A Stone of Hope

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

January 15, 2012

How can we begin to dismantle racism in our hearts and minds? How can we dismantle it in the structures of our society? Are all humans racist when they are born? What transformations might we hope for?

OUT OF A MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE

There is a lot I don’t understand about racism. If I were to talk about all the things I don’t know, we would be here a lot longer than we want to be, so I will talk about some of the things I do know. I know that every group on earth is racist about some other group. Here is what they all say:” They are dirty and lazy. They don’t want to work. They are over emotional and their religion is strange. Their brains are smaller– they just can’t think the way we do, so they are better at hands-on work — as long as you tell them exactly what to do. They will hurt children and women.” That is the Japanese talking about Koreans, whom they traditionally have despised.

It’s the he Northern Italians talking about the Southern Italians, the people or Northern India talking about the Southern Tamil Indians. In Sri Lanka the Tamils hate the Singhalese. Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other in 1947, as Pakistan and Bangladesh were being partitioned off from India. More than a million Hindus and Muslims were killed during the partition. Malaysians hate the Chinese. The Serbs hate the Croats. The Czechs hate the Slovaks. In Africa, the Hutus hate the Tutsis and slaughter each other. Right now the Tutsis are in power, but that will change, as it has before. In Nigeria the Hausa hate the Ibo. Sunni and Shiite Moslems war with one another in Iraq. In Syria, there are families and clans that hate each other. In Darfur, in the Sudan, the Arab-identifying Muslim nomadic Sudanese are slaughtering the non-Arab identifying Muslim sedentary Sudanese. The Israelis hate the Arabs. Will it always be this way? What has to change?

We try anti-racism training, with mixed results. We learn about the way we use language: we talk about darkness as evil and bad, we use the color black to symbolize negative things. “A black mood,” “a black-hearted person.” I was with a group of ministers doing an art project. We were making collages to symbolize our lives. One woman had colored an area of her page dark brown. She said, “This area symbolizes my depression. I learned in anti-racism training not to use black, so I’m using dark brown instead.” Bless our hearts.

To overcome racism, I have to learn to read another human’s face and watch their behavior before I can tell what kind of person they are. Their skin tone is one important thing about a person. Some people who go through anti-ism training say “I just don’t even see what people’s skin color is.” Well, you need to, because it’s an important part of who they are. One part. Like being gay, or being able-bodied, or being tall. One part of who you are. We want to work towards seeing one another as individual humans, reserved or out-going, structured or flexible, buoyant or grounded, excitable or calm. Those qualities come in all colors

That’s one thing we can do as individuals, and although it is arduous, it feels easier to me than dealing with institutional racism, which is one of the other things we have to fix. In his book Dismantling Racism, Joseph Barndt defines racism as “prejudice plus power.” Hispanics and Blacks have strained relations, Koreans and Blacks live in mutual mistrust in the cities of the Northeast. But none of those groups has the power to create a system that is the embodiment of those ideas. This is the point at which I can fall asleep if I want to. I don’t have to care about this. I have the luxury, being light-skinned, not to care or think about this. Not having to face it is one of the privileges I enjoy because of being white.

European Americans have most of the power in the economy and the government. We also have tremendous power in the schools and the service industries Barndt says our institutions are racist because the power behind them is White, and therefore they perpetuate white European values. . I don’t notice it, and I want to believe people who say “Aw, it’s not really that way.” None of the solutions we are currently trying seem to work well. There is some legislation that is working over time, but there are those working to dismantle that legislation as we speak. More long meetings where blacks and whites meet to talk don’t feel like a solution to me. I’ve been to enough of those. I have thought of an instant way to bring it into stark relief for myself and all of Austin. I believe with this plan institutionalized racism in our nation would be wiped out within years.

How would I do this? Imagine this solution: How about we pass legislation that would mandate that all children, in their tenth and eleventh years, do a two-year “exchange-student” program in other neighborhoods of their town. Your child might end up on a golf course or in a housing project. It would teach, enlighten, terrify and annoy all of us.

Be comforted in knowing that it won’t ever happen, but be aware of the feelings it brings up.

Do you think that would encourage the middle-class people of all to come up with housing improvements? Do you think that would encourage us to provide drug treatment for addicted mothers so their children would have a chance at life? And so their children wouldn’t make our lives hell during the time they were with us? I have to say I would in no way want that legislation passed, and the vehemence with which I do not want my children in a “bad neighborhood” tells me something important about the situation. This would counteract the anesthesia that we give ourselves so as not to notice the conditions spawned by institutional and cultural racism. That fantasy proposal woke me right up. I have privileges and so do my children that a non-white woman and her children do not have. I don’t have to worry about cashing a check. I don’t have to train my sons to be wary of officers of the law. There are so many things I don’t have to worry about since my sons have light skin.

None of us in here wants to be racist. We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. But most of us do participate unthinkingly in white privilege. This is not something to wallow in guilt about. Wallowing in guilt makes you stupid and drains your energy. You don’t think well. You don’t want to face the people who don’t have the privileges you do. White privilege is something to notice. This is not something non white people can or should have to help white people with. This is white people’s responsibility. In our UU churches, bless our hearts, it is not uncommon for the people of color who come in our doors to be approached about being on the anti-racism committee. It happens sometimes that when a black person joins the choir, suddenly the repertoire changes to include more gospel songs, even if that particular black person prefers Chopin or country.

Dr.. King said in his “I have a dream” speech “we shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The racism in our world certainly could weigh on a person like a mountain of despair.

I have thought a lot about despair and hope. I’ve been wondering about that image of a stone of hope. It comes from the mountain of despair, so it’s made of the same stuff. How can that be?

The thing that despair and hope have in common is the vision of a better future. A necessary component of despair is knowing that things aren’t what they should be. To feel that, you need a vision of what things should be. Despair is when the vision of what should be combines with the weight of what is and threatens to overwhelm you. You can’t see how to get there. You can’t believe things will ever be better. Despair is giving up. The antedote to despair is that we just take a little piece of that mountain, and the piece we take is the vision of how things could be.

We all know that, if all you have is a sense of how things should be, you can be one miserable human being. In ancient Greek mythology, when Pandora opened the container and let all the evils fly out into the world, she slammed the lid shut with just one left inside. What was it? Hope. What was hope doing among the evils of the world? Hesiod said it was because hope is empty and no good, and it takes away people’s industriousness. Friedrich Nietzsche said ” Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” Yes, hoping without action is foolish, if an action can be taken.

Rita Mae Brown says “Never hope more than you work.” That’s what those people in Ohio were doing. Hoping and working. That’s what the people who believed in Dr. King’s vision did. They held the vision and they worked. Maybe stone is just the right size for hope. Maybe the rest of what we work with is clarity, reason, facing the elements of our lives and those of others with open eyes.

Maybe stone is just the right material for hope. Dr. King did not say “Out of the mountain of despairs we mine a jewel of hope.” It is not something rare and precious we find within the despair, covered, held and hidden in there. Maybe stone is just the right value for hope. Stone is ancient, far more ancient than humanity, and it’s everywhere. It’s common. We can lose hope over and over and just pick up more anywhere. You can throw hope away in a fit of rage and loss of spirit, then just pick up another piece.

Maybe stone is just the right hardness for hope too. Hope has to be tough. One of my friends said at a twelve step meeting her sponsor handed her a stone and said, “Any time you feel like taking a drink, put this in your mouth. When it dissolves, go ahead and have a drink.”

We hold on to our hope. Find yours, and live with it in your pocket, in the palm of your hand. What do you hope for? Hope, and we do what we can do make things better The most important thing is that we do it together.