It starts with the people you love, and the subtle, unconscious messages they give you. It continues with the society you live in and the hidden aspects of this society. It continues with the things you do perhaps unconsciously, that you look back on, with embarrassment or with shame. Things you may not be able to talk about, to seek amends or forgiveness. I’m talking about individual and structural racism, a separation, a border that diminishes all of us.
As I began to think about this topic, I recognized that yes, I was tired of talking about it, that yes, I didn’t want to continue talking about it. I also realize that many black people around me are also tired, tired of explaining, interpreting and at times protecting white people from their own guilt. I also recognize that many non-white people are tired of the extra effort they have to expend to just live in a racially divided society. And yet we cannot stop this work.
I reflected on some of my own stories with race, my own embarrassing past. Here are a couple of stories. In high school, I participated in Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp, which was really the “get out of gym’ program. I was part of a training squad of mostly black students. They used the n-word freely amongst themselves, and at one point I thought myself tight enough to them use it myself. I was not. The dead silence following that word was painful. And an important lesson for me.
When I was in seminary, I worked with Leon, a black seminarian, to plan one of our weekly chapel services. As we talked about our theme — conflict — we realized that we were dancing around race and conflict. This was a discussion that went on for days! Leon called me out, noting that I and other white classmates coddled him, tolerating his lack of follow-through at times. For example, I had never confronted him about how I felt when he had failed to do his part on a major project for the school president. I realized my liberal white guy pattern caused me to silently put up with such behavior without calling Leon on it. Leon reminded me that being held accountable was what he needed in order to be fully included, to feel fully cared about and cared for.
One way to think about one’s own response to racism is to examine it in the larger context of awareness of cultural difference. The more we are sensitive to cultural difference, the better we can understand racism, whether it manifests in ourselves, in people around us, or in the systems of society.
We might consider the continuum of development of intercultural sensitivity sometimes known as the Bennett scale or the DMIS — Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity — scale. As one progresses along this six stage scale, one develops a greater degree of experiences of other cultures.
The first three stages focus on one’s own culture — or race — alone.
At the first stage is denial of difference. People may not even see difference, and see their own culture is the only real culture. People here will push back hard when you point out difference to them.
At the next stage, people see only their own culture at the correct and most evolved one. They are defensive about difference,.
At the third stage people begin to notice difference, but they minimize it. They don’t see privilege. “Can’t we just all get along? And can’t we all just be like me?”
The next three stages invite an opening to seeing one’s own culture in a context of many cultures.
People at the fourth stage begin to accept the existence of difference, to learn about it, even if don’t agree.
At the fifth stage, people begin to adapt, to be able to live and function in others cultures. They ‘walk the walk’.
At the final stage, people have expanded their worldview and integrated cultural difference so that their own culture has diminished, and they operate smoothly in a variety of cultures.
Many Unitarian Universalist churches have used the Intercultural Difference Inventory as a tool to explore where people are in intercultural sensitivity and help them work on multicultural growth. We hope we can bring some of these resources and learning here to UUYO.
But I’ll warn you, people are often surprised that they are not as far along in this work as they imagined. It can be humbling!
There is an power in looking at challenging topics like intercultural sensitivity together. Rev. Keith Kron worked for many years in our UU Association as the director of the UUA Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns. He visited many congregations as he promoted the Welcoming Congregation program for LGBTQ awareness.
Keith developed his own informal scale of where people were on LGBT matters. Keith learned an important lesson in how people convince each other to change and grow in community. He found that people can only affect those who are a level or two below them on the scale. He found there was no hope for someone fully engaged in the LGBT culture to change someone who was at the beginning — they are simply too far apart. Similarly, there’s no hope for a person at the adaptation stage (level 5) on the DMIS to engage someone in denial (level 1) or defensiveness (level 2), however, someone at minimization (level 3) might make a difference.
Keith offered an analogy. Suppose you are just trying to get your least environmentally conscious people to be a little more green, to recycle occasionally maybe, to think about reducing their carbon footprint. The last thing you want to do is have your most fully engaged uber-enviros — you know the ones who recycle everything, who bicycle everywhere, and keep their houses at 40 degrees — be your ambassadors to your beginners. Instead, have other beginners who are just a little farther along the green path talk about how they’ve changed, and what it meant to them.
Keith learned that the same was true in working on welcoming. I believe the same is true on intercultural work. We each are on the path. We have to talk about the hard stuff, like racism, with each other. We need to do the work together, like offering the CQE clinic here, so we can be challenged and grow together as moral people.
And we begin to hold a quality of love in amongst us. We begin to hold that love that blurs our edges. We embrace that love that allows us to transgress the borders between us. We cherish that love that allows me to cross from my world into yours, and you from your world into mine, not necessarily merging those worlds, but being gracious hosts and guests in each.
In this way we each move along the continuum, on the journey toward becoming better people and creating a better world. This is a story of humility, and growth, and becoming. It is not a story about being finished or complete or perfect. It is a story of creating a better future.
The poet William Stafford tells us: “A voice … says the words, ‘You have been weighed, you have been judged, and have failed.’ And the Book asks “What have you done wrong?”[1]
But then “the voice is gone” but the Spirit — the comforting Spirit that we have created through our love — is everywhere, filling all space, all things.
And while “the story ends inside the book, … outside, wherever you are. It goes on.”
The story of hope and possibility goes on.
Notes:
1 In The Book – William Stafford