Overcoming Violence and War: August 2006 Archives

Every now and then Unitarian Universalists engage in a hairsplitting argument, is it classism, or is it racism?  This is related to that other non productive distinction making argument, does the oppression of poor women stem from class or patriarchy?  Round and round the argument goes, and the liberals can't decide which oppression is more oppressing for y'all poor folks.

In the United States, race oppression has always been part of the domination system and related to class oppression.  The social system that gave rise to both class oppression and race oppression was and is patriarchal.  That social system has historically privileged heterosexuals, and institutionalized a double standard relative to propertied class male conduct and female conduct, as a result it sexualized the relation of propertied classes to the oppressed non-propertied classes.

Class oppression and gender  oppression are both pillars of the dominant power elite within the social system.  It is absurd to reduce one to the other, or to separate one from the other.  Attempts of feminists of the dominant and aspiring classes to combat "sexism" without dealing with class has trivialized feminism, so that today we have privileged women who actually believe the slogan "you have come a long way baby" - and act on such  narcissism in a society where African American and Native American women see their men humiliated and their families destroyed -and rationalize this betrayal by the claim that such racialized class violence are not "women's issues."

So what about race and class?  The form of racial oppression that has become institutionalized in the United States arose out of the breakdown of the old system of class oppression in the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century.  To make a long, and complex story short and simple, the English arrived with a laws about servitude that had served them well across the pond.  The English considered themselves to be a race, different and hostile to the Irish race (and other Europeans as well.)  The psychological and cultural differences between the English and other peoples were explained by "blood" rather than enculturation.

Concepts of race as applied by the English elites to the Irish was to consider the Irish to be "savage" and incapable of civilization, but when the English encountered the Africans and the indigenous Americans these people were considered even more savage than the Irish.  In Virginia in the 1670s, the "excluded" of the colony (including African and Irish) formed alliance (against the Indians in the case of Bacon's Rebellion) and engaged in resistance and revolt against the plantation owners.  The revolt was suppressed by violence and the elite began to create a new system of rule to prevent this alliance from ever happening again.  The concept of Whiteness was invented and institualized in the decades that followed.  In the new racist order the Irish (and poor English) were still poor and oppressed, but now they were "racially" the same as the planters.  They were to consider themselves superior to the African descended peoples and to be enemies of the indigenous peoples as well.  Subsequent immigrations of Europeans reveal the same patterns, the Swedes were called "honkies" by the Anglos, but they learned English and became white.  The peoples from southern and eastern Europe were racially oppressed and then made white through assimilation as well.  Whiteness in contemporary America means "not colored" and "not racially oppressed" but for many people of European descent that has come at the price of forgetting ones distinct heritage.

(As a side note. In recent years Jews have become white, and white folks now talk about Judaism being a religion and not a race!  Since "race" is an invention of oppression, what that means is that the Jews are no longer to be racially oppressed (but they are to be religiously discriminated against!))

Race and class in the United States have functioned together to oppress the majority of the people.  The Irish were victims of racial oppression when they were oppressed as another race, and another form of racial oppression continued when they were seduced into giving up being Irish for "whiteness." The oppression of ancestor denial!  The Africans were turned into slaves (a form of class oppression) and after the end of slavery a caste system was established that perpetuated a division between "white" and "colored" working people.  Sharecropping was a class oppression but the white sharecroppers were lynchers and the Black sharecroppers were lychees.  In a twentieth century steel mill, the workers were all oppressed as "proletarians," but "Blacks" were janitors and laborers, and "Whites" operated the machines.

It can be argued that the Native American peoples were victims of race oppression but not class oppression.  That is true as long as "Natives" remained in their own distinct communities and those communities were self sufficient.  But most  people who identify as "Native" live outside of the surviving "Indian communities" today,  and they experience racism and class oppression and are victims of patriarchy as well.*  "Natives" not living in "Indian communities" are not counted by the administrators of the conquest (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) as not being "Native" at all, and yet they are subject to impoverishment and violence by racist institutions.

It does not make sense to a person of color who has experienced oppression to participate in arguments with "white identified"  liberals about whether a particular incident was a result of race, class, culture or patriarchy.  Incidents happen, and they happen within a context of a racialized class society that is patriarchal.  The idea that one can distinguish a classist incident from a racist incident from a sexist incident is to reduce these oppressions to bad attitudes, rather than to see them as interrelated forms of the same domination system.

Now my answer to the "white identified" liberal is not the one the UUA approved anti racist training program has taught us.  Make a conscious choice to overcome the formation process that has taught you to be white!   Become a human being of European heritage if you will.  Whiteness was and is a racist identity.ˆš  Your skin color, mortgage and diploma do not make you part of the elite, despite your illusions.  Join the human race and join with the struggle to  help end all forms of oppression, since they diminish all who would be human. If you have some relative privilege, use that power for the benefit of all.  Don't engage in narcissistic guilt about your "whiteness," or denial about your power.  It is our way of relating to each other that perpetuates both the elites and their ways of dividing us.  Each of us are either part of the solution, or we are part of the problem.

*For example.  I cannot live life as a Cherokee, without living as a gendered person in gender equality and interrelationship.  To live in a patriarchal society is to experience oppression racially, culturally and as a man, because the demands of patriarchy are foreign to my ancestors ways of being men and women.  Thus given the linked nature of oppressions, I am oppressed by this culture's "sexism" and cultural racism.    Now that is not feminist orthodoxy, but that is why people of color reject feminist orthodoxy as being more about privileged white women than it is about being liberated yet gendered human beings.

ˆš I am an anti racist activist and was before the UUA training programs were invented.  I have never figured out this question: what is an white ally?

Doesn't the notion of "ally" imply that anti racism is something people of color do and "white" people help them do it?  Ten years of the UUA anti racism program and forty years of anti racist activism, and I still think that everyone must struggle to overcome this destructive and divisive social construction together.  But the rhetoric of anti racism in my religious community has been shaped by an analysis that sees no link between class and race, and seems to think the category "white people" designates an objective reality rather than a social construction with a history.

I continue to strive toward clarity.

What is a white anti racist?  Doesn't a commitment and years of activism to realize that commitment to anti racism undermine one's whiteness?  Just asking.

Before Bill Sinkford said no to orthodoxy,  just asking such a question was to invite stonewalling  with formulas from a trainer.  Privilege = class, and Power + prejudice = racism.  That was supposed to be an analysis!  And what do you say about the Latino housekeeper who is rapped by her African American corporate manager macho guy employer? Is she a victim of race, class, or sexism?  My answer, she is victim of all the above and so is he.

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

Quotations out of context by the Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr(1892-1971) are often employed by neo-conservatives to justify their foreign policy of violence and great power hegemony. But Niebuhr was sharply critical of nationalism and an advocate of genuine democracy, which meant that people would participate in making the decisions that affect their lives. Todays neo conservatives use the words democracy and freedom as code words for rule by the corporations and trade without restrictions such as labor standards and ecological safeguards. And Niebuhr spoke out against the great power chauvinism of the United States and the tendency of American Protestants to justify this misuse of power. Niebuhr wrote:

If the ministers of our great urban churches become again the simple priests and chaplains of this American idolatry, subtly compounded with a few stray Christian emphases, they will merely add one more dismal proof in the pages of history that a religiously sanctified self-idolatry is more grievous than its secular variety. This is how the gospel becomes a salt that has lost its savor.

The gospel cannot be preached with truth and power if it does not challenge the pretensions and pride, not only of individuals, but of nations, cultures, civilizations, economic and political systems. The good fortune of America and its power place it under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation. If there is no power and grace in the Christian church "to bring down every high thing which exalteth itself against the knowledge of God," the church becomes not merely useless but dangerous.

We Protestants speak critical words about the idolatrous pretensions of the Roman Church. But some of these pretensions are actually more plausible than this miserable identification of the "laws of God" with a particular form of democracy....

Christianity and Society, Spring 1950, in Love and Justice, p. 97.

Theologian David Ray Griffin writes:

Like all empires, the Roman Empire was brutal.  Those territories already subjugated were kept in line by producing "awe and terror" in their peoples.  Rome practiced what we would today call "state terror."  Although states today lie to restrict the term terrorism to the nonstate variety-that variety is always far less deadly than state-sponsored terrorism. 

Rome practiced terror not because Romans were sadistic but because terrorism was deemed effective.  What Rome cared about most  was what it called honor. . .

We can understand this concept of "honor" because it is the same thing the United States called "credibility."  Long after it became clear that America's war in Vietnam was a disastrous mistake, countless political and military leaders argued year after year that we could not leave, because we would lose "credibility."  And so we continued to lose tens of thousands of American soldiers and kill hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people, year after year, all for the sake of maintaining our credibility."

So our leaders engage in unrestrained violence in our name all for the sake of maintaining their image as people who will stick to their policy despite all evidence that it has failed?  That doesn't seem mature or rational does it?

Have we have redefined or concept of "leaders" from people who lead according to a vision of maximizing human potential and benefit, to those who avoid responsibility for their concrete actions, but seek instead to maintain an image of strength by always being ready to inflict violence.  That is a mentality too common among adolescent males!

As I probe the problem of abuse of power the more I find that our theological social ethics may need to be informed by the techniques developed for the classroom management of unruly teenagers, bullies in particular. 

Daniel Gilbert writes:

Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother's lap and my brother and I had what we called "the wayback" all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we'd lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we'd fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. "But he hit me first," one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, "But he hit me harder."

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, "He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral - unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words - like "retaliation" and "retribution" and "revenge" - whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.
That's why participants in every one of the globe's intractable conflicts - from Ireland to the Middle East - offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people's actions as the causes of what came later."


Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of Stumbling on Happiness.  The above is an extract from a larger article  describing research on the cyclical nature of conflict. New York Times, July 24,2006

What is adult religious education?  Many of our programs seem like watered down college courses, we have UU history courses and Bible study courses.  Some of our programs are designed to enable congregational transformation, such as Weaving the Fabric of Diversity, or Welcoming Congregation.  I have taught Spiritual Autobiography Courses, and quite a few new UU workshops.    I think I have taught Adult RE on and off for forty years, beginning as a young adult, then a lay leader, and more recently as a clergy person.
Most adults want education that helps them solve pressing problems in their life, and so while there are people who want to study UU history, and some others who want to take a course writing a sermon, the married couples with children don't come out for adult religious education classes.  It isn't a high priority for them.  So my students have been mainly young adults, and older single adults, with a few empty nesters.  But when I have co-taught marriage enrichment workshops, the committed couples made arrangements to attend.  It was so important to them, that they organized child care, or in one case the church provided child care. 
But where to find a couples enrichment program aimed at Unitarian Universalists that functioned to build both relational skills and spiritual values.  We have a new curriculum (in field test stage) and it is downloadable from the UUA Web Site.  It is designed to be inclusive of all couples, it does not assume marriage or holy union or other formal commitment.  I haven't fully examined it yet, but I will.  I am impressed with what I have looked at. 
  Marjorie and I have received training and were certified by the Association for Couple's Enrichment and worked with a peer group of trainers associated with Andover Newton Theological School.  It will be good to see a Unitarian Universalist resource for this work.
From the web site describing the new curriculum: 
Principled Commitment [has been designed to] enhance and support long-term, committed relationships that reflect the values of Unitarian Universalist Principles. Unitarian Universalist congregations can provide a nurturing environment for interpersonal relationships, and our basic Principles provide an excellent framework to support and enrich marriages and other blessed unions between loving partners.
Principled Commitment seeks to deepen participants' ethical, spiritual, faith, and Unitarian Universalist identity development. This is accomplished through the theme and activities of each workshop. In addition, each workshop includes a guided meditation and suggested readings from Singing the Living Tradition. Facilitators are welcome to incorporate meditations and readings from other sources or to invite workshop participants to share poems and readings relating to each workshop's theme.

On August 7, 1964,  after an alleged incident with a North Vietnam gun boat  the Congress of the United States passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution:

The resolution gave President Lyndon Johnson broad powers in dealing with North Vietnam, including sending U.S. troops.  News coverage relied almost entirely on official U.S. government sources so Americans assumed the North had launched an unprovoked attack. Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK), provided the only "no" votes. (peacebutton.info)

The incident never occurred. The President lied to the people of the United States. *

What concerns me is the liberal's capacity to forget the lessons of history.  People continue to experience shock and outrage that Bush lied about Iraq's nuclear weapon's program.  The Weapon of Mass Destruction rationale was a hoax, and that hoax was exposed by the weapon's inspectors before the invasion - Bush, Rice and Powell's lies were demolished by solid evidence by scores of independent sources.  It seems to me that if one is outraged now that may indicate that you refused to look at the evidence before the invasion.

But what concerns me is that after the liberal becomes outraged, "we were lied to",  they go in search of a Democrat that will replace him.  Lying to the citizenry is a characteristic of the entire political culture.  We must go beyond consumer politics, we must stop enabling a process by which "we chose" a pre selected candidate who tells us the lies we want to hear during his (or her) campaign.  To learn from history is to demand accountability,  to engage critically and assume that they are lying until they prove to you that they care about truth.

The Tonkin Gulf resolution was passed by Congress 42 years ago, the United States sent teen agers into Vietnam and they came back in body bags.  I knew too many of those soldiers to forgive and forget.  They were misused by a corrupt political process.  If we would only learn from history we would learn that "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely." The arrogance of Presidents is because of the power we give them with no accountability, and the result has been absolute corruption.  Those envisioned this federal republic were afraid that that would happen, and they tried to build checks and balances into the structure of the republic.  But they also assumed an informed and critical citizenry.  Perhaps we need to reconsider the building blocks of procedural democracy in our times, how can we hold power accountable?  A liberal religious political theology must take our experience with politicians that distort the truth seriously.    To be a prophetic religion we must address the corruption of our time.

*For those who believe lying to mislead people into supporting a war is a characteristic of the Republicans, Johnson was a Democrat.  We can document the lies of Carter and Clinton to justify military misadventures as well.  Lying to the public is a bi-partisan activity. Based on long observation of the American Presidents, Native Americans  would observe that lying seems to be part of the job description.  Now some citizens might resist the Native claim, even though the facts show deliberate falsehoods were spoken by President after President,  those who identify as "white"  seem to think that the "savages" weren't real Americans.

The atomic bomb named "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 bomber, at 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945. This watch was on the person of one of the victims.

Christians speak of the crucifixion of the rabbi Jesus as a turning point in history. I am more of an Easter man myself, but I agree. Something old ended, something new came into being.

(Survivors watch was stopped at moment of impact.)


I would only add, history has a way of turning, making radical turns. Once it was possible to speak of democracy versus totalitarianism, and science versus superstition. After Hiroshima, such ideas no longer had the clarity and power that they once held.

I wrote this last year but what I wrote is worth saying once more

Martin Luther King recounted his theological journey to a realistic pro peace stance. He recounts his encounter with the works of Niebuhr who had developed an rationale for religious people to utilize violence in pursuit of their perceived moral ends. King who was not an absolute pacifist came to recognize that pursuing peace requires a commitment to non violent ends and a preference for non violent means. He supported the use appropriate force by police both in civil society and in keeping peace by international bodies.

Given the misuse of Niebuhr to justify pre-emptive violence, let us look at King's critique of Niebuhr and begin to construct a political theology for world community that covenants to pursue peace and justice. Reinhold Niebhur's later writings actually provide some important building blocks for constructing a program for peace.

But this is about King's struggle with Niebhur's thoughts that violence and non violence were both problematic. King writes:

But my intellectual odyssey to nonviolence did not end here. During my last year in theological school, I began to read the works of Reinhold Niebuhr. The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr's passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me, and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote.

About this time I read Niebuhr's critique of the pacifist position. Niebuhr had himself once been a member of the pacifist ranks. For several years, he had been national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.* His break with pacifism came in the early thirties, and the first full statement of his criticism of pacifism was in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Here he argued that there was no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance. The social consequences of the two methods were different, he contended, but the differences were in degree rather than kind. Later Niebuhr began emphasizing the irresponsibility of relying on nonviolent resistance when there was no ground for believing that it would be successful in preventing the spread of totalitarian tyranny. It could only be successful, he argued, if the groups against whom the resistance was taking place had some degree of moral conscience, as was the case in Gandhi's struggle against the British. Niebuhr's ultimate rejection of pacifism was based primarily on the doctrine of man. He argued that pacifism failed to do justice to the reformation doctrine of justification by faith, substituting for it a sectarian perfectionism which believes "that divine grace actually lifts man out of the sinful contradictions of history and establishes him above the sins of the world."

At first, Niebuhr's critique of pacifism left me in a state of confusion. As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position. For instance, many of his statements revealed that he interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion. My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.

In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr's philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr's thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man=s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man=s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.

Many pacifists, I felt, failed to see this. All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness. It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.

The next stage of my intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence came during my doctoral studies at Boston University. Here I had the opportunity to talk to many exponents of nonviolence, both students and visitors to the campus. Boston University School of Theology, under the influence of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allen Knight Chalmers, had a deep sympathy for pacifism. Both Dean Muelder and Dr. Chalmers had a passion for social justice that stemmed, not from a superficial optimism, but from a deep faith in the possibilities of human beings when they allowed themselves to become co-workers with God. It was at Boston University that I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man's sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace.