Recently in Against Racism and Oppression Category

Transformation.  It is a word we use to describe the work people do together to overcome the habits of an oppressive social system and learn instead about non oppressive ways of being.   There are many good anti racism trainers out there, and through the Unitarian Universalist Association I can even invite an anti racism training team to come to my congregation.

The first anti oppressive collective, I belonged to was a group of men working to overcome patriarchal ways of being.   We didn't have a trainer, but there was plenty of literature on patriarchy available, and yes, lots of women had published their observations of ways in which men's behavior was oppressive.  We could be open and honest about our lives, and share with each other why we wanted to change.

Later I was part of a group of men who identified as Native Americans.  We were from different traditions and none of us shared a common "tribe."   We lived in Boston, and we knew that we could not be Indians alone.  We also knew that we had work to do as men in relationship to being true to our heritage.  Every man in that weekly conversation (that went on for over a year) agreed that male supremacy was not compatible with the way of our ancestors, and that patriarchy had been learned from our conquerors. 

 Since then I have participated in anti racism trainings, "transformation teams" and other People of Color collectives.  But none of these groups talk about patriarchy anymore.  That is too bad, because I think we still have work to do.  

I don't think we can dismantle racism, unless we work at the same time on gender and class oppression.  And that will be the work of several generations. When I a young activist I was convinced we could finish the work in my lifetime. Oh well.

 

That was thirty five years ago.  I am less defensive about being a male than I was before those discussions, more aware of how destructive male supremacy is, and have observed how deeply imbedded male supremacy is in our society.  But young men don't have these conversations any more, and they do have work to do.

If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn't start with race; I wouldn't start with blackness; I wouldn't start with gender; I wouldn't start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I'm a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.

Oliver Clark, the man who McCain said probably didn't know what Fannie Mae was before the financial crisis (at Tuesday's debate). 

By Tim Wise with additions by Jacqui C. Williams.

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are

looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will

help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin

and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a

personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents,

because "every family has challenges," even as Black and Latino families

with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible,

pathological and arbiters of social decay. 

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like

Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with

you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot

shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a

great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years

like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then

returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller

than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while if you're Black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school, requires it), you are a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn't fit to safeguard American institutions.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people

immediately scared of you.

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an

extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union,

and whose motto is "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or

that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to

come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the

work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to

vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child

labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely

question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college and the fact that she lives close to Russia--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because suddenly your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your

political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a

typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being Black and merely

knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to get to a

hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be viewed as a

great mom whose commitment to her children is unquestionable, and whose "next door neighbor" qualities make her ready to be VP, while if you're a Black candidate for president and you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you're irresponsibly exploiting them.

White privilege is being able to give a 36 minute speech in which you talk

about lipstick and make fun of your opponent, while laying out no

substantive policy positions on any issue at all, and still manage to be

considered a legitimate candidate, while a black person who gives an hour

speech the week before, in which he lays out specific policy proposals on

several issues, is still criticized for being too vague about what he would

do if elected.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose

pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological

principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're Black and friends with a Black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates

America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a

reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a

"trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word

answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question,

or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to

Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen as just an

average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then to Harvard Law, makes you "uppity," who probably looks down on regular folks.

White privilege is being able to graduate near the bottom of your college

class (McCain), or graduate with a C average from Yale (W.) and that's OK,

and you're cut out to be president, but if you're Black and you graduate

near the top of your class from Harvard Law, you can't be trusted to make

good decisions in office.

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she's disfigured

in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you're black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called "terrorist fist bumps."

White privilege is when you can develop a pain-killer addiction, having

obtained your drug of choice illegally like Cindy McCain, go on to beat that

addiction, and everyone praises you for being so strong, while being a Black guy who smoked pot a few times in college and never became an addict means people will wonder if perhaps you still get high, and even ask whether or not you ever sold drugs.

White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be

viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you "dangerously  naive and immature."

White privilege is being able to say that you hate "gooks" and "will always

hate them," and yet, you aren't a racist because, ya know, you were a POW so you're entitled to your hatred, while being black and insisting that black anger about racism is understandable, given the history of your country, makes you a dangerous bigot.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and

experiencing racism and an absent father is apparently among the "lesser

adversities" faced by other politicians, as Sarah Palin explained in her

convention speech. 

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow

someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because a lot of white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, is a problem that white people can't see unless they  overcome their own denial.   White privilege is not seeing your white privilege. 

Recently on an anti racism list serve, a contributor attacked the idea of identity group caucusing, and argued that the idea of 

white privilege was divisive and we should just all get together and talk about our "racism free" world to be.   Many others responded, this was my contribution. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The purpose of identity caucuses has to do with the soul work of transformation.  Native American Indians in the UUA have found that some questions of internalized oppression and the face of racism can best be discussed and ministered to by people who have similar experiences.  The experience of doing anti racism work has shown that identity based caucuses are the best support for people as they ask and process questions relative to this work.

So the idea that caucusing is way to minimize offending people is mistaken. It is a way to help us all learn to talk without defensiveness about how racism oppresses us (it oppresses whites by internalizing habits of domination, which alienates them from their brothers and sisters of color.)   

I will continue to caucus with Native American Indians even after the arrogant preaching of some on this list, because decades of experience has shown me that this is the most effective way to work so that Native Americans are equipped to struggle and flourish in the UUA.    Caucuses of People of Color are also necessary to do similar work, and build unity and we have found these work to promote empowerment.  Those who object, do not seem to object on the basis of experience in the work, rather they make pronouncements like "we can never have unity if people meet separately."    This is ex cathedra, not based on experience.   It comes out of someone's head (ideology) and not out of practice (praxis.)

Those who pronounce that anti-racism work that recognizes relative privilege, designed blindness, and works to unite people with different experiences relative to domination and oppression by forming alliances based on their common interest in overcoming racism is "primarily divisive" and does "great harm."    But decades of praxis belie this declaration.  What experience can be cited to back up his ideological assertion?   I can point to thousands of individuals who have found their voice and become effective workers in our common effort.  Every year we see hundreds more.  

To my white allies, I am your Indian ally..  While we do get together and talk about our common work, I have work to do that must be done with American Indians and People of Color and I support my white allies efforts to get together and do the work that only they can do.  Caucuses do not prevent people from getting together, caucuses empower people with understanding of themselves and the work that they must do, so that when we get together, we can be mutually productive in creating beloved community.  

The Journey Toward Wholeness, the UUA's anti racism effort did teach tens of thousands of Unitarian Universalists about why it is necessary to struggle to overcome white privilege and did encourage people to recognize that this is a struggle and we must form alliances to overcome racism.  But the UUA doesn't have a doctrine, rather this was an analysis based on the best practice of effective anti racist trainers.   

We learned a lot in our work and we made modifications and updated our analysis and improved our training.  This is so different from ideologues who have doctrines to teach.  This is praxis in struggle, we are a learning community.

In a speech by Richard Trumka to the Virginia State Labor Convention, the top ranking labor leader lays it on the line about how racism is harmful to white workers, and that there is no reason not to vote for Barack Obama.  He tells the story of a woman who is under the influence of racism.  For a major labor leader to directly confront racism among white workers in this fashion is a breakthrough.

Paul Rasor in his essay "Liberal Theology and the Challenge of Racism" which is his contribution to Soul Work; anti-racist theologies in dialogue argues that deep in liberal theory there is an antipathy toward community.  Community is seen as restricting the individual and their must be an articulation of rights of the individual, in order to protect the individual from the mob of community. Rasor argues that in order to advance our work of deconstructing racism and other forms of oppression we must renew liberalism to recognize that we are primarily social beings, and it is in supportive community that individuals are able to realize their selves. 

"Our efforts to become genuinely anti-racist are hampered by another liberal ambivalence that history helps to make clear.This ambivalence surfaces as we begin to learn the importance of of community in anti racist work.  Liberals want to create a strong and inclusive community, but we often want to do it without giving up anything, with letting down the barriers we erect around ourselves in the name of individual autonomy.  We wade into te waters of community up to our knees, but we're afraid to let go of the dock and plunge in with our whole bodies. . .

"Our deep seated fear of community, when combined with our tendency toward formalism and abstraction, leads to a deep fear of otherness that we have barely begun to recognize and address.  Fear of the other manifests itself in such liberal ideals as autonomy, self-reliance, and the like and prevents us from seeing we are truelly social selves.

"Liberal political and social theory, too often echoed in liberal religion, tends to protect the individual from the community, from true engagement with the other.  This kind of negative freedom tends to produce a constricted sense of self.  But a love-based understanding of the community would extend the individual and expand the self outward toward the other.  This sort of re-conception of community seems essential if we are serious about our anti racism work."

Unitarian Universalists love to claim that they emerged from the Puritan tradition, and have a long history as liberal Christians.  Understanding Christianity then would seem to me to be a necessary part of understanding Unitarianism and Universalism.  Our religious forebears were participated in the conquest of North America, and sent missionaries among Native American Indians.  We should know something of this history lest we become participants in the denial that characterizes dominant culture response to the American genocide.

George Tinker is an ordained Lutheran minister and on the faculty at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, but he no considers himself a Christian.  He found that he could no longer associate himself with a Church that was so involved in the colonial enterprise of conquest of the Native American Indian peoplles.  Tinker states that 'perhaps the most fearful aspect of the church's complicity in the conquest of the native peoples in the latter sense is that it always happened with the best of intentions.'

Missionary Conquest; the Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide is Tinker's full length treatment of the role of Christian missionaries in the destruction of America's indigenous peoples.  He studeies  four missionaries;  John Eliot, Junipero Serra, Pierre-Jean De Smet, and Henry Benjamin Whipple.  These men are held up to this day as cultural heros for white America.  But the results speak for a different interpretation, what they did was destructive for communities they impacted, what ever the sentiments they proclaimed. 

Tinker examines the policies and the results of those policies and shows how the Christian Church contributed to genocide.

John Eliot, a prominent Puritan, was a full of colonial arrogance, viewing the indigenous culture as inferior to his own, and seeing the Natives as under the influence of the Devil. Junipero Serra's California missions were in an integral part with the oppressive Spanish colonial efforts to enrich Spain.  The French man Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit, who was so self involved in his rational, Catholic theology that he thought nothing of mocking the rituals and practices of the indigenous people who he encountered. . Henry Benjamin Whipple, the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, worked to take the land from the Indians in the northern plains so that they would be forced to adopt the European way of life. 

It is often said that becoming an anti racist involves transformation.  In this series of excerpts from her Soul Work essay "A Struggle To Inhabit By Country" Rebecca Parker applies the theological concept of conversion through engaged action to point to the nature of anti racist transformation.

"A person of faith, seeking out of love and desire for life to inhabit his or her country, needs to be engaged in incarnational social action.  Activism returns one to the actual world as participatory citizen and agent of history. Through activism, compliant absence is transformed into engaged presence.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"This is my country.  Love calls me beyond denial and disassociation.  It is not enough to think of racism as a problem of "human relations" to be cured by me and others like me treating everyone fairly, with respect and without prejudice.  Racism is more.  It is a problem of segregated knowledge, mystification of facts, anesthetization of feeling, exploitation of people and violence against the communion/community of our humanity.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"The habit of living somewhere else rather than here in a constructed "reality" that minimizes my country's history of both violence and beauty and ignores the present facts, keeps me from effectively engaging in the actual world.  I have the sensation of being a disembodied spectator as structures of racism are recreated before my eyes. But involvement in the steps of conversion -- theological reflection, remedial education, soul work, and engaged action -- moves me from enclosure to openness."

Today there are front page articles in the nation's major newspapers, and on the cable news about the census bureaus report that in a few short decades the white majority will no longer be a majority.  Latino/as, African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans and other so called minorities will together constitute the majority, and America will then be a nation of racialized ethnic groups each of which is a minority.   By the middle of this century the white population will be older than the population as a whole, and the United States will have 400 million people (it is a little over 300 million today.) 

The Los Angeles  Times puts it this way "[t]he white population is older and very much centered around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "The future of America is epitomized by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future."

Historically Unitarian was a religion of the white elite, and after the merger the spirit of Unitarianism prevailed over the more inclusive and generous Universalist way of being religiously liberal.  While there have been people of color in Unitarian and Universalist congregations in every stage of our history, those "pioneers in a white denomination" were exceptions to the rule, and did not motivate any concerted effort to reach out and seek to become more ethnically diverse.  

In the late 1960s, because of the work of Unitarian Universalists in the civil rights movement there was an influx of African Americans into our congregations.  These Unitarian Universalists while they saw the promise of religious liberalism also experienced the elitism and complacency of the white majority, and there arose a movement of African Americans and their allies to build Unitarian Universalism in African American communities.  While this movement had wide support, it became divided relative to tactics, and the defenders of the status quo were able to turn back the effort.

Many Unitarian Universalists left the movement and the leadership settled back into self congratulation and complacency.

Again in the 1980s African Americans began to organize and came to the conclusion that it was "internalized racism" that was the main obstacle to Unitarian Universalism becoming more diverse.   In the 1990s Unitarian Universalists resolved at General Assemblies to become more diverse and recognized that they must overcome their own cooperation with systemic racism to accomplish that task.  While much has been done, and the African American initiatives provided an opening for other people of color to find their voice,  we still have much work to do before our congregations reflects the ethnic and racial make up of the nation as a whole

Given my experience with  working with congregations (currently Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California),  I believe that most Unitarian Universalists would support the work to become an anti racist, anti oppressive and multi cultural community if they were given leadership by their minister(s) and lay leadership.  This leadership in turn will need support from the Unitarian Universalist Association providing excellence in programs such as Building The World We Dream About, and Now is the Time!  Leading Congregations Into a Multiracial, Multicultural Future.