"You, Me and Racism"
by the Rev. Krista Taves
February 4, 2007
Reading - Rebecca Ann Parker
In 1976 I began a cross-country road trip with a friend. We had time, so we decided to take the back roads. One afternoon, the road passed through rural western Pennsylvania. We came down through hill country into a valley. It had been raining hard, and as we neared a small town, we noticed blinking yellow lights warning off danger. We saw fields covered in standing water and passed several side roads blocked off with signs saying "Road Closed."
...Coming into town, we crossed a bridge over a wide river. The water was high, muddy, flowing fast. Sandbags lined the roadway...
We headed out of town, following a winding country road, captivated by the evidence all around us that there had been a dramatic flood. Then we rounded a bend, and in front of us, a sheet of water covered the roadway. The water was rising fast, like a huge silver balloon being inflated before our eyes.
We started to turn the car around. The water was rising behind us as well. Suddenly we realized the flood hadn't happened yesterday or last week. It was happening here and now. Dry ground was disappearing fast. We hurriedly clambered out of the car and scrambled to higher ground. Soaked to the bone, we huddled under a fir tree. The cold water of the storm poured down on us, baptizing us into the present - a present from which we had been insulated by both our car and our misjudgments about the country we were traveling through.
This is what it is like to be white in America. It is to travel well ensconced in a secure vehicle, to see signs of what is happening in the world outside your compartment and not realize that these signs have any contemporary meaning. It is to midjudge your location and believe you are uninvolved and unaffected by what is happening in the world.
Sermon
On July 1st, 2005, I stood in U.S. customs, paperwork in hand to secure the first visa that allowed me to work in this country. The customs officer was very polite to me. She didn’t even call me by my first name, she called me Reverend. "Reverend can you tell me this" and "Reverend you need to sign here." This deference often comes my way when people realize what I do. I have gained a certain status, a status that often comes unbidden. That customs officer didn’t know if I was a good minister or a lousy one, but still, the deference was there. And so I assumed that I was being treated like I was simply because of my profession. But as I sat there, I noticed that I was the only white person in line. Everyone else was a person of color, many of them Middle Eastern. They were receiving very different treatment. The customs officers spoke with louder voices, often patronizing in tone, impatient and sharp. When they asked me questions, they were questions of clarification. When they asked these others questions, they were tests, meant to expose guilt or innocence. I realized I had been granted both white privilege and class privilege.
Sometimes you have to be knocked over the head a time or two or ten before you realize what is happening before your eyes, particularly if you come from a privileged place, and part of that privilege is the luxury of being able to remain ignorant or in denial of the privilege itself. The invisibility of privilege to those who hold it helps maintain it. I imagine that I am not alone in this experience. How many of us ride in a protective vehicle through a battered countryside unaware that the storm around us is not separate from us, but can and will also engulf us in its menacing power?
I also imagine that I am in the company of those have been on the other side of this experience, watching people like me receive that privilege while you are handed something much different. And I can only guess that it is much harder for you to deny or remain ignorant to what is really going on.
While a person of color lives in that reality most of their lives, white people are generally forced into it through momentary breaches when the system is exposed for what it is. I experienced that breach at customs, but it happens all around us. Perhaps you’re driving along Manchester when you realize that many of the people waiting for the city bus are black, and almost all the cars around you are driven by white people. Perhaps you make a wrong turn going downtown and end up in a neighborhood you would never choose to enter. One parent told me that at her children’s school, everyone played together until grade five, when without a word the kids divided into peer groups along racial lines. Another visited an inner city school and realized there were more books in her basement than in the school library. The most dramatic example I can think of is Hurricane Katrina, where the nation was exposed to the faultline of race and poverty.
This morning I want to explore how to use those momentary breaches as springboards for change. I want to explore how to choose to walk into that momentary breach and to stay there, even if it is uncomfortable. For years, people of color, including Unitarian Universalist people of color, have been saying that those who live with privilege need to do their homework if our society as a whole is to come closer to that place of healing and wholeness. No one is free unless we are all free. Last year, at General Assembly, the annual Unitarian Universalist convention, delegates voted to use this year as a time for doing some of that homework. In a denomination that is primarily white, there is no doubt that a big part of that homework is about not waiting until we are forced into that momentary breach, but rather to choose to walk into those difficult places and to stay there, so we can do this important religious and spiritual homework.
This sermon is about doing that homework. And I say that knowing that not everyone in this church is white. This makes the work even more important because we cannot truly feel ourselves as one with each other when we are without the full knowledge and understanding of what keeps us apart. We also know that privilege is not only limited to color, but to class and gender and sexual orientation as well. All of us are wrapped up in complex webs where we get privilege in some places and it is denied to us in others. So if your particular privilege is wrapped up in something other than race, this homework is for you too.
Unitarian Universalist minister Rebecca Ann Parker says that if we're serious about doing our homework, what we need is a conversion experience. Now I know that this word is not without its baggage, especially in Bible Belt Missouri, so let me explain what she means. Conversion means becoming actively engaged with the world. It means to be converted from a people who are numbed to the suffering of others, to those who are dramatically connected with the realities of life. It means to be converted from people focused primarily on ourselves, to people focused on serving others. It means to move from a place of isolation to a place of radical connection with all that is in this beautiful and tragic world. In traditional Christianity, conversion is about seeing the light, and Parker is definitely talking about a light, but in a very this worldly way. In Christianity, conversion is about joining the kingdom of heaven. For Parker, conversion is about becoming a true participant in our world. That’s the kind of conversion she’s talking about.
There are four elements to this kind of conversion, four elements that will help us do the homework that is waiting for us.
The first element of conversion is about taking responsibility for the privileges we have and the impact of having them on those who are denied them. After Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people felt angry. Many felt helpless. Many wanted someone to blame. Depending on where you stood politically, people blamed different things. Conservatives blamed liberals, saying it was liberal social programs that enabled the poverty that kept those people from having the means to leave the city before the storm. Liberals blamed conservatives, saying it was underfunding those social programs that contributed to the problem. What seemed most significant is that no one was willing to claim some of the blame. It was being pushed all over the place and as soon as it got close to some individual or to some group, it would be redirected somewhere else. And very few would take responsibility for any aspect of the resulting chaos that pointed to institutionalized racism. Rebecca Ann Parker says that part of the conversion experience is to be able to look at and own the stains on your own hands. Retreat from the blame game and allow the responsibility that is yours to rest on your shoulders. In a place of privilege, it is so tempting to cling to innocence and purity. Part of our homework is having the strength of character to own that we do have privilege and to acknowledge that others pay a price for it.
This first step can be very difficult, especially for white liberals who are ideologically committed to equality. I have seen many try to disown their privilege by saying they don’t want it, or never asked for it, and thus can’t be held responsible for it. Others claim that their own particular form of oppression cancels out any privileges they get. But that is not going to change anything. The idea of unearned or unasked for privilege is a hard concept to understand, especially if you have privilege, because so often what we get is invisible to our untrained eyes. Can we open our eyes to see clearly what we have been given?
The next part of the conversion experience is to educate yourself. Much of what we learn in school and in society, and much of what we see in the media silences the underbelly of this country’s history or makes things overly simple. The history many of us learn in school is usually the history of those with power and even when other stories make it into history, they are often simply added on without questioning the basic assumptions we already have. How many of our children believe that the primary reason the north fought the civil war was to end slavery? How many Americans believe that equality was won with voting rights and desegregation? The Civil War, Voting Rights and Desegregation were vital, but they were but pieces, and much remains undone. We need to know that. Knowledge transforms us. And when we learn together, knowledge transforms whole communities.
How many of you watched the show Oprah's Genealogy on PBS this week? Piece by piece the story of her ancestors, a story she did not know, was put into place. Did you see how that empowered her? She gained a sense of identity, a sense of place and purpose by knowing her history and where she came from. This is huge. For those who have grown up with privilege, learning our true history is just as huge, because you can’t really understand your part in the bigger picture of things until you learn about the bigger picture itself. Knowledge is power, and when we only have the knowledge of the powerful and the victorious, that’s how things will stay. Education is how we can retrain ourselves to see the world with our new eyes.
The third piece of the conversion is what Rebecca Ann Parker calls "soul work." This is where you start to look inward at what makes you tick. It's where you start to look at your own wounding. Soul work is about seeing how we ourselves have been fragmented and wounded and isolated by the racism that separates us one from another. So often we think that racism hurts only those who are people of color and justice becomes the patronizing act of helping "them" gain equality. Racism poisons everyone. There is a deep soul wounding that has worked itself into all of us, regardless of our color. The wounding involves so much suppression, of love, passion, compassion, anger, a sense of connection and oneness. This is about recovering lost parts of ourselves. It’s about extending hospitality and forgiveness to all those dark parts we just can hardly bear to look at. Because when we bring that all into the light, those parts lose their power over us and we are then free to reach out to others in ways we never could before.
And final piece of conversion is to be an engaged presence. We need to be engaged citizens working out there in the world. It's important to claim responsibility. It’s important to learn as much as we can. And it’s important to do that inner healing. But it can’t stop there, because if it does, then we’re really just falling into self-preoccupation and narcissism. It’s still all about us, which is the hallmark of the white middle class and what allows the oppression to keep on going. What all this conversion work is about is to prepare to live differently, to live in a way that counters the violence that is racism. This church has made a small commitment in this direction. Every year, some of our Forums and our guest speakers engage the subject of racism, so we are educating ourselves. Lift for Life, the organization to which we are giving half of this month’s Sunday collection, serves inner city kids, mostly African American, so that they have opportunities that other children take for granted. This is all important. It is all part of our homework. But I think we all know that it will take more than this to do such important work. It will take breaking outside of our small circles and walking out into the larger world.
I think this is may be the hardest part of our homework. Acknowledging our privilege, educating ourselves, and exploring the inner workings of our hearts…. as Unitarian Universalists, we are so used to expanding our minds, stretching our hearts and speaking our truths that this is actually familiar territory. It’s a huge part of what it has come to mean to be a Unitarian Universalist. The hard part is leaving the safety of what we know and going out into those unknown places and building relationships with those who are outside of our small circles, because that’s really what the fourth element of conversion is all about. It’s about leaving behind the safe places that our privileges have created for us, and making real flesh and blood connections with people and working in union with them to free us all from that prison of inequality.
And I wonder what it would look like? Maybe it looks like writing state and federal legislators to keep them on their toes. Maybe it looks like volunteering at an inner city school. Maybe it looks like supporting legislation that will increase your taxes but will benefit everyone regardless of income. Maybe it looks like planning a family trip to New Orleans to help in the rebuilding. Maybe it looks like planning an anti-racism training for this church in the coming year. I wonder, if each one of us did one small thing this week that took us outside of the comfort zone of our being, what would it be?
There's no doubt, this homework is not easy. Most things that are really important aren't easy. And they don't happen in a few days or even in a few years. They happen over a lifetime. So this isn’t a conversion process that you can do by writing down the steps and working through them. This is a life process. This is a way of living. And it is a way of living more fully and more richly. Our lives become fuller when we take personal and collective responsibility for the wellbeing of our fellow human beings. Our understanding becomes richer when we learn the truth. Our ability to love and be loved grows immeasurably when we do our soul work. And we have a reason for being when we serve. If you haven’t already figured this out, this homework is about much more than racism. This homework is about freedom. It is about that deep hunger in all of us for a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, that hunger to transform the ordinary into the sacred. This homework is about the deepest strata of healing and wholeness.
So in this imperfect world, and from our imperfect lives, let us stand in those momentary breaches and give thanks for them, for they show us the way.
Amen and blessed be.
Reading by Rebecca Ann Parker, president of the Unitarian Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, from her book, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now Skinner House Books, 2006.
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Send Questions or Comments to Rev. Taves: Minister@EmersonUUChapel.org
Updated: 02/03/07