Diane Light, Unitarian Society of Menomonie
January 13, 2019

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. March on Washington, 1963
If the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had not been shot on that day in April of 1968, he would be 90 years old this month, on Jan 15. We celebrate Dr. King’s life and work in January, probably more than we would if he was still around to harangue this nation to do better. And harangue he did! As Dr. King talked about his dream of a great nation where a person would be judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin, he also demanded civil rights now-not tomorrow, or when Congress has time to get to it, or when white people have adjusted to the idea. His people had suffered long enough, and now in 1963, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, Dr. King demanded justice now.
Dr. King is not alive to harangue us today. But as I listened to several of his speeches in the past two weeks, I was astounded at how his words are still relevant today. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality. These are words from Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail, a letter in which he also wrote: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
The appalling silence of the good people. That hits home for me when I think about how to be a good ally in the current struggle for racial justice. I want what our second UU principle proclaims: justice, equity and compassion in human relations for everyone, and I want it now, especially now. But often, I don’t know what to do about the injustice, the hatred and the inequality that is so pervasive. I don’t know how to be a good ally a lot of the time.
Have you ever been in this situation? You’re at a family gathering, and someone says something racist about African Americans or Native Americans or these days about the caravan of people trying to enter the U.S. both legally and illegally. Kathleen and I have each found ourselves in these situations and it’s really uncomfortable. Do you say something in the middle of the turkey dinner, or let it go to maintain peace? If you do say something, what happens?
Sometimes I have said something, and everyone gets quiet and no one looks at each other until someone changes the subject. At other times people get defensive, or start talking about how they are equally oppressed. Whatever the response, it feels like I’m being silenced—or even more, that racism is not something that a lot of white people want to talk about.
The thing is, the less we talk about it, the more it becomes hidden. Racism doesn’t go away, it just gets shoved under the rug.
If we are going to be good and effective allies, if we are going to walk our UU talk about justice, equity and compassion, we need to pull back the rug and get to hidden stuff that’s there. A good housecleaning—it feels good when you’re done, even if the cleaning part isn’t much fun!
I want to talk a bit today about hidden racism, the racism that’s inside of me and everyone in this room. The only way I can start to talk about this, is to tell you a bit about how I got to this understanding. I sure can’t speak for any of you.
When I first attended seminary in 2008, I heard a lot about rooting out the racism that is inside of all of us who are white: my professors talked about it, my African American classmates talked about it. But I didn’t get it really. I was told it was a process that would take a long time to figure out, but I didn’t really know where to start. My value system was progressive: I was a UU, and when I added Christianity to the mix, I was progressive there too. I never felt that I was prejudiced. And I still don’t. But that’s not what my professors and classmates were trying to tell me.
What they were saying was that I had been socialized from infancy into white culture and white attitudes, and that these still influenced my life in ways that I wasn’t aware of, and that they gave me an advantage over people of color socially, economically, politically. That helped a little, but not much. But, when I’m in school, I’m want to be the best! I wanted to know, I wanted to see what others are seeing and knowing. What I really wanted was a self-help book, or a chart that would give me specific directions on how to access and root out the racism that was inside of me, so that I could get an A in anti-racism. Then I could cross that off my list and graduate from seminary with a good conscience.
But it just didn’t work that way. My Black classmates continued to talk about white cluelessness, and I thought that must be true, but I couldn’t see it. I want to say these conversations happened during discussions in classes or around dinner, but never unkindly, never directed at anyone in particular. But still, I kept quiet so I wouldn’t expose myself by saying something stupid.
I went to justice workshops. In one, led by a group of Native American women, we were asked to move into smaller and smaller spaces, as they told the story of how Indians were forced from the land to the reservation by white colonists. They wanted us to feel in a small way what that might be like. It was very effective, but my internal response was anger and defensiveness. The situation of Native Americans was not my fault. I was a good and kind person, and I wasn’t prejudiced! Which was not the point. But I felt attacked.
Still, I kept reading and listening, not always with an open heart.
At one point, I watched an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. I was appalled
In this cartoon, Bugs bunny is imitating a black man who is portrayed as ignorant, slow, playing the banjo, happy in his position and who is called boy without complaint and eats watermelon regularly. A racist stereotype of a black man. I don’t know about you, but I watched Bugs Bunny every day when I was a kid. When people talk about whites being socialized by racism, this the kind of thing they’re talking about the unspoken attitudes that seeped into our consciousness through the media and the environments we grew up in; how the people around us talked about people of color; or how they did not talk about them because they didn’t exist for us, except as portrayed in the media. It was just how we grew up—and it’s not our fault.
But without my realizing it, my perceptions and attitudes were socialized racially. I was white, and for me that meant that I was just ordinary, normal, typical, and everyone else was other.
Here are some ways I realized that as and adult, I realized that I had been racially socialized.
When I was working in Allina hospice in Minneapolis, I was given the territory North of the city. North Minneapolis is about 50% black and 25 % white with the rest being folks of Asian, Hispanic, Native American and others. Economically, it tends to be poorer, although It’s a mixed neighborhood, both middle class and poor. 37% of people in North Minneapolis live below the poverty line, and most of those are African American. I’d heard about the gangs, and the police shootings. I was scared to go into that neighborhood, scared for my physical safety, but I didn’t want to say anything, because then I’d have to admit to myself or my co-workers that I wasn’t as inclusive as I saw myself; that I was unable and unwilling to live out our UU principle of the worth and dignity of every person. So I went.
In North MPLS, I took care of a lot of older folks who were dying, and a few younger people as well. In the home of one dying man, family surrounded him while a recorded version of the Muslim call to prayer was playing loudly from someone’s computer. It was beautiful. And I was given a fresh Somali meat dumpling as I was leaving. In the home of a dying grandma who would sit on the edge of her bed with a big smile, asking our UU chaplain to talk with her about Jesus, one of the daughters was making fry bread, and gave me a plump juicy piece of fresh warm fry bread as I was leaving: I’d never tasted fry bread that good before! And I thought: maybe antiracism through the sharing of food is the answer!
I encountered deep poverty, and in one home there was a bag of trash that had broken open in the kitchen and no one had picked it up. But the grandma there was so well cared for, so loved by her daughter and granddaughter, that I was in awe. They had nothing, and were in danger of losing their homes, but they knew how to love. In another home, two 20 something grandsons were caring for their grandma who was bedbound. They cooked for her, changed her depends, fed her when she needed to be fed, and just loved her.
In North Minneapolis, I never felt unsafe. Mostly I felt respected and welcome.
Learning to be an effective ally in the struggle against ongoing racism means that we have to question our assumptions, like which places are good (white) and which are bad (predominantly black).
Question your assumptions. That’s the first item on the list that I’m creating about how to be a good ally.
My second item, is listen, deeply, the way the Buddha, the way Thich Nhat Hanh tells us to be. Look deeply at the person in front of you, listen with your heart wide open and without interrupting. Listen the way you want to be heard when you are grieving or upset.
A friend was talking about how often someone has come up to her while she’s in the grocery store or the CVS pharmacy or at the bus stop, and touched her hair. This friend has beautiful, big dread locks—a really nice cascade of hair and she is black. It is very distressing for her when someone, always a white woman, comes up to her and touches her hair. The woman does not ask permission, just does it. I mean think about it. This is about personal space and respect! And it has happened to her over and over again. She says that this kind of touching by white women happens to a lot of black women, as if black women were dolls on a shelf, or mannequins in a clothing store. This is an everyday kind of racism, one of many, that people of color experience.
Let’s imagine that my friend is telling me this over coffee. She’s angry, frustrated hurt. What if I respond: “well the white woman didn’t mean anything by it, she was just curious, after all you do have beautiful unusual hair. You’re being too sensitive.” These are responses that black women hear a lot from white folks. When I excuse the white woman for touching my friend’s hair, I’ve just missed an opportunity to learn about what it’s like to be a person of color in a white world. That’s something I will never know. I’ve just shut down the conversation and lost my friend’s trust. And I’ve received an F on my antiracism report card.
Listen. And even if you can’t imagine that experience because it is not your own, trust that the person speaking is speaking their truth and their pain. Sometimes the pain sounds like anger, but it’s pain deep down at not being respected as a human being. Every time we listen, we have the opportunity to understand a little more, a tip of the iceberg more, about what it’s like to be a non-white person in our country. And we offer the person who is speaking a gift-of being seen, heard, understood by a white person: not something that happens much.
In the ‘being a good ally list’ we have so far are:
Question our assumptions
Listen deeply with an open heart
Try not to become defensive
Because what I did not know in that workshop led by the Native American women, was that I wasn’t being attacked. I was hearing expressions of pain. Sometimes the pain sounds like anger. It’s still pain. My defensiveness kept me hearing that.
I’m going to tell one more story.
There’s a podcast from the NPR show On Being with Krista Tippett that aired on Thursday this week. Krista interviewed African American author, poet and professor at Yale, Claudia Rankine. Toward the end of the interview, Claudia related a story of a conversation she had on a plane with a white man. They were having this great conversation about their shared musical tastes, and at one point the man told Claudia “I don’t see color.” And this is how the conversation went:
Claudia recounts what happened next: “…the amazing thing that happened was, somehow, I said — I don’t even know how I did it, but I said to him, “Ah, that’s not such a good thing to say.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “Because I’m a black woman, and you’re a white man. And I want you to see that. If you don’t see color, you’re not seeing me. And if you can’t see me, you can’t see racism. And I want you to be able to see those things.” And he said — and this is the moment that I loved. He said to me, “Did I say anything else?” And I said, “No, that was it.” And then they went on to have more great conversations about their shared interests
The really great thing about this conversation, and what Claudia was so happy about, is that this man did not get defensive. He didn’t try to explain how and why he was not a racist. He listened to her perspective and was not only open to hearing her feedback, but wanted to know if there was anything else he hadn’t noticed in their conversations so far.
When we say that we don’t see color, or that we are colorblind we are saying that we aren’t willing to see or talk about racism in way that’s personal, like our hidden stuff—like the stuff I’m discovering about myself. And if we aren’t willing to try to see racism, the everyday kind of racism that we might stumble on as this man did, we aren’t going to be good allies. We will never ‘get’ racism, until we are willing to see that I am white and that person over there is black.
The next item on my ’being a good ally’ list, is see color. See it. Honor it and the person inside that skin. It’s not how many of us are used to thinking. At least it wasn’t for me.
The last thing on my list is show up to protest injustice with people of color like UU president Rev Susan Frederick-Gray did when she stood outside with clergy in Charlottesville. Like James Reeb in Selma. Not everyone can do this, but it makes a difference to have white people present. James Reeb’s story reminds us that it’s always a risk to show up and protest. It means that we are willing to take some of the risks that our brothers and sisters of color are taking. That’s not a small thing.
There are more items to be added to the being a good and effective ally list. But I think these are the most important ones.
Question your assumptions.
Listen deeply.
Try not to be defensive.
See color.
Participate in protest.

And remember, we aren’t trying to get an ‘A’ in anti-racism. That’s not an item on my list!
When we are willing to be open minded, open hearted about the things we don’t see that others are seeing and experiencing every day, we will be in a position of privilege that isn’t white privilege. It’s the privilege of helping to realize that freedom dream that Dr. King talked about: where everyone will be able to sit at the table together as sisters and brothers.
May it be so.