To sing not enough ...

Yesterday morning I joined with a group of people in a park in downtown Charlottesville.  The park has been getting a lot of attention lately, both locally and in the national media, because of an effort to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee which stands so prominently in its center.

A couple of weeks back a rally was held in front of the statue.  Richard Spencer, the man who is credited with coining the term "alt-right," led a torch-bearing crowd in chanting, "We will not be replaced," and the Nazi-era slogan, "blood and soil."  The next night, a larger crowd gathered, bearing candles, to say that Charlottesville should be a place where all people are welcome, and that the stories, the experiences, the lives of People of Color will no longer be dismissed and ignored.

Word went out that there would be a "pro-Confederacy" rally yesterday morning at 10:00, so a group came together at 9:00 so as to be there to greet them.  Signs and banners were gathered, prayers were spoken, songs were sung ... we even hummed "Amazing Grace" over and over again as people read from the Bible, made stirring speeches, and prayed some more.

And I was there, with others from the Unitarian Universalist congregation I serve, singing, and humming, and chanting with everyone else.  I even was moved to give voice to a prayer of my own. 

"Let us not be fooled into thinking that rallies are enough.  We can sing all we want to, but if lives aren't changed for the better, it will be in vain."

Earlier I had been walking around the periphery of the crowd -- trying to get a photo of the congregation's banner, truth be told -- when I was stopped by an African American man who wanted me to explain to him why I was there and why I was saying "Black Lives Matter" when, really, all lives should matter.  There was a small group around us -- some of whom I recognized from other pro-statue rallies -- but it was pretty much only the two of us talking.

A point he was trying to make was that from his perspective, People of Color in Charlottesville don't really care all that much about whether there's a statue of Lee in Lee Park.  They care about the gangs that have taken over the projects; they care about jobs, and housing, and unfair incarceration rates.  He said, essentially, "why don't all you white folks who're here singing get together in the projects and do something to actually make a difference in people's lives?  That's what will bring people together.  This stuff will just divide us further."

I have heard this same point made even closer to home.  The Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church has been a frequent guest in our pulpit, and he has said this same thing about our congregation's decades-long wrestling over whether or not to change our congregation's name -- "people in the Black community," he has said, "don't really care whether this church is named after Thomas Jefferson or not.  We care about jobs, and drugs, and real problems that affect real people."  [An interesting coincidence -- the man I was speaking to in the park is a member of Ebenezer.]

Now ... while I do hear this, I also hear the voices of other People of Color, here and around the country, who talk with equal clarity about how the names and the statues do matter.  The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, gave a powerful speech a week or so ago about why it was so important that the city had taken the step of removing four Confederate monuments.  If you haven't heard it, you should.  [Here's a transcript of the speech, but his delivery was incredible, so I encourage you to actually watch and listen to it.]

Anybody who's ever read even a little of what I've written knows that I am very much a both/and guy, and I recognize that there are a lot of perspectives on this country's history with regards to race, how to understand its present, and where (and how) we should go from here.  The people on one side of the issue have a lot of different motivations for holding the views that they do, as is true for those on the other side, and there is another whole group who, for a whole lot of different reasons, fall somewhere in between.  So I do see that this isn't just, excuse me, black and white.

AND

At the same time that I recognize that there are a lot of different perspectives, I also recognize that some of those perspectives have been consciously, intentionally, and systematically denied or denigrated.  While I know that there are a number of different voices offering a number of different stories, each of which I believe has some core of validity, I also know that there are some voices which have been purposefully silenced.  This is one of the things I think Mayor Landrieu did so well in his speech -- he recognized the existence of a variety of perspectives, denying none of them, and he named the importance of now listening more attentively to those perspectives, to those people, who have been for two long pushed to the margins of U.S. society.

So I understand that names and statues don't matter for some, and I understand that for some they matter a lot, and I understand that for some they have been painful for a long, long time and that that pain has been ignored. I also know that for me, I will side with those whose voices have gone too long unheard; I will cast my lot who are asking that their too long unrecognized pain for finally seen and responded to; I will show up when I am asked to show up as a sign of solidarity with those who have been pushed to the periphery.

That's why I was there yesterday morning, singing, and humming, and holding a sign that says "Black Lives Matter," because there has never been a question in this country that white lives matter.  What has been said repeatedly, and in ways both subtle and overt, is that Black lives don't matter, and I will lend my voice, my time, my energy, my body to the growing number of people insisting that we, as a country, no longer pretend that there is a rot in the roots of the nation, and demanding that we do something about it.  Black lives do matter, all evidence to the contrary.  And until our reality reflects this rhetoric, I will keep showing up.

Yet there's one more both/and here, and that's that while I will keep showing up because I think it is important to gather to sing, I also recognize that singing is not enough.  If all we do is show up in the park on a Wednesday morning and sing, and hum, and speak strong words, but the gangs remain a presence in the projects, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have negative interactions with the police, and our legal system remains so obscenely imbalanced, and ... if these things don't change, none of the songs of solidarity will matter much at all.

What would happen if all of the people who identify as white who show up at rallies like this were to put as much energy and enthusiasm into making a real difference in the real lives of real people as we do in putting on a show?  (Note that I said, "we" there, because I should certainly be asking myself that question, no less than any other large-hearted, well-meaning, liberal white person.)

A post from a Charlottesville man named Chris Newman (owner of the local Sylvanaqua Farms), responding to the candle-light follow-up to the torch-lit rally, recently went viral.  He begins:

A message to Charlottesville about Lee Park from your local Black farmer:

I know some folks are really feeling themselves about this whole Love Trumps Hate counter-rally to Richard Spencer's punch-worthy shenanigans in Lee Park.  I'd like to appreciate it, but frankly I just don't.

He goes on to describe Charlottesville as "the most aggressively segregated place" he has ever lived, and he describes some of the realities he faces as someone "farming while black."  He concludes.  

Truth is, as a Black dude, I'm far less bothered by the flag wavers [...] than this town's progressives assuming its race problem has nothing to do with them.  The former is a visual inconvenience.  The later could leave my daughters without a father.  

So please, put down the candles and instead ask yourself:  why is my city like this?  Why is life like this for Black people in my wonderful city?  The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park.

Singing is not enough.  It's never been enough -- important, even essential as it is, it's not enough.  We do need to ask those questions Mr. Newman encourages us all to ask, and then we really have to go out there and do something about it.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

From Torches to Whispers ...

According to my local paper, The Daily Progress, last night:

"Several dozen torch-wielding protesters gathered in Charlottesville’s Lee Park just after 9 p.m. Saturday, chanting “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil.”"  

Lee Park has been in our news a lot lately, since the City Council voted to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee after a hotly heated debate about whether or not to do so.  It was a high school student who got things started after she made a speech about how unwelcoming that gigantic statue made her, and other people of color she knows.  The community quickly divided into factions -- keep the statue (keep our heritage!), remove the statue (recognize that there is more than one heritage to honor!), and those who tried to find some kind of balance.

But let's not lose sight of the headline --  "Several dozen torch-wielding protesters gathered [...] chanting “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil.”

While this blatant attempt to intimidate is infuriating on its own, I can help but also see it through the lens of the conversation going on within the denomination -- and congregation -- I serve.  The Unitarian Universtalist Association is embroiled in a heated conversation about participation in, and perpetuation of, systems and structures of racism within our own institutions.  The fact that our institutions are also infected by the cancer or racism that permeates every facet of the dominant culture -- "the water we swim in" -- is not, or should not be, surprising.  

Naturally, good-hearted, well-meaning liberal's as we UUs generally are don't want to think of our institutions as being caught up in the systems and structures that support racism.  Yet even many who recognize that this is simply an undeniable fact are reacting to the words being used to describe this:  white supremacy.  Those "systems and structures that support racism" are being called "systems and structures that support a white supremacist culture," and even many people who recognize the first are rejecting the second.  

"White supremacists," they say, "are folks who wear hoods, or go to the downtowns of quiet little cities like Charlottesville with torches in their hands."  It makes no sense, then, they say, to use those same words to describe something like the Unitarian Universalist Association which has been long dedicated to a vision of an anti-racist, anti-oppression, multicultural Beloved Community.  To paint us with the same brush as members of the KKK is both to unfairly malign us, as well as to unhelpfully dilute the meaning of the term and its power when directed at its proper targets.  I imagine that the events of last night at Lee Park here in Charlottesville will only serve to bolster this argument.

I would actually suggest the opposite.  About a week or so ago I posted, "A Toxic Cesspool by Any Other Name ..." in which I tried to make the case that no matter what we -- especially we who identify as white -- feel about the words "white supremacy," we should not let our reaction to the words deter us from hearing the underlying diagnosis of our infection.  Last weekend we took part -- with well over 600 other Unitarian Universalist congregations and communities -- in an event known as the UU White Supremacy Teach-In.  (Here's a link to the service we did here -- "Listening Even When We Don't Want to Hear" -- in case you'd like to see it.)  And I've shared widely a graphic that's sometimes called the White Supremacy Triangle.  (It's at the bottom of this post.)

You can also think of this image as an iceberg, with the kinds of behaviors and groups that we'd usually think of when hearing the words "white supremacy" above the "water line."  These are overt, one might say explicit, behaviors ... like bringing torches to a park with a statue of a Confederate General and chanting, "blood and soil."  These are instantly recognizable, and I don't think there are any of my well-meaning, good-hearted, liberal, white kin who would disagree that those words -- white supremacy -- apply to those behaviors.

Yet the metaphor of an iceberg is instructive, because just as the "tip of the iceberg" is supported and sustained by the far-greater mass of ice beneath the water, so, too, white supremacy is supported and sustained by the far-greater mass of behaviors that are less visible, less overt, and less obviously troublesome (to many white folks, at least).

Before going further, let me engage in a moment of semantics.  Racism is defined as, "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."  Few would disagree with that.  Yet here's the problem with this definition, it doesn't specific which race is being considered "superior."  It speaks about this "prejudice, discrimination, [and] antagonism" in general, almost neutral terms.  And yet it has also been accepted for decades is that "racism = prejudice + power."  And in the United States -- historically and presently -- it is white people who have the power.  

Lots of people talk about "reverse racism," yet the definition of racism as "prejudice + power" argues that there really is no such thing.  (Although the comedian Aamer Rahman has a brilliant routine in which he suggests that reverse racism could well be possible if ...)  People of color can be prejudiced, but they have no, nor do they have now, the institutional and structural power necessary to make that prejudice "racism."   Yet defining racism as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior" is generic enough to blur this distinction.

"White supremacy," on the other hand, is defined as "the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society."  This is certainly a more harsh definition, yet it is also more particular and specific -- the scourge we face as a nation is not "prejudice, discrimination, [and] antagonism" against any old race, by any old race believing its own race is "superior."  It is, specifically, a culture that promotes the notion of white superiority which generates "prejudice, discrimination, [and] antagonism" toward People of Color.  Racism is not generic; it is specific.  The phrase "white supremacy" captures and reveals that specificity with greater clarity.

"But I don't believe that 'white people are superior to those of all other races'!," some might say.  "My beloved UUA doesn't believe that white people should 'dominate society!"  That is no doubt true, and yet, simply put, the dominant culture in which we live -- "the water we swim in" -- does.  I could give a million examples of the ways in which the dominant culture of the United States prioritizes, and elevates as superior, white perceptions, which perspectives, and white experience, but here are three:

• We need a "Black History Month" because the history that's been taught the other 11 months of the year is so white.
• We seem to feel the need to identify a Person of Color as such in articles, let's say, yet can safely assume that if we don't identify race, the person is white.
• As we read the previous two examples we assumed that the "we" refers to "everyone" when, in fact, it refers to primarily people who identify or are identified as white.  It is white people, by and large, who believe that when we say "we" we mean to include everyone; People of Color know all too well that they aren't.

So no, good-hearted, well-meaning liberal (white) folks are not engaging the same kinds of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as those who bring torches to a "candlelight march."  And yet, that oh so obvious behavior is supported by all the ways -- overt and covert, above the water line and below it, visible and easily recognizable and not -- that we all -- truly all -- who swim in the water of the white supremacy culture participate in and perpetuate that culture.  It's not just the torches, but the whispers that have a role to play.  To fail to recognize and understand that is to make it virtually -- if not entirely -- impossible to cure what ails us.

Pax tecum,

RevWik