People of Color Covenant Group
This group provides space for people who identify as POC to come together in covenant to reflect and share where our faith is calling us now. Learn more about the People of Color Covenant Group
White Allies Covenant Group
As a member of this group, you will have the opportunity to consider race, privilege, and power while practicing deep listening to cultivate a “soul conversation”. Learn more about the white allies covenant group.
People of Color Covenant Group
This group provides space for people who identify as POC to come together in covenant to reflect and share where our faith is calling us now. Learn more about the People of Color Covenant Group
White Allies Covenant Group
As a member of this group, you will have the opportunity to consider race, privilege, and power while practicing deep listening to cultivate a “soul conversation”. Learn more about the white allies covenant group.
The Coming WORR: A Week of Righteous Resistance July 12 – 18
Last November, I lay down with just under a hundred other people on an interstate highway in Minneapolis. Along with thousands in cities across the country, we stopped the cars, we carried signs and we chanted and sang, saying Black Lives Matter in every way that we could. My brother called me from Texas, and said, “Hey, did you shut down I-35 today?” I responded, “Well, yes, me and a few others.” He said, “It made news down here. That’s dope. My freedom fighter sister.” That was just over six months ago, it was the start of what has been a nonstop whirlwind of actions, public witness, and personal challenges for me. Read more →
White Allies Covenant Group
We are living in a time of heightened awareness about the issues of race and racism. Painful and tragic killings are forcing Americans to examine institutional oppression. Our liberal religious faith tradition calls upon white Unitarian Universalists to examine their understanding of their identity and the role of that identity in the wider society.
As a member of this group, you will have the opportunity to consider race, privilege, and power while practicing deep listening to cultivate a “soul conversation”.
CLF Covenant groups are grounded in the practice of deep listening. Taking to heart Parker Palmer’s small group commitment to “no fixing, saving, or setting each other straight,” this is a place for sharing hopes and fears, challenges and aspirations.
When
First and third Thursdays beginning June 4th, 2015, 1:00 PM-2:15 PM ET.
Who
People who identify as white are welcome to participate in this group.
This group is facilitated by Bob LaVallee, CLF Intern Minister.
How
This group meets in-person via videoconference using Zoom Cloud Meeting.
If you have questions, please contact Bob at blavallee@clfuu.org.
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People of Color Covenant Group
The last year has seen Unitarian Universalists get involved in #blacklivesmatter protests, the commemorative march to Selma, and a renewed commitment to racial justice. For many of us, the conversation about American racism that we’ve been hoping for seems like it might be starting to happen. At the same time, the focus on racial justice that we crave also highlights the places where our liberal religious tradition doesn’t always know quite how to engage us as people of color.
As we navigate the currents of change moving through Unitarian Universalism, this group provides space for people who identify as POC to come together in covenant to reflect and share where our faith is calling us now.
CLF Covenant groups are grounded in the practice of deep listening. Taking to heart Parker Palmer’s small group commitment to “no fixing, saving, or setting each other straight,” this is a place for sharing hopes and fears, challenges and aspirations.
When
2nd and 4th Wednesdays, May-July, 2:30-3:30 PM. (see on a calendar)
Who
People of color are welcome to participate.
This group is facilitated by Arif Mamdani, Spiritual Director and M. Div Student at United Theological Seminary.
How
This group meets in-person via videoconference using Zoom Cloud Meeting.
To join the group, please fill out the registration form below. There is no charge to participate.
Arif will then send you instructions for getting connected.
The Losing Team
Another election has come and gone. Some people, presumably, are delighted, while others are filled with gloom. OK, it was mostly gloom on my Facebook page. Maybe you worked really hard on behalf of a candidate you truly believed in, and that candidate didn’t win. Maybe the one who did win is the worst kind of corrupt imbecile, totally in debt to the moneyed interests. Maybe you feel like the country is going to hell in a hand basket, and we are all at the mercy of people who think that Ebola is washing our shores on a wave of Black people and climate change is a hoax invented by scientists who want to further their careers.
It could be that we are doomed, and if your plans for this week should happen to include an adult beverage or a childhood comfort food, well I wouldn’t blame you.
But eventually we always come round to the question of what now. Now that the election is over and we get a break from the ads. Now we know just how vehemently we might disagree with our neighbors or family members. Now that the whole cycle of hope and possibility and things not ever living up to their potential starts over again. Now what?
The same thing as always. Sorry, but I don’t have a better answer. Now we make dinner and pet the cat and read the kids a story and decide what to wear to work tomorrow. Now we look for a job that will pay the bills or an apartment that won’t break the bank or a date who won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. Now we call our friends to comfort them or be comforted. Now we wait to hear back from the doctor or we wait to hear whether there will be an indictment from Ferguson. We visit the rest home, we take the children to soccer or to dance, we cry or look at videos of cats.
Maybe we remember other elections that swept us up in a tide of hope or despair, and we remember how after those elections we kept on doing what we do. I’m in no way saying that elections don’t matter, or that it’s not worth being deeply engaged in the political process. The government sets policy, and those policies affect really important things like who gets deported, who gets health care, whether people can manage to live on minimum wage, what efforts are made to combat climate change, what kinds of transportation we have access to, whether there is funding for research, what is supported and not supported in our schools, and on and on and on.
Politics matters. Having a voice matters. Speaking up for your hopes matters. But it doesn’t necessarily matter in the way that we would like. Paying attention and voting and making calls and writing letters and campaigning door to door doesn’t always result in the person or policy we support winning. And, sadly, even if they do win it rarely means that everything is rosy and the world is organized the way we would organize it.
Whether we get what we want is not what defines our efforts. We are called to care, and to love and to work for justice. Whether or not things go our way at any given moment. I used to serve a church in the same neighborhood as Wrigley Field in Chicago. Although I am not, myself, a baseball fan, I learned a lot from my Cub-loving congregants. The Cubs lose. Everyone knows that. Historically, currently, the Cubs are just not what you would call a winning team. Which doesn’t stop the fans from rooting for their beloved Cubbies, year in and year out.
You love what you love, and you go out and yell on its behalf, following the statistics or the players or whatever markers of success or defeat you might have. You show up and cheer. When your team wins you get a parade. But when your team loses you have the opportunity to gather with your friends and mourn the losses and plot how next year will be better.
Or maybe two years from now, when elections roll around in 2016.
Justice, Elections, and Whiteness
Brits By the Boatload
When that boatload of Brits showed up in Massachusetts, they quite literally considered themselves god’s gift to the continent. Subsequently, they decided which religions were acceptable; which ethnicities and countries of origin were acceptable; who could vote; who would be enslaved; who lived and who died.
This norm has functioned continuously since, letting some in and refusing entrance to others. This normative power is what Professor Ignatiev meant by “white” in her book How the Irish Became White.
A look at the election results this past Tuesday demonstrates that white skin and male gender are still the tickets to power in the United States, the power of whiteness.
That boatload of British Anglo Saxon Protestants declared themselves the baseline. The arbiters of all things worthy. And they vote.
US history shows that some groups were able to get into the club relatively easily. Descendants of German immigrants, for example, now outnumber descendants of British immigrants. George Washington was half German, though it took until 1890 for a full-blooded German to be elected to national office . . .
Germans became white in 1890.
Professor Ignatiev argues that the Irish became white by becoming more racist than the British and Germans. One piece of evidence: is it a coincidence that the great haters on Fox News are generally of Irish extraction?
Whiteness. It’s a club.
Tuesday’s election demonstrated that whiteness hasn’t given up. I suspect it will become more overt in the next several years.
Here’s a hero many haven’t heard of: A. Philip Randolph. Randolph was African American, born in 1889. He organized a union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. One of the first African American unions. He was also president of the Negro American Labor Council and vice-president of the AFL-CIO.
Whether it’s right or wrong, the Marxist analysis of race that Randolph believed is very simple: the ruling class (read: that boat load of Brits) uses racial prejudice to divide and conquer the poor. In other words, Marxists say that “whiteness”—and allowing some into the club of whiteness—is a manipulative tool for controlling the poor, the majority.
True or untrue, this analysis of race is why humanists, Unitarians, Universalists, and other progressives were once at the forefront of anti-racism work and nowadays are not. True or untrue, the Marxist story marked a path that could be usefully followed.
A. Philip Randolph was a Socialist. An atheist. And a humanist. He signed the second Humanist Manifesto in 1973. (As did Betty Friedan.) The second manifesto was a child of the more explicitly socialist first Humanist Manifesto, written when the New Deal was a heady dream.
Humanism has socialism in its DNA. After all, if you believe in the inherent worth and dignity of each person, it’s hard to argue that “white” America and its engine, Capitalism, offer a level playing field. Facts on the ground point the other direction. Far from being a statement of individualism, the inherent worth and dignity of every person implies communal action toward communal good.
After all, after you’ve asked how a nation can create a level playing field, you have gone down the road of redistributive justice. The most extreme of un-individualistic ideals.
There are two ways to redistribute wealth: revolution and taxes. Sane people tend to suggest that taxes are the way to go . . .
But back to A. Philip Randolph, who helped plan (along with nonviolence theorist, gay rights activist, and socialist Bayard Rustin) the 1963 March on Washington, where MLK gave his greatest speech. That march was the culmination of a way of thinking outside the norm.
And that was then. Isn’t it almost unthinkable in today’s US? Where would the Civil Rights Movement have been without labor halls to speak in and union money?
We are the stories we tell ourselves. “True” or not, some narratives bear richer fruit than others. The idea that race is a construct used by the oppressors to oppress was the fuel of the Civil Rights Movement. Nothing since has borne so much fruit.
I’m just sayin’ . . .
A Phillip Randolph put it this way:
Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
