Sermon Archive	Sermon Archive
Neo-Racism is like a Mutant Virus Opening Words Adin Ballou, an early Universalist and utopian social reformer was integrally involved in setting up the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts over 150 years ago. The community was based on the ethics of Jesus. At its peak it had over 300 members. Eventually it failed, mostly because the capital behind the community was withdrawn to start a factory. Shortly before his death, Ballou looked back at his life and said that in most respects he had been a failure, but that he hoped his significance was in the future, as he thought that many of his ideas were well ahead of their time. He was right. I wish for us, a sense of being ahead of our times, and I wish for us the vision and persistence to be of use to generations who follow. Meditation Most of our nineteenth century forbearers believed in the equality of men. Presumably, today they would have extended their language to include women. We should not applaud yet. We should look more carefully. Doing so we find they believed in the equality of all men before God but not in mind and body here on the earth. This led them to support in such subtle ways, the power they held, the structure of the culture which sustained them, and their positions vis a vis others. We come to this congregation from places powerful and places weak. We gather as people broken and wholesome, as people sad and joyous. We come here with standards of expectation more idealistic and egalitarian and levelling than those of our other worlds. We are Unitarians. We reach out to each other with loving and caring arms, to hold and to support. Here there are no colours, no creeds, no sexual orientations, no genders, no ages, no disabilities which separate us. While we may fail in our goals from time to time, our intent is clear, and ever before us. Like Adin Ballou, we may fail, but we will be remembered for trying to set a standard for human behaviour that could build a more peaceful and caring, a gentler world for succeeding generations. All people are welcome here. All opinions are welcome. And we shall reflect on what is said, and grow in our understandings of truth and dignity. Let us take several minutes in companioned silence as we consider what it means to be a Unitarian, here, in this place. First Reading In 1954, Gordon Alport, Professor of Psychology at Harvard for nearly 40 years, wrote a seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice. Forty years later it still stands as the classic study of the roots of discrimination. This may sound a bit like a textbook study. I encourage you to take this thinking and integrate it with the sermon and blend it in your lives during the week ahead. Alport speaks about Language: Without words we would not be able to form categories at all, excepting, perhaps, as a dog does, forming rudimentary generalizations, such as "small-boys-are-to-be-avoided." This category runs its full course at the conditioned reflex level. It does not become the object of thought. In order to think about categories, we need to fix it in words. Without words our world would be, as William James said, an "empirical sand heap." There are some five and a half billion grains of sand corresponding to our category "human beings". We can not possibly deal with so many people in our thought, we can hardly individualize the hundreds of people we encounter in our daily round. We must group them, so we place them into clusters. We welcome the words that help us to perform the clustering. Often the categories are named with nouns - dog, cat, tree, food. The most important property of a noun is that it brings many erstwhile different grains of sand into a single pail. We disregard the fact that many of the same grains might have fit just as easily into another pail. The very act of classifying causes us to overlook all other features. When we place all dogs here - and all people there - we do not have all the brown eyes in one place. Some labels are exceedingly powerful. Labels can be symbols which act like shrieking sirens, deafening us to all finer discriminations that we might otherwise perceive. Tonya Harding's alleged dishonesty may eclipse all her achievements. Most people seem to submerge their knowledge of this basic law of language. Every label applied to a given person refers properly only to one aspect of that person's nature. You may correctly say that a certain woman is a human, philanthropist, Chinese, physician, athlete. A given person may be all of these; but the chances are that Chinese may stand out in our minds as a symbol of primary potency. Yet neither this nor any other label can refer to the whole of a person's nature. Only a proper name can do so! But even proper names can invoke prejudicial responses because of our deeply conditioned thinking patterns and attributes associated with just about everything we have labelled. In one study, 150 students were shown thirty photographs of college girls and were asked to rate them, only from their looks, on their beauty, intelligence, character, ambition, and general likability. Two months later the same students were asked to complete the same rating on 45 photographs, the thirty original and fifteen more. Names with generally recognizable ethnic origins were attached to the pictures. When Jewish names were attached to the photographs, the following results were detected: - decrease in liking, character, and beauty - increase in intelligence and ambition For those names given Italian names the following occurred: - decrease in liking, character, beauty and intelligence Even though a proper name is the best way to refer to a person, the names themselves carry symbolic meaning that we may not even be aware of. Each of us is prejudged by these symbolic meanings. Rarely are we judged in our own right. We all are victims of this process. Margaret Meade has suggested that if we must use labels to describe people, that the labels not be in the form of nouns, but rather as adjectives and that we also always use more than one adjective. Not only are more adjectives more accurate, but Meade says adjectives lose some of the primary potency of nouns. It is a useful suggestion that we indicate ethnic and religious categories with adjectives rather than with nouns." [Alport, Gordon, The Nature of Prejudice(Don Mills, Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1979, p. 178-181, edited.)] Second Reading Cornell West, author of the best seller, Race Matters, is a professor at Harvard University. His use of language is direct and to the point. His thinking always challenges. It seems to hit the nail on the head more often than other writers and speakers I have heard. While this selection speaks of the States, I challenge you to substitute our minorities for the word "black" as it appears in this reading. The liberal notion that more government money can solve racial problems is simplistic - precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behaviour of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a "problem people," in the words of Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. We generally confine our discussions about race to the "problems" black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. This paralysing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at "the problems"; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the "problems" on black people themselves - and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life. [West, Cornell, Race Matters(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 2 - 3.)] What happens when we simply substitute the words "Native," "Oriental," or "Muslim" here in Canada? SERMON At General Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, last June, Bill Jones, a professor at the University of Florida, and Mark Morrisson-Read, minister in Toronto, spoke to the full assembly on Racial Justice Day. Mark spoke with incredible passion of the history of racism in our denomination. He did not speak the white line of racial audits, fine words, and the difficulties we have of attracting black families to our congregations. He spoke from his heart as a black man who has tasted racism and told us the story of our black ministers who could not be settled in the 40's and 50's, were not even given a chance to settle in parishes because the Department of Ministry said they did not have places for black ministers. Mark spoke of our heroes who fought slavery, Channing, Parker and Lydia Maria Childs, editor of the Anti Slavery Standard. Channing compared blacks to harmless children and told his people that they had no reason to be afraid of them. Parker compared blacks to animals. Childs spoke of intermarriage saying that as long as there are understanding and upstanding women, they will not marry outside their race. The sadness Mark provoked had me in tears long before he dissolved into tears and could not continue. Our beloved bastion of liberal tolerance was riddled with racist thought and action both in our history and in our more recent traditions. If Mark delivered the paralyser, Bill Jones delivered the hammer blow to the knees. I have seen Bill in tears over this subject, and though his words continued my outpouring of tears, his logic was powerful and his perspective convincing. I am indebted to Mark and Bill, to Cornell West and Gordon Alport as well as many other authors and friends for material this morning. Let us begin. We are oppressors. Make no mistake about it. Make no protestation. Let's understand. It is like a mutant virus. It is virtually invisible. We go around looking for the old virus, the ones we think we know, and we keep on trying the old vaccines, but they just don't work. We don't see it. So we say it is not there. We pretend it is gone or going away. All the while the invisible virus is working. Ah . . . so there it is . . . we must make another vaccine! And then nothing happens. Racism today is a new virus. It is unlike anything we have seen before. We will not be able to neutralize it by attacking the protein clusters on its surface. We will not be able to encapsulate it. It goes beyond altering our own DNA. It is a brand new virus and we will not find it using the old methods of seeing . . . for by those measures it is undetectable. Hold up a toilet paper tube. "What is this" Note: Focus of answers: Function - Toilet paper Tube Composition - Cardboard Geometry - Cylinder "It is all of these things" It is a multiplicity of angles of interpretation and reflection. Our own subjectivity chooses an aspect that we are willing to name this with. It is a subjective choice. Hold up sideways to form a rectangle. "What is this?" Hold up end to show a circle. "What is this?" I can even get it to a special point where we could argue over what it is . . . Move to point where some see the cylinder as a circle and others see it as a rectangle - a third group will see it as a three dimensional figure - the cylinder The angle we see it from makes the other perspectives invisible to our eyes - though in our head we know the difference. Who is right in their definition? No one and everyone. Each of us has a part and the more we add to the description the closer we come to what this actually is. There is, of course, a functional level at which we stop in our description. Hold up a red square and a yellow circle. "What are these?" A red square and a yellow circle. While we could have said a square and a circle, we choose to include the colours. Is colour important to determine which is the square and which is the circle? Hardly - but colour is a strong pointer for us as it is for most people. The oppressor always focuses on a difference when talking about people. Gordon Alport let us see how important the power of words is, and Margaret Meade pointed out the power in simple parts of speech, nouns versus adjectives. When the oppressor focuses on the difference it is to arrange the world in a hierarchy - with . . . what a surprise! . . . the oppressor at the top. It is done to protect power. Do not mistake me here. We are not talking about race today. We are talking about power and its misuse. In the next issue of The Ottawa Unitarian the new Sexual Abuse and Harassment Policy will be printed for you to read. The team putting the policy together, after eight months of study, all agreed, the policy is not about sex. It is about an abuse of power. We seldom talk about the power around us. The powerful don't like that. I am convinced that we will ever maintain hierarchies, oppression, sexual abuse and racism and hundreds of other results of abuses of power, until such time as talking about power, its exercise, and distribution is common. Those who have power tend to want to keep it. They will arrange the world into superior and inferior . . . emulating the superior and denigrating what they see as inferior. Cornell West showed how both liberals and conservatives in the States maintain their positions vis a vis poor blacks by seeing the "problems" as located within the black community. How does all this happen? To what end do we sustain such a hideous behaviour and thought pattern? Alport is very clear about how we grow the symbolic language and how deep its power is. The first step is twigging onto linguistic tags when we are very young. The tags are symbols of power and rejection to the young child. In one study in the American South, fully half of the children in a nursery class knew the word "nigger." Few of these young children understood what the word implied. But they knew that the word was potent. It was forbidden, taboo, and always fetched some strong response from the teachers. It was therefore a "power word". Not infrequently a child throwing a temper tantrum would call his teacher a "nigger". Children racing around wildly, shrieking at play, might, in order to enhance their wild orgies, yell "nigger, nigger, nigger". As a strong word it seemed to symbolize and heighten the play. It was a vocalization of the violent expenditure of energy under way. But to show you how little understanding of the word young children have, one boy, after being told by his mother never to play with "niggers" said, "No Mother, I never play with niggers. I only play with white and black children." The aversion is being set up anyway - before the child knows what it refers to. A settlement worker was walking across a playground and saw a little boy crying. She stopped to find out what was the matter. He cried out, "I was hit by the Polish boy." The settlement worker asked around and it was no Polish boy who had hit the child. But it turned out that in the boy's family was constantly quarrelling with Polish neighbours. He had learned to associate "Polish" with aggression and "bad." So anyone who did him harm was "Polish". He had come to make an association which had no reference to the real meaning in a rational adult world. When this child learns who Poles really are he will already have an aversion to them. I wonder how much this is happening to French and to English children in Canada today . . . especially today! A group of children in a class were asked what "white cracker" meant. There were many answers including, "You're supposed to say it when you are mad." It takes young children a few years to get to the next step - integrating those learned power words with behaviour. At six years old a young girl ran home and asked her mother, "What is the name of the children I am supposed to hate?" The young girl is stumbling through some sort of threshold of abstraction. She wants to have her mother's approval and is making some connections here - hopefully the mother is dismayed but loving in her response - though I'll bet not in that case. These linguistic tags, these "power words", become a part of the child's way of dividing up the world into understandable pieces. Every child learns the tags before being capable of applying them to the adult categories. Only after a little fumbling does the categorization take place. Once the child has learned what the other group is, the prejudice may become a part of behaviour. By the time the child is ten or eleven he/she has fully integrated a multiplicity of traits attributable to the group. Often the child so conditioned will not even sit with children of other ethnic groups. They select their own. At the same time in schools there is talk of democracy and equal regard for all races and creeds. With a few more years experience, the overgeneralizations are mellowed somewhat as positive traits are also ascribed to the groups the "power words" referred to. There sets in a stage where differentiations are made, "Oh, I don't mean you . . .", "Some of my best friends are black, or homosexual, but frankly I find most of them . . . " In the background are the childhood learnings about "strong power" associated with words. In the foreground is the democratic multicultural society to which they must at least give lip service. The paradox then is that young children may talk undemocratically but behave democratically. Children in puberty may talk democratically but behave with true prejudice. Such talk and behaviour are saved for appropriate occasions and rationalized during those occasions. [Alport, p. 304 - 310.] Malcolm X gives us an insight into what the effect of this double dealing is on the heart and soul of a black man when he said in 1964, "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you are making progress. No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I'm concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me." [West, p. 35.] When Bill Jones spoke last June, he talked about the drawings in encyclopedias which show the development of the human head from the head of an ape. The white European profile is shown as the highest form of development. There were scientists at the turn of the century who attempted to prove white supremacy by relating both Oriental and Black features to lower stages of development - closer to gorillas. Bill notes with a keen sense of pointed humour, that the gorilla tends to have straight hair and the thinner lips of Europeans! What a morass! Our own denomination is implicated in a tearful story of black ministers rejected. Racism is like a virus . . .but a brand new one and we are looking through old lenses to conquer it. Our vaccines do not work. And there is a hideous process which leads to discrimination. Its tentacles reach way down deep into our childhoods, into our innocence, and there lay the seeds for hatreds and fears. We fell prey to the adult world without knowing it. It is still with in us even when we are politically and culturally correct. What are we to do? The problem, of course is in the way we diagnose the problems. When Senator Ted Kennedy, in the very early days of his tenure in the U.S. Senate said that the problem was in undernourished black children whose IQ scores could be significantly raised if they had a good breakfast - money was given for breakfasts at public schools. When I started work at my last parish in the centre of Philadelphia, the church funded such a program at the public school across the street. It did not solve the racial problems of Philadelphia. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the problem was in the breakdown of the black family and later counselled a course of "benign neglect" to give the programs already in place time to take effect. In doing so he located the cause of the problem in the Black family. It had nothing to do with "us". "Us" is the white Eurocentric crowd. Both Kennedy and Moynihan used the old lenses which saw the problem as located outside. Though I bet they would not agree with my saying this, their responses were typical of the vaccine of blaming the victim. Cornell West does not mince words. He says that Blacks are part of the fabric of the nation and the problem has something to do with the nation. No one escapes the finger pointing . . . though finger pointing itself is just another way of setting a group apart and maintaining power. Another vaccine was offered through the desegregation of schools which resulted from the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954. Only forty years later are we learning that it has not worked. This was a "problem" where everyone eventually agreed there was a problem. They also agreed to impose a solution and control it rigidly. There would be no problem - we, the oppressors, can control society so tightly that the problem will disappear. It did not work! These traditional vaccines do not work because they misunderstand a fundamental aspect of any racism. It is not a black - white problem. It is an abuse and misuse of power. That power is being abused and misused by whites - not Blacks. Now do not get me wrong. I issue this warning because I know that someone will assume that I am blaming all the problems of the Black community on white people. I am not! But do not give a sigh of relief!! I won't absolve white Eurocentric North Americans. I started this sermon by saying that we white Eurocentric folk are oppressors. I moved on to show how insidious it is in the development of our language use. I have shown how some of the solutions harden the foundations of prejudice through use of vaccines which are based on blame, denial and rigid control of society. I have spoken of the complicity our own religious history has in perpetuating the stereotypes and the fears through the words of our great anti-slavery fighters, Channing, Parker and Childs. We are into this up to our knees . . . perhaps even deeper. As Bill Jones warned us all, "The diagnosis will lead to the solution. If you make the wrong diagnosis, i.e., have guessed the wrong cause, watch out, your buns are in trouble!" Bill Jones was right. OK. We have had a lot of talk about the United States. Forget the location if you can. It really does not matter . . . excepting that the examples in the States are so blatant that we can hardly miss the point. What is going on here? It is power misuse and abuse we are talking about. Is it common? You bet - just look at this. This week we learned that the Liberal government is moving with all deliberate speed into talks with native groups about self determination. It is the reading of the current government that our constitution does not have to be altered, that right is inherent in some of the current wording. This, I contend, is true power sharing and I like the feel. In our country the English and the French have had a difficult time since the Plains of Abraham. I suggest that one of the reasons is that some Canadians would like the French to behave as though they were the losers just east of Quebec City. That sounds a lot like the oppressors and the oppressed thinking to me. I believe that what is now happening is that the people of Quebec are looking for a way to cast off the oppression. This particular history is so littered with vaccines and funds spent that have not worked, and attitudes ingrained in children that still crop up when they are adults, that I am not sure its solution can be found in one generation - though I do believe that the concept of a bilingual nation was brilliant. I wish, however, that it had had more time to grow up through the generations. This issue will not easily be solved, but the prejudices between English and French can not be lessened until there is real power sharing, and that is hard in a democracy these days. Hierarchies in our democracies are strong. Power protection is the name of the game. New paradigms and new lenses are required. Sometimes steps are taken which lead us to new ground, but to protect that ground other steps must be taken to consolidate power to protect that ground. The quagmire thickens. I have no answers for the large cultural questions. They are simply too complicated and I know so little, but . . . I will continue to read and attempt to understand through glasses which see the world in terms of the use of power. I believe that those glasses are going to give us a better measure of where we need to go. Sharing power is the answer, not protection of power. I believe that the fight of women in this century, to gain and share power, has been wonderfully productive. While being declared persons or getting the vote are important, the more important things are happening right now - where abuse of power is being called into question in the Catholic Orphanages, in the protected sanctuaries of priests, in the castles, the homes of men, in the privacy of the doctor's domain, in the confidence of the lawyer's office, in the professorial white towers, wherever there is a possibility for the abuse of power it is being opened up and looked at. A new ethic of the use of power is dawning. While it is sometimes confusing, I see more promise than threat. Right now what I am waiting for is the day when the power words for children are "abuser", "controller", "manipulator", "oppressor", "censor", and "harasser." Can you imagine what it will take to get there? Next time you hit your thumb with a hammer and have a child nearby, say, "ABUSER." Next time you want to get mad, say, "OPPRESSOR". Always shift the "power words" to behaviour. Then . . . then the next generation may have an even chance of looking back at our disturbed behaviour with curiosity, rather than terror . . . terror . . . because they are repeating it. AFTERWORD One may well wonder what all the psychology and sociology have to do with the spiritual or religious expectations that people come to church with on a Sunday morning. I can only say to you this, that in-so-far as religion is concerned, I must always admit that I have not achieved the expectations which I dream of for myself. I am far from the pinnacle of my capacity for moral reasoning. The highest expression of religion is ethical thought and behaviour. As a part of my religious search, indeed, the most important portion of that search and growth, I must seek out like a ferret on the scent, each block that human psychology, and my psychology and sociology in particular, places in my way. I cannot do this without an honest exchange of ideas between myself and other searchers. A sermon such as this represents a slice of the thinking I must carry out to be an ethical person - in my religious framework. As for the spiritual dimension, I am too well aware that the meaning of spiritual sustenance is different for each of us. I do not attempt on a Sunday morning to meet all of your spiritual needs. To do so would water down any message and foreshorten the progress of the quest for truth. Ultimately it would deny us the depth of challenge that is needed for us to change - complicity in denying the challenges required for us to change means that I accept us as we now are - and I do not - as much as I love all of this, and you. Change is inevitable and we must participate in its progress. Why? Because a kinder world must be provided for children so that more of their energies can go into solving the problems we face as a species living in Gia. Why must we participate energetically? Because in being given the opportunity to participate in our own development, we are given the possibility of shaping not only our individual spirits, but the collective spirit of humankind. Comfort is often found in that which we already know, that which confirms our being as it exists, I know that it would be ethically immoral to provide that sustenance all the time. I find my spirit soars highest against the wind, like a kite tugging at the string. And so I hope even one of you is challenged as I share from my journey this week, challenged to do your own thinking, to grow in your own ways, and to share that growth and the ethical results with myself and others. In that way, we will grow to be known as a religious people who sought truth and dignity, gentle thinking people who sought the best for our creation. Benediction May we be ever so careful with our children. The spirit of humanity as it is to be carried into the future is being lodged in their hearts this very day. A-men.	What to expect on Sundays Religious Sources "Views From These Pews"