I was at the headquarters of our Unitarian Universalist Association last week as a member of the UUA Curriculum Advisory Committee. Newly elected UUA President Bill Sinkford met with us to thank us and to field questions. Bill is the first African American to head an historically white denomination. I asked him for his view of our movement's anti-racism, anti-oppression programs - programs which have been critiqued by Thandeka, a rather controversial African American theologian who teaches at Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago.
Bill said that the most frequently asked question as he travels across the country is "How can we attract people of color to our congregations?" After all, we are a 97% white denomination. That is also the most frequently asked question by those attending our orientation sessions. His response may surprise you. He said that to make our major goal attracting more people of color is a bankrupt approach. Why would he say that? I'll try to tease out what I think he means, and in so doing, look at our liberal religious movement in terms of race, class and justice.
Bill is light-skinned, the son of two light-skinned African Americans. He said, "You don't get to be this color without intimacy across the divide of race." His father grew up middle class, was educated at Harvard, spoke seven languages, but found himself driving a cab in Detroit when he met Bill's mother - other jobs more suited to his education were unavailable to him. Bill concluded, "For persons of color, class always needs to be seen in the context of race . . . . (and) race needs always to be viewed through the lens of class."
He went on to say that what we need to do is to know who we are. "To engage in the work of justice, we need to cultivate an attitude of humility, not arrogance. . . . we need to know that what comfort we have is claimed at the disempowerment and oppression of so many. Pogo said, 'we have seen the enemy and it is us.' We are not evil people. Our intentions are good. We are participants in a system that we did not create, but that binds us together. . . . Our work is to help the universe bend toward justice, and there is not only one way to do that. . . . Do we need to change ourselves, do we have to become something different to make a difference, do we need to attract more persons of color or more of the truly poor into our pews? My answer is no. It's OK to be who we are, and even to know who we are and our place in this system. Who we are is not the question. The question is what we are called to do. How will we show up? As allies. If we work for justice, some other people will join us. But that is not the objective."
Our movement has a checkered history of bending the universe toward racial justice. Theodore Parker said "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." So did Martin Luther King, Jr. So must we. But our forebears were among the slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson. As recently as our 1994 General Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the Thomas Jefferson District, delegates were invited to a Jeffersonian-era costume ball. Black delegates wondered if they should come dressed like slaves. Needless to say, there was controversy. Now that district is among the leaders in anti-racist work.
Our ministers and laity divided over slavery during the Civil War, but nearly one fifth of our ministers were in Selma in 1965 for James Reeb's memorial service at which Dr. King spoke - I was among them. In 1968 I witnessed our movement's passionate and divisive debate over the challenge of black power. Mark Morrison-Reed, one of 45 ministers of color in our ranks, captured our history of discrimination against black ministers in his disturbing book Black Pioneers in a White Denomination. It has been a checkered story - our attempts to bend the arc of the universe toward racial justice have been at best uneven.
And so in 1996 the Unitarian Universalist Association embarked on what has become the Journey Toward Wholeness program to make our movement anti-racist and anti-oppressive - to learn from our past mistakes, to redeem the times and to do justice. There have been workshops - including a Jubilee Workshop in this church two years ago - in which we explored white racism and our involvement in a society where racism still thrives. We looked at white privilege - the easy assumptions of the unearned acceptance and power that come to whites.
This leads to Thandeka's criticism of our Journey Toward Wholeness program. She says she learned 3 things from it: (1) All whites in America are racists; (2) No blacks in America are racists. They may be prejudiced but they lack power - prejudice plus power equals racism; (3) whites must be shown that they are racists and confess their racism.
First, "all whites are racist." She believes this pattern violates our first principle of the "inherent worth and dignity of every person." It assumes that all whites bear "original sin," which is not part of Unitarian Universalist theology. This layering on of guilt undermines our affirmation of the essential goodness of people.
Secondly, she says the program wrongly assumes that white privilege means virtually all whites prosper in our economic system. However, this "privilege" is very unevenly divided: 80% of the wealth and 50% of the nation's income is controlled by 20% of the people; the top 1% own 47%. Even Unitarian Universalists, who are among the most prosperous Americans, aren't really in this power and wealth elite. We tend to be professional people - teachers, doctors, social workers, small business owners, middle managers - the "technicians and bureaucrats of the establishment." We do not have our hands on the levers of power. We have, Thandeka says, "a big brain and a small purse."
The obsession with race, Thandeka contends, often diverts us from the realities of class. Thus many working class and middle class whites believe their interests are with the rich, rather than with the poor. She notes that white people - like blacks - are working harder than ever, fearful of losing their jobs, many a paycheck away from economic privation. She calls it white middle class poverty. So exhausted are they from this struggle for economic survival, they come to church with little psychic energy to bend that moral arc of the universe toward justice. That is not white skin privilege. Many whites are as much victims of an unjust economic order as blacks.
Thandeka's third point is that most whites are not racist, but are living with the guilt and shame of being white in a pluralistic society. She speaks of Dan, a Presbyterian minister whose father told him blacks were inferior. Dan was deeply disturbed on a trip into the South to find the "colored" and "white" signs posted everywhere. When he joined a college fraternity, he helped pledge a black student, but when the national board learned of it, they threatened to rescind the local chapter's charter unless it reversed that decision. Dan had to tell his friend to leave. When he told this story to Thandeka in a restaurant, he broke into tears. "I felt so ashamed of what I did. I have carried this burden for forty years. I will carry it to my grave." Thandeka suggested that Dan cried not because he was a racist, but because he was trapped in his whiteness by other whites.[1]
The Journey Toward Wholeness team responded to this critique by saying that there was agreement on three points: "whites are harmed by racism . . . that racism and classism are linked; that all anti-oppression work must be grounded in our Unitarian Universalist history, traditions and principles."
They believe, however, that Thandeka's criticism is rooted in the personal realm where religious liberals are most comfortable, not in the analysis of class where they are not. They deny that the workshop is based on the idea of original sin - in fact they no longer use the liberal Protestant group Crossroads to lead workshops. Participants in the Jubilee Workshop are not required to confess their "sins." But racism is a social evil that affects all people and should be dismantled. They note that guilt and shame are not always bad things, but that they can energize people. This debate is working its way through our denomination. I personally believe that not only are the parties talking past each other, but they also both have valuable insights. We must beware the law of the excluded middle in our rush to take sides instead of learning what we can from each.
Some will bemoan our differences of interpretation and opinion. I celebrate them. Unitarian Universalists have always struggled with the issue of race, and more recently, with the issue of class. This kind of debate is healthy - provided - provided that we not allow ourselves to wallow in rhetoric at the expense of significant personal and social action.
As I have participated in anti-racism workshops, I have learned some of the prejudice in me. I will never forget one day at a conference with two ministerial colleagues, one black, one white. During a break we were watching a basketball game on T.V. Before I could catch myself, I commented that there was only one white player on the University of Michigan team - for no apparent reason, to no apparent end, as if that made a difference. But the moment I said it, I wish I had the words back. I was embarrassed. It was an innocent slip, but demonstrated my racial insensitivity.
My own skin color is not much in my consciousness - I assume it and accept it for what privileges it brings. It is not a problem for me in the wider world. I have also learned that color-blindness is not necessarily good, because it means we may neglect the injustice inflicted on people because of their skin color. And I have learned that racism and classism are the Siamese twins of American society - we must dismantle both at once.
Racism is alive and well in racial profiling; it is seen in housing discrimination which contributes to the concentration of poverty in our city and the plight of urban education now seen in the City School District's financial plight; it is seen in job discrimination as the local NAACP criticizes Kodak and Xerox employment policies.
Classism is alive and well in the steadily increasing disparity of income and wealth - which will be exacerbated in the current recession. The walls between economic groups continue to be built - symbolized by more gated communities. We see it dramatically in Enron-Gate - where executives sold their stock in advance of corporate collapse while the retirement savings of thousands of ordinary employees and stockholders disappeared.
Racism and classism are both alive and well and living in America. Martin Luther King understood that and in his Poor People's March united concerns of class and race. He understood the common ground on which poor whites and poor blacks stood.
Which brings me back to Bill Sinkford's point. Yes, of course, I would love to have more people of color in our congregation, our door is open. But would that address the problems of racism and classism I have enumerated - or would it simply help those of us who are white feel better about ourselves? I think we do best by being what Unitarian Universalism intrinsically is: a free people who combine passion and reason in an attempt to create meaning in life by celebrating its joys, healing its sorrows, working to bend the arc of the universe toward justice. If we do this, some who share our vision and our values will join us. As Mark Morrison-Reed said, "Vision is more important than guilt."
I think of a favorite cartoon: Two figures meet for discussion about today's political predicament: "Oh, it's better to light one little candle, but I find it a lot more emotionally fulfilling to curse the darkness." We cannot afford to curse the darkness any more.
We bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice by honoring this church's tradition of being "Rochester's Alert Conscience and Hospitable Roof"; by our strong support of the Urban League - remember Unitarian Universalist and Urban League Executive Whitney's Young's words that a fistful of rights does not necessarily feed an empty stomach; we seek justice by our participation in the Interfaith Forum; by our increasing education in the Islamic faith; by our Saturday Academy at School 22 which provides an experience of integration for teachers and learners and those young people who prepare lunch for them; we do it by our interest in the African continent and its problems; by our support of all our social outreach projects which seek to build here a semblance of the Beloved Community of Love and Justice.
My own response is in the latest newsletter from Interfaith Impact of New York State in which I urge state and federal officials to roll back the ill-advised tax cuts to meet the desperate needs of our city and our school district. Last Sunday I participated in the interfaith service honoring Mayor Johnson's re-election last Sunday - an unparalleled multi-cultural and diversity experience even if it did last two and a half hours. In my three minutes I called for a "moral equivalent to war," an effort to end poverty in the midst of plenty with the same kind of patriotism, energy and resolve that is now going into the war against terrorism.
The important thing to keep in mind is this: as long as we are struggling with issues of justice, as long as we hold ourselves in serious conversation, as long as we are showing up where issues are joined, we are being true to our Unitarian Universalist heritage. The moment we think the struggle is over, the minute we throw up our hands in frustration, the time when we say it is all too complicated, then we will have abdicated faith in our movement and in ourselves. We have to learn to be white, to be black, to be Hispanic, to be Asian, to be Native American - but most of all we have to learn to be human.
It is a theological as well as a social issue. We are Unitarian Universalists - the term Unitarian suggests that we are one human race and must live in unity. The term Universalist suggests that all of us share a common destiny. Unitarian Universalism prompts me to conclude that we are all more human than otherwise. The human race is a vast rainbow bursting into view - of white and black, red, yellow and brown, yet for all blood is red, the sky is blue, the earth brown, the night dark. In size and shape we are a varied pattern of tall and short, slim and stout, elegant and plain. For all there are fingers to touch, hearts to break, eyes to cry, ears to hear, mouths to speak.
In tongue we are a tower of Babel, a great jumble of voices grasping for words, groping for ways to say love, peace, pity, and hope. Boundaries divide us, lines drawn to mark our diversity, maps charted to separate the human race from itself. Yet a mother's grief, a father's love, a child's happy cry, a musician's sound, an artist's stroke, batter the boundaries and shatter the walls. Strength and weakness, arrogance and humility, confidence and fear, live together in each one, reminding us that we share a common humanity. We are all more human than otherwise.
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