I was raised on a steady diet of protest songs. My family would while away the hours on long car trips with all the old songs of freedom that my father, a CIO organizer, learned at Highlander Folk School in 1940, songs like “Union Maid,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Joe Hill” and of course, “We Shall Overcome.” And so you can imagine how moved I was this past Monday evening, when I visited Highlander Center outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, and heard former Highlander co-directors Guy and Candie Carawan sing an old favorite of my father’s, a song written by a Kentucky coal miner’s wife in 1947. The lyrics question whether the listener is on the side of the striking miners and their families or on the side of the owners, declaring, “They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there;/you’ll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.” The chorus resounds, “Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?”
As we end a Jubilee World anti-racism weekend at your church, it is fitting and needful to ask, “Which side are you on?” Is it possible for anyone in America to be neutral about racism, or do we all live, metaphorically at least, in Harlan County? When it comes to racism in our country, which side are we on, as white people, as religious liberals?
In his parable about our world, the Rev. Joe Barndt of Crossroads Ministries clearly intends to show that all of us are damaged by the evils of racism. My colleague Anita Farber-Robinson, who served on the UUA Racial and Cultural Diversity Task Force that predated the current Journey Toward Wholeness Committee, compared our situation to 1930s Germany, writing that it is as impossible for a white person in America today to be a “non-racist” as it was for a German then to be a “non-Nazi.” There is either complicity with evil or there is active working against evil. Here, as in Harlan County, there are indeed no neutrals.
The purpose of this morning’s sermon, like that of the “Creating a Jubilee World” workshop, is not to accuse or blame or produce guilt. In fact, accusation, blame, and guilt are by-products, part of the dross of our Happiness Machine, because these feelings are deadening, resulting in paralysis and depression and inaction. I might even say that accusation, blame, and guilt are exactly what our racist system wants European-Americans to feel, because as long as we do, we are unable to work to effect permanent change.
Is there an alternative to accusation, blame, and guilt? Yes, there is. We can begin to unlearn the deliberate ignorance imposed on us by our culture; we can prepare ourselves for positive if painful changes; and we can place ourselves squarely where our Unitarian Universalist principles say we’ll be on the side of justice, equity, and compassion; on the side of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, on the side of the democratic process. In short, we can transform ourselves from passive complicity with evil into active antiracists, working to dismantle racism.
The necessary first step for all European Americans is to break the blind denial imposed by our social conditioning. We cannot fix anything if we think that nothing is broken. Roger Wilkins once said, “Like an individual who cannot solve a cancer problem, an alcohol problem, or a drug problem by denying it, a nation cannot deal¼with racism by denying its existence¼.”
Many whites, even those of good intention, seem to think that racism is no longer an issue, or that it doesn’t affect anyone they know. As I travel around the country, co-leading “Creating a Jubilee World” antiracism workshop, I see over and over again the surprise and shock of many white UUs as they learn the pernicious effects of today’s racism on all people of color, and the corresponding benefits for whites. “I just didn’t know,” they say.
Philosopher Karl Popper, who died in 1994, did not accept the explanation that people did not know about the concentration camps, the Gulag, the Holocaust. He concluded that they simply did not want to know. It was Popper’s “penetrating insight that ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind. In Popper’s view, ignorance has an ethical dimension, and knowing is a moral obligation for human beings.”
“Knowing is a moral obligation for human beings.” If this is so, and I believe it is, then we are all ethically and morally responsible for what we do not know and refuse to learn.
What is racism? Most of us think we know. Many if not most European-Americans conflate racism with personal prejudice. Some whites contend that white racism is canceled out by what they call black racism.
Others insist that racism today is an illusion born of “professional victimhood.” If we white Unitarian Universalists are going to become antiracists, we ought to know precisely what it is we’re up against. Civil rights organizations and religious groups around the world, from America to New Zealand, are using a definition of racism that was pioneered by the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond, an antiracism training organization based in New Orleans, which has worked extensively with UUA.
That definition is Racism = Race Prejudice + Systemic/Institutional Power. It is true that prejudice is a big part of racism, but racism is much more than just prejudice. Joe Barndt explains: [R]acism is clearly more than simple bigotry. To be prejudiced is to have opinions without knowing the facts, to hold onto those opinions, even after contrary facts are known. But racism goes beyond prejudice—it is backed up by power. Racism is the power to enforce one’s prejudices. [DR, 28] Bigotry and prejudice are individual problems, and they can be solved with individual solutions, such as “Prejudice Reduction” programs and diversity training.
But if we’ve learned anything since the days of Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s that racism cannot be cured by raising consciousness or through eliminating the more egregious forms of personal prejudice. Even becoming multicultural, as so many corporations and congregations strive to do, doesn’t work. Speaking at General Assembly several years ago, Barbara Majors of the People’s Institute put it bluntly, “Trying to achieve multiculturalism without antiracism simply creates racist multiculturalism.” Racism is not simply personal feelings and behaviors; it is a complete social and economic and cultural system. As a system, it was intentionally created and set up (we can trace its beginnings in colonial lawbooks dating back to the 1600s), and then was passed on to each succeeding generation—and it can and must be dismantled the same way. Johnetta Cole, former president of Spellman College, likes to say: “If folks can learn to be racist, then they can learn to be anti-racist.”
Since racism manifests itself as a system of interlocking institutions, it can only be institutionally and systemically deconstructed. Admittedly, this is not an easy concept or a comfortable idea for most white people, especially religious liberals, to grasp. We white Unitarian Universalists are justifiably proud of our denomination’s racial history: our support for abolition, the extension of the franchise to male former slaves, and the civil rights movement. We point with honor to the names of our martyrs, Jim Reeb and Viola Liuzza, killed 36 years ago in Selma, and the untold number of Unitarian and Universalist ministers and lay people who answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call in the 1960s.
We may be a good bit hazier on the less savory aspects of our denomination’s record on race, but we are sure that we have more to celebrate than to regret. And, good religious liberals that we are, we are positive that we are not implicated in racism since we do not feel or practice personal racial bigotry. I like to tell workshop participants that most white UUs feelings about racism can be summed up by a little verse: “It’s not you; it’s not me—it’s that guy behind the tree.” We UUs are sure that racism is someone’s problem.
I understand that reaction, because it’s exactly how I felt the first time I took an antiracism workshop. “I’m just here to help out,” I thought smugly to myself, “Racism has nothing to do with me.” The idea that I too benefited from and was implicated in racism was one I resisted mightily. I wanted to continue to believe in my own innocence. But I have to come to know, when it comes to racism in America, none of us is innocent.
As an antiracism consultant for the UUA, I have struggled with how to get across to white UUs the systemic nature of racism. Inspired by the youth I worked with for 4 summers as the minister for the Senior High Camp at The Mountain Learning and Resource Center in North Carolina, I’ve hit upon a metaphor that seems to help show how irrelevant personal feelings are in discussions of systemic racism.
One of the Senior High Campers’ favorite free time activity is playing foosball in the REC Hall. Let’s say a mixed group of kids go into the Rec Hall to play foosball and find the table tilted, with one end chocked up by cement blocks. The white players stand at the top of the tilted table and the people of color at the bottom. Since the table slants, simple gravity and the laws of physics mean that the white players make most of the goals— although extremely skilled and lucky and determined players at the other end do get in the occasional point.
After a while, the people of color get angry. “Hey, we don’t like playing this way,” they complain, “we can’t win; the game is rigged.” And the white players reply soothingly, “Why are you so angry? We’re not prejudiced—your color doesn’t matter. It’s not our fault—we didn’t prop up the table; it’s just like that. Play by the rules and don’t be sore losers.”
But only the willfully blind would claim that the white players win more often because they have more talent, are more deserving, or have earned it solely through their own efforts. (As one white antiracism activist has said, “Some folks are born on 3rd base and think they hit a triple.”) For the game to be fair and for the rules to be meaningful, we must make the table level.
Prejudice and bigotry are indeed harmful—harming the prejudiced person in subtle ways, just as much as they damage in more obvious ways those who are the objects of bigotry. But they are much worse and their effects more far-reaching and magnified when backed up by an entire social system. That system, that slanted table, is racism. Racism means that individuals and communities of color are at the mercy of structures, bureaucracies, corporations, organizations, agencies, and institutions established, dominated, and controlled by white people, in which individuals of color have little or no voice. There are no comparable white communities in our country that are dominated by structures, bureaucracies, corporations, organizations, agencies, and institutions controlled by people of color.
The result is white privilege, an unearned and usually unrecognized special advantage of having been born with white skin. (Of course, most of our forebears weren’t born “white” but were some other ethnic group before they gave up that identity to become a part of the ruling majority. I recommend the book How The Irish Became White for an inside look at this historical process.)
White privilege, like racism, does not rest on personal feelings about race; the Rev. Yvonne Delk, Executive Director of Community Renewal Society in Chicago, writes in the Introduction to Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America, “¼[W]hites have benefited from the structure of racism whether they have ever committed a racist act, uttered a racist word, or thought a racist thought.” In the United States, racism is a white problem¼ Every white person supports, benefits from, and is unable to be separated from white racism. [DR, 34, 44]
So what can we do? An important first step is simply to be more awake, more aware. We European Americans are inured to white skin privilege, well trained not to see it; indeed, as Robert Terry, an analyst and educator on racism and racial justice puts it, “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.” [DR, 56] We whites are the only “ethnic” group in America that don’t have to hyphenate; we’re the “default” in our society. But whether we want to acknowledge it or not, the benefits for living inside a white skin are very real: better education, better jobs, higher salaries, better living conditions in the form of nicer neighborhoods and better police protection, better health care—we even live longer!
And then there are all the daily small rewards that make our lives a little easier, a little more pleasant, that we never really notice: the ease of check cashing and using public accommodations, browsing in expensive shops without suspicion, looking for a place to live anywhere our financial means allow, the ubiquitous central place that white people have in the media, in history books, in the arts, in positions of power and authority. If we are both honest and aware, the list goes on and on.
Remember the story of the Happiness Machine? We whites have been enjoying the results of the Machine without noticing that the forces responsible for the problems of people of color in our society are the same forces that sustain the comforts and pleasures of our own lives. We have not seen—we have not wanted to see—that the condition of the minority is a direct result of the majority’s pursuit of happiness. We have tried to limit the effects of the dross without cutting off its flow. I remember that during Apartheid Bishop Tutu once said, “We don’t want our chains made more comfortable—we want the chains removed.”
Undoing racism—cutting off the dross, leveling the table, removing the chains—means changing our systems and institutions and churches, as well as changing ourselves. It cannot be done by merely reducing prejudice and learning to “get along” better. Leaving the systems and institutions intact leaves racism intact.
In an essay entitled “Family Values” in the UU World magazine several years ago, Dr. Ronald O. Valdiserri of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned:
Our world is defined by the people who live in it. People who aren’t all the same, who differ in color and sexual orientation and social circumstance, are part of our human race. If we refuse to listen to them, if we refuse to share societal resources to meet their expressed ¼ needs, we will pay a price. We will lose something of what it means to be human. [UUW, Jan./Feb. 1995]
Thirty years before, Martin Luther King, Jr., challenged white America in much the same way: ¼All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who live in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to be an accomplice to it¼(In the final analysis, whites cannot ignore the problems of people of color, because we are all part of each other. The agony of people of color diminishes whites, and the salvation of people of color enlarges whites.
What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognizes this truth¼What price are we willing to pay for comfort and happiness? How will we respond to Martin’s challenge? Will we continue to be silent accomplices to evil? Will we stay oblivious, receiving the benefits of racism in the form of white privilege, losing precious parts of our humanity, and passing on
this oblivion to our children—or will we work to change the racist system? Which will we choose? Which side are we on? The right decision will change our lives forever. So might this be, for ourselves and for our children!
AMEN AND ASHE.
