Words of Wisdom?

His name was Clyde.  He stood a good head and a half taller than me, an African American man probably about the same age as me. We had agreed to be conversation partners at a meeting held by the ACLU for the Gwinnett community and the Gwinnett County Police Department.  This, we would learn, was the first of many meetings that the ACLU had agreed to facilitate for building better relations between the communities of Gwinnett county and its police department.

We were asked to spend 1 minute describing to our conversation partner something about which we are passionate.  Clyde said that he was passionate about being seen. He then told me about a cultural competency meeting he had gone to at an Atlanta area university.  He went into the building and entered the elevator. Before the door closed, a white woman approached the elevator and saw him. She became very dramatic about not wanting to get on the elevator.  He was disturbed by that, but not nearly so much as when he walked into the conference room and saw that the same woman was there to attend the meeting on cultural competency as well.  At one of the breaks, he approached the woman and said that it was nice to see her again.  She was polite and asked if they knew each other.  He said: well, I was the man on the elevator this morning that you didn’t want to get into.  He said that she became embarrassed and apologized to him.

He wants to be seen.  For who he is.  As a real person.

Later in the meeting at the ACLU conference room, Clyde and I talked some more.  He said that he felt like I did see him.  That was good to know.  I hoped that was true about me, but the other truth about me is that at times in my life I have acted like the woman at the elevator, dodging People of Color out of some fear that had been instilled in me about “those people.”

Clyde told me that when he encounters people, he finds that they either show up as their true selves or as “the representative.”  I asked him about that.  The “representative” is what we put forward as the proxy for our true selves–masks, fronts, pretend or even “best” faces–almost always out of some fear or attempt to be what we think others want us to be. These are not our true selves.  These are our “representatives.”

This was a deeply helpful insight.  As I enter into any situation or conversation with other human beings, am I being my true self or am I showing up as my representative?  Clyde taught me another lesson.  He said that when he encounters a representative, he just thinks in his head:  Okay, this is your representative.  Maybe in a day or a week or a month you will show me who you really are.  A very good guide for me, this man, Clyde.

Bob Patrick

Jennifer Garrison, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett, and I had a conversation after the service this past Sunday, and then she followed up sharing her reflections.  These are the kinds of interior journeys that become our work in a welcoming community.  Jennifer writes about the impact that words like “white supremacy” have on her:

When I think of “white supremacy,” I think of klansmen in their white robes terrorizing the South. I think of neo-nazis raising their arms, saluting a person and ideals that shake me at the core of my being. The voices of those in my family (past and present) who engage in racial rhetoric are not as extreme as those examples, but the idea of “white people” being somehow better in the way we live versus “others” is equally as stunning and disturbing to me. I still hear their voices whenever I am in social settings. I have no need to judge: the jury is already in my head.

To find the struggle created by the white supremacy system in one’s own soul is disturbing. Jennifer describes that struggle and some of the ways it was delivered to her:

I wonder how many people have this judge and jury in their head, from people in their life who do not share the open-mindedness that Unitarian Universalists work toward every day. I try so hard to differentiate my voice and soul from those voices of loved ones who have been so hateful and misinformed about people outside our “white” circle. I share half my DNA with a man who talks down my neighbor, who is Asian, because he owns a landscaping business and kindly cuts my grass for free. “He’s joined the Mexicans, eh?” Wow, you can’t get any closer to direct racism than that. Dad moved out of Atlanta because of the traffic, and the Mexicans. I call it like I see it. The most painful part if this is that I still love him. I have the same quirky sense of humor as he does, but I don’t add race into it.

Many of us have and continue to struggle with the very words that we use around these issues, words needed to communicate but often which come with a double edged-sword. Jennifer shares a powerful moment of realization that she had:

I have had additional thoughts about what “white privilege” means in contrast to “affluence.” I have never related to the idea of “white privilege” because I did not think that I had experienced that myself. I have never known money. After church, I started thinking that the “privilege” I was referring to is actually “affluence.” Affluence by definition has a lot to do with economic power, flexibility and influence. This can be seen in all races, as well as the lack of it. That’s closer to the idea I had in my head with “white privilege.” I realize now that the “white privilege” I do enjoy is that to look at me, most people would see me as friendly, someone not to be afraid of. I have seen folks afraid of the “opposite” race. I have also seen people of all colors come together for the greater good. Let’s keep the conversation going, so that one day we will all get there.

Doing our own work, on our individual selves as well as a community is very much a part of what it means to welcome it all into our community.

Bob Patrick

When Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says that changing the narratives that support inequity and racial injustice is one of the major requirements for changing the world we live in, he is tapping into something very powerful in human beings.

Story.

Human beings have been telling stories for longer than we have had language.  Amazing, isn’t that?  For more like 150,000 years those beings who were evolving into modern human beings–who had not developed speech yet–were telling stories with paint, dance and ritual.  Speech is a very new skill for us, evolutionarily speaking, and reading is even newer.  Reading and writing have only come into common human experience in the last 5000 years.  It is no surprise, then, that learning difficulties often manifest around speech and reading.

Recent brain research has helped us understand that story, however, has a much more ancient role in our brains.  Rather than a peripheral role, it appears now that the entire human brain organizes itself around the very process of story telling (cf. Kendall Haven, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story).

We organize our entire way of thinking and being in the world around stories and story telling.  Haven demonstrates how even non-story-like human thinking (e.g. scientific investigations) are organized for understanding and communication as story.

The stories are not just a side interest that human beings have or fun skill sets that human beings engage in.  Stories are everything we do. In light of this, I am coming to see that asking ourselves about the stories we tell ourselves about human relations in this country, namely, between light skinned people (aka white people) and darker skinned people (aka black, brown, yellow, and red people) goes to the very root of our existence as a nation. These stories affect everything that we do, all day, everywhere.

I wonder how willing we are to examine the stories that we and our predecessors have been telling ourselves about race in this country.  Dr. Carol Anderson, in her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, can help us with this.  Having begun the book, I can tell you that this is not easy.  In coming days, I want to share a few of the stories that I have walked around with all my life that I now know are not even close to the truth.  But, for today, I leave this.

Through different functions, eating food and telling ourselves stories are what keep us alive. In both instances, we can be made aware that what we we are taking in is not good for us.  We can come to see that choosing to take in something else is much healthier for us. Eating food that is bad for me will ultimately kill me.  Telling myself destructive stories will not only kill me, but ultimately it aids the destruction of entire communities.

Bob Patrick

I had the privilege of listening to the Ware Lecture from General Assembly this year just a couple of weeks ago, live streamed from New Orleans.  

Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL, offers that there are four things we have to do if we want to change the world we live in to a world of equity and justice: 1) get proximate to the neglected, 2) change the narratives that sustain inequality, 3) stay hopeful because hopelessness is the enemy of justice, and 4) be willing to do uncomfortable things.

Can we work on some uncomfortable questions today so that we can begin to change the narratives that sustain inequality?  If we are among the white people in this congregation, one of those narratives might be that we think of our community here as a white community.  Not that we would ever say that.  Not that we would ever want our doors to be closed to people of Color (colors other than white–because we are all People of Color, aren’t we?) But when we find ourselves semi-consciously thinking of UUCG, does that semi-conscious image of this place look and feel white to us?  And, aren’t we all People of Color?  If that question causes some uneasiness in you, then there’s a great place to start. Why am I made uneasy by the suggestion that we are all people of Color?  And if I allow myself to walk around with even a semi-conscious image of this community as a white community, won’t I be more inclined to behave, semi-consciously, in ways that keep it a white community?  We live in the most multi-cultural county in the US right now. Couldn’t this be the most multi-cultural religious community in the county?

I am collecting resources and practices that will help me do this work.  I want to share with you what I have so far and let you know that when you find resources and practices that help you work on your role in the white supremacy system of this country, I want to learn from you, too.  You will find at the top of a page a tab labeled “Resources.”  Click on it and you will find this collection of blogs, websites, books, videos, podcasts and radio shows that you can access and begin to use in your work on the white supremacy system in this country.  If you find a resource that you think would be helpful to others, send it to me or Christiana, and we will add them to the resources list.

Bob Patrick