A series of homilies presented as part of the UU White Supremacy Teach-In, April 30, 2017.

Homily: “Receiving and Giving (My Odyssey as a Unitarian Universalist)”

Jim Rogers

When Molly called me this week about the subject matter today, and asked would I participate, she also mentioned she didn’t want to put me on the spot. Then I thought about it for about two seconds and said yes. I guess I thought that it was time for me, a black Unitarian Universalist to be put on the spot. This is serious stuff, and I consider myself to be a serious UU.

I trust I can be candid with everyone here because I consider you friends and family. What’s going on in the UUA is nothing more than a family trying to resolve an internal conflict involving ethnicity and inclusiveness. The idea of a faith like ours airing out it’s dirty laundry is a healthy sign. We know that our actions say so much about who we are, and I truly believe we try to get it right.

I’m a black Unitarian Universalist, with a college degree, but in the lower economic strata. My profile might not fit the overall profile of a UU congregant, but that doesn’t matter. The fact that I am here means that I have something in common with other UU’s that transcends education, race and economic status. It may or may not qualify me to be in a position of leadership either.

Mark Morrison Reed, a black UU minister from Chicago and former teacher at the Meadville-Lombard Theological Seminary knows a lot about the personal struggle of blacks from all socioeconomic levels. In the preface of his book, “Darkening the Doorways” he states; ” African Americans will be drawn to liberal religion as they have in the past. Our challenge today is to develop a culturally inclusive vision that is grand and hopeful enough to inspire, and a way of being that is open and welcoming to all races and cultures: Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and those with roots in Africa. As we build in the present for the future we dream of, the only reliable foundation is one that honestly acknowledges, grieves, and celebrates the past; otherwise we will remain captive to beliefs and behavior that have not served liberal religion well.” Other books by Mr. Reed include; The Selma Awakening, In Between, A Memoir of an Integration Baby, Been in the Storm So Long, and Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.

White privilege is ingrained into the fabric of the United States as a whole, and Unitarian Universalists are a part of that whole. What I find different and refreshing among members of our faith is that they acknowledge it.

What pains me the most is the lack of knowledge about our faith on many levels. One important one is the struggle of black people of all socioeconomic levels to integrate into the higher echelons of the UUA. I’m A firm believer that the more enlightened one is, the more one is able to see the big picture, and then make the right decision.

In this book, “Darkening the Doorways”, Mark Morrison-Reed gives us stories about our faith involving people of color. These individuals are important to the history of Unitarian Universalism just as any white members. They just happen to have a path that was hampered by cultural roadblocks. Stories are important for us to learn, and at times to be inspired.

I’m proud to announce that my story will be included in an anthology of UU’s who have been transformed by Unitarian Universalism. The book will be published by Skinner Books in October, and compiled by the Rev. Meg Riley. When I got the email this week about my article being included, I was asked to give my article a title. I will call it; “Receiving and Giving (My Odyssey as a Unitarian Universalist). I have been the recipient of so much support, encouragement, and guidance from this faith, that I feel compelled to give back.

No one gives a black person Unitarian Universalism. They embrace it because it fits their mindset. Myself, and people like Mark Morrison-Reed, William Sinkford and countless others are members of this faith not because it’s a mostly white faith with the presumed acceptance of white privilege. We are here in spite of it. I’m here for the long haul. Are you?

 

Homily: “Blindness, Bias, and Bridging the Divide”

Molly Toth

“But I don’t see color.”

These were words that came out of my mouth in my freshman Women’s Studies class. They were words directed to a black woman. Saying them outloud today is embarrassing, humbling, frightening. I said the words to her so sweetly; they were well-intentioned in my mind, a way for me to express that it didn’t matter what color she was, I was going to treat her the same no matter what.

“Like hell you don’t,” she shot back.

I was hurt, shocked, offended. Everything I’d been taught about race was challenged in that moment. I wasn’t supposed to see color. I was supposed to judge people only by the content of their character. Right?

It took me a while before I understood how deeply hurtful I had been, and I have carried the regret and deep shame of that moment for a decade now. I share this story not because I seek validation or some kind of redemption. I am not a white woman who mistakenly uttered a racist statement then finally got it right years later. I haven’t gotten it right. I still stumble and I still make mistakes. I share this story because it’s emblematic of a deeper problem that we have to address as individuals, as a church, as a community: an attitude of tolerance, not to be mistaken for acceptance, which is not to be mistaken for love.

The sea I swam in was a pretty white one but I had the benefits of growing up in a household that valued experiencing other cultures and stressed being good to people, regardless of who they were. My parents used to joke that if we had a family crest it would say in Latin: “people are allowed to be different as long as they aren’t hurting anyone.” I spent my earliest years on the city’s north side, where my grandma’s neighbor, a little girl named Varda, became my first best friend, period, not just my first black friend. I learned about slavery and segregation and Ruby Bridges and MLK. I learned that my grandfather was a foreman at one of the mills and that he’d helped to integrate the company baseball team.

I learned how to be good. I learned how to be tolerant. I also learned color-blindness.

White kids of my generation grew up in a post-affirmative action world with no memories of the racial tension of the civil rights movement that defined our parents’ attitude toward race. Somehow, after the trials of the Civil Rights era, the backlash of the Southern Strategy, and the rise of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, white people collectively and quietly decided that colorblindness was safest. A sterile, hands-off approach to race and racism was what resulted. Tolerance was all you needed, nothing more.

We learned about black history in February, women’s history in March, and Latinx and Hispanic history in September. Everything in its right place; everybody gets a month. We celebrated diversity, but only the good stuff–the food, the writing, the art, the dress–and never the struggles, and to handle it all with care. Our parents and teachers picked the good parts, the easy parts, like MLK saying “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We didn’t hear him say “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Having been taught only tolerance, white kids of my generation grew into adults whose only expectation was that they simply ignore race altogether. It’s the content of someone’s character that really matters, right?

Well, yes and no. Would that we lived in a world where that’s what mattered most, but we don’t. Color matters. Race matters. Ethnicity matters. Religion matters. And refusing to engage with that first thing that MLK said: the color of one’s skin, has rendered us unable to engage with each other as whole persons.

Knowing only tolerance, we never learned how to be accepting. We never learned how to empathize. We never learned how to love. Tolerance is not an embrace. Tolerance is not a pushing away, either. Rather, it’s more sinister: it’s a poisonous apathy, a deliberate demarcation between us and them, a way of keeping someone at arm’s length while still saving your own face.

This is the white moderate Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks of in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

The policy of tolerance, the policy of colorblindness, allows us to be bystanders to injustice, to say that the Other should always wait until a “more convenient season.”

For many people my age, the killings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless others, were a series of alarms that shook us awake to consciousness from our ignorant slumber. For many of us, it took a steady stream of black death for us to recognize the pain of an entire people, a pain that we should have been feeling with them all along.

There is no “more convenient season.” The season is now. The season has always been now.

It has brought a wave of police killings of unarmed black men, women, and children, immigration detention centers popping up across the country, and a rise in hate crimes for white people of my generation and older to begin to look inward.

The move from tolerance to acceptance and eventually to love looks like us looking inward before we look outward. It looks like us examining our own biases, which can be painful. If you have ever taken an implicit bias test, the results can be extremely uncomfortable. The images and words flashing on the screen reveal truths that we have either struggled to bury deep in our souls and psyches or have not yet reckoned with. I encourage you to take one, especially the test offered by Harvard. It will uncover racist feelings you might not even be aware of.

I heard a Presbyterian minister of color speak once about multiculturalism, diversity, and racism. He said, “all of us have prejudices. Some of us are better at doing the work to unravel them. Not all of us are racist, in that we explicitly want to hurt those who are different from us. But all of us carry around racist feelings.” Racist feelings, he said, come to us in the same way that we breathe air, watch TV, exist in communities with other people. We absorb it, whether we want to or not.

We can learn to filter what we absorb. We can push back, challenge our biases, call ourselves in to deeper understanding. We can work on ourselves. The work of racial reconciliation and dismantling white supremacy starts with us demanding better of ourselves as individuals and as a community. We can call other people like us in, have difficult conversations, struggle, and insist on an ethic of love, even if it means we make mistakes as we journey toward wholeness.

I say “wholeness” because that’s what we desire: to be one body united in love, that deep, abiding agape love that we feel when we are truly in community with each other. All of us need all of us to make it.

We can insist on seeing each other, rejecting colorblindness. Because when we profess to colorblindness what we are really saying is “I don’t see you, in all of your complexities, in all of your struggle, in all of your pain, in all of your beauty. I don’t see you as a whole person.”

We have to reject a sterile approach to racism, the idea that it’s someone else’s struggle and we’d do well not to get our hands dirty. We have to get our hands dirty. As a community struggling towards wholeness and struggling to love, we don’t have a choice. The season is now. The season has always been now.

 

Homily: “Visiting a Foreign Land” 

Rev. Matt Alspaugh

You may wonder why we are joining with some 600 other UU congregations in having this teach-in worship, exploring the question of racism, of what many in our movement call white supremacy.

What was going on?

After all, as Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray indicated in her remarks here on Wednesday night, other racial justice organizations have called Unitarian Universalism the largest anti-racist organization in the world. That’s it — we’re the largest anti-racist organization in the world. That’s a huge claim, a real honor to try to live into.

And we are imperfect. About a month ago, an incident happened within our Unitarian Universalist Association that caused us to seriously question how well we are doing on anti-racism work.

The incident was this. A job opening for a regional lead position was being filled, one of five such senior positions. One candidate was a Latina woman, a professional religious educator. Another was a white man, a minister. The white man was hired.

The Latina woman learned of the hiring decision while she was at a gathering of UUs of color. She said to them: “wait a minute, why is it that all of these five positions are filled by white people, mostly men?”

The hiring manager, citing personnel confidentiality, appropriately wouldn’t comment on the hiring details. The president of the UUA tried to address the issue, and only made things worse. The president then thought he could perhaps resolve things by resigning. That didn’t help — perhaps partly because he himself was Latino. The hiring manager, and his boss, then resigned.

Now this has been personally distressing because both the president, Rev. Peter Morales, and the hiring manager, Rev. Scott Tayler, are dear to me. Peter was my minister, before I became a minister. I’ve worked closely with Scott over the years. My heart aches for them.

But that does not excuse the distress felt by the person passed over, Christina Rivera, and that felt many persons of color and their allies in situations like this. My heart aches for them, too.

I try not to blame individuals. I try to take a step back and look at this situation in a systemic way. I know that Peter Morales and the leadership team at the UUA were trying to modernize the organization of the UUA, giving people greater autonomy and flexibility in their jobs, using tools like telecommuting and technology so people could work more effectively and reduce costs.  

But they didn’t pay attention to their hiring process. And it was subtly broken. The hiring process was flawed, in that it quite likely allowed unconscious biases to leak into decisions.

Consider, for example, how people are hired in the field of music. I quote from an article in the New York Times magazine.

“In the 1970s, symphony orchestras were still made up almost exclusively of white men — directors claimed they were the only ones qualified. Around that time, many [orchestras] began to use a new method of hiring musicians: blind auditions. Musicians auditioned behind screens so the judges couldn’t see what they looked like….

The Boston Symphony Orchestra pioneered the practice in 1952, and more orchestras began using it after a high-profile racial discrimination case was brought by two black musicians against the New York Philharmonic in 1969.

Researchers from Harvard and Princeton took notice and studied the results; they found that blind auditions increased the likelihood that a woman would be hired by between 25 and 46 percent. In fact, with blind auditions, women became slightly more likely to be hired than men. Confident that they would be treated fairly, female musicians started applying in greater numbers.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-the-best-hiring.html?_r=0]

In not thinking creatively about the biases that might creep into the hiring process, the leadership at our association missed an opportunity to fight institutional racism. They — I think unconsciously — tolerated practices that have traditionally favored white people, practices that feed what we now are calling white supremacy.

They just didn’t see it.

Here’s the point. We — white people — can be like fish that don’t see the water we swim in. We, moving through a culture where whiteness is normative, don’t see it when white people are given subtle preferences, or people of color are treated less well.

When we begin to wake up, when we begin to look differently, we begin to see white supremacy everywhere. When we begin to see those patterns, we are amazed how much white supremacy exists in our nation.

It goes without saying that we have a federal government — at least a sitting president — steeped in white supremacy. In fact, many of us believe that the white supremacy in politics is simply a tool to motivate the construction of a plutocracy, but that’s a topic for another time.

Furthermore, when we scan through American history, we begin to see how much white supremacy has informed our political and cultural choices.

• How voter suppression has been a constant issue since blacks and other persons of color have been given the ballot.
• How vagrancy and trespassing laws were designed to limit the migration of Southern blacks after the Civil War.
• How the original Social Security Act excluded farm and domestic workers, so that nearly two-thirds of blacks were not covered originally by Social Security.
• How evangelical Christianity turned a blind eye to racism in its midst, so that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would say, (quoting Dr. Helen Kenyon) that “Eleven O’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.”
• How policing is intimately wrapped up in white supremacy, so that violent, racist cops re-offend with impunity.
• How cities like Ferguson, Missouri have bent their legal system into an income stream taking money out of the pockets of poor blacks.

And finally,

• How many of the leading tech and software companies use hiring practices that minimize the number of minorities on staff.

When we scan our history, and our current state of affairs, we see white supremacy everywhere. The first step to being aware, to being ‘woke’, is to notice this sea of whiteness.

Pay attention to the ways in which we — white people — get advantages and privilege. Observe, be curious, ask about this stuff.

I know that when I go to Mexico, I will be in for an education. I will be in a different land, with different patterns. I will strive to be humble. I will not try to impose my ‘north of the border’ ways on people.

In the same way, we need to think of ourselves — white people — as visitors into the land of struggle for racial justice, a land where people of color must dwell all the time. I know this metaphor is paradoxical, for we white people have a tendency to think of racial justice as our own work — our own country if you will — in which people of color are the visitors who need to adapt our methods and strategies. Instead, we need to take direction from the residents in the land of the struggle. We need to work alongside the oppressed, next to people of all colors in our work for racial and social justice.

Finally, we want to continue this conversation. We want to continue to engage in the work toward racial justice, toward building the beloved community. To this end, we’ll have a conversation on race next Sunday at 9:45 in Channing Hall. It’s called Building the Beloved Community. I invite you to come, to join us, to listen and share and learn.

Please consider your role in this work, in how we might continue — together. For as Rev. Teresa Soto tells us, “All of us need all of us to make it.”

We do. This is not work that just persons of color, or white people, or progressives can do alone. “All of us need all of us to make it.”

We need to be together. “All of us need all of us to make it.”