UU White Supremacy
Many of you who are involved with social media know that over the past few days, a painful conversation has been taking place about the white supremacy which is evident at the national UUA headquarters and indeed throughout our religious movement.
As leaders entrusted with the care of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), we have been witnessing the conversation carefully and wondering what, if anything, we need to say. Ultimately, we feel the need to speak out to our members and friends, and particularly to the people of color who have joined the CLF as a last resort in Unitarian Universalism, after experiencing marginalization or being discounted in bricks and mortar congregations. We do not want you to feel marginalized or discounted at CLF, and yet we harbor no illusions that we are made of different DNA than other historic UU institutions.
And so we’ll say three things: First, we applaud the breaking of silences and the direct communication which is taking place now, particularly by people of color. We know that there is risk in breaking silence, and we see these voices as voices of love. We pray that this moment will provide opportunities and motivation for necessary changes to come in all of the institutions that make up our religious movement, including CLF.
Second, we understand that it is the responsibility of white Unitarian Universalists in all of our institutions to examine our practices and see their impact, to listen without getting stuck in defensiveness as people of color point out where we fail to be conscious in our work, and to keep moving towards justice, knowing that we will do all of this imperfectly.
Third, we witness and grieve the pain that people of color in our movement have carried historically and continue to carry because of the lack of consciousness and courage of white people. Religious institutions should be places of healing and transformation, not one more place to need healing from.
With deep awareness of our own imperfections as individuals and as a congregation, we vow to keep trying, keep listening, keep evolving.
Rev. Meg Riley
Senior Minister
Arif Mamdani
Incoming Board Chair
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
I agree, white supremacy in UU is a big problem…..I live in Adelaide, one of the last redoubts of white elitism where xenophobic intellectual bigotry dominates and nobody seems to know it. I came to UU because of the seven principles and left because I did not feel they were being observed.
I am a male of African descent who resides in Manchester, NH. I arrived here by way of Chicago. I think we as a human family are faced with a challenge that becomes the more difficult because it requires growth in addition to change. We all know that growth and evolution can be experienced as painful. But our friend Albert Einstein said “you can’t solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created it.”
The dehumanization of the African personality (in particular) in the European imagination has resulted in a short-hand that relegates melanin enhanced people to the bottom of the political economy (both domestically, in the U.S., and internationally, around the world) while articluating an ascendant position for those who are melanin deficient. This short hand is the concept of ‘race” and the designation of humans as “white” or “Black” people. When we identify with those designations we also identify with the social designations ascribed to them. Maulana Karenga said “there is not separate freedom and dignity for African men and women.”