A sermon by Gary Bennett, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, May 23, 2004

Sermon:  The last acceptable predjudice

      A few years back the thesis was advanced by conservative Catholic writers, that beneath the sophisticated tolerance of America’s liberals, was one remaining “acceptable prejudice”: anti-Catholicism.  Why else would anyone support birth control or oppose aid to private schools?  More recently we are told that all critics of Israel’s policies are anti-Semites. No — you can criticize imperfect institutions without hating people.  Disturbing how many folks can’t tell the difference.

      Prejudice is more than disagreement on issues. It is a feeling that causes people to remember facts and news about some group selectively and negatively, to assume evil motives, to deny equal treatment, to hate people simply for existing and being different. As liberals, we take pride in not being prejudiced.  It is one of our best things.  So if I say there IS an acceptable prejudice, a true bigotry, you should challenge me, you should demand evidence.

      What is “liberal?” I like Jefferson’s dictum:  “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”  It is a principle that transcends particular issues and eras.  In the course of American history, Roger Williams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Dr. King have represented liberalism in their time. Political liberty and equality, choice in religious beliefs and lifestyle.  Science, reason and material progress that frees people to become more than drudges.  We balance environmentalism against economic growth, our traditional fear of government tyranny against an even older fear of the unchecked power of wealth.  Wars tend to divide liberals; we have always taken them on a case by case basis.

      Liberal prejudices are against three related groups: evangelicals, whom we do not give the respect of other religious groups; Southerners, whom we hold guilty of uniquely wicked views and behavior, as well as stupidity, evangelicalism and talking funny; Texans, we say, combine the wickedness and corn pone dialect of Southerners with diabolical evils all their own. Since evangelicals in our own back yard tend to be invisible to us, let's sum all of this up as a single bigotry, the prejudice of regionalism.

      A bit of personal history:  The Texas I grew up in was a border state: unlike the Deep South, which seemed trapped in a dreamy past and Segregation Forever, states like Florida, North Carolina and Texas wanted to be part of modern America.  Desegregation came shamefully late, yes, in the 1950s or even the ‘60s, but it came quietly.  A new study says the civil rights movement prevailed because it had the backing of churches and the other side did not. I believe this: in 1954, with Brown vs Topeka Board of Education, my father the Southern Baptist minister and every other preacher or lay leader I knew said: yes, we should obey because it is the law; but also  because it is right.  I was shocked when I first heard a Fundamentalist — someone who fuses evangelical religion with right-wing politics — speaking from a pulpit ten years later; 15 years after that, they used sophisticated political techniques to hijack the denomination.  At Rice University in Houston in 1961, my classmates voted by a wide margin for desegregation. Students from the Deep South were hassled to defend their folks back home, as images of violence, hatred, ignorance and demagoguery from Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma were brought into America’s living rooms.  Out of this came the Myth of Southern Exceptionalism: civil rights laws of the ‘60s assumed that racial problems were concentrated in a few states, and only Southerners needed to change their lives.  At Cornell I encountered a hopped-up form of the myth: even the least American from anywhere else was better than any Southerners, who were like “Good Germans” — citizens of the Third Reich that, because they could not stop Hitler, were as tainted with evil as the worst of Nazis. Since Cornellians did not differentiate between Deep South and Border States — except possibly one where their families wintered — I was no longer on the fun side of the Myth.  My fellow students had that smugness on civil rights issues that comes only to those have lived deeply segregated lives: most hailed from upper middle class suburban ghettos, and had enrolled in a university only slightly less segregated.  But in 1965 the University began to recruit minorities, and four years later the number of blacks on campus was still small but greatly increased.  1969 saw the culmination of years of rising racial tension: occupation of the Student Union building by an armed group of African American students, holding visiting parents hostage. They said they were retaliating against Klan type activity by white students.  Suddenly Cornell was, in the eyes of the nation, Alabama.  I guess it was there I first learned true irony.

      I  suggest that as a group, liberals are bigoted against Southerners, that this prejudice is morally wrong in itself, in that it blinds us to our own faults and as it is deadly dangerous to the survival of the liberal values we profess. Why is it wrong to be bigoted against bigots?  To begin with, it’s a rare group indeed that has never hated, never discriminated.  Liberal Labor leaders contributed much to civil rights, but were embarrassed by racial discrimination among their own membership. And African American men had a great deal of trouble dealing with women’s liberation issues a generation ago and with gay rights today.

       Secondly, all bigotry is interchangeable.  I get e-mailed anti-Southern jokes these days that are mostly recycled racial / ethnic jokes from the past.  Southerners are invariably yokels, hillbillies, rednecks, Good Ol’ Boys and Bubbas.  On the liberal internet today is a chart that lists purported average IQs by state, accompanied by vote from 2000 — to show that Democrats are smarter, don’t you see — and if one believes the chart, half of all Mississippians are mentally retarded.  Racial Darwinism revisited; territory haunted by the ghost of H.L. Mencken, dispenser of vitriol against Southerners, evangelicals, blacks and liberals, closet admirer of Hitler, who for some reason liberals persist in believing was one of us. 

      If we probe a little, we see that this regionalism is also the prejudice of class: the Northeast is much richer than any other region of the US.  Why? I mean, New York has all those corporate headquarters, and Washington — you can’t be steward of hundreds of billions a year in public money without a little of it sticking, well a lot actually.  But Philadelphia is a declining manufacturing city that can’t keep its own college graduates, ranking 57th of 69 large cities in percent of college educated over age 25; and Pennsylvania is 41st among states. But in the capitalist system, nothing makes money as fast as money.  Northeastern wealth is in large part hereditary, the legacy of a time a century ago when this was the economic heart of America. We are the rich kid on the block, while the South deals with inherited poverty and a century or more as resource colony; so we are allowed to sneer at their rags.  All the while, of course, we pretend it is the other way around, that we are champions of the little guy.

      Our bias is wrong because as Unitarians we do not believe in original sin; we cannot through prejudice hold an individual responsible for the crimes of others or of a group.  Prejudice is an offense against personhood — and it is so regardless of the group. This point I cannot argue with you; either you believe it or not.  But we profess to believe it.

      Prejudice against Southerners is wrong also because it blinds us to social injustice closer to home and to our own faults.  I've never encountered BuxMonters doing bigotry at the personal level — but it is a different story when we interpret the world.  Years ago a close friend led a meditation here.  He was troubled, he said, by America’s continuing racism, shown by a hate murder in Atlanta.  I suggested that we also remember another incident the same week, a hate-filled white lynch mob in the Queens section of New York that chased a young black man to his death in highway traffic; the more troubling, as it WAS a mob.  Hypocrisy?  Of course not: but his mind was not ready to handle the idea that racism could motivate a crime outside the South, so the data simply disappeared.

      For every type of barbarism found in the South, there are equivalent examples from the rest of the nation.   Police brutality against African Americans?  Bull Conner had nothing on Frank Rizzo’s Boys in Blue — and it was still his when MOVE headquarters was fire bombed in 1985 —  who routinely brutalized black suspects, according to one of our speakers. Remember the LA police “arrest” of  Rodney King, caught on tape?  This year a middle aged New York black businessman was killed by police as he reached for identification. Racial profiling is everywhere.

            Public accommodations?  John Hope Franklin, historian of the African American experience, recalls this from the ‘50s: on a trip from Madison, Wisconsin, to Ithaca, New York, where he was to teach, he and his family were rejected at every hotel and were the targets of racist comments. He then opted to take a longer route. "We went to Canada, and at the very first stop, the people welcomed us with open arms."  Trace the route on a map, if you like — it doesn’t go anywhere near South Carolina. Mob violence resisting school desegregation?  The worst case was in South Boston in the ‘70s.  Residential segregation?  When we moved to this area in 1973, fire bombings were routine, as blacks attempted to move into white neighborhoods.

      Do these facts change your mental map of America?  How about this? Pennsylvania ranks among the top three states in hate crimes each year, though only sixth in population. Nazi and Klan type organizations have had explosive growth in this state in the last decade or so.

      Here is the reality which regionalist prejudice hides: America — all of it —  has been and remains a deeply racist, strongly segregated society. Until the late ‘40s, popular culture was so filled with demeaning portrayals of blacks, browns, reds and yellows, that much cannot be repeated today.  De jure or de facto segregation was the rule almost everywhere. Professional, college and high school sports were mostly segregated, as were the Armed Forces.  In the Northeast, segregation was hard to overcome because there were few blacks outside major cities, while in them, residential patterns were heavily segregated. The South was a focus of the Movement because underlying residential patterns were less segregated — in small towns, black and white neighborhoods were often fairly close together — since segregation was by law or custom, it was easier to attack in the courts.

      Racial prejudice is at the heart of the new, virulent Radical Right, with Fundamentalist religion and untrammeled corporate greed.  Despite extreme views, it is competitive in every state and region of the US — locally, think of Senator Santorum.  Every part of the doctrine — attitudes toward poverty, welfare, unemployment, health insurance, minimum wage, abortion, sex education, birth control, drugs, crime, imprisonment, capital punishment, aid to cities and the efficacy of public schools comes from people’s stereotypical beliefs about races and racial behavior; and attitudes toward war are poisoned by Americans’ refusal to believe foreign lives have value.  The Southern Right is part of all this, but only part, and a part so far away from us that it should perhaps not be our primary concern.  George Wallace noted in 1981 that Ronald Reagan had just rerun HIS presidential campaign, but with a more acceptable accent.

      The longer run past?  Slavery was practiced in all regions of the US from the 17th century into the 19th; we know of a slave plantation in New York's Finger Lakes region as late as the 1820s.  New England had few slaves, not from moral revulsion, but because the long, harsh winters and glacially scoured topsoil made most agriculture unprofitable — the only farming was for subsistence .  Where New England did rake in the money — and lots of it, as Boston and other cities had become very rich by 1800 — was the slave trade.  As bad as slavery was, the trade in slaves was far worse.  This sordid  chapter of New England’s history was recently opened up for investigation by Brown’s new African American President: how much has the endowment wealth of the school come from slavery and the slave trade? and what should the school do about it now?

      Slavery finally did disappear outside the South even while gaining new life there; the moral indefensibility of what seemed economically essential deeply corrupted the Southern soul. Was anti-slavery feeling growing elsewhere merely a matter of virtue?  A cynic has suggested that the first New England Abolitionist appeared one day after the last New England slaver came home, stinking with profits.  Abolitionism added a new twist to the Anti-Slavery movement by insisting that slave owners  should not be compensated for emancipation, since they were all wicked men.  This increased levels of rage and violence all around — politics was giving way to war.  Since the planters were often on the opposite side of economic issues of concern to Northern money, it has been suggested that Abolitionists were more interested in destroying Southern planters as political rivals than in freedom and dignity for slaves.  An interesting anecdote comes from Philadelphia: in 1862, freed blacks were attempting to gain access to public transit — but each attempt to board a trolley was met by increasing white mob violence until the protesters gave up.  I’m not sure what young Philadelphians thought they were volunteering for in 1862, but it was not about the rights or dignity of African Americans.

      The third reason why prejudice against Southerners is wrong : it has twice killed eras of reform in America. Look at 250 years of the dance of regions of America.  In the 1760s the English colonists realized they had much to gain by working together; and the next 75 years or so were a high point of liberalism, with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights and the modern world’s first democracy. 

      By the 1840s this liberal consensus fell apart in an intense regionalism that produced the Civil War.  Ending slavery was clearly a triumph for liberalism, even if life for the freed slaves was little improved, and the 14th Amendment was the mother of all Civil Rights legislation; but once the South was no longer seen as essential for Republican power, this Amendment was used only to protect the civil rights of new artificial persons called corporations. The next generation was regressive and corrupt, what historians have called the Robber Baron Era. In the 1890s a new progressive alliance began to emerge along class lines rather than regional. At its high point, the New Deal attacked rural poverty, the collapse of manufacturing and ecological disaster simultaneously; and nobody questioned jump-starting the Southern economy as #1 priority and, we see in perspective, its greatest success. A heyday of liberal values, when America was again the world’s model of democracy.

      This coalition disintegrated between the end of World War II and the ‘70s.  The South left in ‘64 and never supported the national party again; in stripping Southern chairmen of power, Congressional liberals promised a new era of reform.  But aside from a bit of environmentalist legislation in the early ‘70s —  an area more important to middle and upper classes than to the poor — there have been no progressive breakthroughs since, and a lot of regressive ones.  Meanwhile the focus of liberals shifted from civil rights to economic preservation of the Industrial Northeast, or “Rust Belt.”  After 1945, the region was without competition in the world, as all its foreign rivals had been damaged by the war.  In this atmosphere of complacency, the steel and auto industries gave generous wage settlements to the unions they had fought so savagely as late as the ‘30s, then used those settlements as pretexts for even more generous price increases, always announced lock step by supposedly competing companies; and little or nothing was reinvested.  Detroit became notorious for churning out gas-guzzling clunkers: they were unsalable abroad and at home only from habit, aggressive life-style advertising and the promise that fuel would be forever cheap.  Then came the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973.

       The rest of the industrialized world considered this a wake up call, and transformed their economies to encourage conservation and alternative energy sources — today, they achieve a high standard of living from relatively few resources.  In the US, the Northeast, with liberals in tow, instead created a scapegoat villain.  The Arab sheiks were out of reach, as invading nations for their resources was still unthinkable; but Texans were close at hand, with two decades of skirmishes over economic policy; plus the ground was prepared by all those sly hints that it was really Texas oil millionaires who killed Kennedy.  Out was Rod Steiger as Mississippi small town bigot sheriff; in was Larry Hagman as oil tycoon Texas schemer.  In 1973, there were gas lines at every service station and price rises every month, and all was made the result of Texan perfidy, a plot to steal from the American consumer.  When Exxon’s profits went from 1 % to 2 %, the evening news announced that the company had increased profits by 100 %.  Local TV news stations here and elsewhere sent out reporters and mini-cam units to check out rumors of hidden oil in offshore tankers — none ever found of course.  In 1979 a second crisis was triggered by events in Iran.  Controls were gone from oil, so gasoline was available at high prices, but natural gas prices were still controlled.  Many businesses in the Northeast shut down several times that winter because of fuel shortages. For a 2-3 year period, businesses packed up by the thousands and workers by the hundreds of thousands and moved to the Sun Belt, and Texas in particular, where fuel was expensive but dependable.

      It was between 1979 and 1982 in particular that most of the present liberal image of Texas was finely polished.  Where the prejudices against the South came from the perceived weaknesses of that region, its continuing rural poverty and ignorance and lawlessness, the new prejudice arose not from the real and many faults of the state but from its strengths; the Rust Belt was hemorrhaging businesses and jobs, and Texas was reaping a lion’s share of them.  Union organizers went to Houston, the most attractive job market in the state, to recruit enough new members that businesses would think twice about leaving the Northeast. But prospective recruits figured out that the purpose was to destroy jobs, not increase pay, so the campaign was unsuccessful.  Publicizing the state’s skinflint welfare policies did little to deter people who were more interested in working than in being paid for not working. A new TV show called Dallas was introduced with all the stereotypes of wicked oil men, wicked Texans and even the City That Killed Kennedy, all rolled together; but ordinary Americans apparently liked JR, the man they were supposed to hate, as they had taken to heart another caricature, Archie Bunker, a decade before. These crude attempts at demonization have come back to haunt serious liberal dialogue; too many average Americans see attacks on Bush the Younger as being just so much more regionalist bigotry, and ignore it. It is a case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I guess. One particularly nasty bit was when Americans were told that practically every car in Texas sported a bumper sticker gloating about how Yankees should freeze in the dark. I happened to visit family in the state shortly after this "news" item, and was curious to see how widespread such stickers were.  Answer: none I ever saw. I shrugged it off as more BS, but the smear was insidious. In the ‘80s a school colleague and I had many stimulating discussions, in part because he was truly liberal, that is, well-read, thoughtful and motivated by compassion and a sense of social justice.  During one of those rare recessions that affected Texas more deeply than the nation at large, I reminded him that a lot of ordinary people in my state were suffering hardship.  He refused to believe it.  All Texans, he asserted with absolute conviction, were rich oil millionaires who had gloated when the Northeast was suffering; so this was a just payback. 

      The demonization of Texas is strange in a number of ways.  It may be a socially conservative and racist society, but it also has a rich history of supporting, and even helping lead, liberal administrations.  Colonel House helped draft Wilson’s Fourteen Points; Sam Rayburn’s parliamentary skills were invaluable from FDR to JFK; and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs are second only to the New Deal in this century for significant progressive reform.  Liberals in Texas usually lost statewide races, alas, often by close margins, but remained a loud and insistent force; even as Republicans have replaced Conservative Democrats in statewide offices — think Tom Ridge vs Bob Casey — it has maintained a balance of Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  State polls suggest public opinion on most major issues, including the War in Iraq, is very close to national polls.  Fellow Border State Florida has been at least as socially conservative and racist, and voted far more consistently Republican for President until the 1990’s — when the GOP’s penchant for going after Social Security and Medicare mobilized the old folks —  and it is solidly Republican in the House of Representatives — yet it is almost never bashed by the liberal press.  The difference in treatment seems to be that Florida has no oil worth stealing.

      Texas is a state of relatively empty, poverty-ridden peripheries, but with a central core of modern, high tech cities and many migrants from the US and abroad — the total population of the four largest metropolitan areas is greater than the entire state of Pennsylvania.  Those large cities in particular are increasingly like the cities in the rest of America .  I annoyed a fellow Unitarian at a conference recently: as we talked about Art Severance, former BuxMont minister, and presently minister at San Antonio First Church, he announced how oddly fascinating he found it that there could be any Unitarians in such ludicrously inappropriate places as Texas.  I mentioned that Texas has about as many UUs as Pennsylvania — feel free to confirm from the UU Directory on the web — and he in turn showed his Unitarian open-mindedness by refusing to answer or indeed to speak to me for the remainder of the evening.  And if one is seriously interested in rebuilding a progressive majority in America, consider this: even if Democrats cannot or will not do what is necessary to win back white Anglos, Texas is expected in a few years to become the second large state with a majority minority population — after this transformation in the 1980s California entered the Democratic column for President for only the second time since 1948.

      We are still dealing with the colossal wreckage of the decade of the 1970s.  After all the lies, half-truths and verbal abuse by people who called themselves liberals, Texas walked; it has not voted for a Democrat for President since — if not for this folly, it is possible that nobody in 2000 would have to give a hang about Florida’s chads.  Republicans, having betrayed the legacy of Lincoln and the party’s soul to gain the Deep South, were given Texas for free.  They ran with the gift, placing a Texan on their ticket in five of the next six Presidential races.  The state after 1979 moved right and left to some extent in sync with the nation, but no movement persuaded the state to vote Democrat again; and disgraceful campaigns like Al Gore’s never will.

       A second consequence of the 70s was that many tens of millions of ordinary Americans became convinced that the national media had a liberal bias — the concept of regionalism is a rather subtle one, requiring one to notice whose ox is being gored — and it was this conviction that ultimately left many of them suckers for lies, damned lies and Fox News.  Third and most catastrophic was that America’s path began to diverge sharply from other First World nations in planning for the future.  Having been convinced by liberals that unlimited cheap energy is an entitlement, and that anyone who says differently is trying to steal, the average American can no longer be persuaded to adopt measures to stave off the environmental crisis to come.  Even environmentalists must speak in code here, if they wish to be heard at all: they can talk of pollution or global warming or ugly landscapes or even snail darter extinction; but they cannot say what the rest of the world knows and fears, that our resource depleting civilization is careening toward catastrophe.

      Liberalism has become marginalized in the last generation because it no longer has a vision for the whole nation.  Consider how liberals must answer the following questions, given their own words and deeds:

      Do you believe in financial aid to corporations?  It depends on where they are located.

      Do you believe in federal aid to cities?  Yes, if they are Rust Belt cities.

      Do you believe in government sponsorship of expensive scientific research projects?  First tell me where the money will be spent.

      Do you believe we should crack down on corporate fraud and crime?  Yes, for corporations headquartered in Houston.

      Having periodically decried excessive military spending, would you support the Pentagon’s decision to close a shipbuilding facility?  Not if it is in Philadelphia.

      Do you believe in crackpot conspiracy theories of history?  Uh, where do the alleged masterminds hail from?

      Do you believe in protecting victims of Civil Rights crimes?  In the South; since only Southerners are racially prejudiced, Civil Rights violations cannot occur elsewhere.

      Are all Americans equal?  First check out their accents.

      By contrast, the Radical Right seems to present a coherent vision of America, given its twisted values and distorted facts.  Confronted with a choice between that and the usual Democratic platform, a pork-barrel full of promises to groups and regions, well . . . Something almost always beats Nothing.  That is what Liberal Regionalism is at heart —  a rather large Nothing.  

      Is there hope for our ideals?  Perhaps, but only if we change what we conceive liberalism to be.  There are no good or bad regions. Or cities, states or nations. Or even religions, in the usual sense. But there is a darkness in each of us that can be exploited by the unscrupulous, to turn us from those who should be our allies, or give us permission to do evil in the right cause.  Ideologies, institutions, groups of like-thinkers can be corrupted, tainting a whole era. These are the places we should concentrate our moral energies. For the most part, I think we in BuxMont do that, and one hopes most other liberals at least aspire to do so. I started by pointing out all the positives we have — commitment to civil rights, our open-mindedness toward most religious faiths, belief in gender equality, acceptance of diversity in sexuality and in other lifestyle differences. If I did not think we were capable of attacking this last prejudice, I would not be here now.

      But this much we still have to do:  poor, semi-literate farmers are people deserving our respect. Most evangelicals are decent and serious people, who a century ago helped turn America from the cynicism and corruption of the First Robber Baron Era — that decency could be enlisted again in a true progressive cause.  There is a common thread here: it is called respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person; it is called seeking to promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations. And when we are ready to accept these principles for all people, we may find a way to recover the true liberal heritage of America.