When White People Preach about Race
Our 9-year community Ministry program at Judson Memorial Church, with its 57 graduates, 35% of whom are people of color, has taught me, the presumed teacher, a lot about race. I am white. I like to think I am colorful–or in the newest incomplete language about race: “of color.” While white is also a color, I don’t want to get distracted by language so early in this piece about language, race, and preaching. Instead, I’ll start with the issue that the language tries, generation after generation, to name. What words do we use for each other? Human? Black? White? Of Color? Do you recall when African-America turned to black, and then back, or when Hispanic became Chicano and now Latino (for a brief history of words that fail)?
The issue is who names who and how. The issue is also perdurant, persistent power that white people have over people of color. We in fact have so much power that we don’t even have to think about race if we don’t want to. We can wear a bulletproof vest of indifference while other children can’t walk down the straight in a place like Ferguson, or Brooklyn, or Chicago without needing one.
So if we wanted to preach about race, we’d have to lose the vestment of indifference. We’d have to know how to care about something that was not we. And we’d have to know guilt, that feeling that comes when you know you have done something wrong, that sin that St. Paul named as the sin of omission rather than the sin of commission. Guilt is different from shame. Of course, white people should and may, can and might, feel guilt about our persistent, often indifferent power. Shame is not necessary, although it is a detour on the way to guilt. Shame is a place with no exit. Guilt is a place with an exit: you can receive forgiveness and initiate repentance. You may have to do it more than once. There is a place of grace for the guilty. That place comes on the other side of repentance. Repentance comes when you change behavior and drop off the defensive channel of “I am not a racist,” on to the channel where you make sure you know and that others know, especially your white friends know, that you are a recovering racist, with every chance of backsliding off the wagon. Mixed metaphors intended.
Once you know you are a sinner, feel guilty about it, have changed at least a little behavior, and have sniffed the grace around it, you might be able to preach about race. But when you preach about race, note you need not preach about “people of color.” If you are white, preach to white folk. You might have something to say to them. Take three examples. One is the way white folk talk about money in politics. We go cerebral. We say with dismay that elections have become auctions. We talk about Citizens United. We declare that corporations aren’t people. We wring our hands. When people of color talk about money in politics, they see the naked truth that “voter suppression” is all about getting them out of the ballot box. The issue of politics and money is about taking the franchise away from some people so that other people won’t have obstacles in their way to keep the political economy as it is. As it is: protected, persistent, power for some and the opposite for others.
There is a difference in dismay and denial of the right to vote. “Elections have become auctions, sold to the highest bidder.” Contrast: “They are taking away our vote again, like in Miami, now in Georgia and North Carolina, and many other places.” Voter suppression is not about white people voting.
A second example is how we talk about education. White people may bemoan testing or having 26 children to a kindergarten class. Other people might instead talk about the school to prison highway or raising the age so that juveniles are treated like juveniles. Other people might ask why people of color are over represented in prison and under represented in the economy. Check out: #why we can’t wait.
Another example might be how I feel about the police and how someone else feels about the police. If somebody hurt me or stole from me, I’d call the police. I trust the police. Many other people do not and won’t until we get culturally competent policing. Preaching has something to do with cultural competency.
What is Cultural Competency?
It is knowing what you don’t know. It is knowing in your belly what your culture has taught you about how much better is to be white than to be of color. It is seeing race but not only seeing race.
Her name is Ronneak. She was our student in an unusual form of exchange. She is black. We, at Judson, are mostly white. She had the assignment from New York Theological Seminary to learn about cultural competency. She is a member of a very dynamic Harlem Church, “Second Corinthians.” Her assignment was to go some place different, a place unlike what her previous life had shown her. She agreed to come for a kind of immersion in a church different than her own uptown one. Ronneak came downtown. Downtown we brag about diversity all the time, even though we mostly like people to come downtown. When we go uptown, we know how far away it is. Easy 45 minutes; 45 minutes lost to being downtown.
Back to Ronneak. She was kind to us. She was ebullient. She appeared to like us. We also liked her, but not until she liked us. Her graciousness was emblematic: in my experience black people are always twice as gracious as white people. Maybe thrice. They are nice to us in a way that we are not always nice to them. I experience grace in this forgiveness–or if not forgiveness, then willingness to be around us, after all we have done and not done.
The Sermon You Might Preach about Diversity
Diversity is a word so overused that it should be put on a shelf for at least a dozen years. Maybe when we take it off the shelf, we can give it an honorary burial, or begin to find its meaning, such that we can use it again with something like integrity.
Is diversity where people in power enjoy having a few people without power around them, as long as they don’t say much? Is diversity decorating your meeting or staff or living room with a splash of color? Is diversity making sure white is the basic color and any other color is “different?” Or other, as in my otherizing language here in these very words? Or does diversity have a chance of being mutually accountable to each other?
Mutual accountability means that I move a little and you move a little. Not that I move an inch and you move 45 inches–or minutes. The power relationships between people of color and people who are without color are so historic, so deep, so long, comprising one generation after another, such that a grandchild of a slave exists among us at any given minute. She probably didn’t hear a hopeful story for a long time. She also found one in her surreptitious heart. When we preach diversity as a virtue, we need first to address her hopelessness about diversity. She may not even want diversity, just a little hope that life for her might be good and without systemic intervention against her. So who wants diversity? The powerful? Or the powerless? Why not substitute a less mean and cruel word like pluralism? Like people not being bothered by each other. Or harassed by each other. Or used by each other. Or shot by their surrogates with guns?
Back to Ronneak. She came to us and was kind to us. She seemed to like us. But truthfully, even after a year of being with us, I wondered what she really felt about us. How could she be so generous of spirit? And how can we be generous of spirit when we preach about diversity–as opposed to self-congratulatory?
Simple Hints
1. Put the word diversity away and use pluralism. Pluralism is a fact of life. By 2040 the United States will be a majority minority country. Celebrate that fact. Don’t bemoan it. Enjoy it. In the UCC we became an “open and affirming church,” regarding homosexuals. Everybody just wanted to be open. The key was in the affirmation: Affirm pluralism.
2. Repent of your sins. If you have used a person of color to decorate your staff or your board, understand it. Understand why you did it. Accept the forgiveness of Almighty God who knows we are only halfway there, if that.
3. Imagine what God intended in creation: one color? Many colors? Harmonic Colors? I’m betting the latter. Preach to that. Begin with creation, go through redemption, end up at the good place of creation redeemed in rainbows. You may have a lot of guilt about race. But don’t preach guilt. Preach the joy of creation.
4. Find a way to signal that you know your power. Use words. Use gestures. Use the way you hang out in coffee hour or at a meeting. Do all the white kids sit together in the lunch room? You bet we do. Don’t do that. Make sure you not only have a good friend “of color” but that you listen to him or her tell you how many mistakes you made in your last public comment.
5. Invite Ronneak to be your intern. She will shame or grace you into a delightful pluralism.
6. Forget the word “Should.” Its track record is abysmal. Consider the power of the word may. Or might. We may find our way to a positive pluralism. We might find our way to a positive pluralism. Not “we should” find our way. That language contains too much blame and has the sneaky effect of acting as though white people are still in charge. Even self-blaming is a form of power at work.
7. Have fun while understanding that you are no longer the majority. You are already the global minority and chances are that you will soon be the American minority. Learn to enjoy minority status.
8. Finally make sure you get to know Ronneak. Be kind to her. Go uptown and worship with her.
Preaching about race won’t stop racism. It will help you to be less of a partner in it.
Very interesting way of putting things
Donna, as always you hit the target!
Thanks for this helpful and remarkable piece.