"Reparations: Building a Country of Hospitality and Peace."

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne.
January 17, 2009.

Reading

Truth and Reconciliation: Unitarian Universalist Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr Day January 10, 2007

Introduction by the Reverend William G. Sinkford “On the day that we honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have no choice but to speak. However, like many persons of color in our faith, and far beyond our faith, I struggle to find a voice, to find the words that might move us forward. It feels to me that Unitarian Universalists have been stuck around the issue of race for far too long.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation process, now being used widely not only in Africa but in Latin America as well, ties the possibility of reconciliation to the honest confession of truth. Truth of past harms and oversights. Truth of past failures in the attempt to find and create justice. Anything short of real truth telling is a search for cheap reconciliation. We all have truths to discover and to tell. The claim of innocence cannot be an option for any of us, because ignorance of the truth does not alter its legacy. As the Reverend Al Sharpton says, people of color have a history, not a hallucination.

Getting the history right is important, because our memories can be selective. For example, Unitarian Universalists want to remember and hold up our support of Dr. King in Selma and to honor the deaths there of James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo. What we don't always want to remember is that King was witnessing in Memphis for economic justice for garbage collectors, of all races, when he was killed. He had recognized the truth that race and class in this country are inextricably intertwined. If our work for racial justice does not engage with the realities of class it is doomed to fail. Likewise, if we try to reconcile class inequities without acknowledging race, those efforts are equally doomed.

Though Martin Luther King, Jr. did not coin the term "beloved community," this vision for loving and just human relationships and the accompanying practice of reconciliation were central to his ministry. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, several Unitarian Universalists have offered reflections on how Unitarian Universalists can engage in our own truth-telling process and begin the task of reconciliation. We asked these questions:

• What truth needs to be told?
• With whom do we need to be reconciled so that Unitarian Universalism can move toward the Beloved Community?

Following are excerpts of some of the responses:

- Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley “What continues to challenge my personal faith is wondering whether I will ever see the day when our religious movement moves beyond its Eurocentric norms. We would probably all agree that a life of faith cannot be nurtured in the face of endemic evil. But it's more difficult to see that it is also impossible for many people from non-European heritage to be nurtured by an upper middle class Euro-centric norm blessed by self-satisfaction.”

- Taquiena Boston, Director, Identity-Based Ministries staff group, Unitarian Universalist Association “To create communities of love and justice, Unitarian Universalists must face the fact that our faith has not fully welcomed, affirmed and included the multiracial, multicultural diversity present in our ministry and membership today or in the past. We don't have to wait until we have the perfect curriculum or more diversity in our sanctuaries to commit to transforming congregations into communities that embrace, empower, and minister to people of all races and cultures whether they are children and youth, religious professionals, lay leaders or simply members worshipping in the pews. The sacred practice of reconciliation begins at home.”

- Rev. John Crestwell, Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church, Camp Springs, Maryland “King was an archetype and my hero. Ultimately, he lived out his principles - moral principles found in his Bible, and in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He was willing to live and die by these principles. That is the point! We must find principles we are willing to live and die by. I know seven very good ones that prick my conscience daily, asking me to be and do more. We need more conviction in our faith. We need more doers and fewer talkers; people who say, "Let's fix the problem," not folk who say, "Let's discuss the problem."

Sermon

Reparations: Building a Country of Hospitality and Peace Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

On Tuesday, with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Americans will witness a historic turning point. It will certainly be the beginning of a different political philosophy than we have lived under, but perhaps more importantly it will mark a huge milestone in race relations in our country. An African-American President had to be part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for America when he said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.” The election of Barack Obama signals that Americans have changed and that we yearn for resolution of racial tensions in our country. We hope, beginning with this inauguration, we will see real movement in the direction of King’s hope and dream – that one day “we will transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood…[That] we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day.”

The inauguration of President Obama is a turning point, but it’s still unclear just what it will mean. I won’t indulge in platitudes about how we can’t really know the future; of course we don’t know how events will play out in Obama’s tenure as President, but on the issue of race, there is a particularly high level of uncertainty. We’re still not sure what Obama intends when it comes to race relations. During his campaign, everyone tried to analyze him, and many more projected onto him their own sense of what he would mean to race relations. For a time, he didn’t put race on the front burner, maybe intentionally laying low. Some said he that because he is multi-racial and he had not personally been part of the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s that he was unaffected by them. With his Harvard education, and his corporate lawyer, African-American wife, Michelle, he was somehow “post-racial.”

Black Conservative writer Shelby Steele accused Obama of being a “bargainer who makes a very specific deal with whites: ‘I will not use America’s horrible history of white racism against you, if you promise not to use race against me.’…granting a kind of innocence or moral absolution [in exchange] for White goodwill.”…”Obama himself acknowledged that some saw his candidacy as ‘an exercise in affirmative action’ based on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.’” Then along came Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial remarks, and Obama’s speech in response recalled the African American history of oppression and struggle, the current gap of wealth, income and opportunity between black and whites, and he defended black anger in general. His speech acknowledged the violence of the past, and asked us to redouble our efforts to solve the racial problems of the present with understanding and care for the feelings of all Americans. This kind of nuanced speech is rare in American political and racial experience; some loved it, but others found nits to pick and were offended. Such is the danger of talking about race in America. Our wounds are still raw, our fears are close to the surface.

So much for his speech, or even the election of Obama itself resolving all of our racial issues. That America elected Obama is not, on its own, reparation enough for all the harm done to African Americans, nor is it reconciliation enough to heal the wounds of racism felt by people of all ethnicities. As we congratulate ourselves on moving forward on race, as rightly we can, we are in danger of doing again what has been done so many times in our history, which is to forego serious self-examination and fall back into our comfort zones about race – a place where anger simmers, but our assumptions don’t have to change. We still have work to do – to address the evils of the past and the present. We cannot afford to disengage from racism once again when this opportunity to really make progress has presented itself.

Rev. Rebecca Ann Parker, professor of theology and president of our UU Starr King School for the Ministry, in her recent book, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, addresses the problem of disengagement with racism. She illustrates with this story:
On a cross country trip with a friend, driving thru beautiful rural western Pennsylvania, they decided to take the scenic route and turned off the freeway onto country roads. It had been raining hard, and when they came down a hill into a small valley, they saw water standing in some fields, and several road closed signs with blinking yellow lights warning of danger. “Looks like they’ve had a flood here,” they said. Crossing a bridge in a small town, the water was high, muddy and flowing fast. There were sandbags lining its banks. “Gosh, they said, looks like they must have had a major flood here.” As they continued out of town, they were captivated by even more evidence of high water. Rounding a bend, they were confronted with water over the road, and it was rising fast, coming toward them like a huge silver balloon being inflated. They turned the car around only to find water over the road in that direction now, too. Suddenly they realized the flood hadn’t happened yesterday or last week; it was happening here and now. They clambered out of the car and scrambled, to higher ground. Soaked to the bone, they huddled under a tree as the water engulfed their car. Parker says, “The cold water of the storm poured down on us, baptizing us into the present – a present from which we had been insulated by both our car and our misjudgments about the country we were traveling through.”

She says, “This is what it is like to be white in America.” We live secure in the suburbs, and when we drive through the city ensconced in our Priuses, we may see signs of what is happening on the poor streets, but we don’t realize the urgency of what we are seeing. It is too easy to believe we are not affected by the poverty, innocent of its causes and to remain uninvolved with the people who are suffering its consequences. We are separated by the years from the violence of our racial history, and we are insulated from the current oppressions in our society by our privilege and sometimes by our idealism. Yes, we liberals have good intentions to end oppression, but if those good intentions lull us into inaction, we are driving by the warning signs while the water continues to rise, standing by while lives are destroyed.

By remaining dis-engaged, we not only allow oppression to continue, we cut ourselves off from the diversity present in our country. By presuming white culture is normative, we miss the richness of art, religion, music, intellectual variety, and human relationships that have always been part of America and available to us if we only look for them. By staying in white enclaves, we miss the complex multicultural beauty of the place we live. To insist on whiteness as the norm, we cut ourselves off from the creativity of most of America’s people. In the hard times facing us right now, if we would only ask we might learn a few things from those who have survived harder times than we have ever known.

If we don’t pursue genuine relationships with people of other classes and ethnicities, we cut ourselves off from the real country we live in. This results in a dividing of neighbor from neighbor, a false hierarchy of one knowledge system over another, and a splitting of our psyche. All this leaves us with a loss of our sense of wholeness. If we believe all life is interconnected, we must repair the strands of the web that get broken in the night.

As you may have heard, last November Unitarian Universalist Association President Bill Sinkford met in South Africa with leaders of the truth and reconciliation movement. The South African process is ongoing, and not all parts of it have been completely successful, but their experience holds lessons for America as we think about repairing our damaged racial web.

The most successful part of their process seems to have been truth-telling. Sinkford’s report notes, “While the victims of gross human rights violations could never have been entirely healed, or justice entirely served by having perpetrators come forward and admit their crimes, most victims did benefit, some in surprisingly powerful ways, and a future has been opened for South Africa that “is not based on either a cover-up or a lie.” After the truth-telling had begun to work the South African government decided to attempt reparations.

In the South African model Reparations come in three forms: individual, community, and symbolic. Individual reparations for the victims of gross human rights abuses ended up as one lump-sum payment which amounted to nothing more than a token. In fact, monetary reparations to individuals in South Africa can be judged a failure, as they would likely be if we attempted a similar method in America. Community reparations are meant to provide infrastructure to cities, towns and rural areas that suffered under apartheid and will include housing, schools and hospitals. To date, these reparations have not been undertaken, but they may be forthcoming soon. These sound like Van Jones’s call to “Green the Ghetto First” that I told you about a few months ago. Why don’t you contact your congress person this week and insist some of the bailout money going toward infrastructure be targeted at our poor inner city neighborhoods? Symbolic reparations include creating public witnesses to the anti-apartheid struggle and the evils of the apartheid system. For example, the “Apartheid Museum” in Johannesburg parallels our own Freedom Center.

The South Africans with whom Sinkford met “placed great emphasis on the truth-telling aspect of the process,” and they were confident “community and symbolic reparations have important roles, and that statements of apology, forgiveness and processes of atonement are worthy of pursuit.” Reparations have been called for at least as far back as Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he noted American slavery had stolen the fruits of African Americans’ labor for the previous 250 years. However, in America, whenever reparations for slavery and its legacy are suggested, there is never any substantive debate of the issues. Instead of seriously discussing the assumptions which control American society, conservatives stonewall by denying responsibility, claiming victomhood for themselves, and turning the discussion into an argument for taking personal responsibility for your situation in life. It is time America broke through this smoke screen and owned its historical injustices and the obligations that derive from them. Maybe by putting individual monetary payments aside, at least for a time, we could free ourselves to do our own truth-telling and symbolic and community reparations.

Reparations are not just for African Americans. Racism has hurt all Americans. Slavery and Jim Crow created a racial divide that has never fully healed. That divide has caused us to make enemies of our neighbors, to split off part of our humanity. All people are broken creatures to some extent. Brokenness is an inevitable consequence of the human experience, but our human nature provides us an antidote, the drive to form relationships which can help us transcend the brokenness. Relationships with people different from us make us more whole. That’s a religious task – helping each other to become more whole. Obama’s campaign re-opened the national dialog on race –and as reluctant as we may have been to have that happen – we should look at his Presidency as a fresh opportunity to make our country whole on the issue of race. It is past time for us to reclaim our country’s humanity.
What will it take to repair our racial divide? First we must open our eyes and read the signs that something important is happening – right here and now. The way people, especially the younger generations, see race is different than in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, or in the Reagan years or even the Clinton years. And part of that difference is younger people don’t see why we can’t move forward and eliminate the divisions of the past.

Second, our children and our communities need some remedial education about racism. Here our theology that sanctifies gathering of diverse knowledge, of gaining wisdom from experiences of both good and evil, will serve us well. For example, I highly recommend reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. His history is not that of the rich and powerful, the version we mostly know. Instead, he tells it from the point of view of the slave, the worker, the immigrant, and the native American, the vast majority of the people who actually worked and struggled to build this country.

And we need to tell our own stories – all of our stories – white, and black, and red, and yellow, and brown – with equal respect for each of us. It is important that each storyteller be free to tell their internal truth, of our experience of race and how racism has affected us. And it is important that each of us listen deeply to stories of people whose experiences of race are different from ours. Each of our experiences is valid. Each of us needs to acknowledge the truth of others’ experiences, not to negate them or try to generalize all of them into one right or preferred way of being in the world.

Telling our stories is a beginning to building understanding between the races, and it is a beginning to making ourselves more whole. If racism has left internal scars, we need spiritual healing. If we have shame about parts of our racial story, we will need to resolve that shame, maybe by making amends or changing our behavior. We need to be careful we don’t look to people of a different race to remove that shame from us. That is common mistake in efforts at interracial dialog. Each of us need to be able to own our experiences, to bless ourselves when those experiences have been painful.

We cannot just breath a sigh of relief that Obama was elected and assume that very fact will fix our race problems. We have to recognize this as an opportunity for progress to go ahead and work for the things we have been talking about and wishing for so many years. Those of us who want to eliminate the scourge of racism must take responsibility for making the communities in which we live wholesome for all of our people. When we work for social justice, acting in concert with our internal beliefs, in relationship with people of other races, we may find a new sense of wholeness. If we remain present for this historical moment and become engaged in the struggle, we can bring justice and peace to our neighbors, to ourselves and to our country.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I Have A Dream” speech delivered Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963.
Ibid.
Henry, Charles P. “Obama as Reparations,” in Tikkun, Institute for Labor and Mental Health (Oakland, CA: Jul/Aug 2008) 22.
Parker, Rebecca Ann. “Not Somewhere Else But Here,” Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, Skinner House Books (Boston: 2006) 25-26.
“Sinkford Holds Truth and Reconciliation Meetings in South Africa” UUA Press Release, (Boston: November 17, 2008).
Ibid.