“WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY

Call to Gather: “For Martin Luther King, Jr.” by Toni Vincent (Responsive Reading #732)

We gather once again to remember a fallen friend, and nourish ourselves from the fountain of reflections.

Open our hearts to the anguish of our pain, to the tired taste of swallowed tears, and to our unrealized vision.

In this place we bring our scattered lives together, groping for meaning and looking for truth.

Be with us as we continue our search for the understanding of the mystery of the temporal.

Stay with us as we wander through our memories, seeking pathways to the future.

As we touch one another in common cause, and with the great Spirit in our midst,

Let us find the way and the courage to realize the dream which still lives within us. Amen.^¹

Reading: from “Crazy Sometimes” by Leonard Pitts, Jr. (an African American columnist for the Miami Herald)

So here we stand, a generation after civil rights; more doors open, more opportunities available, and yet we have not overcome. We have only learned to flinch on the one side and deny on the other.

Meanwhile, the nation frays along seams of culture, race, and class. Black men still earn fractions on the dollar to what white men make for the same position. Black and Native American men have the lowest life expectancies in the nation. Black male unemployment runs at approximately three times that of white males twenty and older.

According to The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, black people account for 13 percent of regular drug users, but 35 percent of drug possession arrests, 55 percent of drug possession convictions, and 74 percent of all drug possession prison sentences.

The Justice Department reports that, on any given day, one in three black men ages twenty to twenty-nine is under the control of the justice system, either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. After reviewing statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, Jerome Miller, founder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Virginia, has concluded that by the year 2010, the majority of black men ages eighteen to thirty-nine will be in jail.

And yet black unemployment is down. Black earnings are up. Black test scores are rising. College attendance among black women is skyrocketing. Black teen pregnancy is falling. And an unprecedented number of black women and men stand acclaimed by the white mainstream as role models.

Which picture tells the truth? Blacks and whites would tend to point in opposite directions. The fact is, both pictures are correct. Together, they point to the unfinished business that remains between those who flinch and those who deny.

Because the truth is this: Black people spend way too much time talking about race.

Did you notice that I identified Leonard Pitts, the author of today’s reading, as an African American? I wonder if that bothered any of you? Did you think, “Roger doesn’t usually identify the race of the reading’s author; he doesn’t say “Today’s reading is a poem by Mary Oliver, a white American poet,” or “Today’s reading comes from the white author Wendell Berry.” Many of us are uncomfortable identifying the race of someone—especially a nonwhite—because we have this belief that we ought to live in a colorblind society. This is the liberal ideal: race shouldn’t matter.

But it does matter. Race matters a lot in our society. We are far from realizing the liberal ideal. Race still matters—sometimes in a more subtle way than forty or fifty years ago. Gone is Bull Conner shouting his bigotry for all to hear—that’s no longer socially acceptable. But, as Pitts articulates, we haven’t yet arrived at the promised land of full equality and inclusion. We still have a long way to go.

This reality typically is far more self-evident to nonwhites than whites in America. Hence the resulting reality that blacks spend a lot more time talking about and thinking about race than do whites. There is a persistent gulf between whites and non-whites in perceptions and analysis of race in America. For example, whites are more inclined to view racism—which doesn’t come onto their radar screen all that often—as an isolated problem. You know: sure, there are a few bad KKK-type apples, but we’ve come so far in eliminating racism. Blacks and other minority populations who often have the reality of racism regularly slapped in their faces tend to see racism not as an isolated problem but as a pervasive (not to mention perverse) reality.^³ This gulf is part of why I identified Leonard Pitts as an African American: it’s important to understand that his words come from an African American, and for those of us who are white not to ignore his perspective but to wrestle with it.

For whites, there is a side of racism that is a more regular occurrence. It is the flip side of racism: white privilege. But white privilege is something we whites generally choose not to examine or acknowledge. I would say we whites are largely in denial of the reality of white privilege. And we have built up strong walls to keep the facts of white privilege—and the corresponding oppression of non-whites—out of our consciousness. One result: we whites don’t think or talk about race and racism very often.

I should also add that it is not easy as a white person to talk about race. The potential minefields of this explosive subject are numerous and scary. We often worry about saying the wrong thing or revealing our latent prejudice or showing our ignorance. It’s easier to avoid the topic, and with that avoidance, to deny the pervasiveness of racism in this country. Because it doesn’t keep smacking us in the face, we whites actually have the choice about whether to ignore or to address race.^⁴

I for one often choose to ignore it. To resist the temptation, I have challenged myself over my years here to return to the topic of race periodically. I don’t want to be guilty of not spending enough time talking about race. This is what prompts me to take up this theme today.

In preparation for today’s sermon, I read a marvelous book given me a year ago by a Post-Crescent reporter. It sat on my desk for awhile; choosing this topic for a sermon forced me to pick it up. The book is called When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories. The piece from Leonard Pitts comes from the book. Rather than presenting a comprehensive analysis of race in American, When Race Becomes Real instead focuses on the real experiences and ponderings of black and white Americans. Surprisingly, Appleton figures prominently in the book: four of the twenty-nine writers (including the book’s editor) have lived in Appleton at some point in their lives. Three of these four are African American. Lawrence University graduate Bernestine Singley, the book’s editor, summarizes the mission of the book in the introduction:

I was determined to make this book different than all the other books about race. I wanted to gather a cross section of people, both black and white, and get them to do what most Americans refuse to do—honestly reveal their personal feelings and experiences around race. Baring your soul to public view or, more accurately, for public consumption, is not easy. We are, after all, a culture that leaps to destroy whatever displeases us. And race, no matter how you look at it, is rarely pleasing.

To handle this tough task, I devised a simple strategy: choose writers who had already demonstrated they would not tiptoe around the issue, but could stand up to the challenge to stay focused on themselves, stay honest, and stay clear…

To black writers, I said, “Drop the arm’s length objectivity and write about race the way you talk about race when white folks aren’t in the room.” To white writers, I said, “Don’t write about black people. Keep yourself at the center of the narrative and write about what it’s like to be white...”^⁵

I’ve decided to take the book’s lead and devote most of my sermon to telling my own story of race honestly as I can. I’m going to keep myself at the center of the narrative.

I was born in the real though unofficially sanctioned segregation of American suburbia. The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, has significant African American and Hispanic populations, but the outlying suburbs (at least when I was a kid) were almost entirely lily-white—especially my suburb, East Grand Rapids, which was the ritziest of all. I don’t remember a single non-white student at my elementary school. The only non-white in the whole school building was the custodian (a black man). We called all of the adults in the building Mr. or Mrs. or Miss—except for the custodian, whom we called by his first name. In Jr. High there was one Chinese American student (who one of my teachers called “China Man”) and an African American boy who ran on a relay team with me. I remember, too, an African American girl from the next block who was ahead of me in school. I had the impression that she and the other few minorities in East Grand Rapids were treated as exotic celebrities.

The African American and Hispanic parts of Grand Rapids were largely invisible to me. We went to a downtown church that wasn’t much more diverse than our suburb—in spite of its location near both the African American and the Hispanic parts of town. Out of a perceived fear for our safety, we generally avoided the minority neighborhoods—except occasional visits to the family cemetery plot in a neighborhood that had morphed from one of the wealthiest in the city to a poor, black neighborhood. This fear was stoked during the great race riots of the late 1960s; I remember a vague fear that militant blacks from the inner city might march on our suburb.

Like so many of their generation, my grandparents were blatant racists. Unlike many of their contemporaries, though, they didn’t use the word “nigger;” nevertheless they clearly exhibited a general contempt for the “coloreds” and for the other group often subjected to such blatant bigotry: Jews. I remember being shocked numerous times by their derogatory comments. I remember, for example, the time my grandmother, talking about my brother being a Peace Corp volunteer in Africa, said that the possibility he would fall in love with an African would be “the final blow.” One set of grandparents had a black maid whom everyone in the family dearly loved, but she was seen as an exception to the rule. And, of course, she was notably in a subservient role.

Somewhere along the line my parents picked up different values regarding race. Even though we lived in a segregated suburb and had a fear of black neighborhoods and militant blacks attacking our neighborhood, my parents had an underlying belief in the principle of equality and the inherent dignity of all people. I bought into this with all my heart and soul. They never engaged in the kind of blatantly prejudicial remarks that my grandparents routinely uttered. Their parenting is why I was shocked and embarrassed by my grandparents’ bigotry: I had been taught that such prejudice is wrong.

For college, I went from lily-white suburbia to lily-white coastal Maine. Try as my college did to recruit non-white students, Maine just wasn’t a very attractive place for minorities. I joined a local, co-ed fraternity named ARU—standing for All Races Unite—but even ARU didn’t have a lot of color. During my four years we had two black members in ARU and one member from Thailand. I briefly dated one of the African American members—my one and only experience with inter-racial dating. This relationship was the last in a string of less than stellar relationships, and at least from my perspective, the inter-racial component was the least of its challenges.

When I spent the first half of my junior year in Sri Lanka, I suddenly found myself immersed in a non-white culture. For the first time in my life, I was constantly and keenly aware of the color of my skin—and I knew that everyone around me was equally aware of my skin color. But to say that this was anything like non-white’s experiences in this country would be wrong; as a white in Sri Lanka I was always treated as a VIP. I was looked up to, idolized, fawned over, and often treated like a master. It was weird and uncomfortable and illuminating in its own way, but the experience didn’t really give me much insight into what it might be like to be a non-white in the U.S. Other than feeling like an alien, I don’t think there was a lot of commonality with the experience of being a minority here.

From college I moved to Hyde Park, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. I wasn’t in white suburbia or white coastal Maine anymore! I lived right in the middle of one of the largest black communities in the nation. There were African Americans everywhere I looked. And there was an incredible degree of tension. At least I felt a lot of racial tension. And I felt scared. The childhood fears about driving through the black area in Grand Rapids came home to roost: now I was living in a predominantly black area.

For the first time, that which had been distant and abstract was real and at hand. But there still was a distance even though there was physical proximity: I had little contact with my black neighbors outside of superficial interactions. My commitment to equality, truly tested for the first time, proved to be shallower than I had imagined or hoped. I was shocked and dismayed at how pervasive racist thoughts and assumptions were in my mind as I lived in this new place. My meeting what had been Other in my life revealed a lot of latent racism within me. I hated living in Hyde Park for a lot of reasons; looking back, I have to admit that one source of this hatred was that Hyde Park unveiled my own racism.

After brief sojourns in white southern Indiana and white Nantucket Island and a year in an integrated but less tense north-side Chicago neighborhood, I ended up here, in Appleton, Wisconsin. At first it seemed like more of the same segregation I lived in during my childhood and college years. But gradually I realized that this was an incorrect perception. The real eye-opener was when my daughter started Kindergarten and nearly half of her class was non-white. In Appleton, Wisconsin, of all places, we actually lived in a diverse neighborhood. When we moved across town a few years later, we regretted leaving a diverse neighborhood. But then in pretty short order our new neighborhood became more racially diverse, too: our elementary school went from a handful of nonwhites to a quarter non-whites. The face of the Fox Cities is changing.

I decided soon after moving to Appleton that doing my part to build bridges between different groups of people should be central to my personal mission. This has been my response to the painful truths I learned about myself in Hyde Park. So here I’m putting considerable time and energy into welcoming rather than being scared of diversity. I have done that especially through my work with Toward Community: Unity in Diversity, and through my work here at the Fellowship. More than anything, I have tried to open myself to friendship and connections—real, honest connections—with people from different races and backgrounds. I’ve tried to do my small part to break down the “integration illusion”^⁶ that is still the reality of our country: we may no longer officially sanction and bless segregation, but the reality is that beyond occasionally working with people of a different race, we very rarely have much to do with each other. Integration remains an illusion.

When I’m honest, I have to admit that although I’ve made some progress in my personal journey from racism to inclusion, I still have a long ways to go. I am a recovering racist, not a recovered racist. One experience a few years ago reminded me of this. I was in Cleveland for the Unitarian Universalist Association’s annual assembly. Some of the delegates had organized a rally to protest the name and logo of the Cleveland Indians baseball team. In spite of having Native American friends and having developed what I thought was a tremendous appreciation for Native American culture and spirituality, I pooh-poohed the protest. Instead of protesting, I’m embarrassed to say, I went to an Indians game, and bought an Indians lunchbox for my son. When I got back to my hotel room, I really looked at the logo on the lunchbox. The logo pierced my denial and unveiled more of my racism. The logo is just so incredibly demeaning of Native Americans. I realized that I have a long way to go. I bought my son a different present. When I got home, I took a marker to the lunchbox and put a slash through the logo. The lunchbox—complete with the slash mark—sits in my office as a reminder that I have a ways to travel.

The overall segregation and whiteness of my experiences has made it hard to understand or appreciate the experience of non-whites. I’ve had glimpses every now and then that have been eye-opening.

There was the time in college, for example, when I rode home for winter break with two other students from Michigan. One of them was black. We planned to travel through Canada—it’s quicker to enter Canada at Niagara Falls than to stay in the U.S. and travel south of Lake Erie. That trip was the one and only time I’ve ever had trouble getting into Canada. In fact, the white customs agent simply wouldn’t let us into his country. The stated reason was that it wasn’t our car—it was the car of another student (whose permission we had in writing to drive his car). Maybe that was a legitimate reason, but I wonder. Did it have more to do with a black woman traveling with two white men?

And then I remember once hearing a black fellow student at the University of Chicago remark that he was constantly asked to show his student ID. Most of the time when he boarded a University bus, the driver asked him for his ID. And sometimes just walking along a street the University police would stop him and ask him to show his ID. In my three years at the University of Chicago, I was never once asked to show my ID by a campus bus driver or police officer. And this black student was asked to show his ID all the time. Just a coincidence? I doubt it.

And then there’s this story from an African American friend in Toward Community. One time he and a friend went to Nakashima. A white man refused to be seated with them at the same hibachi table. It was clear that this man didn’t want to eat with a black man.

I was also struck by how hard the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. a few years ago hit African Americans. James Byrd was the African American man who for no other reason than the color of his skin was tied to a vehicle in Jasper, Texas, and dragged for miles. Different body parts were strewn over two miles of the road. I was shocked and horrified by the murder, but it was a little bit distant from me. I didn’t have the sense that could have been me tied to the car. Of course it hit African Americans hard—they did have the sense it could have just as easily been them.

Each of these gives me a glimpse at the pervasive nature of racism, and the sheer inescapability of it for non-whites in this country. These glimpses of the grinding, everyday nature of racism are illuminating. Racism, which I can and often do choose to ignore, remains a harsh and omnipresent reality for many non-whites—and a reality that is pretty hard to ignore. As a white person, I am the beneficiary of enormous privileges, many of which I don’t even see. I don’t get pulled over by police for driving (or walking) while black. People don’t mind sitting with me to eat a meal. I don’t have to worry about somebody tying me to a car and dragging me through the streets because of the color of my skin. And of course this is all just the very tip of the iceberg. The educational and economic opportunities I’ve had as a white person constitute an enormous privilege.

The editor of When Race Becomes Real asks a very good question in her introduction to the book: “Where the hell do we go from here?”^⁷ Martin Luther King, Jr., asked the same question (perhaps a little more eloquently) in 1967 when he wrote Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. In spite of the considerable progress that has been made since the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, the answer to this question is not yet clear. As a nation and as individuals, we still have a long ways to go on the road to true equality. If we truly learn to get along with each other; if we truly learn to respect and honor our differences while also recognizing our underlying similarities, we will one day arrive at true community. If we don’t, we will inexorably walk toward chaos.

My choice (at least most of the time, I hope) is to work and walk toward community. What must I do to help? I must own and understand and share my own story. I must honor diversity instead of fearing it. I must do my part to build bridges. I must try to understand those who are different; I must try to walk a mile in their shoes. I must keep on working the recovery program.

1 Reading #732 in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

2 Leonard Pitts, Jr., “Crazy Sometimes,” in When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), pp. 26-27.

3 David Bradley, “To Make Them Stand in Fear,” in When Race Becomes Real, p. 117.

4 Singley, p. xiii.

5Ibid., pp. xi-xii.

6 Ibid., p. xi.

7 Ibid., p. xi.