a sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
preached November 5, 2000
Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church
First Reading: Paula Rothenberg, Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class & Gender
A major East Coast bank provides some of its customers with a service called "privileged checking". Those who qualify are allowed to write checks in amounts that exceed their balance with the assurance that they will not bounce. In many ways, this service stands as a metaphor for the kinds of invisible privilege some people in our society enjoy because of their class position, their race or ethnicity, their gender, or some combination of all three. As beneficiaries of a history of privilege, they are able to draw on credit to bankroll whatever initiatives they undertake. This provides them with advantages that most other people do not enjoy and provides their children with a head start in the race of life.
Second Reading: Thandeka, Learning to Be White
In high school, Jackie talked about one of her teachers so often as someone who was playing a formative role in her education that her parents encouraged her to invite him home for dinner. Jackie remembers her mother’s flushed and astonished face when she opened the door and discovered that the teacher was black. After he left, Jackie’s parents were outraged that she had not told them of his race, making Jackie feel she had done something wrong, that she had broken a rule that until that moment she did not realize existed. She was sorry she had embarrassed her parents and knew she must be careful not to embarrass them again.
Sermon:
In his classic The Road Less Traveled, M Scott Peck distinguishes between people who suffer from assuming too much responsibility and those who suffer from not assuming enough. He says most of us are a combination of the two, sometimes being neurotic when we immerse ourselves in a million “should”s and sometimes displaying a character disorder when we don’t take responsibility for what is truly our own stuff. Thinking about my own self, among Unitarian Universalists I often find myself overwhelmingly neurotic! This isn’t anything new. When I was in high school and college, my own neurosis came in the form of the Messiah complex. I felt that I needed to save the whole world, that I should somehow write the spiritual text that would turn people away from selfishness and greed and towards cooperation and compassion and trust!
Today’s service is the first of many that have been developed with a worship associate. Three times a year, the worship associates and I will reflect on what is on the hearts and minds of the congregation, develop a long list of potential themes, whittle them down, and then assign themes and worship associates for each service. I won’t typically mention what went into developing a theme. But I was struck by how one surfaced in a number of ways: how we, many of us who are between upper middle class and upper class, can use our power and privilege for good.
It is an honor for me to serve a congregation where members take to heart their relationship to their spiritual community. It is also deeply satisfying to have learned over the last year how much you want to be challenged, challenged to develop an ever stronger faith community, challenged to reflect on the most difficult questions of the human condition, challenged to bring your lives in accord with the principles we espouse.
As I reflect on the responsibilities of privilege, I am acutely aware of the enormous temptation to tell you of all the “should”s in my life, and say, “You privileged folk, you should, you should, you should.” This is akin to propagating liberal guilt and would be irresponsible of me, just as it would be irresponsible for me to tell you how you should vote on Tuesday—except to say: you really should vote!
What is privilege? My American Heritage Dictionary gives this definition: a special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, a class, or a caste. Such an advantage, an immunity, or a right held as a prerogative of status or rank, and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others. Privilege usually suggests a right not enjoyed by everyone. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, said: “When the laws undertake to…grant…exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society…have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.”
One hundred and seventy years ago, when Andrew Jackson was president, many Americans complained that the government favored the rich and powerful—indeed, Jackson’s populist ideas were what won him the presidency. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as our nation is about to elect the forty-third president of the United States of America, there is considerable discontent that the rich are getting richer. And yet, unlike in Jackson’s day, there does not appear to be a majority uprising to curb this trend. With the Tuesday election so close, I want to offer an analysis of how race and class have played into presidential politics. Let me start with a story.
When my father was a child, he would play a game with his younger sister. “Which would you prefer to happen,” he’d ask her, “that both of us get five cents or for you to get fifteen cents while I get twenty-five cents.” His sister would inevitably say, “for me to get the twenty-five cents.” But when he would press her to choose between five cents for each of them or fifteen cents for her while twenty-five cents go to him, she’d always say she’d settle for the five cents.
There’s something fierce in the human psyche that would prefer to be poor than to receive some benefits while believing that someone who’s different (and perhaps an object of our contempt) is getting more. And that’s exactly the fear that several politicians have exploited—the fear that black people or Hispanic people or Puerto Rican people are getting more benefits than white people. It was originally a Democratic candidate that first used this technique called race baiting on the national stage. George Wallace in 1964, a three time governor of Alabama, lost during the primaries, but he found an enormous response from poor immigrant communities with his vitriolic comments about hippies, civil rights “agitators,” welfare recipients, atheists, beatniks, anti-war protestors, and Communists.
It didn’t take long for Republican politicians to learn this politicized language. Indeed, George Wallace, despite winning the Democrat ticket, lost the 1968 presidential election to his Republican contender Richard Nixon. According to American historian Dan Carter, Richard Nixon won on the platform of appealing for “law and order” in American cities, and Nixon enthusiastically found such talk to effectively speak to the racial fears of racial assault. Speaking to his staff, Nixon said enthusiastically, “That hits it right on the nose! It’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.” Nixon effectively promoted this ideology of false consciousness without having to make the racial connection. Ronald Reagan did the exact same thing when he began one of his famous discourses on welfare queens using food stamps to buy porterhouse steaks. He didn’t need to say “black” or “African American.” His audience was already primed to make that connection.
Because of cultural stereotypes and long ingrained patterns of misinformation, race has provided an effective avenue for many politicians. For race baiting maintains divisions and separations between poor people of different races, highlighted by the murder of three civil rights activists in Mississippi also in 1964. With the strange phenomena that it is better to have a dog to kick, an amazingly large number of whites of low economic status have largely voted for candidates that do not benefit their situation.
I believe that as people of education, we have the responsibility to acknowledge the reality that race plays an important part in our lives. I want to shift gears, moving from the intersection of race, class, and presidential elections, and move to the stories of real people.
In college during the late 1950s, Dan joined a fraternity. With his prompting, his local chapter pledged a black student. When the chapter’s national headquarters learned of this first step toward integration of its ranks, headquarters threatened to rescind the local chapter’s charter unless the black student was expelled. The local chapter caved in to the pressure, and Dan was elected to tell the black student member he would have to leave the fraternity. Dan did it. “I felt so ashamed of what I did,” he says years later, and he began to cry. “I have carried this burden for forty years,” he said. “I will carry it to my grave.”
At age sixteen, Sarah brought her best friend home with her from high school. After the friend left, Sarah’s mother told her not to invite her friend home again. “Why?” Sarah asked, astonished and confused. “Because she’s colored,” her mother responded. “That was not an answer,” Sarah thought to herself. It was obvious that her friend was colored, but what kind of reason was that for not inviting her to Sarah’s house? So Sarah persisted, insisting that her mother tell her the real reason for her action. None was forthcoming. The indignant look on her mother’s face, however, made Sarah realize that if she persisted, she would jeopardize her mother’s affection toward her.
These stories of Dan and Sarah were shared with Thandeka and printed in her new book, Learning to Be White. Thandeka, a Unitarian Universalist theologian, is a faculty member at Meadville-Lombard seminary in Chicago. As an African American lesbian she has reflected on race relations what it means to be different. Her conclusions are startling and original--that being white is a social limiting construction just as any other, but unlike being black or gay, most people are not conscious of the limitations of white consciousness.
Just as the folk song says “you’ve got to be taught how to hate,” Thandeka argues that you also have to learn how to be white, that in the experience of every Euro-American, there is a moment in childhood when he or she is “induced” into whiteness. The result is an unusual racial victim, someone who had to become white in order to survive, and the price of admission to the white race includes child abuse, ethnic conflicts, class exploitation, lost self-esteem, and a general feeling of self-contempt.
From the dozens of stories Thandeka has heard from white people, the experience of shame echoes the most loudly. In her words, “Shame is an emotional display of a hidden civil war. It is a pitched battle by a self against itself in order to stop feeling what it is not supposed to feel: forbidden desires and prohibited feelings that render one different. Such desires and felt differences must be suppressed or blocked off in some way because one’s community deems them to be bad. The ensuing internal battle often ends as a stalemate, momentary paralysis marked by the red flag of a blush or the cold sweat of a frozen grimace.”
Another story she heard was from a white man who in the eighth grade went on a class trip to Washington DC in 1952 and saw the signs that indicated “whites” and “coloreds” were to drink from separate drinking fountains and use different bathrooms. What disturbed this young teenager even more was that no one seemed to notice, and he felt that his discomfort and sense of wrongness was his personal secret.
I am guessing that most of us have had an experience where someone who is different was treated poorly or unfairly on account of their difference. The feeling of not being at home in one’s own white community is the formative experience of developing a white racial identity. As we get older, it is easy to stuff such feelings, forget them, and not remember them for years.
As Unitarian Universalists, one of our principles is to promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Coupled with our principle to affirm the worth and dignity of every individual, we cannot, as people of faith, ignore the enormous amount of prejudice in our culture that serves to deny the humanity of people of color.
One member shared with me that she was unsure how to respond to her child’s questions and confusion about how the school celebrates Black History month but doesn’t celebrate white history month. It is not a part of children’s historical consciousness of the gross injustices suffered by people of darker skin color, some of whom lived on this continent before the European settlers and some of whom were brought here in chains against their will. Even today, some people are offered privileged banking, while others watch helplessly as their banks uproot because it is not a profitable neighborhood. Unless we white people can acknowledge our own whiteness, we will not be able to respond to the children in our midst seeking clarity about the discomfort that comes with bumping up against prejudice.
The human condition, whether we are highly privileged or have virtually nothing such that our backs are up against the wall, our struggle is the same. We must fend off the three hounds of hell—fear, hatred, and deception. As long as we live out of a place of fear, hatred, or deception, we cannot be authentic. These temptations are fierce in this day of age, perhaps even more so the more wealth and status one has—for there is an illusion that you have more to lose. Economic privilege doesn’t come without cost. In this morning’s Seattle Times, the front page story is about the tremendous wealth here in the pacific northwest and how wealthy people struggle with the enormous freedom and privilege that comes with sudden wealth.
I especially appreciated Linda Sherry’s sharing today. If you are older, wiser, more mature, do you not have a responsibility for your brother who is younger, less experienced, and hasn’t yet learned better?
It is not my hope that you will go home and feel responsible for solving all the nation’s problems; however, it is my hope you will take heart and find ways of bringing to light the long history of prejudice that haunts our nation. There is much to uncover, not only in the history of others but within our own lives, which once liberated, we can live in the streams of love.
Blessed be. Amen.