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."
Results tagged “Cultural Misappropriation” from People So Bold!
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.
I see an analogy between cross cultural borrowing, and scholarship. If one is writing a paper, one makes an effort to cite the source of an idea, or information. If one quotes, one makes sure to quote exactly. It is not appropriate to distort what another writer has written in order to make polemic. And if the other writer has expressly forbidden the use of his/her words, it is considered unethical to use those words in one's paper. Most writers agree, and vigorously defend their copy-write.
The Hopi do not want any one using their ceremonies. The Cherokee say you are welcome to incorporate some of practices, but do it with respect. The Reform Jews say learn from us, but do not do our ceremonies out of context. Orthodox and Conservative Jews are insulted by non Jews doing Jewish things.
At the Super Bowl 2005 there was a program of dancers in what appeared to be native Americans fashion, doing a modern dance, dressed in totally green lycra...save for the head dresses, that is an example of distortion and misuse of Native cultural ways .
This is a summer rerun from a post of November 2005
Does Hafidha Sofia Acuay see something that many of us have been trained not to see?
She experiences our worship is "a show." In a post in which the presenting problem is an incident of "cultural appropriation" there she also shares an insight into worship, and what she says about worship is important for us to see as well. (I will write about her insights relative to cultural appropriation (and misappropriation) at another time.)
At first I found her suggestion that Unitarian Universalist worship was constructed as entertainment disturbing. I have defended the idea of congregation as "worshipping community" so many times to the skeptics and rationalists that I have the arguments down pat - we come together to give expression those values we hold in common, to aspire to that which is worthy. I have preached that sermon! I have explained that worship is shaping worth ( a usage idiomatic to Old English.)
Theology arises from embodied beings, and reflects personal perspectives and experiences. So two observations, then I will explain why I think she is seeing something that we need to look at.
1. Personally I am accustomed to the way we have done worship. I strive to create worship services that have coherence. So does my spouse, The Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley but she has different approach than I do. So when we talk about our upcoming worship services together we are challenged to explain why we use certain elements and why we arrange them as we do. We do not think of the format we use as consisting of slots to fill, but rather I see the whole service as consisting of interrelated parts. Still, after the order of service has been constructed for a particular congregation and has been used with that congregation for a long time, I know I fall into a routine. I start with the form that has become our worship format. I search for opening words, or I write them. I write my prayerful meditation. I think about readings, and how the offering fits into the whole. Those who join in worship in churches I have served have told me that it "all works together." But I am sure many young adults find my worship services somewhat old fashioned, or as one observed "contemporary content trapped in a Protestant form."
2. Hafidha's specific observations arise out of her experiences with a committee's attempt to create a ceremonial occasion in a big ugly convention hall. That space wasn't designed for the kind of worship that we do. Our worship culture was developed to be done in Protestant meeting houses, and its function was to teach a lesson. We have expanded our definition of worship to include various seasonal celebrations and community building rituals, but most people continue to see the sermon as a teaching event, framed by edifying music and readings. Most of the clergy at this point in our history will offer public prayer, and many lay people find public prayers and meditative readings meaningful, but it would be over the top to assert that Unitarian Universalists come to church to pray together. A few might do that, but most people indicate that they come to be with their community as they ponder a theme, or topic together. They want good music and they would think it is a good thing when the music works with the theme. That is our practice as "worshipping communities."
Many of our congregations meet in halls and auditoriums that facilitate performances for audiences rather than congregational engagement in shaping community worth, or praising God, or re-creating the cosmos or whatever your idea of the purpose of common worship may be. But we are not always sensitive to the space. Appropriate activity given the space is one of those lessons we learn from experience. What works in a chapel doesn't work in a cathedral, we can't do Quaker silent worship in a convention hall, nor can we do Protestant meeting house worship in one either.
For me, and for many others who plan worship, we think of worship as planned event that happens in a certain space, and at a certain time. I dare say this assumption Hafidha is questioning. She writes:
[I] personally loathe to plan worships. You must know that I have never known Muslims to "plan" worships; we got together and we prayed, basta!
and then again she describes a worship service she helped lead at an anti racist training:
I'm a strong believer in spirituality, but I hate the idea of telling people that it's time to feel holy now. My co-trainer, Toph, felt the same way I did, yet we managed to put together two very decent worships, one of which actually made me cry. But what?! We didn't do anything! The youth and the sponsors present brought their spirits into that space and made it powerful and worshipful. I was in awe that first night - of them and the community they created. I do not think we would have had the same conference without that.
The youth experienced a ritualized interaction that was personally transformative, I doubt whether the space was designed for worship, and I suppose that the time was whenever it was convenient for the participants. Our tradition has taught us to spend a lot of money to build sanctuaries designed for Protestant worship with Unitarian Universalist content that will be filled with people for an couple of hours once a week. The participants in our services are listeners, singers, and again listeners, save for silent prayers and ritualized sharing. The service that Hafidha and Toph "planned" was spatially transient and temporally ad hoc and open to facilitate participant interaction. The clergy, whether that clergy is Unitarian Universalist, mainstream Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish - because they have been narrowly trained in worship arts - experience such youth services as formless and too dependent on spontaneity. For the youth and young adults that may be a feature, rather than a fault. I often have this conversation with classically trained musicians, who argue that jazz is too free form, too ad hoc, too form less. Can an artist trained in one musical discipline appreciate an art that breaks out and defies the forms and conventions of that discipline? Can a liturgist? Yes, but it requires being comfortable with your own embodied self, and then transcending its limitations to appreciate the other point of view.
As I struggled with Hafidha's observation, it prompted me to ask these questions
First, is the form of worship that we continue in most Unitarian Universalist congregations a product of a different time and a different social set up?
Second, has society changed in such a way that the way our spiritual ancestors organized "worshipping communities" will become increasingly irrelevant to the way that new generations will "support each other in spiritual growth" and build covenant community?
And finally, what does it mean to be a worshipping community in a networked and high tech world?
I will continue these probings in future postings. This is the second essay on this subject, the first is here.
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Cultural appropriation is when the people of one culture find some activity or artifact of another culture useful and adopts that activity or artifact into their own culture.
This may or may not be ethical. For example, the Hopi consider their religious ceremonies to be sacred, and would prefer that others not appropriate them. We "misappropriate"
when we take something that another people have stated is not available for appropriation, even if we do not hear their protests. Other Native American Nations believe that it is a good thing when European background Americans learn from Native peoples. But they do not want to see what is borrowed misused, or distorted.
I found this quote that may guide our appropriations:
Our first task in approaching another people,
another culture is to take off our shoes,
for the place we are approaching is holy.
Else we find our ourselves treading on another's dream.
More serious still, we may forget that God was there before our arrival.
"And this day shall become a memorial for you, and you shall observe it as a festival for the LORD, for your generations, as an eternal decree shall you observe it. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall remove the leaven from your homes ... you shall guard the unleavened bread, because on this very day I will take you out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day for your generations as an eternal decree. - Exodus 12:14-17
Religions mark rituals of reference. remembering events that define the identity of the people. Often these rituals of reference mark memories of suffering, enslavement, humiliation, and then liberation and renewal. Christianity has the Passion which is answered by the Resurrection marked by Good Friday and Easter. Judaism has an ancient memory of slavery and a subsequent passing over to freedom, ritually celebrated at Passover. Judaism returns to this theme again and again in other rituals of reference such as Purim and Chanukah.
Many Native American communities recall the long marches of forced removals with rituals of reference. It is a scandal among indigenous peoples that dominant culture spiritual seekers come to celebrate Native American spirituality, because they seem in such a rush to be one with nature, and one with the dance, but clueless about the suffering and brokenness that the rituals seek to address.
The spirituals of the African American people arose to address terror and degradation. Slavery and after emancipation Lynch Law are the context for these songs of freedom. When religious liberals sing these songs, what suffering are they addressing? When we sing that we will let our light shine, what long nights of terror are we defying. What horrors do we wish to overcome? If we sing these songs with out deep congregational reflection on the context of their origins, and recognition that for the community of origin they are rituals of reference are we not celebrating cheap grace?
When questions of cultural misappropriation are raised around the singing of African American spirituals, it is not simply a concern that "white people don't clap on the right beat" or "y'all don't sing with gusto and passion" - the concern is taking a song that has context in community memories and represents a ritual of reference in the African American community, and seems to be used for some other purpose in the liberal congregation. Much of the writing on this subject by dominant culture ministers and musicians appears to be defensive and more concerned with rights, than with responsibilities.
Appropriate use requires communicating the context under which the song arose and the meaning in depth for the community of origin. In that context that the singing of such music would contribute toward our common struggle for wholeness and right relations.
I see an analogy between cross cultural borrowing, and scholarship. If one is writing a paper, one makes an effort to cite the source of an idea, or information. If one quotes, one makes sure to quote exactly. It is not appropriate to distort what another writer has written in order to make polemic. And if the other writer has expressly forbidden the use of his/her words, it is considered unethical to use those words in one's paper.
Most writers agree, and vigerously defend their copywrite.
The Hopi do not want any one using their ceremonies. The Cherokee say you are welcome to use our stuff, but do it with respect. The Reform Jews say learn from us, but do not do our ceremonies our of context. Orthodox and Conservative have other concerns.
At the superbowl last year had what appeared to be native Americans dressed, doing a modern dance, dressed in totally green lycra... that is an example of distortion and misuse of Native cultural ways .
