.
It’s understandable that some respond to all of this with a sense of defeat, debilitating rage, or rejecting any possibility of meaningful human progress. Still, I don’t have to look far at all to find the insistent and hopeful working steadily in their day to day to offer relief, and to chip away at limiting ideas and longstanding inequities.
The ILI is in that camp, searching for alchemies of old and emerging insights, putting into action innovative models and programs that promise progress toward a more equitable and nonviolent future.
When I shared that vision with my friend and former professor Dr. Szabi Ishtai-Zee, and asked him to join the ILI as an advisor, he said, “I would love to join you. This is important work.” The work he meant was sustained and systemic change, across sectors of work and living, driven by rigorous thinking-together and mutual accountability.
Dr. Zee passed away unexpectedly last week. Szabi was an accomplished musician and martial artist, a greatly respected and much-loved teacher. He embraced complexity with a rare combination of humor and serious, scholarly regard. He was Black, and blind, and the love of his life was a white woman. Our conversations about multi-racial relationships were honest and earnest; we knew those relationships, including the one we were in together, were inextricably linked to dismantling racism. He was excited about our research with multi-racial families, eager to hear the results. I’ll be sad not to share those with him.
Szabi insisted on the possibility of a more just world, and at the same time unstintingly facing its ongoing violence and injustice. He held those two realities with equally insistent grace.
We have work to do in the service of that insistence - joyful, painful, necessary work. It will certainly include long swims against fierce tides. It will include failure. And as the president of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, wrote this week about stopping the war in Ukraine, “it’s a task from which we cannot flinch.”*
Sometimes, I confess, I flinch. Then I remember all who came before, and now Szabi is among them. With his belief in our work in my pocket, I’ll keep reaching for Light.