“Am I My Brother’s (& Sister’s) Keeper?”
February 26, 2012
Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 58: 1-12: Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. May these ancient and holy words resound within us, heart, mind and soul.
Mark 8:34-9:1: Jesus called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
Sermon: Am I My Brother’s (& Sister’s) Keeper?
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
I want to invite you to think with me this morning about a challenging topic. Today I invite you into a conversation about race. You might wonder why I want to focus a service of worship, a sermon, a conversation in church, on a topic that was absolutely crucial at other times in history, but that maybe seems not so important now. After all, we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country. As true as this is, I believe we also have a long way to go in understanding the racial problems that still exist in this country, and I believe we are called as Christians, as we said in our responsive reading, to hear and give voice to the cry for justice. People may wonder what this has to do with our congregation. Here we are welcoming to all, we appreciate diversity. I don’t disagree about our welcoming spirit, but we are very far from being a truly multi-cultural church. And it is not my goal to make us one. I can’t say I’ve heard a call from God regarding the racial make up of this church. According to census data from the year 2000, the population of Leicester is 96.3% white. I suspect that has not changed substantially over the last decade or so. It makes sense in this community that this church membership is mostly white. My goal this morning is to raise awareness of racism as a continuing problem in this country, and to begin to find a way we can talk about it.
This is scary for me because many times when I have talked about my concern about racism, people have gotten angry and defensive. I have seen a group of religiously minded folk that worked together for a whole school term fall apart when the topic of racism was brought up. So it has been hard for me to know what to do with this concern I’ve carried with me for a long, long time. I was thrilled when the Massachusetts Conference began to more intentionally address the issue of racism, and over the moon that at the 2011 Annual Meeting it passed a resolution encouraging its churches to become pro-actively anti-racist. In service to that resolution, the Conference offered a training a few weeks ago called, “Moving from Talk to Action: Training for Anti-Racist White People.” THAT called to me for sure, because that is what I want to be, a pro-actively anti-racist white person. I am indebted to Dawn Hammond, a member of the Conference staff and a lay member of the UCC church in Holliston. She attended the training and shared with me a sermon she preached in Holliston, which I borrowed substantially from for this sermon.
Now I signed up for that training, and I have carried this concern for decades, and still it was very difficult, painful even, to confront the continuing effects of centuries of racial oppression. It’s a topic that tends to make white people feel guilty or uncomfortable. Let me assure you that I am not looking to point fingers or assign blame. We are, none of us, not white people or any color people, personally to blame for racism. It wasn’t our idea. But I believe that it is our responsibility to do what we can to end racism. I want to be sensitive to the reality that you came this morning to worship and honor God, and maybe you are not sure this is the way to do that. But I would ask you to hear the words of the prophet Isaiah about the type of fast God would choose for us – to loose the bonds of injustice, to break every yoke; or the call of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark to pick up our cross to follow him. As I’ve said before, I believe Jesus is less concerned with our emotional and psychological comfort than he is with transforming this world into God’s beloved community. And so please, will you join me with an open mind?
When I said I was inviting you into conversation this morning, I meant it. I don’t want to be the only one talking. I would like you all to find a partner, someone sitting near you, that you can talk with for a few minutes. I am going to ask you to share with that person one of your early memories connected with race or racism. To give you a little time to get your thoughts going, I will share a few early impressions I had. I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly white. I don’t remember having people of color in any of my classes before high school, not in my church, generally not in my world. I remember in fifth grade, that would have been in the late 1960’s we were learning about discrimination and my teacher did a little experiment for a day, giving special privileges to the blue-eyed children in the class, and being mean to the dark-eyed children. I have blue eyes, and I felt terrible. I just had a terrible knot in my stomach the whole time. I was on the verge of tears to think that people would be treated differently based on something so surface, something that had nothing to do with their character or abilities. At that point I became very sensitized to racial comments and stereotypes. I noticed my dad, a big-hearted and loving man, would make comments about black people – like they were lazy or criminals or not as smart as white people. This was very hard for me to understand because he and my mother also took real and meaningful steps in regards to school integration. They signed up for voluntary busing for my brothers, and my father was on the board of the parish’s private school and he agitated for admission of students of color. How could he do the right thing and say the wrong things? It was confusing.
So that is part of my story. Your own story might be similar or very different. We’ll take a total of 4 minutes, two minutes per person. Choose who will go first. While that person is talking, the other person is just listening, maybe nodding, but not interrupting. After 2 minutes I’ll let you know that it is time for the second person to talk and the first to listen.
Thank you so much. Let me ask you to think about the emotions that were attached to this memory or experience. How many of you would say the emotion was a positive one – for example, excited, happy, or hopeful? (about half the people raised hands)
Clinical psychologist and Spellman College president Dr. Beverly Tatum has asked thousands of people about their early race-related memories. Almost everyone she talked to experiences difficult emotions – fear, anger, sadness, confusion, guilt, shame, or embarrassment. And many people say that at the time they did not talk to any adult about their experience or their feelings. Somehow they’d received the message from adults that this is something we don’t discuss. I suggest that we need to change that message. We need to find the courage to talk, to listen and be listened to with love and without judgment in order to heal. If we are ever going to loose the bonds of injustice or break every yoke, we need to be able to talk about what is wrong. It is my hope and prayer that this church can be a safe place to do that.
Because truly, something is wrong. Racism was not just a problem in 1636 when the slave trade began in Colonial North American, nor in 1641 when Massachusetts became the first colony to legalize slavery. I am encouraged that there was some anti-racism work being done in 1776 with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence as there was an attempt to include a section denouncing the slave trade. This section was deleted.
Racism was not just a problem from 1882 to 1920, when about 3500 people in this country died by lynching. It’s not just that for 40 years, 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama conducted a study of the effect of untreated syphilis on 400 black men who were never told they had the disease and were denied treatment even after it was know that penicillin was a cure for it. Racism was not just a problem in 1944 when the U.S. Supreme court upheld the relocation and detention of all people of Japanese ancestry in war relocation center, regardless of U.S. citizenship or loyalty to this country.
Racism is not over. I know we have come a long way. I know that it pains you all to think that such things happened here, and not so very long ago. I know that you would be absolutely outraged to hear of such things going on now. The problem is, these events in the history of the American people can’t just be blocked off and put behind us. Their impact continues to be felt. The beliefs and attitudes and systems that allowed them to happen are part of our roots. We can’t just cut ourselves off from our roots. We ought not be blind to the fruits of privilege and oppression that continue to blossom in ways that are often invisible to us as white people.
I want to take a minute to define some terms so that we are all on the same page. I’ve heard people talk about reverse racism, the belief that white people are becoming the target group for discrimination. I’ve had people point out to me that people of color hold prejudices against white people, or against people of other races different from their own. I agree with the second statement, that people of all races can and do hold prejudices against others. A prejudice is a judgment or opinion formed on insufficient grounds or in disregard of contradictory facts. It is lumping people together and refusing to see differences between members of a racial or ethnic group. But racism is different. Racism is a system in which one race maintains supremacy over another race through institutional power, attitudes, behaviors and social structures. With racism there is a structured dis-equality where people in some racial groups receive rewards, benefits and privileges generally not available to people in other racial groups. So while all races can hold prejudices, racism can only be exhibited by the dominant social group. Racism requires institutional power to enforce prejudices. In this country the institutional power is behind people of the white race.
People often want to see issues of race as individually based. Some believe that all people, no matter their race, have equal opportunity. They would agree that individual acts of discrimination should be punished or stopped. But they wrongly assume that such acts are obvious and intentional. The Mass. Conference has a 20 minute film they lend out called True Colors. It is a documentary about two friends – John, who is White, and Glen, who is Black – who take part in a series of hidden camera experiments exploring people’s reactions to each in a variety of situations. The study follows John and Glen separately as they each try to rent an apartment, respond to job listings, purchase a car, and conduct everyday activities such as shopping. In every instance, John is welcomed into the community while Glen is discouraged by high prices, long waits, and unfriendly salespeople. I haven’t seen the film myself, but it sounds fascinating. I wonder if they interviewed the people who reacted. Were any of them consciously aware of the different way they reacted? Would any of them have admitted that race was a factor? Would you, as a white person, find reasons for these differences that were not race related? I think we often miss the forest for the trees. If we look at the big picture of where the money is, where the freedoms are, where the advantages are, it is difficult to deny that racism is still at work.
Something is wrong when in 2011, 44% of all prisoners in the U.S. are African American, when they account for only 12% of the population. Something is wrong when the average prison term for African Americans is 69% longer than the terms for white people convicted of the same offense. Each case can be looked at individually, and justification provided, I’m sure, on each case for the terms given. Denials can be made that the sentences were racially based, but how can we ignore the big picture?
Something is wrong when the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Something is wrong when the trend is an increasingly lopsided wealth ratio. The wealth gap between white and black households has doubled since 2006. The bursting of the housing bubble and the recession affected everyone, but the impact was vastly more marked to black and Hispanic households. The Research Center analyzes inflation-adjusted median wealth from 2005-2009. The analysis showed that wealth fell by 16% for white households. But it fell by 53% among black households and 66% among Hispanic households. How can we say that whites are becoming disadvantaged? Affirmative action may offer an advantage for an individual person of color over an individual white person, but how can we say they are people of color are privileged and whites are disadvantaged when this is the big picture?
Something is wrong, something is wrong. Can we hear and give voice to creations cry for justice? Can we join in the struggle for liberation? Racism hurts everyone, not just people of color. It stands in the way of God’s Beloved Community.
Thank you for joining me this morning, for sharing, for listening, for considering these issues. If anyone is interested in continuing the conversation, let me know. I offer you a loving, non-judgmental ear. I have lots of resources and information. Perhaps we could borrow the documentary about John and Glenn or other ones, and watch and reflect together. I also offer you this loving, non-judgmental ear if you have a different reaction to this conversation. However you feel about this, whatever you think, you are my brother, my sister, my family in Christ, and I love you.
I chose our opening hymn, My Country Tis of Thee because I wanted to start this service by expressing the love and pride I have for our country that is not diminished by looking at the shadow places of her history, of our history. Our closing hymn is also a song expressing patriotism and hope. It was a poem written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson, principal of a segregated Black school, to welcome its honored guest Booker T Washington. Johnson’s brother put the words to music in 1905, and in 1919 it was adopted by the NAACP as the “Negro” National Anthem. Won’t you join me in singing with gusto?
