And Justice For All

And Justice for All

Confronting Racism

a sermon by Rev. Daniel S. Schatz

BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

October 23, 2005

He phoned more than an hour ago, to say he was on his way home. But I have yet to hear the scrape of the iron gate, the rattling keys, so I worry.

Most married women fret about a tardy husband. Young black women like myself worry more. For most people in New York the urban bogeyman is a young black man in sneakers. But we live in Central Harlem, where every young man is black and wears sneakers, so we learn to look into the eyes of young males and discern the difference between youthful bravado and the true dangers of the streets.

No, I have other fears. I fear white men in police uniforms; white teenagers driving by; thin, panicky, middle-aged white men on the subway. Most of all, I fear that their path and my husband’s will cross one night as he makes his way home.

I fear that some white person will look at him and see only his or her nightmare – another black man in sneakers.

But he’s also a writer, an amateur cyclist, a lousy basketball player, his parents’ son, my life’s companion. When I peek out the window, the visions in my head are those of blind white panic at my husband’s black presence.

Once upon a time I was vaguely ashamed of my paranoia about his safety in the world outside our home. After all, he’s a grown man. But he’s a grown black man on the streets alone. I am reminded, over and over, how dangerous white people can be, how their fears are still a hazard to our health. When white people are ruled by their fears of everything black, every black man is a rapist – even a murderer.

Because racism is no longer visible..., the conclusion follows that it has been exterminated. Hail to the exterminator! To spot the error here, recall the Hubble telescope. This new telescope did not create the stars that it allowed us to see for the first time; they were there all along. The fact that something is visible or invisible to us does not mean that it does not exist. Whether something is visible or invisible depends on the sophistication of our viewing instruments, as well as on the point of view we choose.

I endorse and advance, as the foundation for Unitarian Universalism’s anti-racist imperative... the disguise hypothesis, which sees not racism’s demise but its disguise. From this vantage point, institutional racism is not in remission or even declining, as is commonly believed; rather, it is mutating and reclaiming lost territory through ingenious disguises, conceptual camouflages, and hypocritical masks of moral invulnerability....

Classical racism has not been dismantled; rather, it has evolved into neo-racism, and apartheid into neo-apartheid. The mutant virus of racial oppression not only is immune to our updated economic, social and political vaccines but feasts upon them.

When the storm came to New Orleans we watched helplessly as wind and water destroyed homes and lives. The fury of Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed us as we saw houses flooded in the deluge, refugees weeping and starving in the aftermath.

It didn’t take long before we saw something else. Of the people who had been left behind in New Orleans – those with no money for gas or bus tickets – the vast majority were Black. The people in the Superdome, who suffered nearly a week of intolerable heat and inadequate medical care, who died even as they walked out from that hell-hole, searching for some way out of town, were almost all Black. And the people in the New Orleans Convention Center, whose existence was not even acknowledged by governmental authorities until days after they had begun to suffer the effects of abandonment, were almost all African American.

Of course, it wasn’t only African Americans who suffered. People of all races lost their homes; many lost their lives. I know this because when I watched the television coverage, I usually saw the White victims of the disaster interviewed, even though most of those left behind were not White.

Still, people of every race were forced out of their homes. People of every race resorted to breaking into stores to survive – though media outlets told us that the White people were “searching for food,” while African Americans were “looting.”

We don’t hear the word “racism” very much any more in our country. It seems to have been relegated to the history class. It’s an uncomfortable word, because it encompasses so much that has become repugnant to all but the most reactionary. We tend to think of racism as a kind of personal hatred, based on skin color, towards someone of another race.

That’s part of what racism is, very often. It is certainly a big part of what racism has been. That kind of racism today manifests itself largely in the fears that many White people have towards people of color, fueled by a public culture that too often portrays them as violent, dangerous and unpredictable. But irrational fears are not the same as hatred, and it’s tempting to think that even if racism isn’t gone completely, it’s in its final throes. After all, we have Martin Luther King, Jr. holidays and even a few people of color in high office. But, as the Unitarian Universalist theologian William Jones reminds us, just because something has become invisible does not mean it doesn’t exist. Racism continues in more subtle and insidious forms.

It is sad that it has taken a cataclysm like Hurricane Katrina to open many of our eyes to the idea that racism still exists, is real, and has taken root in our social and economic systems. It is sadder still that this realization is so uncomfortable to so many people that it has been quickly hushed as other concerns take over.

When the word “racism” began to raise its head after the response to Hurricane Katrina abandoned thousands of African Americans to whatever fate might come, officials quickly dismissed it. Indignantly they assured us that all that such accusations were false and extremist, that they had never given a thought to the race of the people left behind in New Orleans. While it is very probably true that race was not an active consideration in the response to Katrina, that in itself means very little. It wasn’t that the government actively dismissed the concerns of the poor and people of color – rather it was that they never considered them in the first place.

The problem in New Orleans was not that racists blocked shipments of food and potable water; it was that the vulnerable people were the poor – and as in so many cities across the country – most of the poor were people of color.

Do you remember the pictures you saw? Black and brown faces slogging through wreckage and poisonous waters with babies in their arms? Black women and men dirty and dying for want of water and food? Soldiers and police finally coming into the city, only to greet these women and men with machine guns and riot gear?

Some pundits quickly assured us that this wasn’t racism. I heard one commentator say that what happened in New Orleans was the natural result of a culture of poverty. “This is what happens,” he said, “to people who choose to embrace the gangsta culture.”

If there was ever a question that racism is real and alive, the tragedy of New Orleans ought to give us an answer.

In Soul Work, a Unitarian Universalist collection of conversations on racism, Rebecca Parker recalls the words of James Baldwin: “This is the crime of which I accuse my countrymen, and for which I and history will never forgive them, that they have destroyed hundreds and thousands of lives, and do not know it, and do not want to know it.” The problem in New Orleans was never that anyone looked at the people there and said, “Oh, they’re poor and Black, so they don’t matter – we can let them drown.” The problem was that nobody thought about them at all.

The great crime – the new racism with which we must come to terms – is not the obvious racial hatred of the past. It is subtle, insidious, and all but invisible even to the most well-meaning amongst us. It is no less dangerous, no less destructive for all its invisibility. Its power to destroy lives is all the more potent because it hides itself deeply in the economic, social and cultural fabric of our communities.

What happened in New Orleans was not an aberration. Racism is not limited to the aftermath of natural disasters; racism is itself a disaster, every bit as devastating for millions of people as Katrina was for hundreds of thousands. Racism is itself a disaster and it is going on now – not far off in some distant city, but here, in our lives. We are all in New Orleans.

Whether we are in Philadelphia or Bucks County or Montgomery County or Chester County we are in New Orleans.

In Philadelphia, the majority of children attend schools that are all but segregated – less than one in ten students are White in the worst schools, and in these schools, buildings are falling apart, advanced placement courses are rare, and teachers are fewer and far less experienced. Philadelphia has an average of $9,000 to spend on each student, every year – and much of that goes to administration. The mostly White suburbs spend between $3000 and $8000 a year more. When such blatant racial inequality persists – and has worsened over the last ten years – we are in New Orleans.

When an African American baby born today can still expect a life six years shorter than that of a White baby, we are in New Orleans.

When the people lined up at the bus stops in affluent suburbs are almost all African Americans from segregated neighborhoods on their way home from low-wage jobs, we are in New Orleans.

When Unitarian Universalists – as well meaning a group of people as I can think of – came to General Assembly in Fort Worth, Texas this year, and repeatedly mistook Black and Brown youth and young adult delegates for hotel employees, rudely telling them to “get that bag,” we discovered that Unitarian Universalists too are in New Orleans. And that water is rising.

Where I live, in West Chester, we actually have a modicum of ethnic diversity. Yet it is hard for me to miss that most of the African American and Latino families in town live in one or two neighborhoods, and that in these neighborhoods the streets are in poor repair, the sidewalks cracked and broken, and the streetlights far more likely to be out. That doesn’t happen three blocks away, where the wealthy live in $400,000 twins. Why in one boro is the racial divide so obvious? Why doesn’t anybody say anything? We are all in New Orleans.

Now, when we look at all these problems, we might say, “These are not problems of race; they’re problems of class,” and we’d have a point. They are problems of class. But a disproportionate number of African American, Latino and First Nations people did not “just happen” to become poor. A disproportionate number do not “just happen” to attend failing schools. Five hundred years of history made it that way. Racism was invented to justify those systems of oppression and exploitation – indeed, race itself is a social construct. Racism is, as the UU theologian Paul Rasor says, an evil with a life of its own.

Getting rid of Jim Crow laws in the South was a good step, but it didn’t solve the whole problem. Today we have a moral imperative to address issues of poverty, healthcare and poor education, and we must never forget that much of that poverty and much of that poor education is the direct result of a racist economy and racist institutions. People have been systematically kept down and they continue to be kept down.

Most of us, like the powers who could have helped the people of that city, ignore the problem much of the time. It’s too complicated – systemic racism doesn’t fit neatly within our worldview. Yes, we understand racial hatred – give us a good Klan rally or a hate crime and we’ll be up in arms – but what do we do about racism which takes the form of poverty? What do we do about segregation which is de facto rather than legal? We know that our feelings are right – our hearts are for racial equality and economic justice – but we don’t have a clue what to do about it.

So, most of the time, we ignore the problem. We avoid going into neighborhoods in which the system of racism is too obvious. If we have to drive through North Philadelphia, we go straight down 611 and never deviate. We might even lock our doors. We do not want to have to face the obvious – that crowded into the streets of our city, between boarded up buildings and razor wire – are seas of human faces, almost all of them Black or Latino, almost all of them poor.

Some would suggest that this is what we should do – that the best response to racism is to become blind to all racial differences. But color-blindness misses the problem. If we ignore race, than we will fail to see what is so obvious – that African American and Latino people in this country are far more likely to live in poverty, be given a poor education, and have inadequate health care than their White brothers and sisters. If we were to ignore race completely, than we would have no tools at all with which to struggle against the subtle machinations of racism. Not only would we continue to be in New Orleans; we would have given up our only chance of ever getting out before the flood waters come – and become too high.

These are hard words to say, and they’re hard words to hear. Few of us want to be told that our society is still riddled with racism. Few of us want to be told that many of our economic and social institutions, from the schools to the jails to the banks, perpetuate the problem. It is all so enormous and so amorphous that we risk descending into utter helplessness.

We know we have a responsibility to address the problem. Paul Rasor calls it “soul work.” Everything we value as Unitarian Universalists – freedom, human dignity, community, integrity – demands of us that we address the problem of racism. It is part of our calling. It is the responsibility demanded by our own integrity and by the arc of the universe – that arc which I still believe will bend toward justice, if we will enter into its covenant.

As large as the problem may be, there is hope. There is hope, and we can make a difference.

What can we do? It begins when we open our eyes to racial disparities and acknowledge the truth in what we see. It begins when we refuse to be seduced any longer by easy lies and convenient half-truths. It begins when we admit to ourselves that racism is real.

Then we talk about it. We name it. We choose to get past our shame and awkwardness and debilitating inertia and start talking about the problem – loudly and not just with one another.

This in itself can be frightening. It has become almost as taboo to utter the word “racist” as it is to be one. And to be honest, I have no interest in calling anybody a racist. It is not racists that frighten me – it is racism. The two can no longer be equated. Good, non-racist people, even anti-racist people, may yet still close their eyes to the realities of racism. We, who have chosen to open our eyes, have a moral responsibility and spiritual calling to speak the truth and speak it loudly.

I know we can do this much. I know we can talk. We’re UUs – we’re good at that sort of thing. It isn’t enough, by itself, but it is a big step. After all, almost everyone agrees that racism is wrong, so if we can point out racism’s new face we can make a big difference in a human conscience.

We do need to do more, though, and there is more that we can do. It doesn’t matter how many consciences we raise if none of us address the larger social and economic issues. We need to pay attention, ask ourselves whether social policies will disproportionately hurt people of color – and work against those policies. We need to ask ourselves what programs can help empower people of color who have been kept down for so long – and support those programs. We need to get involved, and we need to do it now – because we are in New Orleans, and New Orleans is a good city, but it is under water.

As Unitarian Universalists we can begin to build coalitions – working with groups like the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza and so many others who have been in this struggle for the long haul. These groups understand the issues and they need our support. Together we will all be stronger in our struggle against racism. We have the power to change this world if only we will lift our eyes, raise our voices and join with others in the struggle for justice.

Each morning, millions of school children across the country turn, look up at the American Flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, ending with these six words – “with liberty and justice for all.” These words are a promise, and it is up to us to fulfill that promise. We owe it to our children, whatever their race or ethnicity. We owe it to our own sense of integrity. We owe it to the God of love and justice. We owe it to the kinship of humanity. We owe the fulfillment of these sacred words. It is our duty – and in the spirit of love, of freedom and of justice, let us make it our destiny.