August 4th, 2019
When I was nineteen or twenty my mother told me that she was married, and divorced, before she married my dad. This wasn’t, on its surface, particularly earth-shattering news- she married when she was very young, it only lasted a few years, they didn’t have any children, they weren’t in touch after the divorce was settled. But it rattled me that my mom had a hidden history. Without realizing it, until that point I mostly thought of her as a person who came into being when I was born, without her own backstory. But here was evidence that a decade before I came along she fell in love, got married, the marriage fell apart- what else was I missing? My perspective on my mom, this person who had always been a supporting character in the drama that starred me me me, widened.
It can be hard, even here in middle age, to remember that my personal history isn’t universal history. My mom’s life story includes parenting my brother and I, but also she did the mashed potato on a TV competition show featuring high school teenagers from across the US. She was married to a man I’ve never met, and they had a border collie. Throughout our childhood she read quality literature whenever my brother and I were around- Ulysses, Anna Karenina and Molly Ivins. But after we were in bed she read Louis Lamour westerns. From her example we were learning to read the Western cannon, but she wanted to read about shoot-outs between ranchers and farmers over the Utah territories. My mom is a well-rounded person, not just my mom. My version of her story isn’t the only version, and it’s certainly not the most complete version.
Our Unitarian Universalist history is much the same way. The story of our history, the one you hear most often, whether it’s true or not, is that we are a very white denomination and always have been. But like my mom’s own history, the truth is more varied and more interesting. And the whole truth, the more complex and often painful truth, will help us see what we need to do to be a more diverse denomination, and congregation, today.
Let’s go back to the founding of the US and the birth of Unitarianism and Universalism in this nation. You have probably heard that many of the leaders in the abolitionist movement were Unitarians and Universalists. This included lobbying politicians and rally congregants to march in protest, like we do today. But it also included people risking their lives to aid people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. Our forebearers hid people in their homes, they led them through the woods at night when the moon was just a sliver. They crossed state and even national borders with refugees from slavery hidden under piles of hay or bolts of cloth. This is true, and it is absolutely something we should be proud of. From our earliest, most formative years, our two root denominations engaged in social justice as a way of expressing their religious beliefs in a secular world.
Sadly many of our leaders, while aiding black people, still thought of them as less human than an Anglo-Saxon. The Rev. Mark Morrison Reed, a professor, minister, and historian, writes that both William Ellery Channing, Unitarianism’s first major leader in the US, and the famous Universalist minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker, were vehemently against slavery. Still, they thought that black people lacked sophistication and intellect. They thought Anglo Saxons were the best race, followed the other white-skinned groups like Irish. Then the slaves, then African-Americans. Channing and Parker were liberal for their time- Parker was famous for keeping a pistol in one hand while he wrote his sermon with the other, because pro-slavery white people were always trying to kill him. But they both still were white supremacist.
This is a trend throughout our history. Unitarians and Universalists weren’t as racist as many people in the US, but they were still racist. In 1911 Joseph Fletcher Jordan, a black academic, asked the Universalist national convention for $6000, to add a Universalist seminary to an African-American school he ran in Suffolk, Virginia. $6000 sounds like a tremendous amount of money for it being 1911, but those were fat years for Universalists, the denomination was thriving. Every year the Universalist convention sent at least $6000 to Japan, to spread Universalism there. But after going from one congregation to the next, Jordan as only able to raise $1500.00. Imagine, as Mark Morrison Reed encourages, if the Universalist seminary in Suffolk had been established. Black Universalist congregations would have spread across the south and the eastern seaboard. Perhaps every big southern city would have a historic UU congregation. But the denomination chose to send funds to Japan, where no significant Universalist stronghold was ever established, not one congregation.
This happens again and again throughout our history. Egbert Ethelred Brown founded a Unitarian congregation in Jamaica and then in Harlem, but the American Unitarian Association provided sporadic support before cutting them off completely. The same was true for congregations led by black ministers in Cincinnati, Chicago, and three cities in Virginia. The Unitarians were happy to provide ample financial support to white congregations in northeast college towns, but ignored black congregations.
Okay, but that was a long time ago, why does it matter now? It matters because when we don’t have a full understanding of our history we can’t see where we err, again and again. We curse our future by not honoring our past. The whole past, even the parts th. at we aren’t proud of.
I was recently accused on the internet of being a self-hating white person. Clearly by someone I haven’t met. They have no idea how healthy my self-esteem is. I don’t hate myself. But this friend-of-a-friend was reacting to a Facebook post of mine about white supremacy. He thinks it is ridiculous to spend time crying over some problem that I didn’t create. Why worry so much about racism when it doesn’t affect me? I wasn’t alive during slavery, I don’t have slaves, I’m not a former KKK member- why should I feel guilty? But really, he wondered, why should he? Shouldn’t he be exempt from having to hear about racism?
The problem is that we all grew up, every one of us, with this idea that racism was this horrible, unforgivable sin, and that it was committed by white men in white hoods burning crosses on people’s lawns. Robin Di’Angelo speaks eloquently about this in her book White Fragility- we learned about racism as this cardinal sin that manifested in hate crimes, in apartheid, in slavery. Racism was the great evil and we were encouraged to remain vigilant, lest we become infected. And yes, racism does manifest in the KKK burning crosses, in slavery, in apartheid. And it manifests in a billion small actions and inactions, like the city official who tried to save a few bucks by sending lead-dosed water to Flint, MI, which is predominantly black. It manifests in a huge outcry from everyday white people when a black woman is cast as Ariel in the upcoming re-make of The Little Mermaid- these people don’t think of themselves as racist, but they sure are made about a kid’s movie character having brown skin. Racism is embedded in our culture to the point where everyone is at least a little racist. I recall my brief jolt of surprise the first time I had a black doctor- was it racist of me to be surprised? Sure. But I am kinda racist, just like just about everybody else in this world.
We were taught that racism was this horrible, evil force, out there- but it is also the jolt of surprise at having a black doctor. It’s the everyday microaggressions, like hair products for black women being in the ethnic section instead of under hair care, which is products for white women. It is a white Seattle teacher reporting that she felt unsafe being with a black fifth grader- an adult afraid of a ten-year-old she is supposed to be teaching. Racism isn’t out there, it’s everywhere. And I acknowledge the racism around me not because I hate myself, because I don’t. I know I am a work in progress, I know that nearly everyone is racist and so that means me, too. I don’t hate myself, I just know I can do better. That we all can do better. But the first step is recognizing our own white supremacist thoughts, and our own white supremisist history.
Many of the founders of our faith were racist. All lived in a culture saturated with white supremacy. We don’t need to hate Unitarian Universalism for that, just like we don’t hate ourselves for our own racist thoughts. Shame is a lousy motivator. We acknowledge that we have work to do and figure out where to start. Our denomination has work to do, our congregation has work to do. Where shall we start?
One place is with the worship service itself. Despite the dramatic changes in theology in Unitarianism and Universalism, and even more dramatic cultural changes over the past 250 years, worship services have changed very little. Unitarian and Universalist worship services leaned toward the academic, the dry, the reason-based, 250 years ago, as now. The most recent study of UU worship preferences was back in 1989, which was along while back. But the results are fascinating. 74.5 percent of white congregants said intellectual stimulation was what they valued most in the Sunday morning experience. Black congregant’s valued first, celebrating common values, then hope, then vision, and then music. Intellectual stimulation, the first choice of white folks, didn’t crack the top five categories for African-Americans.
And maybe this shouldn’t be a big surprise- living in a racist world, where black lives don’t seem to matter to figures of authority, celebrating our common value of every person having worth and dignity may feel pretty revolutionary for a person of color. It might be the only place a black person gets that message. Mark Morrison-Reed writes “Here was cultural dissonance between a people who, having political rights, prized “intellectual freedom” in their struggle with orthodoxy–and those for whom the struggles for basic freedoms—political and spiritual freedom—were paramount.” Meaning, white people were already living in a world that, to some degree, embraced UU values like individual worth, democracy, justice, and interdependence. Perhaps white people didn’t need Sunday morning worship to fill them with hope, because they found it in other areas of life. The same for a bright vision of the future- perhaps the majority of white UUs were already anticipating a better world to come. So those weren’t what they needed from worship services. But black people, living under first Reagan and then Bush as president, during the drug wars when so many young black men were locked up, during the AIDS crisis that disproportionately impacted black women- maybe they weren’t looking for intellectual stimulation so much as a community where they could grieve and find hope, be reminded of common values and a brighter future.
We are living in a strange time. Climate change, political upheaval, the moral failure of institutions that held public trust. I think we all could use more hope, more music, more celebration of the values that more and more make us different from our world, which gets crueler and crueler. Now we need worship services that bring us hope and remind us of who we are. We are Unitarian Universalists. We fought for abolition, although we didn’t conquer our own racism. We did better in the 1960’s, in Selma and across the US. We are Unitarian Universalists and while our root denominations neglected black clergy and black congregations, today we are doing much better, providing scholarships to black student ministers, funding groups like BLUU. We, as a denomination, a congregation, and even as individuals, are works in progress. We have tried and failed to be our best selves, but we will not stop trying. We know our whole history, so we know how far we have come. Now, together, we can create a faith to carry us into the future.
