Thank you to all who contributed comments to Breaking the Rules. I believe that the encounter between the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and the Reverend Martha Niebanck's pickup chorus at Starr Island back in 1997 illustrates the spiritual practice that we have come to call "Staying at the Table." The practice involves patiently challenging the assumptions of the dominant culture by inviting a cross cultural conversation based on emphatic engagement. (Breaking the Rules is a selection of a sermon by Martha Niebanck.)
Staying at the table involves self awareness for those engaged in confronting oppressive social constructions because if one is to practice it one must accept that many dominant culture folks will reject the opportunity to discuss their experience and their assumptions and refuse to get in touch with their own privilege and their own familiar and personal experience of oppression. And for many who experience systemic oppression, whether that oppression is patriarchy, racism, cultural domination, imperialism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism or some other form of oppression to stay at the table seems to invite more insults and misunderstanding. Better leave the conversation and find some like minded people to share in the strength of one's own kind.
(In plain English, the invitation to deep conversation may be rejected in a less than courteous manner, so why take a chance? Because we can not escape oppression, we can only overcome it.)
Staying at the Table is personally difficult, that why it is a spiritual discipline. Still if we are to overcome racism and cultural domination we must stay engaged and invite transformation.
Gandhi read Jesus and discovered what many others have discovered, a form of engagement with violence based not on returning violence or fleeing the violator, but on loving resistance. I believe staying at the table involves a similar stance.
How different this approach is from some of the discussion of cultural misappropriation that I hear and read from my fellow Unitarian Universalists. On the one hand we have the cosmopolitans, who argue that music is music and African Americans don't own African American music. They the cosmopolitans can sing it because it is "human expression" and they are human and by singing they expand their playlist and "celebrate their diversity." On the other hand we have the censors, which argue that under no circumstance can dominant culture folk sing songs of the cultures of the oppressed without engaging in oppression.
Clearly Marjorie's invitation to Martha's group was to appropriate consciously and emphatically. But to make that invitation required the practice of staying at the table despite the protests of those who dismissed her concern as "politically correct" and "denying me a good time of just singing."
Against Racism and Oppression: December 2006 Archives
A 1997 sermon by Martha Niebanck recalls Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley:
Breaking social rules, sometimes just even talking about our culture and the meanings of what we say and do takes courage. I had an experience this summer at Star Island that brought this message home. I still haven't learned all there is to learn from the experience.
Two weeks before I went to Star Island for a week with religious educators I was driving home from the Doolittle Home one Friday and went into Building 19. That's my Friday afternoon ritual. I saw a CD of Sweet Honey in the Rock, called Sacred Grounds and played it when I arrived home. The first song, "I Remember, I Believe" left me in tears the first time I heard it. I couldn't explain it but I was drawn to that song. I played it again and again for the next two weeks, imagining getting a singing group together to sing it for the talent show. In my past years at Star Island, I had always waited to be invited to sing with other people, so to initiate a singing group was new for me. I wasn't sure of the rules, the conventions involved in inviting singers, of ignoring the choir director, of getting men and women to sing together instead of the usual women's singing group. I didn't think about it consciously, but the sense that I was in new social territory gave me a vague uneasiness.
The theme speaker that week was the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatly, an African-American woman who is the affiliate minister at the Community Church in New York. She spoke each morning about the challenges of making our communities diverse. She spoke about the need for African Americans to define and control their own culture rather than to simply disappear into the white-western culture. What she said wasn't new to me but I got more and more uncomfortable about singing a Gospel tune in her presence. I proceeded with asking people to sing and one night, over dinner, I asked Marjorie to sing. She told me that she had taken lessons with Sweet Honey and that she might sing with us if she had the time. I felt encouraged to get the group together, assuming that Marjorie would teach us to sing it authentically. I thought to myself , "She would give it soul."
I got a group together, men and women, and we practiced, and we decided we were good enough to be in the musicale. I was learning how things got done in this new cultural context of Star Island. Marjorie wasn't able to join us until our very last rehearsal. She slowly walked into the room and asked a question. "How do you understand yourselves to be singing these words."
I swallowed hard, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable and spoke about the theology of remembering and believing. I looked her in the eye and said, " I believe that I can, by singing this song, learn in my body the kind of courage and faith of the African Americans who have survived slavery." When I said those words I thought of myself as honoring those people and their courage. She didn't overtly respond with approval or disapproval but instead asked each person for their understanding. One man walked out of the room without a word, the others began to talk all at once, defensiveness in their tone. I heard my own defensiveness in my voice that sounded aggressive and pointed and realized that we were being forced to have a real conversation about something uncomfortable. Until Marjorie had the courage to break the rule of silence, we had practiced good manners and kept quiet about our understanding of how a group of Euro-Americans could sing this song with any authority of their own experience. In our discussion we learned that each of us had a sense of our own slavery or an oppression that a family member had endured.
But I make it all sound clear in my telling, when it was not clear in the moment. Some folks felt that we were being told not to sing the song. Some folks thought Marjorie was accusing us of being racist. There was anger and frustration and tears. The man who left told me," I come to Star Island to get away from arguments. I am in charge of how I spend my time and I didn't want to spend my precious hours fighting-even if it was a good fight. I just wanted to sing." Marjorie stood her ground, even as the second member fled the room, she insisted that we needed to talk rather than to keep silent. She insisted on breaking the rule of polite silence we had been practicing. She insisted on breaking the social convention that allowed us to borrow African American culture and use it for our own, undiscussed purposes.
Our conversation did not resolve itself but we agreed to sing anyway. I promised to introduce our singing with a statement that allowed the audience into our discussion. I said, " We are singing a song tonight that comes out of the suffering of slavery. It took us a week to have a discussion about how we have the right to sing it. We are doing the work of diversity that we came to Star to learn and we ask that you hear us sing and know that it is a prayer for our healing.
I am still in the process of learning from my experience at Star this summer. Today I am aware of the silencing oppression of good manners -the fear of making a fuss, going along with the status quo, in the service of behaving "properly." Like the hemorrhaging woman we are expected to stay in the privacy of our homes if we are bleeding.
The Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley taught me something about challenging the etiquette of silence.
The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations announces the creation of The Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley Fund.
"This fund will be used to support Unitarian Universalist congregations and their lay and ordained leaders who are committed to the transformative work of creating inclusive multicultural communities of the spirit."
The UUA web page that is devoted to this fund has information about credit card contributions, snail mail contributions and even transfers of stocks and bonds to the fund.
Grants from the fund will be made with the approval of the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and members of the Bowens-Wheatley family.
For tax purposes: The UUA is a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax-exempt I.D. number is 04-210-3733. Your donation to the Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley Fund qualifies as a tax deductible charitable gift. Please consult your financial and tax advisors regarding your particular circumstances.
"I continue to be nurtured by my ministerial colleagues, but when I go into many of our congregations, at a cultural level, it often feels like all the healthy juices in my body are being drained out of me.
What continues to challenge my personal faith is wondering whether I will ever see the day when our religious movement moves beyond its Eurocentric norms. We would probably all agree that a life of faith cannot be nurtured in the face of endemic evil. But it's more difficult to see that it is also impossible for many people from non-European heritage to be nurtured by an upper middle class Euro-centric norm blessed by self-satisfaction.
Someday, I'm going to update W.E.B. DuBois' book, "The Ways of White Folks," that will focus on the cost of Euro-centrism and of cultural indifference in a multicultural society."
From the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
address to the Birmingham Minister's Convocation 2002
A DRUUM meeting in San Diego, California
