BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 11: THE EXPERIENCE OF WHITENESS FROM OTHERS POINT OF VIEW
BY MARK HICKS. GAIL FORSYTH-VAIL, DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR.
© Copyright 2010 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 10:36:48 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
Whatever any of us concludes about race relations, we should start by including all of us. — Frank Wu, author of Yellow
This workshop introduces perspectives on "Whiteness" from people who belong to marginalized racial/ethnic identity groups. It provides resources that will engage participants with stories of Unitarian Universalists whose racial/ethnic identities reflect the demographic of the congregation and/or the surrounding community or region in which the congregation is located.
Before leading this workshop, review the accessibility guidelines in the program Introduction under Integrating All Participants.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Welcoming and Entering | 0 |
Opening | 10 |
Activity 1: Sharing Reflections on Whiteness | 25 |
Activity 2: Voices and Perspectives | 35 |
Activity 3: Large Group Discussion | 40 |
Closing | 10 |
Alternate Activity 1: We'll Build a Land | 20 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Consider interactions, relationships, and friendships you have had with people of a different race or ethnicity from your own. What did you learn from others? What broader perspectives did you gain? Were there things that you wish you had known or that you wish you had done/said differently? If there is/was a connection between you and another across racial/ethnic boundaries, what approaches or attitudes on both of your parts made the connection possible?
Write your responses in your journal or share them with your co-facilitator or a trusted conversation partner.
WORKSHOP PLAN
WELCOMING AND ENTERING
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Greet participants as they arrive.
OPENING (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Light the chalice or invite a participant to light it while you read Leader Resource 1 aloud.
Share feedback from the previous workshop evaluations. Acknowledge shared patterns and observations to give participants a sense of how people in the group are thinking and feeling about the program. Be conscientious about maintaining confidentiality. One technique is to say, "Some people felt... ," rather than saying, "One of you felt... ." If time allows, invite participants to share one-minute observations or new insights they may have gained since the last workshop.
Remind participants of the spirit of their covenant.
Share the goals of this workshop.
ACTIVITY 1: SHARING REFLECTIONS ON WHITENESS (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to share thoughts or observations they have had about Whiteness since the last workshop. Ask these or similar questions:
Invite participants to share their observations and reflections one person at a time. Pass the talking stick or object to each speaker in turn, so that only one speaks at a time. Ask participants to practice simply listening to one another, and to refrain from questioning, clarifying, affirming, or challenging another's observations or comments.
ACTIVITY 2: VOICES AND PERSPECTIVES (35 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to move into groups of three to six. Give each group copies of one handout, ensuring that each group has a different one. If you have chosen to include the Drinking from Our Own Wells video, assign it to one group in lieu of a handout. Explain that the readings represent perspectives and voices of some People of Color and other people marginalized by race and ethnicity, of different genders and at various life stages. Tell participants they will receive copies of all of the handouts at the conclusion of the workshop.
Ask each group to either read their handout silently or invite one or more people to read it aloud. If one group is viewing the DVD, invite them to view the nine-minute segment twice to catch more of what is said. Give each group newsprint and markers. Have small groups work through the posted questions together and record the responses on newsprint to share with the larger group.
After 35 minutes, ask small groups to select a spokesperson, post their responses, and rejoin the large group.
ACTIVITY 3: LARGE GROUP DISCUSSION (40 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite each group to report about their article or video, using their recorded responses as a guide. Allow each group five minutes and monitor the time so that all have a chance to report.
Lead a discussion with these questions:
CLOSING (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to spend five minutes writing feedback in response to the question you have posted on newsprint.
Distribute Taking It Home and Handouts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and invite participants to do the suggested activities before the next meeting. Read the instructions aloud and invite participants to ask questions.
Offer the following words of Kat Liu and extinguish the chalice:
Some people have argued that Unitarian Universalism is not for everyone, that we cannot be all things to all people. While this is true, the question remains: What, then, will we be, and for whom? If we want to be a religion of the race and class privileged, then we need not change, and we can watch society pass us by. If it is our desire to be prophetic leaders in building a multiethnic, multicultural beloved community, we must step outside our culture-bound viewpoints, recognize that other equally valid viewpoints exist, and intentionally work to see through the eyes of others. Those among us who live on various margins have already had to learn to do this.
May we lead, not lag. May we reclaim the voice of our prophetic faith.
Gather participants' written feedback.
Including All Participants
Prepare a large-print version of Taking It Home.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
Take a few moments right after the workshop to ask each other:
TAKING IT HOME
Whatever any of us concludes about race relations, we should start by including all of us. — Frank Wu, author of Yellow
Read (or reread) and reflect on the voices and perspectives in the handouts. Then, write questions, puzzlements, observations, and new insights you have. Find a conversation partner with whom you can share your questions and insights.
Before the next workshop, take some time to reflect and write in your journal about the gifts and challenges your identity brings to your life.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: WE'LL BUILD A LAND (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to sing the first verse and chorus of "We'll Build a Land," Hymn 121 in Singing the Living Tradition.
Distribute Handout 5 and explain that this article was posted on the UUA website as part of the event coverage at General Assembly in 2009. Invite participants to read the handout. Then, invite questions, comments, and observations.
If you have copies of Singing the Journey, invite participants to sing Hymn 1064, "Blue Boat Home," bearing in mind the perspective voiced by Sofia Bettencourt.
Ask: How might the suggestions offered by the Council on Cross-Cultural Engagement be implemented in our congregation?
Sing Hymn 121, using the "We'll Build a World" lyrics offered by the Council on Cross-Cultural Engagement.
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 1: THEOLOGY AND ANTIRACISM — LATINO AND LATINA PERSPECTIVES
Excerpted from an essay by Patricia Jimenez, originally published in Soul Work: Anti-racist Theologies in Dialogue, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones, editors (Boston, Skinner House, 2003). Used with permission.
Race. Class. Culture. [Unitarian Universalist minister] Marta Valentin called these the "Un(W)holey Trinity." Even one of these has the ability to separate one from another, to build walls—mostly metaphorical, but sometimes real. For Latinos and Latinas the issues are complex. Where discussions of oppression center on race alone, and where race tends to be cast in terms of a white and black dichotomy, the complexities of the Latino experience are lost. Our experiences are racial, cultural, and linguistic. We cannot be defined racially, since all races are a part of our people. Besides, if we wish to think in terms of current scientific thought, we humans are all one despite the fact that we see difference. In our experience, economic domination is directly linked to racial and ethnic domination. Our racial/ethnic differences have been used to displace us from land, to use as cheap labor, to exploit our countries for their prime resources, to insist that we give up culture and values.
With regard to race, class, and culture, the issue of names arises yet again. Among Latinos and Latinas, as perhaps among other oppressed groups, names may carry political, cultural, social, and racial meanings. For example, a name may be a political/geographical description that indicates national heritage, such as Puerto Rican or Cuban; it may make a political statement, as with the name Chicano; or it may be a racial description, such as mulatto or mestizo. In some countries, names may even indicate class.
Our names and descriptions of ourselves are colored by individual experiences of history and politics and geography. Some of us, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, are citizens of this country as a result of U.S. conquest and colonization. Many of us have lived in what is now the United States since the sixteenth century. Those of us who have roots here among the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere may count time even further back. Others have entered the United States in more recent waves of immigration.
Often these names are controversial, and in the end, as my colleague Peter Morales wrote, "Any category is an idol, no matter how powerful or useful that category may be. For behind any construct is a rich, multifaceted, complex, chaotic, messy reality... Using categories inevitably does a subtle kind of violence. I am a Latino. But while that term captures a critical part of who I am, it does not begin to capture the totality of who I am."
His comments bring to mind the U.S. census form, one of the more recent examples of an attempt to name and categorize according to race that left me frustrated and uneasy. Mixed, as I know myself to be, I struggled to find a category that fit. There were certainly more categories on the form than I remembered from earlier censuses! Yet, I struggled to find a category that described me. Finally, in a fit of pique, I checked several boxes and sent the form in—fully expecting someone to come after me. At the very least, I expected to get a letter stating that I hadn't filled the form out properly, and therefore didn't belong or perhaps did not exist. The form was yet another way that my reality—and probably that of many others—is not recognized.
Bilingual education generates another complex series of issues and questions. There is no agreement, even among Latinos and Latinas, about bilingual education as an educational tool. Keep in mind that there are Latinos and Latinas that speak only English; others who speak only Spanish, others who speak Portuguese or one of the various indigenous languages around the world, and still others who are not only bilingual but multilingual. Many Latinos and Latinas growing up in the United States in the days before bilingual education may remember when we were forbidden to speak Spanish at school or were punished for doing so. Even with bilingual education, language is still an issue.
Bilingual education also raises questions that go beyond language, questions such as what it takes to succeed in this country and how success is measured. The answer to these questions is complicated, first by the fact that many people buy into the great myth that all one has to do to succeed is work hard, and second by the fact that success in this country is measured solely by individual success. It also raises the questions whether or to what extent mastery of language alone is sufficient to escape the cycle of poverty. Even more critically, it raises the questions of just how crucial language is to identity and what it takes to nurture family, community, and cultural ties. And finally, it raises the question of what it means to be a true citizen of this country. Implicit in many of the arguments around language—and how this applies as well to other minorities who speak other languages—is the assumption that true citizens speak English. What is left out of such arguments is what it takes for those living in poverty—or below the poverty level—to find the time and energy to learn English. It is also necessary to point out that not all immigrants are poor, and the need to be able to use English will affect immigrants differently.
The question of what makes a true citizen revolves around not only language but other forms of cultural expression, and there are class issues involved as well. Implicit in the assumption about the United States as a "melting pot" is the belief that true citizens become like everyone else...
What is astonishing about the belief in the "melting pot" is the assumption that there exists a single correct way of being. In general, this belief in assimilation assumes absorption into the mainstream at the expense of ethnic and cultural identity, but this does not reflect reality. Alternative theories, such as multiculturalism and pluralism, do not sufficiently address the problem either. Multiculturalism, as some individuals may use this term, often assumes a basic and unchanging culture in which minorities merely add color rather than create an altogether new entity. Describing the drawbacks of pluralism, William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor wrote,
While pluralism allows for private and even some public celebration of difference, it tends to be the celebration of difference in publicly sanctioned settings of special holidays, parades, and social events, where we are permitted to be Jewish, or Italian, or Polish, or to claim any other ethnic heritage. Pluralism implies that in our private lives we can possess and exhibit different cultural identities, but that in the public sphere, except in those sanctioned displays of ethnicity, we must put aside those identities and interact instead in a culturally neutral space as "Americans." By taking for granted that public space can be and is culturally neutral, pluralism endorses the dominant culture as normative. More serious is pluralism's silence on inequality and power relations in the country. While expression of difference is permitted, challenges to power relations are suppressed. (Latino Cultural Citizenship, Boston: Beacon Press, 1997)
... The process of telling one's story leads to greater understanding—not just for the listener but for the narrator as well. If the listener has developed the gifts of empathy, then it is in hearing the story that he or she may begin to understand. And sometimes it is with the telling of the story that the narrator hears, learns, and understands more deeply the significance and meaning of the story. Transformation requires understanding that comes from the very center of our being—that place that sees and knows no difference between people across social boundaries...
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 2: PARENTS SHOULDN'T TAKE THEIR CHILDREN'S RACE PERSONALLY
Joseph Santos-Lyons from The Arc of the Universe is Long (Boston: Skinner House, 2009). This was broadcast on KBOO 90.7 in Portland, Oregon, on July 19, 2006. Santos-Lyons was a founding member of DRUUMM (Diverse and Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries) and a young adult leader. Used with permission.
This is Joseph Santos-Lyons, a People of Color activist in the Unitarian Universalist Church, and this is my Angry Asian Minute.
Coming of age I found myself thinking and living through a different racial lens than my childhood. I moved beyond an abstract, intellectual understanding of being a mixed race person, Chinese and White, and found myself identifying as, being seen as, and living as a multiracial person.
I am adopted, by White parents, who intentionally and unintentionally ignored any discussion about my racial identity. Upon reflection, they've shared that they had hoped that I would see myself as white, and were deeply perplexed by my wish to live as a mixed race person.
Why be proud of my racial and cultural heritage? Why give care and attention to the ancestors who have come before me? Why be concerned about my racial identity in such a deeply racialized society? These questions were important to me, and my attitudes and beliefs changed as a result.
My parents took this personally, in the sense that they had a personal expectation about how I would believe and live racially and culturally, and that my choice to live as I wanted to live offended them personally. They were unhappy with me, impatient with my explanations, frustrated with my developing sense of racial identity. It was a difficult time for all of us.
Parents shouldn't take their children's racial identity personally. We have a right to our racial and cultural identity, we have a right to interpret and define our existence. Racial identity is fluid and dynamic, race today defies the definitions of the 1960s.
My wish is for our parents, and our religious and social institutions, to support people who search for the truth and meaning of their racial identity in our racialized society. We seek this knowledge not only for our own dignity and self-respect, but for our health and safety.
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 3: WE ARE ONE
By Rev. Peter Morales, originally published in A People So Bold: Theology and Ministry for Unitarian Universalists, edited by John Gibb Millspaugh (Boston: Skinner House, 2010). Used with permission.
The hilly countryside of Chiapas is dotted everywhere with milpas, patches of corn. These milpas look nothing like the vast ocean of hybridized, fertilized, industrialized, subsidized corn that stretches from Nebraska to New York State. In Chiapas, the corn plants are farther apart, and the corn is mixed with beans and squash in an ancient, sustainable combination that produces a diet with all the essential amino acids. The corn is tended by hand, in little plots worked by individual families.
Chiapas is Mexico's southernmost state, bordering Guatemala. In both regions, impressive Mayan ruins dot the landscape and draw tourists. The descendants of that great civilization live today in abject poverty. The children are malnourished. Many cannot afford milk. Mayans are on the margins of society, living today, as they have for the past five hundred years, under an oppressive regime that denies their basic human rights.
My wife Phyllis and I traveled to Chiapas as part of a delegation sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. We met with people running nonprofit organizations, and we also met with Zapatista rebels struggling, with limited success, against centuries of oppression. They taught us about the intimate connections between the industrial corn of Iowa and the native corn in the milpas. Since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. corn has been changing the Mexican economy. The corn tortilla, the staple of the Mexican diet, especially among the poor, is now typically made with U.S. corn. As demand for ethanol for U.S. gas guzzlers inflates the price of U.S. corn, the price of tortillas has skyrocketed. A little-known part of those NAFTA agreements required Mexico to change its laws that permitted ejidos, large areas of land owned communally for generations. The moneyed classes can now buy up land long owned by peasant families.
The richest man in the world is a Mexican, Carlos Slim. Slim is in fat city, worth more than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, and getting richer at an amazing rate. He enjoys his wealth in a country where millions of children have insufficient food, a woeful education system, and no health care. It is an old story, little different from that of Europe or the United States. With rural families living on small plots of land being forced to leave, Chiapas is now a leading exporter of people. As thousands of economic refugees flee Chiapas, others from Central America cross Chiapas on their way north. They are heading for jobs at luxurious beach resorts filled with Americans and Europeans, or for the slums of Mexico City. Some of the most adventurous risk takers head for la frontera, the newly militarized border that tries to separate desperate Mexicanos from jobs in the United States. Hundreds die trying to cross the desert, and now there are Anglo vigilantes on the border attempting to "protect" America from the frightful prospect of more illegal immigrants. U.S. citizens are afraid, and their fear is stoked by reactionary ideologues and political opportunists in both major parties.
The illegal immigrants who are already here are afraid, too. There are about twelve million of them. They don't know when a raid by federal authorities will break up their families. Children don't know when their mother or father will be taken away. It happened not long ago in Greeley, Colorado. It is happening all over the country, and it is madness.
We live in a new America. My colleague Stan Perea calls it the America of the moo-shoo burrito and the Korean taco. California now has more people from minority populations than it has whites. Our country is now home to more Hispanics than African Americans. In most cities, the children entering the public schools speak more than seventy languages among them.
America was once defined by the movement of people who came to the east coast and moved westward. The new American story is of people moving north from countries to the south and moving to the west coast from countries in the Far East—such as Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere.
In the case of the recent rapid increase in immigration from Mexico and Central America, most U.S. citizens tend to think we are somehow passive victims. These aliens are pouring over our border and must be stopped.
The truth is very different. Our economic policies, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy, are helping to create wrenching economic dislocations in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Many of the people trying to sneak into the United States were pushed out of their homes by U.S. policies.
I am not suggesting that our country does not need to control its borders, and I do not pretend to have all the policy answers. I do know this: We cannot pretend that we had nothing to do with the creation of this problem. I also know this: We are all connected. We are in this together.
Let us take a moment to get some historical perspective on our situation. Let us look at some major demographic events of the past five hundred years: The arrival of Europeans started a horrific pandemic in the Americas. It was worse than the plague in Europe and many times worse than AIDS. Native Americans had no resistance to the new diseases such as smallpox. Entire populations were wiped out. It was easy for Europeans to move west across North America because the Indian population had largely died off. The Native American population was a tiny fraction of what it had been in 1491.
Another major demographic move, of course, was the importation of African slaves. Slavery became the basis of an economy producing cotton and tobacco for an international market. The legacy of slavery, racism, and oppression still casts its shadow across America.
A hundred and seventy years ago, the slave-based economy with huge plantations growing commodities for export expanded westward across the South, but then it hit a border. What is now southeast Texas is prime land for growing cotton. The trouble was that it was part of Mexico. The border was porous, though, and undocumented Anglos poured across, bringing their slaves. They encountered another problem: Slavery was illegal in Mexico. The Anglo immigrants soon fomented a rebellion aimed at legalizing slavery. This is not radical left-wing revisionist history; this is the standard account of academic historians, and the version told on the University of Texas website. The fact that the white Texan revolt against Mexico was founded on the desire to extend black slavery has somehow never filtered down to what we teach in elementary schools. After winning their quick little war of independence, Texas joined the union as a slave state. Sadly, James Bowie, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston were not the freedom-loving heroes we were once led to believe.
We need to see our present situation in its historical context. The border between the United States and Mexico was created to make space for slavery. We are building fences and guard towers along that border to keep Mexicans from reentering land that was taken from them. Of course, the Mexican elite, mostly of European descent, were not exactly blameless: The land that undocumented Americans stole from them was land they had previously stolen from Native Americans. It is easy to determine who has a legal right to be here, but who has a moral right to be here?
As a religious people who affirm human compassion, advocate for human rights, and seek justice, we must never make the mistake of confusing a legal right with a moral right. The forced removal of Native Americans from their land and onto reservations was legal. The importation and sale of African slaves was legal. South African apartheid was legal. The confiscation of the property of Jews at the beginning of the Nazi regime was legal. The Spanish Inquisition was legal. Crucifying Jesus was legal. Burning Michael Servetus at the stake for his Unitarian theology was legal. The fact that something is legal does not cut much ethical ice. The powerful have always used the legal system to oppress the powerless.
It is true that as citizens we should respect the rule of law. More importantly, though, our duty is to create laws founded on our highest sense of justice, equity, and compassion. Loud voices urge us to choose fear, denial, reactionary nationalism, and racism. We must resist and choose the better way urged by every major religious tradition. We must choose the path of compassion and hope. We must choose a path that is founded on the recognition that we are connected, that we are all in this together.
These are the teachings of every great tradition. At the core of the teachings of Jesus is the conviction that we are all one. We are all God's children, and we are all equal. We are supposed to care for one another. Jesus taught his followers that an act of kindness to the most humble human being was the equivalent of performing the same for Jesus.
The prophet Muhammad taught that the tribal divisions among the Arabian people were wrong. The symbols of those tribal divisions were the legion of tribal gods, and Muhammad told the people that these gods were false, that there is only one God. We are united, and we owe our allegiance to the one creator.
Buddhism teaches that if we stop and really pay attention, we will realize that the things we think separate us are an illusion. Our connections are ultimately real, not our divisions.
We find the same message in every tradition: We are one. We are connected. We are brothers and sisters. If we truly accept that we are all part of a greater whole, that what unites and transcends us is ultimately more important than our illusion of individuality, how might that guide us? If we accept that compassion (literally "to suffer with") is the manifestation of realizing that we are one, what are the implications? What would our community and our state and our nation do if they were guided by the finest aspirations of humanity's religions? What would you and I do if we were guided by these very same ideas, as expressed in our Unitarian Universalist Principles? What future might we build if we created policies guided by our notions of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations?
I do not have all the policy answers on immigration or the related issues of public education, health care, and the economy. I do know this: Breaking up poor working families who have lived among us for years does not feel like justice, equity, and compassion in action. Refusing minimal health services to young children does not feel like the way we should treat members of our human family. Having our police forces profile brown people does not feel like breaking down the walls of tribalism. Creating a huge wall, complete with barbed wire, across hundreds of miles of border does not feel neighborly.
There must be a better way, and you and I must help build it. Barbed wire is not the answer. More border guards and more deportations are not the answer. Paranoia and panic will solve nothing.
We must remember that we are all immigrant stock, every single one of us living on this continent. Even Native Americans at one time immigrated here from Asia.
We must also acknowledge that we helped to create the situation in which displaced people look to find a home here. America has already been transformed by the latest waves of immigration. Our children and grandchildren are going to live in a multicultural society—a society of moo-shoo burritos, egg roll tacos, and whole wheat tortillas. We need not be afraid of that multicultural society. Fear leads to violence and repression.
Instead, let us embrace the possibilities before us. Let us be guided by love and hope. Let our actions emerge from the deep conviction that people from Mexico and Korea and Canada and Vietnam are ultimately part of our extended family. Surely, religious people who have learned to embrace the wisdom of Judaism, Christianity, humanism, Islam, and Eastern religions can lead the way. We are people who have always affirmed human diversity. We have always looked to the future and seen new possibilities. We must do so again. Let us be the people who break down the arbitrary barriers that divide us from them. We are one, and love and hope will guide us. Let us, together with all our brothers and sisters, build a new way.
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 4: COME YE DISCONSOLATE
By Taquiena Boston, originally published in A People So Bold: Theology and Ministry for Unitarian Universalists, edited by John Gibb Millspaugh (Boston: Skinner House, 2010). Used with permission. Taquiena Boston is a member of All Souls Church, Unitarian, an intentionally multiracial/multicultural Unitarian Universalist congregation in Washington, DC, and has been a Unitarian Universalist since 1984. Taquiena also guided the development of Building the World We Dream About.
Maybe because I was born in the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, I have always known that brokenness is not only individual but social and collective. Religious community and theology so often hold a people struggling with brokenness, suffering, and injustice. My earliest influences in being held this way are my family church and the movement for African-American civil rights.
At Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, where I grew up, the hymn "Come Ye Disconsolate" called worshipers to the altar for personal prayer:
Come ye disconsolate, where're ye languish
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel
Here bring your wounded heart, here tell your anguish
Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal
Established as the E Street Mission in southwest Washington in 1856, Saint Paul has a history inseparable from abolitionism and the struggle for racial equality. The congregation's founding minister, Anthony Bowen, formed the first YMCA for colored men in 1853. The church served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Bowen joined Frederick Douglass and John F. Cook, Jr., to recruit the first black regiment from Washington, DC, the First U.S. Colored Troops, in 1863. After the Civil War, he petitioned the mayor to provide free public education for African-American children on the grounds that blacks were taxpaying citizens.
I hesitated to write about Saint Paul in a Unitarian Universalist context for two reasons: first, because the congregation cannot defend itself against my memory; second, because in order to accurately re-create that memory I must resort to the religious language of the Saint Paul community and risk being dismissed by members of my chosen faith. Although I discovered Unitarian Universalism as a young adult more than twenty years ago and feel it has always been my authentic religious identity, I have often had to navigate border spaces as culturally other in my faith community and religiously other in the African-American community. However, I cannot speak about faith, brokenness, suffering, and injustice without crossing back and forth between these communities and their theologies.
Despite its history, I would not label Saint Paul in the 1960s and 1970s an activist church. It was the congregation where Uncle Johnny volunteered with the Boosters Club, Cousin Dorothy supervised the Sunday School, and Cousin Earl cooked the meals that bridged the time between the morning worship and the afternoon fundraisers. Saint Paul was the place where our community's families marked all the important rituals from birth to death. The church had no committees for social justice or community outreach. However, like many historically black congregations, Saint Paul played an important role in supporting the African-American community materially and spiritually.
My earliest image of how faith holds a people in brokenness and suffering is Saint Paul members walking down the sunlit aisles in the former synagogue to bring their wounded hearts, anguish, sorrow, and loss to the wide wooden altar, as the choir sang "Come Ye Disconsolate." Those prayerful moments in the church demonstrated the equality of all in the eyes of the Creator: school teachers and nurses, government workers and college professors, beauticians and truck drivers, domestics and day laborers—all came to kneel humbly in private conversation with their God. When they rose to return to the pews, their eyes sometimes held tears, but always held hope, and their bodies were outlined by the glow from stained glass windows, still decorated with Stars of David.
Saint Paul, the extended family of a congregation made up of extended families, gave aid and comfort in times of trouble. The pastor, deacons, and missionary sisters connected individual families and the congregation. The first to find out about illness, death, or family catastrophe, they visited the sick and shut-in, sat with the bereaved, cooked and cleaned for people recovering from surgery, and became surrogate family for members with no other relatives to care for them. The church family assisted with funeral arrangements and collected clothes, food, money, or whatever was needed to help members in hard times. Extending service to those in need was evidence of what it meant to be Christian.
The congregation extended its care and comfort beyond the membership to welcome the stranger, recruiting neighborhood children for Sunday school and vacation Bible school. Adults groomed youth in the ways of doing church: worshiping, ushering, singing in the choir, fundraising, and leading Bible lessons. They consciously instilled pride and affirmed racial and religious identity in a city stratified by race, color, and class, not only between blacks and whites but also within the black community.
In the 1960s, social status in Washington was communicated not only by race and ethnicity but also through education, profession, material assets, and physical appearance. As early as age four, I saw that children with fair skin and silky hair were viewed as more attractive, intelligent, and well behaved by black and white society. I recognized that the black proprietor of my nursery school had great respect for the children whose parents worked for the federal government and owned their houses and that she treated me indifferently because my mother worked at a laundry, my father worked for a trash company, and we rented the upstairs apartment in another family's home. I went to an all-black elementary school, where the white principal did not allow teachers to give A's to students because she was convinced of the inferiority of black people. Aunts, uncles, and neighbors, when moved by television images of attack dogs and fire hoses turned on students and marchers, told personal stories about unfair treatment at work, in stores, by police, or while traveling through white neighborhoods.
The church, while not immune from race, color, and class discrimination, provided fortification for struggling against racial and economic injustice. Ministers in the 1960s and 1970s would never use a word like empowerment, but it was the subtext of sermons and the Bible stories they most frequently referenced. They spoke of evil as a social condition that was evident in oppression and inequality. The sermons about oppression came clothed in stories of persecuted prophets and other Biblical protagonists with whom the congregation could identify, those ancient stories often paired with accounts of contemporary civil rights struggles.
The church asserted that neither material assets nor profession nor social standing determined intrinsic worth. God conferred worth and dignity. No matter the struggles and injustice in the world, the faithful would find support in times of trouble. The righteous will not be forsaken, we were told. The meek shall inherit the earth. We shall overcome. Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal. These messages gave me a strong sense of my own possibilities despite the larger society's messages.
As much as the Saint Paul community formed my understanding of how theology holds brokenness and suffering, the most influential minister of my childhood and early youth was a Baptist minister from Georgia. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to the brokenness and suffering caused by injustice in society. His words, echoing the messages I heard from the pulpit, named injustice and oppression as evils that had to be transformed—but King went further. He called the oppressor as well as the oppressed to a vision of beloved community, a society of love and justice that all people were responsible for creating.
When King expanded his ministry and advocacy to include work for peace, antipoverty, and economic justice, I realized that social justice is ever evolving and that the work of making justice is never done. King's ministry underscored religious teachings that the core of faith was not what people believed but how they lived their values. Religious people face a difficult challenge: not choosing between compassion and justice, but learning how the two can operate together. Neither compassion alone nor justice in the form of retribution can heal the brokenness caused by injustice and oppression. King taught that justice unified with compassion is the supreme demonstration of love.
As I witnessed King's work at the intersection of his religious identity and social justice, I unconsciously absorbed the wisdom that living as a person of faith means practicing social justice. And I learned that one role of the church is to support its members in acting justly beyond its walls. However, a time came when the support that Saint Paul offered was inadequate to hold the identity struggles I experienced as a working-class, first-generation college student. Although the congregation continued to affirm me with positive messages, the theology did not address the complexity that I witnessed in worlds beyond the church community. However, the college environment lacked the values that I cherished at Saint Paul, as well as its emphasis on integrity and character.
My search for something to anchor me led me to other theologies. At the Howard University School of Religion library, I immersed myself in the philosophies of Howard Thurman, Zen Buddhists, existentialists, and Christian mystics, as well as traditions of the Far East, to help me cope with my personal anguish. Though the philosophies provided useful insights, they did not provide comfort. I found myself listening a lot to "Come Ye Disconsolate," as recorded by Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. Many years later I commented to a Unitarian Universalist friend that it would have been helpful to know about Unitarian Universalism during that difficult time because it is a faith where questions are respected as part of the spiritual journey.
When I discovered Unitarian Universalism a decade later, as a young adult at All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington, DC, I found a faith with justice at its core. I did not leave Saint Paul because I rejected anything; I joined All Souls because Unitarian Universalism was theologically expansive, included more social identities, emphasized human agency, and brought together faith and justice. For many years, All Souls was the religious home that fortified me through all the disappointing presidential elections, irrational wars, and halting progress of social justice movements. Unitarian Universalism challenged me to continue to expand my consciousness of the ways that injustice manifests in human relationships—not only with regard to race, gender, and class but also sexual orientation, disability, age, nationality, and religion.
My childhood religion still holds me, but in a different way. I understand the messages of empowerment as visible evidence of a people's capacity to endure and to create beauty in music, expressive worship, and in the many acts of service to families and their communities. There are times when I need to culturally immerse myself in the historically black church and hear the fortifying messages of my childhood, especially at times when events affecting the larger African-American community produce occasions of mourning or celebration.
The 2008 U.S. election pushed my buttons on race, class, and gender issues, and I found myself having, not a "come-to-Jesus" moment, but a "come-to-the-chalice" moment. Intellectually, I knew that the United States was having identity encounters, and the presidential primaries and election confronted people with identity issues about which many were either unconscious or in denial. Remnants of historical racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism asserted themselves strongly. Emotionally, I was scared—not afraid, but scared—of what I might learn about the only country I could truly call home, despite my desire to be a citizen of the planet. All of my family was here in the United States, and my known ancestors had been in Virginia for more than two hundred years. Education and profession had taken me to new class territory, but geographically I had not traveled far from my ancestors' home.
Increasingly, I needed a local religious community that would support me in being faithful to the vision and values of the beloved community—the community of love and justice—no matter the outcome of the general election. Even after the election, I knew that the United States did not enter the promised land on November 4, but stood on the boundary of the next struggle for social justice. The realization became a decision to renew my connection with a Unitarian Universalist congregation. My mature faith requires a community that will challenge my social consciousness, ground my commitment to justice in compassion, and nurture me spiritually by supporting me in living the values of love and justice.
Unitarian Universalism is my religious home. It is not a perfect faith community for a woman of color from a working-class family. Our congregations' struggle to be fully racially and culturally inclusive is a continuing source of disappointment, and it is painful to admit that not all social identities find full welcome in our faith. Despite the tensions and contradictions between Unitarian Universalists' principles and practices, in matters of faith and social justice I find in it a more expansive altar where I can bring my wounded heart and tell my anguish.
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
HANDOUT 5: PIRATES, BOATS, AND ADVENTURES IN CROSS-CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT
General Assembly 2009 web coverage
Presented by the Council for Cross-Cultural Engagement: Rev. Danielle DiBona, President of Diverse and Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries (DRUUMM); Rev. David Takahashi Morris; Linda Friedman, General Assembly (GA) Planning Committee; Sofia Betancourt, Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Identity-Based Ministries; Ellen Zemlin, Youth Representative, former Steering Committee member; Keith Arnold, President, Unitarian Universalist (UU) Musicians Network.
The Council for Cross-Cultural Engagement (CCE) first convened about cultural misappropriation that occurred at General Assembly 2007 in Seattle, Washington. Since then, they have been talking about misunderstandings that happen when cultures intersect, when an individual may feel marginalized when music, a poem, a reading, prayer, or spiritual practice is used without context credit or any sense of relationship to the communities involved.
Rev. Danielle DiBona began the session by describing her initial experience in Seattle. She had attended the Service of the Living Tradition, and the program included the hymn "We'll Build a Land." When DiBona, a Wampanoag Indian, saw hundreds of mostly white faces in the hall singing this, she thought about how white European culture indeed had built—on Native American land. Knowing all this was done at the expense of Native culture caused her great pain.
DiBona shared these feelings with Keith Arnold, who had helped plan the service. Arnold, president of the UU Musicians Network (UUMN) initially replied that he would never sing the song again. But DiBona assured him that he could, now that she had been heard. Arnold told the attendees he will always remember her story when he sings it. This experience has changed how he thinks of this song, he said, using "other ears." He advised answering with "Tell me more," rather than trying to explain what you hoped a song would mean.
Members of CCE then shared examples of multiple interpretations. For example, most responded to "Blue Boat Home" as a comforting song with calming imagery. However, for Sofia Betancourt, it reminded her of the many slaves who chose to jump overboard slave ships and drown, rather than remain in bondage.
Another example is the hymnal song "Light of Ages and Nations," a longtime national anthem of Germany. The Haydn melody was used by the Nazis during WWII with different lyrics that took on a pro-Nazi connotation. Linda Friedman said she found it hard to listen to, as it invoked painful feelings about the Holocaust. Ellen Zemlin experienced it differently, however. Zemlin then shared knowledge of Holocaust history, that only a portion of the lyrics are still a part of the anthem. David Takahashi Morris shared that he was asked to never play the song again, because it offended a congregation member. "That tune," he said, "is a casualty of WWII; it's lost and can't come back."
Dialogue Service
To address the initial incident that sparked the group's inception, CCE presented a worship service at General Assembly on Thursday morning. They presented the hymn, "We'll Build a Land," and offered dialogue expression that illustrated how people with different backgrounds experience hymns in different ways:
Come build a world where families and neighbors
United by love may then create peace
Where justice shall roll down like waters
And peace like an ever-flowing stream
BUILDING THE WORLD WE DREAM ABOUT: WORKSHOP 11:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: ASK ME
William Stafford, "Ask Me," from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (C) 1977, 1998 by the Estate of William Safford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt — ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
FIND OUT MORE
The UUA Multicultural Growth & Witness staff group offers resources, curricula, trainings, and tools to help Unitarian Universalist congregations and leaders engage in the work of antiracism, antioppression, and multiculturalism. Visit www.uua.org/multicultural (at www.uua.org/multicultural) or email multicultural @ uua.org (at mailto:multicultural@uua.org) to learn more.