I grew up in a small town in South Jersey. For a liberality, South Jersey could have been Mississippi without the accent.

It was a pretty conventional town. It preserved the marks of society as it was in that era: mine was the one school bus out of the fleet that passed through the black neighborhood of a neighboring town and picked up "those kids," from what seemed another solar system. And so every morning I had opportunity to note that the streets in that neighborhood were not paved, that the municipal sewer system didn't run there. The shacks in which people lived were heated by wood or kerosene stoves.

Nearby was the small city of Lakewood, a mostly Jewish town. When there was a fire in Lakewood, Grandad would announce that it was caused by "Jewish Lightning," for insurance.

I was raised in a conservative Presbyterian home and every Sunday, without fail, found us in our usual pew at the huge Presbyterian Church of Toms River, New Jersey. I was always there, listening to the minister: he was there for forty years, died at a meeting. I never heard him refer to any of these anomalies of our community's life, never heard him mention the fact that the streets in the black neighborhood were not paved, and that there was no city sewer there. He spoke only of matters pertaining to our private lives and faith — never any of our public sins.

Eventually I got involved in a fundamentalist church, an Assembly of God, and went off to one of their colleges in their headquarters city in the Missouri Ozarks. After a year or two there, I was surprised to learn that the school had admitted black students from, as they put it, "the mission field" — who could go back to Africa and preach Christianity — but had been closed to black Americans — an official policy that had ended only a couple of years earlier.

There was an order that you really shouldn't think about shaking up. Apparently it was a divinely-ordained order. Certainly it had the blessing of these churches, and these churches had warned us that Martin Luther King was really a Communist bent on overthrowing this good godly order.

I left that college in the middle of my senior year, thoroughly disillusioned and quite confused but unwilling to live any longer with the contradictions and hypocrisy of life in Springfield, Missouri in the epicenter of the Assemblies of God. I rented a cheap apartment in Jersey City and got a job at what is known as the God-Box, or more formally, the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive in New York where the major denominations had their offices, and where more progressive religious folks lurked, Presbyterians included.

This was my introduction to life in the city. Here one saw things one did not see in Island Heights, New Jersey or Springfield, Missouri. Here I saw Vietnam War draft resistors and heard their side of the story. Here they seemed to have a different view of this matter of race in America.

One night in my Jersey City apartment I was watching the news. Darned if that Communist agitator King hadn't come to town to make a speech, and darned if they didn't run at least 30 seconds of it on the news. And a funny thing happened. I said to myself, "He's right!" A few prophetic words cut right through years of conditioning and training in how a European American is supposed to think. I was convinced.

Within a week, the God-Box was closed to observe the funeral of Martin Luther King. I sat glued to my television watching the proceedings from Atlanta. At one point they interviewed a black minister named Herb Daughtry from the Bed-Sty section of Brooklyn.

A few Sundays later I was at his church, and I returned there Sunday after Sunday. I was attending meetings and participating in demonstrations run by Operation Breadbasket, of which Herb Daughtry was a local organizer. Somewhere I have a picture of myself holding a sign that read "Soul Brothers Unite," which Herb found hysterically funny. I saw the energy and resolve into which the rage about a few centuries' humiliation can be turned.

After awhile I went to work for a crazy evangelist who ran pre-schools in ghetto neighborhoods as a way of evangelizing. I was doing photography for their publications. And by now I had learned my way around Brownsville, in Brooklyn, where 500 buildings had been torched in riots and stood eerily boarded but not really empty, and Bed-Sty, and the South Bronx, and Harlem. So a lot of my photos showed black and hispanic children in the city — until I was told to keep the camera pointed at white children lest the evangelist lose the generous contributions of his good Christian constituency. That, and a few other incidents, led to my firing a few months later as a "Communist Sympathizer."

My journey through the New York of the late 60s equipped me for my own breakthrough to liberation when, a decade later, I came out for who I am, with pride.

v

I don't know why I tell you all this, really. It just somehow seemed germane.

v

Because I was brought up White. And White, in my America, signified something monumentally more consequential than the color of my skin.

We may spend the rest of our days discovering what it means to be White, or to be not-White. There is always another wrinkle or fold in this fantastic mystical status called White.

I felt it in that good Presbyterian home in New Jersey and in that good Presbyterian church and that Assembly of God congregation. I felt it on the bus to Central Regional High School and in the little town of Island Heights. It was something you were supposed to be and must try very hard to be.

So those black folks were really a convenience for us. Surely, they could never be White. If there was injustice, God would take care of it in the afterlife, in Heaven, and so we didn't have to trouble ourselves. We could be superior and no doubt closer to God, and we could be secure in the knowledge that we were entitled to our separate and unequal advantage. It is a form of grandiosity by which we are all manipulated. It's been put very well by a rising Unitarian Universalist Theologian, Thandeka, who is herself black and lesbian. She writes:

The objectively groundless fear of racial "others" on the part of white Americans makes white voters prime targets for manipulation by political and economic interests who use race-baiting tactics to achieve their own ends."¹

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Dr. King recognized that and organized the Poor People's Campaign, which was supposed to be an interracial mass movement of the poor against the power elite, but it didn't work, because, as King discovered, and these are his words, "white America [was] not psychologically organized to close the gap" between rich and poor if doing so meant uplifting black folks. European Americans had been carefully taught that you don't do that.²

Some of the giant figures in our own religious tradition understood this. I count among them Theodore Parker, and Mr. Emerson and Lydia Maria Child and Senator Charles Sumner and the entire radical Transcendentalist wing of our Unitarian Universalist religious movement. They understood what was going on with what they referred to as the Slave Power or Slavocracy, and how they secured their power. It was a small privileged aristocracy that created the illusion of a larger aristocracy called White. (Don't think this is just a bit of irrelevant history. We're caught in the same fraud.)

v

In the American South, this comfy oligarchy had secured for itself the privileges of wealth, comfort, and leisure without having to do much work. This was achieved on the suffering backs of slaves, of course — everyone knows that. But there was more to it. In 1860 an oligarchy of just 8,000 people — that is, seven percent of the total European American population of the South — ruled the South: they defined what "White" was supposed to mean, and they ruled and owned three million black slaves and they ruled five million poor white folks too. And what was "White" supposed to mean — but a class that, under the Divine order, was entitled to dominate and enjoy a life of wealth and luxury without having to labor, because labor was beneath them!

So — those European Americans who were not among the privileged 8,000 — the poor, laboring class — could only try to be "White." They were uncomfortably close to the status of the slaves and they struggled to distance themselves from the despised enslaved class, struggled to attain to the elite Oligarchy.

It's true that they were privileged in a very important way — they were free. But they would never be admitted to the Club. They'd been set on a treadmill going nowhere. And the more desperately they tried to assert their specialness, this Whiteness, the more hatred and contempt they felt for those they were most like, who had even less status and power. They took it as given that their white skin was proof of their entitlement. Their aspirations were shaped and determined by the Oligarchy they could mimick but never join. Racism in America grew out of the shameless manipulation by a few of the American economy. It began with greed. We ought to remember that.

Race and class are inextricably tangled together. We are all inextricably tangled in this thing called racism. And though we have a fear of difference, and of people who are different — a fear we have to learn to overcome — there is not, in us, any inborn aversion to black or brown or yellow skin. There is a desperation to attain the powerful status of the ruling oligarchy.

In my little home town, in my high school, the churches that taught me about the Divine Order, just everywhere — until I hit New York — the desperation of this struggle meant you didn't dare identify with people of color because you were trying your darndest to be White: Whiteness as it was and is defined by a ruling oligarchy.

What is it Americans are striving for — what is the American dream?

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Here's a clue. It's from two stories that appeared in the London newspaper The Guardian, founded, by the way, by a group of Unitarians in Manchester. The Guardian still maintains its vision of social justice.

The first story appeared September 22. It reads, in part:

America's richest people have seen a 10 per cent increase in their net worth over the past year . . . even as unemployment continues to rise and the income of average workers remains stagnant.

Collectively, the top 400 were worth $955bn . . . The improving fortunes of those on the list also reflected the largess being shown to the richest Americans by the Bush administration.

They are the main beneficiaries of tax cuts that will pump $100bn [mostly] into the pockets of the top 1 per cent — this year alone. They have also benefited from measures such as the repeal of estate taxes and the lifting of various government regulations on industry and large businesses.

The second story appeared last Tuesday, a piece written by Michael Moore. The headline is "Face it, you'll never be rich."

In the manufacturing sector . . , British CEOs make 24 times as much as their average workers — the widest gap in Europe. German CEOs only make 15 times more than their employees, while Swedish CEOs get 13 times as much. But here in the US, the average CEO makes 411 times the salaries of their blue-collar workers. Wealthy Europeans pay up to 65% in taxes . . .

In the US, we are afraid to sock it to them. . . . We don't want to do anything that could harm us on that day we end up millionaires. . . .

Suddenly, it seemed like everyone I knew jumped on the stock market bandwagon. They let their unions invest all their pension money in stocks. . . .

But it was a sham. It was all a ruse concocted by the corporate powers-that-be who never had any intention of letting you into their club. They just needed your money to take them to that next level, the one that insulates them from ever having to actually work for a living.

But White people have been trained, carefully, persistently, for a long, long time — that we are entitled. Toward this end, millions of us live beyond our means, which is a fine thing for the banks that hold the credit card accounts. Last month a notice arrived saying that my credit card will now charge a 25% interest if I am ever late with two payments.

As Thandeka has pointed out — it would be a good thing for us all if we would figure out that this trip to Whiteness with a capital W, entrance into the elite club — whatever your race, Condoleeza — isn't going to happen. It's a sham. And anyone, whatever your ethnicity, can be taken in by it.

I want to remind you of what Paulo Friere said. Remember him — the revolutionary theologian and educator in Chile until the US-coordinated military coup in 1964 brought an end to progressive democracy and installed a brutal dictator who would do America's bidding. (Is that entitlement, or what? But back to Freire.)

His method of teaching poor folks in Latin America was known as "praxis." He warned of what can happen when the oppressed gain power in a corrupt system, without changing the system. Having been brutalized, they can become brutal, become even worse oppressors.

We are all responsible for what we do with what power we have, and everyone who isn't dead yet has some power. We all share a common humanity, with the same possibilities and perils. People of color, too, can be sucked into the scam, cherish unworthy values, jump on the treadmill.

Every one of us can accept a self-compromising stance toward life in the effort to become more like our so-called class superiors, who are really our oppressors, who have set up a false ideal that we are foolish enough to try to attain.

For those of us who are European American — fuelled as we are by the carefully-taught sense of entitlement — we have to watch, always keep alert. Consciously, intentionally, labor to build a fairer world. That sense of entitlement, and the quest for status and dominance that permeates the culture — get the best of us. We have to remain conscious.

And we have to live compassion and solidarity with all who bear the noble name, human. It has to matter to us what it is to live in the regular dread of racial profiling by contemptuous police, or a thousand other indignities and injuries suffered by some — so that others can enjoy the reality or the illusion of domination.

Think of all the pressures on all of us from childhood, — to suppress our childhood capacity of openhearted engagement with others — and, instead, to shun them. It's a form of child abuse, isn't it? — to alienate a child from her truest self⁴ and train young minds and hearts to divide the human family into the chosen and the heathen, the entitled and the disenherited outsider.

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Liberation comes when we get off the treadmill; see through the sham of Whiteness and entitlement as a specious bait to keep us maintaining the economic status quo, spending ourselves into poverty to keep the oligarchy rich.

We can get off the treadmill — examine our innermost values and aspirations. Whoever we are, we can take satisfaction and pride in what we are, and quit trying to accumulate tokens of status. Learn to look at our neighbor as just who she or he is, actually see them, see the beauty of who they are and recognize their right to fulfill their dreams.

The most liberated, the most liberal-minded of us, has not lived in this world without being scarred by it. But we are more than parts of a classist, racist society. We are part of a religious movement ennob led by those who heroically sailed against the tide. That, too, is part of our identity — at least to the extent that we know our own story and take it to heart. In our story there are less-than-inspirational chapters, to be sure. But ours is a self-transformative movement — led beyond the status quo to the edges of consciousness by great and noble mean and women.

In 1844, speaking in Concord, Emerson said something that very few people, even abolitionists, had yet dared to say:

The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization. There have been moments . . . when men might be forgiven who doubted. Those moments are past.⁵

He was denounced as a troublemaker for his advocacy, shouted down in Boston and Cambridge by racist audiences. He was uncowed; he couldn't be silenced.

We can draw into ourselves this noble story, and retell it and teach it to our children. There is Theodore Parker and his Vigilance Committee in Boston that rescued fugitive slaves from the slave-catchers after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law. There were the homes of many of our spiritual forebears that were way-stations to Canada and freedom — Emerson's, Thoreau's, and so many more. That, too, is part of who we are, and so is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister who served as colonel in a black regiment in the Civil War and who, with others of them, supplied and supported John Brown. There was Moncure Conway and Senator Sumner and William Henry Channing pleading regularly with President Lincoln to use his special war powers to issue a serious emancipation proclamation.

In March 1965 there was Jim Reeb, a UU minister who was beaten to death when he went to Selma to march with Dr. King, and there was the entire Board of Trustees of the UUA who on learning of Jim's death went immediately down to Selma and marched too.

And here — in Northampton — there was Lydia Maria Child and there was Charles Burleigh and there was that community in Florence that became our congregation — that welcomed Frederick Douglass, and took in Sojourner Truth and believed in her work. Consider Lydia Maria Child — a popular novelist who did something pretty radical. She wrote a novel depicting a Native American Indian as a noble hero — in love with a white woman, and nobly so — and this was 1824! She was an immensely popular writer until she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in 1833. After it appeared, the public shunned her for awhile. Nevertheless, the book influenced the anti-slavery awakenings of Wendell Phillips and William Ellery Channing. She advocated interracial marriage, defended John Brown and attended to his family after his capture, and promoted education for ex-slaves.

That radical experiment — the Northampton Association of Education and Industry — drew many black folks to Northampton and Florence. But many of them were escaped slaves, living as free men and women in the North, until the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring their capture and return to the South.

But Florence also became the site of a number of spa resorts, and these drew many visitors from the South. Immediately, with the passage of that law, it became unsafe for black folks to live here, and they left. Today Northampton is very white — and now you know why. But it was our own religious forebears who heroically fought those battles for justice and freedom, and for the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

That is our brave tradition and it, too, shapes us, forms us.

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Is a fairer world, a more human world, possible?

Our own, great, Theodore Parker said this:

We look to the future, a future to be made:

a church whose creed is truth, whose worship is love:

A society full of industry, wisdom, and the poetry of life;

A state with unity among all, with freedom for each;

A church without tyranny,

a society without want

a state without oppression

a world with no war.

Shall this ever become fact?

History says, No!

Human nature says, Yes!

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What they dreamed — is ours to do.

¹ Thandeka. "The Paradox of Racial Oppression." Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue, ed. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones. Boston: Skinner House, 2003, p. 132.

² Thandeka, op cit., 131.

³ Cited by Rev. William Henry Channing in his speech at Liverpool in June 1861 upon departing England to engage directly in the anti-slavery struggle in America.

⁴ Thandeka. Learning to be White. New York: Continuum, 1999. See especially Chapter 6.

⁵ R. Waldo Emerson. "An Address on Emancipation." Delivered at Concord 1 August 1844 at event sponsored by Women's anti-Slavery Society.

R E A D I N G S

i. The revolutionary Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. . . . Nor does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his antithesis — that without them the oppressor could not exist — in itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception enlists them in the struggle to free themselves.

The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor as a person. Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. . . . Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these "beings for another." The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor — when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.

—Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971, p.34f.

ii. From the theologian Sharon Welch:

We need to learn that failure to develop the strength to remain angry, in order to continue love and therefore to resist, is to die. . . . [T]he death that is experienced by those who turn from rage, who forego resistance, is nonetheless real. It is the death of the imagination, the death of caring, the death of the ability to love. For if we cease resisting, we lose the ability to imagine a world that is any different than that of the present; we lose the ability to imagine . . . ways of sustaining each other in the long struggle for justice. We lose the ability to care, to love life in all its forms. We cannot numb our pain at the degradation of life without numbing our joy at its abundance.

iii. Audre Lorde

History is not kind to us
we restitch it with living
past memory forward
into desire
into the panic articulation
of want without having
or even the promise of getting.

And I dream of our coming together
encircled driven
not only by love
but by lust for a working tomorrow
the flights of this journey
mapless uncertain
and necessary as water.

—from "On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge"

Meditate

From our separate lives we come to share a common life, take up common tasks, covenant together to serve high purposes, to serve the unfolding Mystery of Life Itself.

We come as we are, with sorrows, fears, and joy. Unspoken yearnings deep in the heart of us here find words, and gestures of response. Other faces and voices cheer us, bear us up, assure us of the treasure that is in us.

Yet surrounded and accompanied by however many other souls, each sits alone here today, facing reckonings none other may reach or touch. Let there now flow from the deep wells of every heart the quiet might of that is life, and hope, and love. Let the wind of Spirit clear away the clutter in our souls and let the fire that lights the Universe light our eyes, that from us may rise a fairer world. Beneath the noise and the tumult, let us hear the Voice that speaks from beyond the silence.