Zakiya Jackson: Good Neighbor, Bad Systems

This week, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talks with Zakiya Jackson of the Expectations Project. They talk about the spiritual practice of being a good neighbor, and how good neighboring goes beyond individual relationships to considering how systems and policy affect our communities as a whole.

You can follow Zakiya on Instagram and Threads.
You can learn more about the Expectations Project here.

20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto 
Produced by David de Leon
Editing and Mixing by Wiloza Media
Music by Andre Henry

Transcript

20MT (SE08) - Zakiya Jackson

[Nikki]
Hello, my name is Nikki Toyama-Szeto and I'm the Executive Director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today's episode of 20-Minute Takes.

Today, I have the great privilege of talking with Zakiya Jackson. She's the President of the Expectations Project and she joins us as a daughter of Washington, D.C. She helps us to understand the different ways that Christian engagement in the public sphere around policies and around issues related to public education can really foment or catalyze some of the spiritual renewal that we long for. Join us for this episode of 20-Minute Takes. 

[Nikki]
Zakiya Jackson, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20-Minute Takes.

[Zakiya]
I'm excited to be with you, Nikki.

[Nikki]
Well, Zakiya, I know that you are a daughter of Washington, D.C., raised here, committed and a part of the community. What's the one thing that you love to show people or have people taste when they come and visit your part of the neighborhood?

[Zakiya]
I love to show people our parks. I think they are beautiful. I find a lot of joy and rest and during COVID, I spent an awful lot of time in them, but even before that.

I love Anacostia Park. I love Eastland Gardens. Those are my two favorites, but there's so many other parks that I love to take people to.

That's something I really love.

[Nikki]
I think that's so fantastic because I think maybe a tourist view of Washington, D.C. is a different side, but you're right that it is a city of gardens and parks and a lot of surprising natural beauty. That's fantastic. Well, Zakiya, I have always appreciated the different points that we've had.

Sometimes cross paths, it might be with short little bits or longer bits, but I feel like there is a way that you bring a lens or a certain perspective informed by your Christian faith where you are aware and are able to observe different dynamics and call that out. Can you tell me a little bit of how it was that this connection between your faith and a justice lens was formed or cultivated?

[Zakiya]
Yeah. My parents met in Greenbelt, Maryland at NASA. Both of my parents are scientists and taught us to be inquisitive and curious and think about the world in a pretty expansive way, but how does this make sense for the life we are living, period?

Whether it's science, physics, my mom is a physicist. My dad was the electrical engineer. How does this make sense practically for our lives?

How does this agree with who we are and what we need? They very much applied that curiosity and that wonder to our faith. I grew up in a very Christian household in the church many, many, many days a week, but even in that, my father taught me to argue with him about scripture and to interrogate it deeply and study it for myself.

It's not that he didn't have some pretty defined beliefs that he may have wanted me to adopt many of them, but he felt it was more important that we study ourselves and really interrogate things. My mother is the same way. I think that spirit of curiosity made me from a very young age question in my mind and sometimes out loud what my Sunday school teachers were saying.

What the pastor is saying, not in a disrespectful way, but like, I hear you saying this thing, but I don't know how to do this as a 12-year-old. I was an old soul, definitely. I, as a 12-year-old, was not thinking that.

Yeah. I was like, you're saying this, but it doesn't make sense when I go to school and I'm talking to my friends who are not Christian. I don't think I should walk up to all of them and tell them they're going to hell.

That doesn't really resonate with being a good friend to them. I was very, very curious early on about what my faith means practically for me, but also in a world filled with people who aren't all Christian.

[Nikki]
Yeah. No, I love that because it also feels like your family cultivated that question asking and the curiosity because what it also says to me is it doesn't let God off the hook, right? Like, oh, that seems wrong, so I'm just going to accept it.

But I love that you're like, no, God can probably hang with these questions too. Where is that gap or how is that working out in this particular place? Yeah, you're very right.

One of the things I appreciate is that there is a way that your leadership really calls Christians to think about civic engagement. How would you define what is civic engagement? What does that mean and what do you think it should mean to Christians?

[Zakiya]
I think in a very simple terms that civic engagement is how we practice being good neighbors to each other and how we practice being good to ourselves at a systems level. By systems level, I mean the institutions that govern our communities. In faith spaces, we're often extremely focused on individual behavior.

How is Nikki as an individual treating Zakiya as an individual? Those things matter, but I think not to the point that we ignore systems. I think when we ignore systems, we are in fact being a bad neighbor, whether or not we intended to.

But we're also not taking care of ourselves in the best, most full way when we ignore the systems around us.

[Nikki]
Connect the dots for me just a little bit more. Can you unpack that connection point that you just made between systems, care of self, neighboring?

[Zakiya]
Yeah, I think I just got back from vacation. I had the tremendous privilege and opportunity to go overseas. It's fresh in my mind that the food in basically any other country I've ever been to is fresher, is kinder and easier on the body.

It digests more easily, all of these sorts of things. I say this as a girly who shops at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, right? Amongst other places.

I go to farmer's markets and do co-ops. But even still, in other countries, there are different regulations that insist that food be held to a higher standard than we have here in the United States. That is a systems thing.

That is a policy thing. That is something that if we are aware of it, is something that is harmful to us. If I ignore the systems aspect, I'm leaving something out there that could be good for me, that could help me have a higher quality of life and help me be more sustained.

We ought to care that people have access to things that are good for our bodies in a neighborly way.

[Nikki]
Those things are then related to policies and who they're written for. Civic engagement is an invitation for us to bring some voice or at least attentiveness to those things.

[Zakiya]
To be curious, one way to experience lack is to say, why don't we have better food here in this example? Let me be curious about that. And that can start a journey of civic engagement.

You don't have to go overseas to be exposed to something that is different and be curious about it.

[Nikki]
I think some of what you're saying, I'm totally tracking with you. I think it also might be a surprise to some Christians of like, how is my Christian faith engaging with food policy? Do you have any advice for how a Christian can think, how should I think about, how does my faith inform or what things I should engage with?

Any frameworks or pieces of advice for folks who would be curious to be like, oh, wait, I do want to be a good neighbor. What does it mean to be a good neighbor in this way?

[Zakiya]
I think that one thing that can help Christians is to think about civic engagement as a form of spiritual engagement, and even a form, a type of spiritual discipline. We're not often taught it that way. When I was younger, I read this book called The Celebration of Discipline by Richard J.

Foster, very popular. The book has very good things about how to be disciplined in our faith. I think that is good for Christians.

However, there's only one discipline that has anything to do with your neighbors in that list of 12 disciplines. Seven of them are all individual, and four of them are about what we do corporately at church, but not in the neighborhood, not in the community. If we look at scripture, Jesus and the disciples were in the community.

They were with themselves, if you will. They were their own little church, but they were mostly out and about in the public square, walking between cities, gathering folks, requiring folks to believe in Jesus in order to talk to them, which is what church is. You already have brought in to a certain level.

They're outside. They're not inside. They're out walking, being with the people.

They're doing things that are subversive. Jesus is talking to women all the time, very subversive. They're doing things that the Pharisees and the faithful leaders of the time don't approve of.

I would call some of that building power with the community members. They're building power. They're engaging civically.

They're asking questions about policies even without necessarily using those words. It was a policy to disenfranchise women and to not give them access, but Jesus didn't play those games. I would encourage people to start thinking about this as a spiritual discipline or spiritual engagement.

If it feels blasphemous to you to call it a spiritual discipline, that's fine. The scriptures look at the ways in which Jesus is being civically minded and civically engaged and start doing some reflection on that as one piece. Then the other thing is there are so many things that need civic engagement.

You know, I focus on children and their well-being in most of my work, but I feel like where is your heart drawn towards? You can listen to that. What are you noticing in your communities or the communities that you care about?

Start asking questions about it. You cannot be a social justice warrior for all the topics all the time, right? Yes.

[Nikki]
That is not our job either, but yes.

[Zakiya]
That's not our job, but think of it in terms of what are you proximal to or what really is grabbing your heart? Are you upset that children don't have enough to eat? Are you upset about the state of schools?

Are you concerned about the roads or something in your area that aren't safe and you see elderly trying to cross the street and it's not good? Pay attention to your heart and to what you see and be curious about it.

[Nikki]
Oh, I love that. The thing I really love is I feel like you're taking our spirituality out of this individual and privatized thing, but you're bringing it into a new space that it's like, oh, that's a different pond. Are there maybe names of some of these practices that we might associate within the church, but it's like, oh, actually that's a public practice or that's a thing we can hold in these public spaces?

[Zakiya]
One thing that comes to mind, I'll give a story and then I'll name it clearly, but when I was born here in DC, moved back about 11 years ago and I came without a car and purposely took the bus and the Metro everywhere. That was more cost-effective, but it was also a discipline for me and a practice because I felt that it was important for me to be outside and to be among folks who don't necessarily have a choice about whether or not you have a car or not. I wasn't being pious.

I was being intentional about my work in the world and how I did not want to be an expert on a hill who lives detached from the work that I am very care about and I'm very passionate about. I don't want to forget what's important. It was a discipline for me.

Take the bus every day, take the Metro. I think the integrating natural relationship into your life and being particular about those words is a discipline because it shouldn't be forced. It shouldn't be, let me go look for a person who doesn't look like me and serve them.

That can get ugly and unintentionally gross sometimes, right? But what does it mean to choose to be in regular rhythm and to do things so that we are in regular rhythms that allow us to build relationships, make observations, learn, be curious, study, right? We hear about this in church.

We just don't practice it this way necessarily. In church, it's being in a small group and eating dinner at someone else's home who you hardly know so you can get to know them. It's inviting someone to church who lives in your neighborhood, but it's focused on what's happening inside the church.

I'm saying flip that, focus on what's happening in your city, neighborhood, world outside of the church and be outside and be around. Again, not making spectacle of people, but engaging in it as a part of your life.

[Nikki]
That's so helpful and really provocative because what I hear you describing is a posture and an intention, but it just gives space for God to do a thing or to get your attention. It doesn't necessarily demand it. The other thing that I hear you say is that there are some of these postures or practices that are within the church, but they've been a little bit programatized.

We may not be recognizing the heart or the intention of what they're trying to cultivate. We can just participate and the goods kind of come with it. I appreciate that you're kind of like, oh, translating that into how do I have that same posture, but in these other spaces.

I also hear you saying there's a real sensitivity that you have of not turning people into projects, not sort of making a thing, but being very present and so intentional about things. I think sometimes people who are pursuing justice, sometimes people who are pursuing racial justice, maybe do things that they don't recognize that some of the how is actually undermining the thing that they're trying to do, this pursuit of justice. Are there a couple of things that you've noticed that it's like, oh, this is maybe one of the most common accidental things people might be doing as they're trying to pursue living justly?

[Zakiya]
Yes. I think I have noticed, because I've been a target of it, is that sometimes when people get a conviction about being in homogeneous spaces that are not very diverse, they will then say, well, I don't want to be like that. That's a good thing.

I don't want to only be with people who talk, look, think like me every single day. Then they think about a coworker or a neighbor, and they start to pursue that neighbor or person only because they are different from them. In a way, that tokenizes that person.

If I were to say to myself, for example, I don't think I have enough relationships with Asian women, and then I started coming to you, Nikki, only thinking of you in that frame, it tokenizes you because it doesn't allow me to know you fully in your full essence, as a woman leader of a nonprofit, as the different ways in which you show up in the world. I think instead of it being a loving thing, which I think many people are trying to come at it from a place of love and being a good neighbor, you end up tokenizing someone and putting a burden on them. What you could do instead is just, again, look for natural relationships.

Be in places. Go to events. Go to things that are more diverse, and begin to meet other people in a more organic way.

I think that happens a lot in racial equity and racial justice things where we're so eager to do things, but we haven't done enough of our own work to not be that tokenizing presence. Totally.

[Nikki]
Even as you're describing it, I'm like, oh, yes, you're naming a thing I've seen and felt and recognized. I also appreciate that you gave us permission to not have to carry about every injustice that crossed our path, but you talked about your particular heart's beat for children. The Expectations Project particularly works in the public education space.

Why public education? Why children?

[Zakiya]
Yeah. Well, I want to say I was a child I was homeschooled. I went to private school, and I went to public school, so I have a variety of experiences.

I think sometimes in our head, particularly when I was in private school, you can think that most Christians or most blah, blah, blah, whoever, go to private school. The vast majority of all children of any race, of any ethnicity, of any socioeconomic status in the United States go to public school. I mean like over 80%.

If you include public charters, it's like 90%. This is data backed up by Pew Research and the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of our children are in public school, so we have to care about public school is how I look at it.

I also think we need more understanding around what a public good is. Roads are a public good. Streetlights are a public good.

There's a lot of public amenities that we have, and sometimes we look down on things like public school without understanding our world is full of public goods, and we should care for them and be, again, civically minded towards them to make sure they're serving us well.

[Nikki]
I appreciate that. When you're talking about education, particularly when we're talking about public education, there's an interesting relationship public education has with faith. What is it that you're trying to do through faith communities as it relates to public education?

[Zakiya]
Our founder came out of the historically Black AME Church, African Methodist Episcopal. AME churches are known to be more civically engaged and more civically minded. TEP started under the premise that churches and pastors have influence in their communities.

We're in a midterm year. We know this to be very true. They're going to churches and talking to communities of faith because we are powerful.

Communities of faith are powerful and have a lot of influence. Our founder started TEP knowing that people want to come and court our vote, so to speak, or court our influence, but then not be held accountable. What if we hold them accountable?

What if we say to them, we expect these things for our communities? If you get elected, you're coming back here. That's what her pastor would do.

He would bring the politicians back out once they were elected to do a report card and to hold them accountable to what they had said if they hadn't done it. If you haven't done it, we're going to ask you about that. We know that faith communities are deeply influential.

We want to say, let's use that influence, not just to change individuals' lives, which faith communities do, but to demand justice and equity and goodness, in my case, for all children. Whether or not they are Christian, all children are a gift and are precious. Psalm 127.3 says, children are a gift from the Lord. They are a reward from him. Let's treat them like a gift and use our agency and our influence and our power to that end.

[Nikki]
I love that. Are there any examples, groups that are doing something that inspire you or give you hope?

[Zakiya]
Yes. I have been working for several years now with a group called the Faith Initiative to End Childhood Poverty in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We at TEP know that a child's financial stability of their household very much influences their ability to thrive in school.

That's why we have become so engaged with this group. It's a group of over 50 churches, congregations, and community centers that are striving towards what does it mean to understand how to disrupt our county's policies and practices in order to allow children and their families to thrive. TEP has been going down every other month.

Since September, we've been doing trainings with them. We've been talking about what does it mean to engage in faithful systems change?

[Nikki]
What's an example of a particular thing in that group that you feel like Christians are asking for, can ask for, and advocate for?

[Zakiya]
Yes. This group is exploring wanting to ask for an increase in minimum wage because they believe that the minimum wage is too low. That's part of what keeps families in poverty.

There's a federal minimum wage and then there's a state minimum wage. They want to change the minimum wage in their state. That's one very practical thing that people often wouldn't associate with a community of faith.

That's secular. That doesn't have anything to do with us. They're also thinking a lot about housing.

How do we make sure there's good, safe, stable housing for people?

[Nikki]
Wow. The connection points. I understand now why in the work that you do, you have to stay so curious because I don't think I would have made those jumps between minimum wage, the economic situation of the family, the educational outcomes in public education. But I think as you unpack it, it's like, oh, that does make sense that those would all be related to each other.

But it is so interesting the ways that we accidentally silo some of these issues and we don't recognize in essence the neighborhood in which these different issues live and breathe in our fed and also are hindered.

Zakiya, I thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes. I hope that our audience will continue to move forward with more intentionality and with a more curious posture.

[Zakiya]
Thank you so much. Blessings, Nikki.


[Nikki]
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry, and this episode was mixed and engineered by Willowza Media. If you like this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing, or sharing.

I'm your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at christiansforsocialaction.org.