These days even those without a car have found themselves rubbernecking. Sit on the couch and turn on the TV. We have gone from disaster to the next. Thankfully Rita was not as devastating as had been feared. But, there are now more miles of coast land to restore, more neighbors left to clean up damage and rebuild. But it is more than roofs and power lines. This hurricane season has blown away our shared amnesia about the racism and classism of American society. What sense shall we make of all we saw? How can we help each other see clearly all the implications, all the meanings of the images that passed across our TV screens? What one makes of this hurricane season depends a great deal on where one stands in our society. Black and White Americans have very different answers to the question why did help take so long to arrive? How could things get so bad in New Orleans?
I hope the winds were strong enough to push the issues of race and class beyond the editorial page and onto the national agenda. But that will only happen if individual Americans find the courage and the will to take up these painful issues - yet again. If we can remember what a common sense reading of history makes clear: American racism is the legacy of slavery. To combat it requires on-going deep work. It is not a project that will fit into the cycles of electoral politics. Nor will it recede like flood waters, or fade away, no matter how dazed we become with news of other storms.
Even more than racism, classism is difficult to discuss. We prefer the stories of opportunity. We prefer to believe that education and hard work are all that is needed to make it. We cling to our notions of individuality. We fail to remember that every economic system that creates wealth, also creates poverty. There is nothing in the flow of goods and capital that insures a fair distribution of resources. That is a moral decision, grounded outside our economic lives.
The work to eradicate racism, to alleviate the damage of classism is the work of faith. These problems are so large, so complex, and will take so long to change that unless our deepest principles and highest hopes are involved, we will fail. What response shall we make? This is a religious question.
Liberal religion demands that one develop the capacity to see the world as it is, with honesty, precision and accuracy. It also requires that one never lose sight of those truths, not yet realized, which are the core of life. Realism says: There is animosity, injustice. There are reasons for grief. Things go horribly wrong. We say things to each other that are deeply hurtful, we do things that cause damage, and participate, often unwillingly, in systems that create wealth and power through inequality, scarcity and fear. Faith says: Compassion and creativity are real. Fairness, Justice and Peace are possible.
To be religious is to develop a bi-focal vision. Traditionally, western monotheism separates out these two realms - calls them, Earth and Heaven, this time and the end of time, Aman's law and God's Law. Unitarian Universalism does not. In this we part company with our Jewish and Christian heritage. Heaven is not a place beyond here. There is no other time. The divine, the sacred, is to be found in our midst. To be religious, in our way, is to believe that these two worlds can be brought closer together. And we are the ones to do it.
We begin with our first principle, the essential, the primary insight of our faith: the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Translated back into traditional Christian language this sentence means that each and every one of us is a child of God. And as a six year old theologian told me years ago, "God doesn't make garbage." Translated into the language of Judaism this sentence becomes "God created all humanity from Adam and Eve so that none could say my lineage is greater than yours". Wearing our bi-focals makes clear the fundamental, absolute, equality of persons, just as it brings into focus the fact that this truth is honored most in the breach.
As we pick through the debris of this hurricane season we need to wear those bi-focals. Take 'em out of our pockets and clean them off and keep them on. This morning I want to talk about our own UU history and our struggle to live out that first principle. It is my hope that telling this story will help us each clean off those glasses.
Mark Morrison Reed writes in Black Pioneers in a White Denomination:
Our history in regard to racial justice is brave enough to make you proud, tragic enough to make you cry, and inept enough to make you laugh once the anger passes.
There is much to make us proud. In 1784, Benjamin Rush, one of the signors of the declaration was also one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1785, Gloster Dalton, an African American was one of the founders of the Gloucester Universalist Society. In 1801, Amy Scott, an African American, was one of the incorporators of the First Universalist Society of Philadelphia. In 1833 Lydia Maria Child, a white woman, wrote "An Appeal in Favor of that class of American called African." Most of the white Unitarians and Universalists who lived before the Civil War and who we remember today were active in some way in the work against slavery. Parker preached. Emerson lectured. Bronson Alcott had one of his schools closed because he dared educate girls and boys, blacks and whites in the same classroom. He and Thoreau worked on the Underground Railroad. Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, a black woman, born free in Baltimore, and one of the best known American poets during her lifetime, was a member of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was written by Julia Ward Howe, a white Unitarian. In 1863, Robert Gould Shaw, a white man and the son of a Unitarian minister, was the Colonel of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of African American volunteers from the North to fight in the Civil War.
Our heritage is one of courageous free-thinking folks. We can be proud of the list of Afirsts@ they gave us. But, we were never of one mind. Even in our golden age, many Unitarians and Universalists took no action. Our ranks included some on the other side. It is said that a Southern Unitarian General co-founded the KKK. Although I have known this fact since Sunday School, no one has ever told me his name.
Once slavery had been abolished, both the Unitarians and the Universalists stumbled. For the next one hundred years, we preached inclusion and equality, but we seemed to have lost our way. African Americans joined our ranks - although in small numbers. Some studied for the ministry, and were ordained. Finding no pulpits open to them, they drifted away. We went through periods where African American candidates were refused fellowship because of lack of opportunities. Others founded their own congregations: Joseph Jordon, in 1889, in Norfolk Virginia, Thomas Wise, 1895, in Suffolk, Virginia, Quillen Shinn, 1899, in Barstow, Georgia, Ethelred Brown in Jamaica in 1912, and then Harlem in 1920, William H. G. Carter in 1927 in Cincinnati. Support, both spiritual and financial, was at best inconsistent. In 1927, Lewis Mc Gee, an African American was told "if you want to be a Unitarian you'd better bring your own church." He didn't leave. 20 years later McGee found the inter-racial Free Religious Fellowship in Chicago. By 1961, Mc Gee was minister of the Chico Unitarian Fellowship in California, the first African American Senior minister in a white congregation.
In the 50's work began on desegration. The Service committee and All Souls Church in Washington, with A. Powell Davies, a white man, as their minister, took on the Boys Club. After 3 years The Boys Club was still segregated. They were evicted from the church and All Souls started it's own integrated program. In 1954, Davies posted a list of integrated restaurants and requested that members of his white, well-heeled congregation frequent them - only them. They did. In 1962, Dr. King delivered the Ware Lecture at General Assembly. When he sent out the call to come to Selma, we went. 131 Ministers were there. Some say double, some say triple, that number of lay folks marched. The UUA's board of trustees adjourned a scheduled meeting, flew to Alabama and re-convened in an African American Chapel. The Reverend James Reeb was killed there.
Our involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was for many a moment of clarity and empowerment. The cause was right. The purpose clear. For us, mostly northern, mostly white, it was life changing. These UU's went down south, not as leaders but as followers. They didn't take their marching orders from Dr. King, or any of the leadership we now read of in the history books, but from the local organizers, whose roles were too small to have historians remember their names. Those UU's came home changed.
I was in Sunday School then. I watched but didn't understand. But now I suspect that what happened to many of those folks, was that for a time at least, they stepped out of their normal life and into a Beloved Community. And it was good. It was life as their faith said it should be. My minister, Donald McKinney, said years later, that those were the days that hope was seared into his bones. From then on he knew that Black and White together in America was possible.
We were growing then. And it looked like we might be making strides towards becoming integrated ourselves. By the late sixties there were approximately 1500 black UU's. That's only 1% of membership. But it was a 1% that had never been there before. We had 8 African American ministers - the same number as white women ministers. And we had a contingent of white folks who had been changed and were willing to challenge the status quo.
When the Voting Rights Act was passed, many assumed that the work was done. Our focus turned inward. From 1967 to 1977 we struggled - sometimes bitterly - among ourselves in what is called The Black Empowerment Controversy. Its history is only now being written. It was a painful time. When it was over there had been an exodus of African American members from our pews. We had stopped growing. And as a movement had retreated into a silence that it would take another 10 years to break.
That story is about the competition between BAC, The Black Affairs Council and BAWA, Black and White Action. It is a story of battles for funding and power. It is a story of promises made and broken. At its crux was the question of how to achieve that Beloved Community.
For most of our history, most Unitarians and Universalists had been integrationists. As champions of the individual, we believed that within our walls we were color-blind. The problem with society was that it made distinctions that faith said were not true. The way to racial justice was to strengthen society's ability to see beyond color to the individual. This work had to be done by individuals, in this case by Blacks and Whites working together.
BAC, the Black Affairs Council, saw things differently. Although at first they didn't have the language for it, these UU's had seen how racism was institutionalized. How it replicated itself unconsciously, often against the intentions of individuals, through social conventions and patterns of power. In order to end racism, they believed that these structures and patterns needed to be radically re-arranged. This could be done if the minority, the African Americans, took the lead. The Cleveland General Assembly, in 1968 voted to give one million dollars to BAC, over a period of 4 years, to promote racial justice. This was an enormous amount of money. (Money it turned out we did not have.) But more significant was the relinquishment of control, the change in the flow of power and authority. By the next GA, it became clear that the Association was in fact in dire financial straits, and would have to cut funding across the board. It would take us years to understand that changing the structures of power could not be done through a vote.
In the almost 30 years since the Black Empowerment Controversy ended, we have learned much and made significant changes. We have ministers of color, and they are called to plum pulpits. We are the first main-stream (read white) religious body to elect an African American to our Presidency. We have some integrated congregations. And we have a language to help us talk about the changes, the deep changes that must be made.
But it must be acknowledged that in our Journey Towards Wholeness, we have made more progress combating sexism and homophobia than we have in becoming anti-racist. We are the only American religious body to have our clergy be 50% women and 50% men. We are the first religious body to struggle with the prospect of not having enough men interested in ministry. Almost half our congregations have completed the Welcoming Congregation program. And although the work against homophobia is difficult and pushes all of us, at times, beyond our comfort zones and into uncharted terrain, it seems to me at least, this work no longer carries the threat of tearing us apart. But most of our congregations are still very close to being lily white. Most of us are wishing for something different and unsure how to help that come into being.
We need to look again at racism. Harlon Dalton in Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks and Whites writes:
One view - perhaps the most common - centers on race-based animosity or disdain. Racism equals disliking others (or regarding them as inferior) because of their race. It applies with equal force to the fox and the hound. . . A Black loan applicant who has little use for White people would be just as guilty of racism as a White bank president who considers all Blacks to be unworthy credit risks.
This even handed approach would be fine if psychic pain were all that mattered, but race-based antipathy can have material consequences as well. And those consequences are not distributed evenly in our racially stratified society. There is a real difference between being insulted and being clubbed: between hurt feelings and radically diminished economic opportunity. Many thoughtful social critics argue for a definition of racism that takes such differences into account. In their view, the label "racism" is appropriate only when negative racial sentiments are put into action and result in serious disadvantage.
Recently I have come to realize that there is a second flaw in the traditional approach to racism, one that survives even if we take consequences into account. And it is this: by treating antipathy as a necessary condition, we do not reach the behavior of people who have no malice in their hearts but nevertheless act in ways that create and reproduce racial hierarchy. That is why I embrace Professor David T. Wellman's notion that racism consists of "culturally acceptable beliefs that defend social advantages that are based on race." Or to rephrase it slightly, racism consists of culturally acceptable ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that serve to sustain the racial pecking order.
I believe that no one in this room is a racist, if we take Dalton's first or second definitions of the term. But when racism is understood as those "ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that serve to sustain the racial pecking order", every one of us is involved. As white folks we have a set of privileges, live with unconscious assumptions that betray our highest ideals. Can we work to be free of them?
I know many of you would like the complexion of this fellowship to change. And many UU's across the continent are confused as to why this faith that so clearly celebrates the individual, that strives to live out our essential human equality, is still so white and so upper middle class. Are we willing to look at ourselves? Willing to see how we invite folks in only if they are already like us? And if we learn to see those barriers that privilege have made invisible to us, will we change our ways of being together to dismantle them? For example: can we learn to sing like we mean it? Or are we too white for that? Can we make this a space safe enough to cry in when your heart is overwhelmed with grief. Or are we too upper-class? How many of us realize that folks without college degrees, worry that they will be seen as somehow less than everyone else and so feel they are taking a risk whenever they tell their life stories? Are we so invested in being intellectual that we fail to see each other?
Unlike the UU's who marched in Selma, we have not been rescued from our normal lives and given the chance to breathe in the air of a Beloved Community where power flows differently and hope is seared into our bones. But if we have learned from the struggles for women's equality and the equality due the gay, lesbian and transgender community, maybe we know enough to hear in Katrina's winds, a call to something better.
I hope so. We are the people who know that heaven can be made here on earth: that Justice and Peace are possible. May we pledge to make our sight clear enough, our ears open enough to listen, and our wills strong enough to act on what we hear. The rebuilding that lies ahead, offers us an opportunity to heal this country=s deepest wounds. Let us do our parts. Let us live our faith.