Sunday, January 15, 2017

A People of Integrity: Building an Anti-Racist Identity


“A People of Integrity: Building an Anti-Racist Identity”
Rev. Laura Bogle
Sermon delivered January 17, 2016

Reading from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:  (1963)
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”


Just as King’s letter from a Birmingham jail had a specific audience in mind (white moderates, especially white clergy, during the campaign for voting rights in Alabama), so does my sermon today.
As a white person I am speaking today to other white people.

I begin with a story, and I want to go back in history farther than Dr. King’s time.
It was December 1848 and a married couple, Ellen and William Craft, who had been enslaved in Georgia, made their way through the dangerous paths 1,000 miles north, towards their freedom, with help along the way from Quaker abolitionists and free blacks running the Underground Railroad.   When they got to Boston, they found work and they found a home, and they eventually found a church at the Unitarian congregation led by Rev. Theodore Parker, one of the most prominent clergy in the United States at the time.

A couple of years later, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which not only provided for returning people who had escaped slavery to masters who had owned them in the south, but it actually required citizens in the North to aid in their capture.  Officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway were liable for a fine of up to $1000 (a huge sum of money in those days).  Any private citizen found to be aiding a fugitive also risked six months in jail and a $1000 fine.

Well, Theodore Parker was one of the folks who began to organize a Vigilance Committee in Boston, designed to protect "the colored inhabitants of Boston from any invasion of their rights."  These were people who were prepared to break this law that forced citizens in states where slavery had been abolished to still participate in what they saw was evil.  Not a month after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, slave-catchers from Georgia came to Boston to find the Crafts and bring them back.  The Vigilance Committee went into action and Theodore Parker provided sanctuary to Ellen in his own home.  The story goes that he kept a loaded pistol in his study at the ready.
He wrote:
“This [Fugitive Slave] law has brought us into the most intimate connection with the sin of slavery. I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnapper. Yes, gentlemen, I have been obliged to do that; and then to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night. …This I have done in Boston; in the middle of the nineteenth century; been obliged to do it to defend the [innocent] members of my own church, women as well as men!"

In the end, Parker and the Vigilance Committee were successful in keeping the Crafts from being re-captured.  In order to ensure their safety, they were sent to England where slavery had been abolished, with resources to start a new life.

Furious about this new law, Parker wrote to the President of the United States who had signed it into law and was enforcing it.  Anyone happen to know who it was in 1850?  Millard Fillmore.  Anyone know what religion Millard Fillmore claimed?  He was also a Unitarian. Fillmore was anti-slavery, but he was a moderate and believed in compromise, believed he had to uphold the law of the land in order to preserve the Union.

Theodore Parker didn’t live to see the end of slavery in the United States.  But he, along with many others, white and black, were part of organizing bravely for its end.  (story adapted from resources at uua.org and danielharper.org)

I tell you this story today because it helps me to think about having both these two legacies as part of
my Unitarian heritage, and as part of my heritage as a white person living in the United States.
I, we, have inherited both the legacy of Theodore Parker and other prophetic witnesses through the generations who have defied the law, defied the rules of society, in service of what Parker called “the eternal law of God.”

And we have inherited the legacy of Millard Fillmore, and other white moderates, who have sought to keep order, often at the expense of justice.
Just as I know I also in my own family tree have members who sided with the confederacy and members who sided with the union.  Members who owned slaves, and members who did not and worked for its end.

My question is how we, white people today, hold this true, complex history – and the much longer history that surrounds it—with integrity.

On the surface, to be white in this country means a certain basic, uncomplicated thing. Something that those of us who are white don’t really have to think about.  Many of us, myself included, walk through the world often unaware of the privileges that pave our way.

For others of us as we come to consciousness about the disparities in treatment between white folks and people of color, whiteness has become something that some of us have grown to be ashamed of or at the very least, uncomfortable with.

Others of us, UUs especially, want just to affirm our deeply held belief that all people are born with inherent worth and dignity, and skin color has nothing to do it.  We wish to be colorblind and attempt to live our individual lives that way.  To say simply, ALL lives matter.

Well, I do believe that all lives matter.  But history is important.  Social context is important.  We may be born with that fundamental sacredness, but we are also born into history and into systems and societies.  We are born with that history marking us.

How do I, a white person in 2016, grapple with how I came to be defined as white in the first place?   How is it that peoples from diverse places in Europe became something called “white”—people from England, France, Germany, Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, Poland, Spain and eventually the Irish, Italians and Eastern European Jews all gave up something to become “white.”  Which really meant not “black.”  How do I explore and acknowledge the costs of this whiteness?

And how do I learn about and re-claim the powerful stories, often untold, of those white people who refused to play by the rules of whiteness that keep everyone in their place?

Now, fast forward in time if you will to 1991.  These are the words of Allen Johnson, from his book “Privilege, Power, and Difference”:
“In 1991, a black motorist named Rodney King suffered a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Los Angeles.  When his assailants were acquitted—in spite of evidence that included a video-tape of the incident—and riots broke out in Los Angeles, King uttered the exasperated plea that would become famous as it echoed across the long history and deep divide of racism in the United States. ‘Can’t we all just get along?’
His words formed a simple yet eloquent summary of the current state of our racial dilemma, what the black leader and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called a century ago ‘the problem of the color line.’  But in King’s few words, he said more than that.  Past his exasperation lies a real and serious question, one that has haunted us ever since the Civil War brought down the institution of US slavery.” (p. 1)
Like any serious question, it sits and waits for what it deserves, which is a serious answer.”

I was a high school student in 1991, and I remember sitting in my almost entirely white classroom over at William Blount High School, watching the news show that got piped into the school, watching the coverage of Rodney King getting beaten half to death in broad day light and watching coverage of what the news channels called riots, and I don’t remember a single adult inviting a serious conversation about it.  It was as if it was something that didn’t concern us, although I know plenty of my classmates were watching and wondering “What is going on here?  How can this happen?  How is this related to me?”

Believe me, we learned a lot by the silence of the adults around us.  But we didn’t learn any serious answers.

And now, in the year 2016, I am one of the adults in the room, and I wonder do I have any serious answers to offer?  Any answers to the question of Rodney King,

Or the lives of Trayvon Martin
Michael Brown and and the people of Ferguson
Eric Garner
12 year old Tamir Rice
Freddie Gray
Sandra Bland
The Charleston 9 and Mother Emmanuel Church

Do I have any answers to the questions that are begged when I watch scenes of teenagers at a suburban Texas pool party or a young girl in a South Carolina classroom?

Do I have any serious answers to the questions of an economic system built on the oppression of people of color such that in 2015, according to Forbes magazine, the median black household wealth was just 6% of median white household wealth?  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typical-white-household-has-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/#2715e4857a0b5b7f8cad6c5b )

Where do the huge questions of these lives and these deaths call me, as a white person?

I've been looking for some serious answers, for myself, for my children.  I am a white person, yet I do not want to aid and abet the forces of racism that depend on my complicity.

In her recent article entitled White Debt (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html?_r=1 ), Eula Biss writes, “Whiteness is not a kinship or culture.  White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically than we are to black people….What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States.  ‘There is, in fact, no white community,’ as James Baldwin writes.  Whiteness is not who you are.  Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.”

Eula Biss had a conversation with her young son as he was learning about the legacy of slavery in this country and he said “I don’t want to be on this team.”  She said to him: “You might be stuck on this team, but you don’t have to play by its rules.”

She says, “For me, whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem.”

Whiteness is a paradox:  it is a totally created fiction, something that does not really exist outside of human constructs.  And yet, it is very real in its operation, in the impact it has, on all of us.

Another writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, describes whiteness in a letter he wrote to his 14 year old black son. In the book, entitled Between the World and Me, he says to his son, “’White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.  Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).  But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief of being white, and without it, ‘white people,’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” (p. 42)

This system of white supremacy (and here I am not talking about skin heads), which privileges some at the expense of others, means spiritual death for those it privileges.  Not being fully, truly alive as a human being.

Last year some of us gathered for a series of conversations to learn and talk together about race. These were called “Beloved Conversations” and one exercise in particular has stuck with me.  We shared in our group stories of encountering race in some way in our community, a racially charged situation, or a time when we realized that race was a factor in an interaction.  I told my own story about witnessing a racist interaction and doing nothing, saying nothing. And then we discussed how it felt to tell that story.  And every single one of us shared feeling words like guilt, shame, confusion, powerlessness.

The moral costs of being white in the United States are huge.  These feelings we have let us know that something is amiss, that something is not right.

When we enact whiteness, we lose our fundamental linkage to all of humanity.  Like I did when I felt too uncomfortable to point out to another white person that their comment was offensive.  It was too hard and too scary.  And I lost something important in that moment, a bit of my own integrity.

When we enact whiteness, we lose our own fundamental spiritual freedom.  We are not able to be the people we were born to be, free to love.

Allen Johnson says “We are not prisoners to some natural order that pits us hopelessly and endlessly against one another.  We are prisoners to something, but its closer to our own making than we realize.” (p.4)

Whiteness and a historically white supremacist system binds us all in in a way that diminishes our humanity.

But the good news is this:  It is not the natural order of things!  Because “whiteness” is not a natural identity it means we can refuse to collude, refuse to be complicit, refuse to act like a good white person.  We don’t have to stay stuck in guilt, shame, and confusion. And therein lies our hope!

Martin Luther King Jr. said to those gathered for the Ware lecture at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida, in 1966:
"My friends, there are some things in our nation and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon you to be maladjusted and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized."

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us race only needs to be conversation if there’s a person of color in the room and they bring it up.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us we have to be completely enlightened and have it all figured out before we speak up and speak out.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us to prioritize order – the way things are done according to the law of this time—over justice—the way things are done according to love.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of this white supremacy culture that means black and brown children have to have conversations with their parents about how to be safe and survive in this world at a very early age; conversations that do not cross my mind as I send my 4 year old daughter out into the world.  But perhaps I need to let her know, because shielding her from this reality for other people will not save her soul.

Just as no child is born a racist, no child is born an anti-racist either.

Becoming an anti-racist does not mean hating white folks, and if you are white, it doesn’t mean hating yourself!  It means hating the white supremacy that has shaped our culture, and yes shaped our own souls into something less than human, less than loving, less than just.

Many of us most of the time are neither racist or anti-racist.  We are simply non-racists. (check out this video: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/jan/13/marlon-james-are-you-racist-video )  We don’t use racial slurs.  We believe in the equality and inherent worth and dignity of all.  We would never support a candidate for office who spewed racist hatred.  We are appalled by white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

We roll our eyes when the confederate flag lovers get together for a rally like they did last July at Midland Plaza.

But as UU anti-racist activist Chris Crass challenges us, Will we let the most vocal white people speaking about race be the racists?

Many UU congregations around this country have said no.
At last summer’s General Assembly, our association passed a resolution Action of Immediate Witness, calling on all our congregations to support the Black Lives Matter movement, to engage in learning and action together for racial justice.  (http://www.uua.org/statements/support-black-lives-matter-movement )
Many congregation have decided to put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in front of their place of worship, including our sister congregation in Oak Ridge.  Perhaps a seemingly small, symbolic act. What difference does it make, you might ask?
Hearing the backlash might help you understand how this seemingly innocuous act can really matter.

Many, many UU congregations have had their banners stolen or vandalized, some of them multiple times.  Others have had to deal with attacks on social media and in the news.
Taking the step to put up a public sign and deal with the consequences has also meant being in relationship with others in the community, building relationships with other congregations and organizations working for racial justice, learning about the realities for people of color in their community, committing to showing up – to not just talk the talk but walk the walk.

After their Black Lives Matter banner had been vandalized several times, the people of River Road UU Church in Bethesda, MD, began a weekly Friday night vigil.  Physically standing on the road next to the sign and holding the names of victims of racist violence.

Despite the seemingly constant barrage of bad news, news to be grieved, I believe these are hopeful times!  There is a powerful movement growing, with people of color at the lead, and supported by white anti-racist allies, that is providing serious answers to the fundamental questions of race in this country.  There are so many ways to contribute to this hope.

I heard a story just this past week from a white woman who has a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker on her car.  She was at the recycling center dropping off her stuff when another white woman came up to her and said, thank you so much for having that message on your car.  They connected.  By having that message on her car, she broke the code that says white folks don’t talk about race, because they don’t have to talk about race.  And she invited a conversation with a stranger, who she is now connected with.  Here in Blount County.

Maybe you are not a bumper sticker person.  But what is it YOU can do, and what can WE do together to break the code of silence, to live into a different way of being white, to be more often not just a non-racist, but an active, beautiful, force against racist systems and for the flourishing of all life?

Let us draw on the heritage we inherit from Theodore Parker and those who came after him, and draw on the courage we get from our fellow white Unitarian Universalists who are taking action all over this country today,

As Chris Crass says, “The goal isn’t to prove to others that we aren’t racist; it is to develop the capacity of our faith community… to rise up against white supremacy.”

Let’s do that, in the ways we can, with what we have, where we are, so we can all get free.
Amen.

Closing words
Theodore Parker, in his book Ten Sermons of Religion wrote these words, echoed in the next century by Dr. King:
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

Monday, January 2, 2017

Ch, Ch, Ch, Changes

January 1st, 2017
Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:
The Way by Edwin Muir
Friend, I have lost the way.

__The way leads on.

Is there another way?

__The way is one.

I must retrace the track.

__It's lost and gone.

Back, I must travel back!

__None goes there, none.

Then I'll make here my place --

__The road runs on --

Stand still and set my face-

__The road leaps on.

Stay here, forever stay.

__None stays here, none.

I cannot find the way.

__The way leads on.

Oh, places I have passed!

_That journey's done.

And what will come at last?

__The way leads on.




This last week I’ve spent some time with my partner’s family up in Indiana.
It was cold up there!

One day we took the two year old twins for a walk, we bundled them up and we put their little knit mittens. And put them up on our backs and off we went.

Mittens on two year olds is a gamble if they aren’t somehow attached.  And sure enough when we got back to the house we realized that each one of them had lost one of their mittens somewhere along the way.  Mittens that their Meemaw, whose house we were staying at, had very lovingly knit just for them. Oh dear.

The day of our departure I decided that I’d go out and look along the road we had walked down, see if I could find those mittens.  And so I did.  It had snowed a tiny bit by then and I thought, those white mittens won’t stand out, I’ll never see them.  But I walked and I looked.

And just when I thought there’s no way I’d find them, there was one of them.  It gave me hope so I kept walking, and pretty soon there was the other one!  I was so proud and I brought them back to be reunited with their pair.

If only it were so easy to cope with other changes and loss in life.  To simply retrace our steps and go back to where we were, and all will be restored as it was. 

Finding the lost mittens helped me feel like I could in some way control the chaos and unpredictability of life.  You see, this week was also the first holiday time we spent in Indiana without my partner's beloved step-father, Papa to our girls, who died in May of this year.  We did some of the same things as we have always done at the holidays.  But nothing felt quite the same.  The underlying absence of this person changed it all.  It wasn’t just that we are sad that Roland is gone and miss him, which is of course very true.  Roland’s absence also has changed us.  

The family dynamic is different.  What we do together is different.  Our conversations are different without him. 

I don’t always deal quickly or easily with change, even really good changes.  It takes me time to adjust.  Usually I have to have a period of pretending things aren’t really that different, or a time of trying to make things stay the same.  That never feels very good, because it is not dealing with reality, and a tension builds—a tension between the way I wish things were and the way things actually are.  Being a parent of young children has challenged me more than anything else to pay attention to and accept change.  For instance, right now I really don’t want to admit that the twins are transitioning out of their daily afternoon nap.  Just like some of us really don’t want to admit that in about three weeks a different kind of transition will be happening in the White House.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says that “When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.”

“When we resist change, it’s called suffering.”

Pair that wisdom with the words of ancient Greek philosopher, Heraklietos,  “Change alone is unchanging.”  No wonder he was known as the weeping philosopher!

2017, like every year before it, promises change. That is all we can count on.  Perhaps 2017 promises even more change than other years.  It is a time of great instability and shifting ground in our world and our country.  We feel it in our hearts, in our families, in our communities. 

There are some changes ahead that I really, really, really don’t want to accept; that I don’t want to normalize. 

Today I want to remind us that accepting a change does not mean approving of it or normalizing it.  Accepting a change does not mean liking it, or staying silent about the pain it causes you.  Accepting a change does not mean letting it control you. 

This year I want to be challenged by Pema Chodron’s words to embrace groundlessness and relax into its dynamic quality.  A dynamic means there is a back and forth – that change does not just move in one direction.

We can predict some changes will come that we won’t like, that we wish weren’t happening, but more will follow.  Take heart in the lyrics of Sam Cooke—

“There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will”

Take heart in the lyrics of Bob Dylan:
“The slowest now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last
Cause the times they are a-changing “

We can count on the fact that there will be change. 

It is up to us, the human community, with the help of that Power which is greater than any one of us, to face the changes that come, to move forward through them and to nurture more change that brings new life and love into this world.

You are invited now to participate in our ritual of letting go and opening up for the new year.
What in your life would you like to release, to let go of, or to move towards acceptance of?  You are invited to write these on your piece of paper and then when you are ready come forward to release them into the bowl of water on the table.

Set one or two intentions:  What would you like to make more room for in this coming year?  What change would you like to nurture—either in yourself or in your community?  How will you open to the gifts of your life, even in times of great change?  You are invited to take a marker and write these directly on our table cloth here.  Words, pictures, and symbols all are fine. 

With serenity, we release what is written here into the service of health and growth in 2017.
The Way the Leads On
With courage, we set these intentions written here in the service of health and growth in 2017.
The Way Leads On