Multicultural Sensibility

By Renee Ruchotzke, Central East Region of the UUA

April 10, 2018

Multicultural Sensibility—one of the recommended leadership development competencies—includes:

Understanding how race and privilege operate in our lives and institutions.
Actively working to dismantle racism, especially in our institutions and systems.
Understanding how culture affects beliefs, values and mental models and having strategies to bridge them.

Core Values

We are committed to the practice of radical hospitality, where we encounter each person as a gift. We are committed to the ideal of true diversity, because we understand that each person has something essential to contribute to a more complete whole. This enables us to encounter, experience and integrate diverse ideas and values to work our way closer to our understanding of the “truth.”

Practices

Find ways to understand and appreciate one's own culture and identity and how it informs one's experience and world view.
Understand the markers of White Supremacy Culture in order to disrupt them in our congregations and other institutions.
Continually examine one's own assumptions underlying one's ideas and beliefs.
Be both courageous and gentle with oneself and one another while doing this hard work.

Resources

Videos

Cultural Humility:People, Principles and Practices (YouTube 29:29) Vivian Chavez
Why do we need to be thinking of multiculturalism in congregations? (YouTube, 3:02) Eric Law, author of The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb
4 Tips for Culturally Agile Leadership (YouTube, 1:00)
16 Tips for Turning Your Congregation Around (YouTube, 1:01:23) with Gordon Dragt
Antony Beckham on cross-cultural leadership (YouTube, 4:36)
Advancing Latino Leadership with Juana Bordas
Mark Morrison Reed at the Metro NY Annual District Meeting

Web Articles

A Unitarian Universalist ‘Black Lives Matter’ Theology by Kenny Wiley
Reconciliation as Spiritual Practice by Paula Cole Jones, UU World March/April 2007
Kite Strings and Clotheslines: Learning to Value Difference by William M. Kondrath
Leadership in Multicultural and Multiracial Congregations by Jacqueline J. Lewis
The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity an overview written by the model’s author, Dr. Milton Bennett
Are You on Middle Class Standard Time? by Andrew Willis Garcés
In Communion with One Another: Characteristics of Successful Multiracial Congregations by Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook
How to Talk to Someone About Privilege Who Doesn't Know What That Is Jamit Utt

Videos

Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. embarks on a deeply personal journey through the last fifty years of African American history. Joined by leading scholars, celebrities, and a dynamic cast of people who shaped these years, Gates travels from the victories of the civil rights movement up to today, asking profound questions about the state of race yesterday and today.

Websites

The Racial Dot Map An accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density, and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country.
Black Lives of UU Teach-In Resources
Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Racial Justice and Multicultural Ministries
Building the World We Dream About, Mark Hicks (UUA Tapestry of Faith Curriculum)
If you have potential Youth or Young Adult Leaders of Color, consider sending them to UU Multicultural Leadership School!

Books

Salsa, Soul and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age by Juana Bordas
Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
Soul Work: Anti-racist Theologies in Dialogue, editors: Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, Nancy Palmer Jones
Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History by Mark Harris and Discussion Guide (PDF, 20 pages)
The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lambby Eric Law