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Racing Toward Wholeness
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Douglas A. Taylor
on June 18, 2000
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Two summers ago, I was working as a chaplain up at Unirondack, the
UU summer camp I'm connected with. Each week, the camp brings
up a theme leader, a volunteer who runs a morning program each day
of that week for the kids. One week we had a member of the Lakota
people. Gerald Eaglebear talked with the kids about life on the
reservation, Indian culture in general, and the practices of the Lakota
people in particular. The kids loved it. At the end of the week,
Gerald gave a Lakota pipe to the camp as a gift to the kids. He then
asked the staff to meet with him briefly, and he read to us a prepared
speech he must have written the night before. He told us that while
the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade kids had made him feel welcome, the staff
had made him very uncomfortable. He talked about us staring at him
and talking about him, ignoring him when he sat with us at meals and
generally making him feel that he did not belong.
It was, to us, a remarkable statement for him to make. None of us on
the staff had intentionally treated Gerald in a way that would make
him uncomfortable. No one on the staff as far as I was able to
determine, held any racial bias against Native Americans. For days
and weeks after he left I wondered what I might have done to have
caused Gerald to feel uncomfortable and discriminated against.
Eventually memories began to filter up, memories of events that I had
not seen as significant. But in reviewing them through my best
imagination of Gerald's perspective, I began to see some of what he
might have felt. I remembered one time late in the week, we had a
picnic down on the playing field for the whole camp. I noticed that
Gerald and his younger brother, who was with him that week, were
sitting not just on the fringe of the crowded benches and picnic area,
but all the way over in a different part of the field. I paused and
wondered if I should go over and ask if I could sit with them, but I
thought, "No, I need to be sitting with the campers. Gerald and his
brother must feel overwhelmed by the crowd and felt like sitting a bit
away from the group." At least, this might be one of the reasons I
would have chosen to sit where I had seen him sitting if I were in his
shoes.
Gerald probably saw me pause and look at him. "There is that
Chaplain staring at us. He must think we are (blank)." I have no
guess as to what he might have assumed I was thinking. Perception
is a remarkable thing. My memory of the week when Gerald
Eaglebear was at camp is so different from what Gerald told us on the
last day of the week. Perception is a remarkable thing. I have no
doubt in my mind now that what I should have done was sit down
with him during that picnic and eat with him. But my reason for not
having done so was not based in his ethnicity or racial identity . . . At
least, I believe that to be true.
This is the sort of event and processing that one would find in the
Journey Toward Wholeness program offered through the UUA's
Faith in Action department. The Journey Toward Wholeness is
intended to help our denomination in its efforts to become an anti-racist and
multicultural institution. On their web page, they say that
"the benefits of embarking on this journey are to experience a
spiritual change of heart and to enter into what many anti-racist
theologians and organizers are describing as a 'politics of
conversion.'" A politics of conversion? A spiritual change of heart?
This is not the normal language we find in our churches. Politics,
yes; but conversion??? Yet it seems to have great merit among many
of our churches and this warrants deeper exploration into the situation
of racism among us and our response to it.
I was over at the Gaithersburg Public Library last week doing a little
research for this morning. I typed in "Racism" as the search subject
at the computerized library catalog terminal. So doing, I pulled in
titles on that subject from all over the Montgomery County Public
Libraries and I was offered over a hundred books on the subject, all
published within the past ten years. And this was just the Public
Library search level. I'm sure I could find a great deal more at some
of our University libraries. I want to read to you just a sample, a
dozen titles, from the list of over a hundred I found there on my
Public Library computer screen.
- 40 Ways to Raise Non-racist Child
- Us and Them: a history of intolerance in America
- Dealing with racism
- Color Blind: seeing beyond race in a race-obsessed world
- Notes of a White Black Woman: race, color and community
- Showing My Color: impolite essays on race and identity
- The Evolution of Racism: human differences and the use and abuse of science
- Paved with Good Intentions: the failure of race relations in contemporary America
- Faces at the Bottom of the Well: the permanence of racism
- The Race Card: white guilt, black resentment, and the assault of truth and justice
- White Lies: race and myths of whiteness
- The Color of Crime: racial hoaxes, white fear, black protectionism, police harassment and other macro-aggressions
About a hundred years ago, W. E. B. Dubois wrote that "The problem
of the Twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Dubois
was right. But it seems that the same issue recast will be the problem
of the Twenty-First century as well. Don't get me wrong, we have
made progress. There has been a civil rights movement, the vote,
affirmative action, and integration in many institutions in our country
such as marriage, the armed forces, and prime-time TV. Americans
are talking about racism more these days. I remember having a
conversation with two white strangers who happened to also miss the
last connecting flight to Chicago. We went to dinner together and
talked about racism.
But the situation seems to have gotten quite complex. And we seem
to have hit some unforseen road blocks, at least it seems that way
from the perspective of one who has only been involved in the
conversation for a few years. The civil rights movement of the
1960's was a time of clarity in race relations, at least between black
and white. Things were happening. It was a time when liberal
religious folks could know right from wrong and good from evil.
Segregation was evil, and those who supported it were wrong. It was
a time when a white person could know how to stand in solidarity
with a black person. You could march, you could speak out in favor
of civil rights. The working definition of "racist" was a person who
treated people differently based on the color of their skin; and further,
that by treating people based on the content of their character, you
could know that you were not a racist. It is not so easy to know these
things anymore. It no longer works, for example to think that we are
all the same, that racial equality is the shared goal, or that we can and
should be color blind.
Now, having said that we must admit that there is still some truth to
the sentiment that we are all basically the same. There is no essential
difference between races, genetically speaking. I saw a quote from a
geneticist and scholar from Ghana that basically said that if you
randomly picked out two people from the entire population of our
planet and took a sample of tissue from each, examined it at the level
of the chromosomes, you would have an 85.2% chance of finding the
same characteristics. If you did the same thing only limited your
sample of human being to the population of England, you would
increase that chance to 85.7%. "In other words," this geneticist
wrote, "aside from being able to predict the grosser physical attributes
of color, which defines the racial categories, a person's race has
virtually no predictive value at any biological level." (Kwame
Appiah, In My Father's House) What this says to me is that there is
no such thing as "race" in the sense that biologically we are all one
race, that of Homo Sapiens.
Theologically, the basic tenants of both the Universalists and the
Unitarians state that there is no essential difference between people
of different races. We are, all of us, made in the image and likeness
of God. Each of us has the divine seed within which unites us as
humanity. So we have scientific and theological grounding to say that
racial equality is real and should be our goal.
But it's not. People of differing races are not different biologically
other than a difference in the amount of melanin pigments in the skin.
But it is more complicated than simple biology and physical
attributes. People of differing races do have differing experiences of
the world, cultural differences. And there are also historical
differences, differences in communal memory. I have heard it said
that "race" is simply a social construct. Saying this does not to
diminish the impact it has on a person's life, it only names the
concrete origin of the concept. Think about that for a minute. Race
is a social construct. I'm not really "white," I'm more of a
peach/sandy color. And none of you are "white" either! But that is
the word we use to describe the skin color, and other social
characteristics that accompany the concept.
If I look at an individual and see a person, not a skin color, than I
think I am doing O.K. But if, by doing that, I am ignoring the fact
that some people do look at an individual and see a skin color, then
I am participating in the systemic racism. If I ignore the fact that
some people do judge an individual based on skin color, I am
ignoring a significant portion of that individual's life and experience.
Even if I don't look and judge that way.
The problem of racism is still here. It is real and it does exist. It is
not for nothing that Sunday morning is called the segregation hour in
America. Our liberal religious tradition arose from the culture of
puritan New England. It was a white, European culture with white,
European values. This is our UU history. This is a part of our UU
heritage. However, when some people talk of racial equality, the
standard is often set by white, Euro-American values. Being white is
considered the norm. Logically, it works. Euro-Americans are the
largest percentile of the American population. But then, logic is not
always the best guide because it gets confounded when the parameters
of understanding are set too small.
So, this is not about racial equality. It is about racial justice, which
includes equal opportunity, but is not exhausted therein. The
Rev. Mel Hoover, the current Director of the Faith in Action
department at the UUA, the group who has produced the Journey
toward Wholeness program, says:
I still have hope that as more conversations take place
they will become more of a representative dialogue
that moves beyond the level of politeness.
He goes on to say,
Racism is a systemic issue . . . the popular image of
racism in the white community is that of personal
prejudice, attitudes and actions, while in communities
of color it is experienced as a systemic power . . .
While racism does affect individual action, effective
solutions escape us if we do not address the powerful
socialization and white privilege that characterize our
institutions and our culture.
There is a lot in that statement, but I want to pick up on one point the
Rev. Hoover makes. Does racism consist of only the individual acts
of prejudice and bias or is it in some way ingrained in our culture and
therefor greater than individual acts? Is sin only the individual act or
is there such a thing as original sin. Racism is a moral wrong, a sin.
Racism, and really any sin for that matter, can be seen as individual
acts or as a systemic power. The phrase Hoover uses to describe
racism in its systemic form is "institutional racism." This type of
racism is real. For an example, take account of the fact that this
society imprisons more young black men than it gives college
educations to.
In our reading this morning Dr. King wrote that he "felt that the
people of ill will have used time more effectively than the people of
good will." And that "we will have to repent in this generation not
merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the
appalling silence of the good people." King was railing against the
misunderstanding that to do no harm is enough. Unfortunately he
seems to fall into the misunderstanding of the goodness and badness
in people. There was not then nor is then now "good people" vs "bad
people" outside of rhetoric. The line between good and evil runs
right down the center of every person's heart.
But this is the roadblock we have run up against now. Racism is not
only about individual acts of oppression and bigotry. I feel fairly
confident that none of us here this morning are personally promoting
racism; certainly, not consciously. And yet, there is racism among us.
Therefore, we must in some way be unconsciously promoting it.
That's a stick proposition! If as an individual I am in favor of racial
justice, this does not mean I have eradicated all prejudice from within
me, nor does it mean that every institution in which I participate has
achieved true integration. This, I feel, is where these concepts of
Institutional racism come in. It is not enough to judge a person of a
different race than you based on the content of that person's character
rather than the color of his or her skin. We need to recognize
institutional racism and begin the task of dismantling it.
Well, how do we do that? I must say that the purpose of my sermon
this morning was not to make it look easy. "the benefits of
embarking on this journey are to experience a spiritual change of
heart and to enter into what many anti-racist theologians and
organizers are describing as a 'politics of conversion.'" When I took
the time to thoughtfully explore what happened among us at camp the
week Gerald Eaglebear was there, I was opening myself up the
possibility of finding within myself and within the workings of the
camp I love perspectives and attitudes that are unbecoming. I took
the risk that I would grow, and that I might effect some healthy
change in the camp as well. Such is the risk of engagement.
The task before us, as I see it, is to engage in and pursue the
conversation. Don't freeze up, as we are sometimes wont to do for
fear of saying the wrong thing. We can pay attention, expand our
perception, notice things about our culture and about the way we do
things. Talk about it. Pursue the conversations. "Human progress
never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless
efforts of men and women willing to be co-workers with God."
In a world without end,
May it be so.
cluuc@his.com
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