Doing Justice

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 22, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

How does this part of our mission fit with the others? In preparation for our November congregational conversations about the mission, a few thoughts about justice and transformation.

Reading
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive. Last Summer when we had our open housing marches in Chicago, many of our white liberal friends cried out in horror and dismay: “You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching, You are only developing a white backlash.” I could never understand that logic. They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface ….

The white liberal must escalate his support for racial justice rather than de-escalate it. … The need for commitment is greater today than ever.

Sermon

The last part of our mission is “do justice.” Justice is love in action. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and yesterday Rep. Maxine Waters know that talking about it is not enough. We must get in the fight. Laws must be changed. The status quo is killing people.

Let me tell you about how I learned to be white in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard people say “well, if they wouldn’t make themselves so unpleasant, they’d get a lot farther. They should go about asking for change gradually. They’re asking for too much. Then Dr King was shot dead, and my family in North Carolina was shocked. But quiet.

I was about 8 years old. One day on the way to school my mother pointed across a field and said “That’s the school for the little black children.” I remember that today because it struck me as amazing that I had never wondered where the black kids went to school. It hadn’t occurred to me to notice that there were only white kids at the Mulberry Street Elementary School. It was just the way things were. My mother took us to the city pool the first day it was integrated. We hadn’t been before. I remember the joy with which the children played in the water, the sunlight almost too bright. The situation felt fraught. Tense. I didn’t know why at the time.

There are models of cultural competency which describe the stages of that competency, and the one I’m using is from Milton Bennett. When I was 8, I was deeply in the first stage, where your world is small, and you don’t even really see people who are different from you. “Hm. Weird,” you might say, as you see cultural differences. I knew my culture. I came from missionaries to Pakistan, from Persian rugs and split-level houses, from private schools and academia. I came from a family where writing a book was the way to be special, to arrive. I came from church-going and horses and uncles who were doctors who would fix you up for free if you got measles. I came from family stories about the great-grandfather preacher who would visit and feed poor families, black and white, in a small southern town.

Later I grew into another stage of cultural development. The reversal stage. Having become aware of black culture, I was fascinated. My best friend in high school was from West Philadelphia. She was so much cooler than I was. I adored her. I prayed every night that I would wake up black. I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but I wished hard anyway. Better music, better language, more beautiful skin tone. And my father was all about civil rights. He was a ferocious civil rights fighter, not on the street, but in essays and sermons and speeches he was asked to make because he was on the 6 and 11 o’clock news. I came from a culture. Scots Irish academic/clergy class.

My perspective was still very much of the individual rather than the system. My boy cousins got in trouble with the law at least once in their lives throwing fireworks out of their car windows. When the police stopped one of them, a syringe had rolled out from under the back seat. It was from their dad’s doctor bag, but all of that got worked out at the police station. We didn’t know the reason we could laugh about it was because the boys were white and so were the police officers. We had the privilege of interacting with the authorities in the justice system, in the banking system, when applying for internships and jobs and being fairly certain that we’d be dealing with someone from our same race. If something didn’t go right, we had the privilege of never wondering whether the problem was our skin color or our race.

I could walk in neighborhoods in which I lived without anyone calling the police on “a suspicious person.” My sister can run after dark without people assuming she’s running away from something she did. I could shop by myself without someone following me around the store, thinking I might steal something.

When I’m in a grocery store for a few things I can put them in my shopping bag to carry them before paying without someone assuming I’m going to steal them. If I’m really feeling my privilege, I can grab a bottle of water and drink it while I shop, knowing that people will assume I’ll pay for it when I check out. Because I look like a nice lady. Part of that is my being white. I get the benefit of the doubt all the time. That’s the way things are. For me, the system is working pretty well. The best thing about it is I don’t even have to notice it if I don’t care to.

“The way things are” has different names. The patriarchy is what we say when we are talking about the privilege that accrues to men in our society and others. On Face Book this week, it’s becoming pretty clear that almost every woman in our culture has at some point been sexualized, harassed, assaulted in small ways. Many have been assaulted in awful ways. This sudden visibility of the situation has been painful. It only took a day for the articles to appear about women who abuse and harass men or other women, and how some men are harassed and assaulted sexually when they are very young. Yes, but it has happened to almost every woman. Sometimes we talk about it, and it becomes visible. For a while.

The way things are for white people here in the US is named the White Supremacy System. The US is not the only place this exists, but let’s talk about it as it is here.

It’s not a broken system. The system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. It’s supposed to make people of color players of the game of life here play at an added level of difficulty. White Supremacy is not about individual racists, people who shout “Blood and Soil” and carry tikki torches from Lowes to protest removal of statues of Confederate generals. It’s a system that has exactly the effect it’s supposed to have. Sometimes the legislatures try to make it better. These days they are trying to make it worse through voter suppression, gerrymandering, abolishing affirmative action.

The White Supremacy System is all around us. It’s the air we breathe and the water we swim in. I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to. One of my privileges as a white person is that I can engage when I’m moved to and disengage when I get tired. If I were a person of color I would not have the privilege of being able to turn it off. I would be dealing with it all the time, all around me and within me, as I battle internalized racism and the color prejudices within my own culture.

I have spent most of my time in a middle stage of cultural competence called minimization, where I minimized the cultural differences I saw. “Everyone is the same under the surface,” I would think, and we’re all just people.”

I traveled enough to be curious about other cultures, to understand something about how things were in Europe, the Middle East, Thailand, India. I knew there were big cities, skyscrapers and traffic and all, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya. Curiosity gets you to the stage where you understand that people from other cultures are as complex and individual as those from yours. You can’t imagine that all Latino and latina people are one way, all Black people think this one thing or that one, that all Native folks want this one thing or that one. If you were white, and someone told you “White people love unpaid internships, why is that a thing?” You might bristle. Although the web site “Stuff white people like” is very good for checking your reactivity as a white person. Unpaid internships, hummus, “My So-called Life,” Ray Bans, Grammar, among many other things. You can’t really stereotype individuals, but there are some cultural things you can recognize …

The stage I’m in now is that I know that things are better when minds from varying cultures have had input. People who speak different languages, have cultures different from mine, (and mine is fairly smack in the middle of the dominant white American culture) see things from a different point of view. The more points of view I can include, the better the end result. Diversity, in a church or in a field of corn, ensures sturdiness. If you plant the same kind of corn, or the same kind of potato, one disease can wipe out your whole crop. Lack of diversity equals weakness. In a community, If you’re all too similar, things get handled in the same old way.

We are going to have several “Teach-ins” here, run by our Change Team, a joint effort of the People of Color group and the White Allies. Look for the dates in upcoming newsletters. You might join the Dismantling Racism conversations here on Saturdays, come to the movies shown mostly on Fridays, or get involved in visiting prisoners at the detention centers.

If you are white, you’re not a terrible person. You can’t fix it by yourself, but you can begin to fix you.

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