How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.
We value
learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday
night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,”
that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with
new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own
struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures
in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term
“racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and
minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around
the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.
This is not
a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white
Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school
education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That
with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have
different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I
remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color”
as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school
classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow
segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far
removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying
problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true
bigotry was on display.
When I
spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New
Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one
week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts
were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so
black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue
everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in
class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold
that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.
I take my
education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously
belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of
their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t
or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy;
whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of
skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time
wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically
poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran
denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest
intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college
admissions while wondering if it does any good.
Until I
became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years
ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a
preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my
bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in
every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female
body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to
lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by
white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak
counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every
day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every
way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men
and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate
in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It
became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I
stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the
pew.
It has
taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized
everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational
disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the
lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I
believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of
amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize
the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become
a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will
join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.
It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.
(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)
