Rev. Barbara H. Gadon

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

February 12, 2012

Reading from In Between: Memoirs of an Integration Baby by Mark Morrison-Reed

Mark Morrison-Reed is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister, African-American, and married to a white UU minister, Donna-Morrison Reed. He is the father of two bi-racial children. His book describes, in part, the story of our congregation, the church home for his family when his father was a scientist at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cultural amalgamation – the melding of cultures and races through conquest and slavery, migration and miscegenation – is older than Moses' marriage to a Cushite bride. It's in our blood. During the 50s and 60s, this process emerged as an unusually self-conscious effort to transform society. This era of racial integration, from the time Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 until King's assassination 21 years later, bracketed the formative years of my life. [My personal experience has led me to believe that] integration is inevitable. There is no other way. Never was and never will be.

This story, however, is not just about America's emerging multiracial identity, played out in our lives and those of our ancestors. It also about self-integration and as such subsumes and transcends what we call race. By self-integration I mean the embracing of one's heritage and ancestors, accepting their struggles as one's own without romanticizing them or claiming the good parts while sloughing off the embarrassments. All their stories are mine and mine theirs – a seamless continuation. And because that is so, my choices were never mine alone. They were framed by my ancestors' lives – an extension of their passions, values, and failings. I am their manifestation in the present and trajectory into the future.

There is no turning back from integration, for it pervades our history, courses through our veins, and is embodied in our culture. Moreover, America's interracial drama is no longer enacted primarily between Afro- and Euro-Americans. Native Americans remind us that it never was, and given America's evolving racial demographic, the black/white divide is becoming increasingly irrelevant as the beige-ing of America accelerates. This blending, as the descendents of the oppressor and the oppressed become one and the same, blurs the color line. New immigrants, with no connection to slavery or Jim Crow, do not even experience it as their past; therefore, the future must head in a different direction. A generation or two from now, Euro-Americans will be stripped of their majority status as interracial marriages increase and the size and influence of the Latino and Asian communities continues to expand. This transformation should not surprise us, for integration has been going on for 400 years, and the cultural amalgam that is America has proven anything but static. Today it presses forward, as it always has, in unforeseeable directions, uniting and combining and making use of every people and culture available to it. The question we, as a nation, must face is whether to resist or celebrate the inevitable.

Sermon

Louis Gates, Jr. begins his memoir, Colored People, with a letter to his two biracial daughters. He acknowledges things he has done and said that baffle and embarrass them. Part of the reason for this, besides the fact that most fathers baffle and embarrass their children on a regular basis, is that the world today is different from the one he grew up in. Particularly when it comes to race. He writes:

Dear Maggie & Liza:

I have written to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about, and I pointed to a motel on Route 2 and said that at one time I could not have stayed there. Your mother could have stayed there, but your mother couldn't have stayed there with me. And you kids looked at us like we were telling you the biggest lie you had ever heard. So I thought about writing to you.

As artlessly and honestly as I can, I have tried to evoke [in this memoir] a colored world of the fifties, a Negro world of the early sixties, and the advent of a black world of the later sixties, from the point of view of the boy I was. When you are old enough to read what follows, I hope that it brings you even a small measure of understanding, at long last, of why we see the world with such different eyes...and why that is for me a source of both gladness and of regret.

I love the tenderness of these words. I feel my own measure of both gladness and regret to see the world with such different eyes from my brothers and sisters of color. For different reasons. Gladness that we are different, that there is a variety of cultures, perspectives and flavors that contribute to our gladness for life, to our understanding of the world. Gladness that when we talk, we discover things that we love in common. And regret for how hard it is for us to talk, to have any serious connection across the line of race. Regret that race – and by race I mean culture, the cultures that spring up around the artificial distinctions we have made historically – that race still is, in fact, a line. Regret that the line between us allows a white majority culture to simply not know about, not concern itself with, the dying of black and Latino children in poor neighborhoods, whether it be quickly by violence, or slowly, by poor education, few opportunities, and despair. It allows us, however passively, to decide that they are not everyone's children, that this is not everyone's sorrow. The line between us might allow me not to know that my friend Deborah Chin was harassed all throughout high school, sometimes violently, for being Chinese. It allows me to feel shocked that Jennifer Phillips, a sharp, hilariously funny and effervescent woman from my Wilmington congregation – who wouldn't love Jenn? - was treated with such complete and utter rejection by blacks and whites growing up, for being the daughter of a black mother and a white father. That to this day, people are constantly scrutinizing her, feeling compelled to guess: Middle Eastern? Latina? What are you? And the line between us allows me not to know worlds and worlds of information about life for someone who is Middle Eastern or Latino in their origins.

Cornel West, in a lecture I heard at the University of Chicago many years ago, put it quite simply. He said what he would like most is for more people to turn to our neighbor and say, "How is it for you?" How is it for you? And to listen, even if it's something you would rather not hear. To count yourself blessed if you hear it.

There are many barriers in place for this to happen. We live in such a segregated world. To be a newcomer in Chicago is to note the co-existence of very different worlds, within the same city, within the same neighborhood, even the multi-racial oasis of Hyde Park. Compare the world within Harold's Chicken Shack with the world inside the Sit Down Café. There is some overlap, but different worlds. Most of Robert's and my neighbors on 50th Street are African American. As are the members of our YMCA on 63rd Street. It's just 10 minutes from our apartment, and 5 minutes from the church, and it has everything I love about the Y. There would be only one reason NOT to join, and that reason simply is not good enough. But apparently it's a good enough reason for many other whites not to join – as well as Latinos and Asians – because we don't see many of them there.

We live in such separate worlds. And it's also true, as Mark Morrison-Reed said, we are an increasingly multi-racial society. The question is, will we resist it or celebrate it? So far, the resistance is still great.

Which makes me marvel at the places where we do mix. There are stores and restaurants with a thriving multi-racial mix. Kids who grow up in Hyde Park attend diverse schools. And if you belong to a Unitarian Universalist church here, you belong to one of the very few racially diverse churches in our movement. So it is no wonder that your mission statement puts this front and center, immediately after the words "We are". "We are a diverse community, joyously united..." Now in my brief tenure as your interim minister, I've started to pester you a little about this. It's my job. Your diversity is an amazing gift. What are you doing with that gift? One of you took me aside recently and said, Why do we have to do something with it? Can't we just enjoy it? Of course, you can. I enjoy it, too. And enjoying something is not the same as fulfilling a mission, and you are here to fulfill a mission. If diversity is part of your mission, you are committing yourselves to doing something with it. To be a "diverse community, joyously united" is to be something that the world is not. Not yet. And, my dear brothers and sisters, it is to be something that you are not yet. You've come incredibly far, farther than most. And you are not - yet - a "diverse congregation, joyously united". And that's fine, actually. It is your mission, it is your work to get there.

At my ministers' retreat this fall, I heard the odyssey of Rev. Sydney Morris, who grew up as a child of this church in the 1950s. She marveled at her experience here, where grown-ups discussed race at coffee hour. I asked her later, "Really? They talked about race at coffee hour? In the '50s?" She smiled a little sheepishly, and said, "Well, sort of. I didn't say it was a deep conversation. It was mostly like, 'Isn't it wonderful that we have negro and white members in our church?' 'Yes, it is wonderful.'" That was pretty good for the 1950s. That was an astonishing conversation for the 1950s.

And I am suggesting to you, dear ones, that this is the conversation we are still having. And we can do so much more. You have the opportunity here - mixing it up in the choir, cleaning up the basement together, discussing Charles Darwin in the humanist group. You come together more intimately than just inhabiting the same building. You have opportunities most church communities don't. How simple it would seem, to turn to our neighbor and say, "How is it for you?" Simple, and still amazingly hard.

What gets in the way? Well, there are ways that people here are like the world. Like Dr. Gates and his daughters, we see the world with different eyes, especially when it comes to race. At the millennium, the New York Times did a series of stories about how race is lived in America. Reporters were sent to observe people who were relating to one another across race. They went to high schools where kids still sat by race, for the most part, in the cafeteria. They went to work places, with employees of different backgrounds. And when asking questions, and observing interactions regarding race, they said that most white people were far more reluctant to talk than were the people of color. Both blacks and whites were weary of the conversation, but for different reasons. Whites were tired of hearing about racism as a problem, and thought we should just "put it all behind us" and "give it a rest". The blacks (which most of the people of color they interviewed were) were weary of having to assert – and in some cases, prove - that there was still a problem.

There is a photograph that became famous last month, of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer poking her finger in the face of President Obama. A friend of mine reposted on Facebook an article by Dr. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, prolific author, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Jeffers calls the photo a "teachable racial moment". She deconstructs the photograph, describing its cultural meanings within the black community. She writes:

Because the finger point gesture establishes superiority, the gesture is even worse if a White person does it to a Black person, due to the history in this country of White supremacist violence and cultural demeaning of Black folks.

Nice Non-Racist White folks, this may seem silly to y'all. And I get that. Right now, you may be saying, "Dang, Black folks got too many rules! It's so hard to keep up with y'all!" That's true. I won't deny it. So many rules, even I have a hard time keeping up."

For the whites, she compared it to anything we as individuals want and need to be happy, even if others don't understand it, let alone share it. And it is an act of friendship and love to respect it, regardless. You don't have to agree with a person's experience of racism. That's beside the point. But you need to be open to it, and to respect its reality for them.

Some commenters still insisted that there was nothing racial meant by the gesture. Some said that the people who insisted that this be "about race" were the real clueless (and racist) ones.

This very thing, for most white people, is the biggest thing we do that gets in the way of the conversation. We don't get how something is racist, either by logic or by having a similar enough experience, and we insist that it somehow be proven to us. Why would a person of color even bother? Why would someone talk about such as source of pain in their lives, if chances were good that they would get this kind of reaction?

I remember a long time ago, when I was a student and a member of this church, I asked an older black gentleman, someone I was getting to know quite well, if he ever talked here about the effects of racism in his life. No, he said. It's too painful.

It's painful on both sides, I know now. How hard it is to know that the person you are sitting next to risks experiencing hurt and humiliation on a daily basis. I am having coffee with a woman once, at the same time I am reading about Jim Crow in the Deep South. In our conversation, she tells me she is from a state in the Deep South. I know her approximate age - well past 80. And I connect what I have been reading with the person I am talking to, and it leaves me breathless for a moment. I'm forced to know something I have been protected from knowing. Growing up in Minnesota, we put it all in "The South" and all those terribly prejudiced people down there that had nothing to do with us. As I read about what black migrants to the North experienced here, too, I felt an odd sensation of being exposed, of being trapped. There's no safe place, no good place, no way to claim some kind of territory apart from the whole thing. Some place where I'm not implicated. My people have contributed to this. I sense somehow that it would be rude to tell her how much my heart breaks in that moment. It is a far more personal conversation than I can have with someone I am just getting to know.

There are, of course, disagreements among people of color as to how to talk about race, and there are plenty of people who just don't want to. In this church, there are disagreements about how to come together. Is it ever okay to gather by racial category and share experiences? How does it feel to a white member to have a group created for all African Americans that they are not allowed to join? How does it feel for African Americans to have people upset that they want to gather? It becomes a polarity, and it gets us stuck, just as the fear of talking about the pain gets us stuck.

There are two sources of hope that I see in this church, and they are powerful. One is your long-standing friendships with one another across race. You visit each other's homes, go out to restaurants together, visit one another in hospitals. And perhaps most importantly, you share a common Unitarian Universalist faith and liberal religious worldview. You have a lot invested in each other. In most settings we don't have enough of a common investment to think that if there is a conflict, there can be any redemption, any working it through. But you do, here. If you are willing to engage. If you are willing to take the trust you've already built and build upon it.

And the second source of hope I see is the multitude of perspectives here now that weren't here before. Much of our hope comes from our young people. Younger people have much different experiences around race than their elders, even though racism is a part of their lives too. They expect diversity, and most have more friendships across race. There are more biracial marriages and more biracial and multi-racial people here, who offer their perspective. There are a lot of parents who adopt children of a different race from their own. There are Latino people coming here, and Asian people. "How is it for you?" we might ask one another. And hear different things than we have heard before.

Why do we need to talk about race? Because it still divides most of the world. Because to some extent, it divides us here. Because, as one NYT reporter wrote, to "give race a rest" is to give up on each other. Because if we don't, we don't really know each other. We remain ignorant, isolated, indifferent to one another. And in this church, it's because you have a gift and a mission as a diverse congregation, to heal the world. Now how are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? I believe the answer is here already, if you are willing to look and to hear. Amen.