“Creating an Other”
The Reverend Cecilia Kingman Miller, Interim Minister
Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church
February 17, 2008
Readings
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Sermon
Last year, just before our annual General Assembly in Portland, the local paper ran a story on one of my colleagues, Joseph Santos-Lyons. Joseph is Pacific-Islander, and he was the first minister of color to be ordained in our Pacific Northwest District. In the article, Joseph described the struggles that we Unitarian Universalists have had to become racially diverse—or even racially aware—denomination. Though he was painfully truthful, Joseph also noted our longing to be a truly inclusive faith.
The day of the article, there was a huge outcry from other ministers and the denomination. People felt that Joseph made us look bad; that G.A. is a time for positive press. But I feel that Joseph was an unwitting prophet in that moment.
For so long we have stood on that principle of inherent worth and dignity—as though simply saying it is sufficient. We have engaged in tokenism, for example, by honoring Black History month—without engaging in the deep and intricate work of racial reconciliation. We have recruited ministers of color into our predominantly white congregations without asking that the lay people undergo training to be prepared for this responsibility. We want to get it right, but we just don’t get it.
This nation has a long and extremely troubled history of racial violence and oppression. It began with the first landings of Europeans, who saw this continent as wild and unsettled, who viewed the people already here as either romantic ideals—the noble savage—or as expendable, less than human.
Furthermore, all of our terrible history of racial injustice is intertwined with the history of capitalism and colonialism. Economic desire underlies every instance of racial oppression.
Colonial expansion by European nations was a search for new resources and wealth—land, timber, minerals, furs. When the native populations resisted, they were removed or decimated, or used as free or inexpensive labor. For example, in the west, the Spanish forced indigenous people into labor.
Colonial powers then began importing their own labor—whether forcibly or through economic incentive. The African slave trade was about cheap labor. The use of immigrant labor in the Northeast—the Irish, the Welsh, the Italian waves of immigration, and here in the West, the massive labor contributions of the Chinese, the Japanese, Latinos, and of course the remaining native tribes, and the terrible prejudice and hatred those peoples suffered when an economic downturn occurred and their labor was no longer valued.
The tenacity of these people, their survival through generations of back-breaking and soul-numbing work and racial violence, is amazing. Equally stunning is the undeniable fact that this nation’s greatest economic activity—the carving of cities out of dense forests, the creation of entire industries (cotton, timber, copper), the building of the transcontinental railroad with its tunnels carved through mountains, the economic power we became—all of it rests upon the labor of people of color.
And yet little of the profit, the wealth, of that labor, or even the use of its products, has accrued to those who sweated, struggled and even died in that work. This is the argument for reparations to the descendants of African slaves—that their labor created significant wealth for this nation, and they remain outside of the benefits of that wealth-creation, even today.
Once again we face an economically motivated racial question. The immigration debate is no different now than it was in the mid-1800s, when political parties formed around the xenophobic fear of Asian workers.
The reality is that there is—has always been—labor which privileged white America is unwilling to do, which we want someone else to do for us, and for which we are not willing to pay much. Once again, we create an other—a less than human group to do this undesirable work, and then we degrade and despise them for their otherness.
I believe that our young people understand better than we do the challenges ahead. Two years ago, students all up and down the West Coast participated in a general walkout on immigration. Though my own son discussed this at the dinner table for weeks, I didn’t realize at the time that this generation is working on its own racial issues, no less significant than those of the civil rights era.
We have cast immigration not as a racial question, but as a debate over citizenry and borders. Yet the anxiety, the fear, the name-calling that colors the immigration debate is so very pronounced (and so like previous debates over the Irish and the Chinese) that I believe it to be about race. This debate is rooted in a deep fear of the other—the non-white. Once again we have made a different category of humans—stripping them of their personhood.
How does this happen? James Aho, in his brilliant work on the creation of the other, tells us that the process begins, surprisingly, in a form of self-loathing. In a racially stratified society, or in any hierarchy of oppression, the more privileged parties project onto the less privileged all those qualities they loathe in themselves. Any feelings or traits that are repressed in the dominant culture are declared as inherent traits of the oppressed group.
Projections onto an “other” could include sexuality, or violent feelings, or even “wildness,” a lack of self-control. Let me give you an example from feminist studies: the projection of weakness, an undesirable quality, onto women.
Another good example is black sexuality—whites projected hyper-sexualization onto blacks out of a repression of their own sexual impulses. Laziness is another one—in a capitalist culture which prizes industriousness. Ironic that it would be projected onto those who have worked so hard.
Our own Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka examined this issue in her book Learning to Be White. She asserts that white Anglo-American culture is the dominant culture in the U.S., and that each successive immigrant group has had to assimilate itself. In that process their own unique culture is reduced or caricatured, and ultimately rejected by the group itself, in order to become “white.”
In a hierarchical system, each group strives to locate itself closer to power and privilege. And again, there is an economic element.
Audre Lord tells us that:
“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”
A profit driven culture benefits from racial and class separation.
I am not qualified to present a solution to America’s racial dilemma. I am myself in the middle of this long journey of reconciliation. I am striving to understand my own complicity in a racial hierarchy of oppression. I am astounded at how much I have left to learn, and how many mistakes I make.
I am also struggling with what I see as a pronounced classism in Unitarian Universalism. We make what we could call class-normative assumptions all the time in our churches—assuming that people have a college education, that they can afford to pay registration fees for conferences, and other, assuming everyone is a homeowner. I am deeply saddened by the way these assumptions exclude people from full welcome among us.
As I struggle through these questions, I turn to those whom I trust—activists further along in the struggle, as guides. I had the blessed good fortune to attend a seminary that placed these issues at the center of our theological training. Starr King School for the Ministry, our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, has a core commitment that is known as ECO: Educating to Counter Oppression, an extraordinary education in these matters.
One of the first principles I learned was that each of us dwells within a matrix of privilege and oppression. Our own family stories intersect with events in history, and we sit at a particular intersection. We are responsible, each of us, for knowing the ways that we have or do not have privilege and power.
One learns to articulate where one stands on that matrix:
I am white, and female, and heterosexual. I am the first in my family to get a masters degree. I am descended from middle-class Connecticut merchants, and dirt-poor Kansas farmers. And so on…
As I articulated my own place in our nation’s story, I could acknowledge for the first time a pronounced sorrow. My own privilege rests upon a history of violent oppression, for my forbears on both sides were among the first Europeans to colonize Northeastern America. My very presence here is proof of their successful suppression of native people. I haven’t yet absorbed the fullness of that reality.
This self-descriptive work also helped me to see how my own behavior in a given moment is shaped by my experiences of having or not having more power than someone else. I learned to notice when I am acting from privilege, and when I feel silenced or marginalized. There are ways each of us can act to ameliorate these power differences among us, if we can remain aware of our own location of power.
Some of the points that have been helpful to me, as a person of relative privilege, are:
Don’t assume that you’re more capable than others.
Don’t overlook history and equate all oppressions as equal—important for me as a white woman.
Don’t assume that everyone has the same options as you do.
Don’t take up all the space or always speak first.
I decided to practice these principles while still in seminary, and I have to tell you how appalled I was to discover my own habit of speaking over people. I also had a habit of assuming that I understood another group’s perspective, when I truly had only a glancing awareness. It was a clear indicator of how much more work I had to do.
Another deliberate assumption of the ECO program is that it is the responsibility of those with privilege to understand the position of those without. Whites must seek to witness and understand the experiences of people of color. Men have a responsibility to truly listen to and understand the experiences of women. Straight people must listen to the stories from those among us who gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered, stories about what it means to live in a hostile, or hetero-normative culture. The economically privileged must witness—and truly understand—the lives of the poor, not from the position of having the answers or solving their problems, but simply listening and witnessing.
It is not the duty of the oppressed to enlighten the privileged. The responsibility goes the other way.
How do we do this? By educating ourselves. Reading, listening. We can read newspapers published by marginalized groups. We can read autobiographies. My understanding of the modern black experience in America was enhanced by the book Unafraid of the Dark. It’s a memoir of growing up poor and black in Chicago, written by my colleague in our Unitarian ministry, the Rev. Rosemary Bray-McNatt.
We can read together. We can invite people to speak to us about their experiences—farmworkers, recent immigrants, and anyone whose experience is vastly different from our own.
We can also get training—as this congregation will be doing soon. Part of searching for a new minister includes a workshop called “Beyond Categorical Thinking,” which is designed to help a congregation break through some of its assumptions about race, gender, sexual identity, and other things like physical abilities.
Just as an example, you have an assumption here that your next minister will be able-bodied. How do I know this? You don’t have a way for a wheelchair to get onto the chancel here.
When we listen to others, we can notice the failures of traditional liberal thinking on these matters. Too often, well-meaning liberals have given lip service to the cause of solidarity in racial and class matters. It is an easy thing to say that we are in solidarity with another group. The Cuban-American theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz relates the story of her experiences at various religious conferences, particularly feminist theology gatherings. Well-meaning white feminists would tell her that they were sisters in solidarity with Latinas.
Isasi-Diaz writes that this word means nothing unless it has a political reality to it. Solidarity is not a feeling—it is an action. She critiques as well those whites who deny their own place in the class and racial hierarchy. She defines solidarity thusly:
“To be in solidarity…is to use one’s privilege to bring about radical change, rather than denying one has privileges.”
Isasi-Diaz also notes the crucial role of mutuality in the practice of solidarity. Mutuality says that our well-being, our futures, our spiritual wholeness—our entire lives—are inextricably knit together—and that structures of oppression harm the privileged as much as the oppressed.
When we recognize our shared humanity, when we truly see ourselves as one people, one family, then we experience mutuality. When we see the broken hands of the farmworker, and see them as our brother’s hands, or see the broken dreams of a child in poverty and see that child as our child, then we experience mutuality.
And that opening of our hearts leads us into new ways of addressing injustice. If we wish to see a new world, to see the creation of a just society, if we wish to be that beloved community, we people of faith must be willing to walk as allies, in solidarity with those who have been oppressed. We must use our privilege to change society.
It is not necessary for us to be experts in policymaking, nor be fluent in the intricacies of the immigration debate or the reparations question.
What is required of us is our willingness to listen to the voices of the voiceless, to witness their realities, and then to use our privilege to amplify their voices. We must use our own access to power, our educations, our political voices, our connections, and our money to lift up the concerns of the marginalized.
Joseph was right, in that interview. We keep trying to get it. Maybe it is our deep longing for true equality among all people; maybe it is a sense of sorrow for our nation’s history. Maybe we realize that these divisions impoverish us all culturally and spiritually. Perhaps it is simply that we want to act with integrity and compassion in this life, and we cannot willfully walk away from the work of justice. Whatever it is, we are called into this work.
May we each see our part, and know what we might do to bring in the realm of love and justice. May we have strength on this journey, that our steps might be steady and our hearts strong. May we have hope, and courage, and may we find our way in love.
May it be so, my friends, this day, and all the days to come.
AMEN.
