Over the years as I have reflected on the social injustices of racism and classism, there are several questions I keep coming back to and asking myself. Why do I, like many whites, often fear people of color in general but not as individuals? Why do I resist engaging with my own feelings around race issues? Why do poor and middle class white people not see that they have more in common with other poorer people than with rich elites.

I have searched for many years for answers to these questions and for a model of racial healing. I have found the models offered both on the left and right of the political and religious spectrum to be shallow and unsatisfying. I reject the orthodox view that I and society are inherently sinful and corrupt and only God can save us. I also reject the equally degrading idea that all white people are racists simply by virtue of being white. This is a Darwinian Calvinism dressed up in liberal guilt and political correctness and is equally offensive to my understanding of the inherent worth and dignity of all people.

In the last ten years our larger UU Association has been working on ways we can institutionally better address various social oppressions, particularly racism. The approach of anti-racism in particular points out that racism is a white problem and must be addressed by whites. This is in contrast to most previous approaches by whites which treated racism "their" problem and looked for ways for "them" to cope and assimilate. Anti-racism says, in effect, pull the plank from your own eye before pulling the splinter from your neighbor's eye.

It is important to deal with the institutional sources and causes of racism. This would seem like a natural and a no brainer that we as religious and social liberals would be eager to jump at these efforts. But the reality is that at this point I find an emotional gap of eagerness, energy and willingness to personally engage with these issues, myself and by most others I know, laity and clergy alike. It is like walking through quicksand. We rarely had this type of resistance in dealing with gender based issues. Why is this so now? I have usually found resistance like this to be rooted in some sort of fear, but fear of what?

The simplistic answer is that white people are hateful and/or they are greedy and fearful of losing their racially based perks. But this reduces people to one dimensional bigots or units of economic maximization. It offers no recognition of our humanity, of our souls, if you will.

Unitarian Universalist theologian, educator and author Thandeka recently published what I consider to be a major work in helping to understand white relationships to others and motivations for supporting racism that do not make people one dimensional or evil. Thandeka is a UU minister and Professor of Liberal Theology at my alma mater, our UU seminary Meadville/Lombard in Chicago. She received her name "Thandeka" which means "one who is loved by God" from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and she has also been an Emmy Award-winning television producer, journalist and talk show host. In her book Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America she offers what I find to be the most compelling understanding of why I and most whites have great difficulty in dealing with issues of race and racism. I encourage you, each of you to buy a copy, and I hope order a couple for our library. I hope have further discussions on her ideas and they will very likely be a major resource for our ongoing anti-racism efforts.

This is a complex book and its 135 pages of text are packed. There is no way I can do justice to all the nuances of everything that should be talked about. I will try to cover the major points in a way that will make sense in this format.

First, race is not a biological given but a social construct. Science shows no basis in fact for the structure or make up of racial groups as we know them. (p.125) Race classification systems, from a biological, taxinomical perspective are tautologies. They were/are created first, then the subjects placed in them. They must be used in and of themselves to define themselves, a scientific and logical fallacy.

Racial categories are not socially fixed. Some people can move back and forth from one to another, often against their will. People can pass from one to another and one can be ostracized from one's racial group. It is a social construct and membership is socially determined.

The construct of a white race did not exist as such until the seventeenth century in America with the creation of race laws which created social differences between indentured or poor Euro-Americans and enslaved Africans. In colonial Virginia and other colonies from one half to two thirds of European immigrants arrived in chains. They were property, and were called "slaves" in the law and common use. Up to eighty percent of them died in the first twelve months. (pp. 130-2)

As an economic issue it became expedient to find ways to separate, and pit European and African servants against each other and thereby better control these two groups. Until then European and African servants were seen and treated alike and saw themselves in common cause, rebelling together and often intermarrying.

European servants and free poor were given marginally less oppression and more privileges by taking away previous freedoms and privileges of Africans and increasing their oppression. The European-Americans became white and they were encouraged to think of themselves as superior to Africans, with their interests and aspirations were tied to those of the European elites not the Africans. The treatment, living and working conditions of poor whites was usually no better, and was often worse, than African slaves, but they could at least say at the end of the day, that they weren't black.

A racial identity is not something people are born knowing. We are taught and inculturated what it means to be white, and what it means not to be white. Like the man Dan in the reading earlier, (pp.1, 8-9), those of us who identify as white or Caucasian have all been given lessons, implicit and explicit about the consequences of not conforming and not denying our human impulses to community with others who are considered white.

Thandeka offers numerous case studies with the stories of European Americans who were often painfully made aware that noncompliance with racial separation and oppression could cost them the love and even the protection of families, caregivers and communities of origin. The threat was and is real. You could and can be made un-white. Being white was synonymous with being an American, a citizen. Women who married non-white aliens were automatically stripped of their citizenship. Only whites were allowed to be citizens, even in the North. Until 1965, non-European immigrants were not allowed to become U.S. citizens. Whiteness was a legal status, not a congenital condition.

The price for this racial indoctrination and identity is a loss of a sense of wholeness in a context of feeling at risk of being ostracized by those who are supposed to care for us most. This process creates unresolved conflicts within us between our humane impulses and the consequences we perceive for not doing as we are expected. This internal conflict is a self critical emotion which Thandeka calls "white shame."

She tells of coming to write her book through a process of trying to help inquisitive Euro-Americans know what it was like to have an ongoing race identity. She invented what she called the Race Game in which Euro-Americans were asked to use the modifier "white" when ever they referred to some one who was Euro-American.

Right now, if you are Euro-American or Caucasian or not, I want you to turn to a person near you and say something about someone you know, using the modifier "my white" what ever to describe them. (Pause) For many of you this felt weird, or strange or uncomfortable, even embarrassing. We are just not used to thinking of our selves as a racial identity.

Thandeka recalled that most people in her speaking audiences either refused to play or found they could not play her race game for any length of time at all. They usually talked about a lack of courage or of how painful it was to even think about doing it. This was her first clue that something was happening that did not fit traditional motives for racially based actions. What took courage to say, "white" as a racial identifier?

Part of this is that as whites we have been trained to reserve racial modifiers for those who are not white. It is assumed that not using a modifier means the person is white, one of us. To speak otherwise, is to break an unspoken but fully present assumption of racial exclusivity. By explicitly talking about being white one risks exposing a hidden truth, neither the white speaker or listener feels white enough. (p. 16)

For Thandeka, "white shame is this deeply private feeling of not being at home within one's own white community. (p. 13) Shame is and emotional display of a hidden civil war. It is a pitched battle by a self against itself in order to stop feeling what it is not supposed to feel: forbidden desires and prohibited feelings that render one different.(p. 12) She feels that "the Euro-American child,... is a racial victim of its own white community of parents, caretakers, and peers, who attack it because it does not yet have a white racial identity. Rather than continue to suffer such attacks, the Euro-American child defends itself by creating a white racial identity for itself. It begins to think and act like its community's ideal of a white self. When the adult recalls the feelings and ideas it had to set aside in order to mound this defense, it feels shame. More precisely, white shame. ... The parts of (the child) that were not white had to be set aside as unloved and therefore unlovable. (p. 13) Shame is the death of an unloved part of the self because it, apparently, is just not good enough to be loved. (p.17)

At this point it is important to differentiate between shame and guilt. Guilt is feeling bad about something we have done and can be dealt with via penance or making recompense. Shame is feeling bad for who are and is dealt with by self acceptance and being surrounded by those who accept us for who we are unconditionally.

For Thandeka, and I agree, this experience of white shame, is the missing piece of why Euro-Americans, whites are so resistant to addressing issues of race and racism. It is not prejudice or being racists, it is in fact the failure to meet white racial expectations, that they feel shamefully inadequate.

An even deeper layering of white shame is a what she calls white ethnic shame. This is usually felt by those who are immigrants or the near descendants of immigrants trying to pass as "white." She writes that "White ethnic shame is the self's disparagement of its own nonwhite ethnic zone of experience as distinct from the WASP ideal. (p. 35)

Why does it take an African American scholar and others to remind us of this dynamic? Legal scholar Barbara J. Flagg calls (the) "tendency for whiteness to vanish from whites' self-perception the transparency phenomenon" and argues that this "transparency" is "the defining characteristic of whiteness." Whiteness, Flagg insists, "is always a salient personal characteristic (for whites), but once identified, it fades almost instantaneously from white consciousness into transparency.

Thandeka argues that the process of becoming white is so quickly relegated to, ..."the realm of the subconscious," because the process that creates this racial identity entails attacks upon one's core sense of self by those who ostensibly love it the most: its caretakers, legal defenders, and protectors. Such an awareness is too much for most persons to retain in conscious memory. (p.86)

This unconscious quality is very important. Recent studies on race and politics show that there is a deep racial resentment by whites toward black Americans which is "based not on objective fact but on subjective fear. Additionally, this resentment is the "most potent force in white public opinion on race today." (p.90) Further more "(w)hites vote their perceived race interest rather than for the immediate economic and social well being of themselves and their own families." (p.91) A consequence of this is a continuation of the colonial era identification of white working class interests as being the same as those of the wealthy.

The massive non-inflationary boom we constantly hear about and the increase in profits is possible only because real wages have been and are static or in decline since the 1970's. We have to worker harder and longer on average for the same buying power. Middle income jobs paying $ 50,000.oo a year or more now have twice the share of job-loss than in the 1980's. More and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people as a proportion of the population. One third of Americans are doing really well, one third is just hanging on and one third is in an economic decline, falling out of the category of making it. The resulting anxiety is particularly acute in high end blue collar and low to middle-end workers who have acquired the trappings of middle class success with the necessary financial security to hold it. (p.97)

For whites this failure to achieve the upper middle class WASP ideal, which in reality is achieved by only 15 % of the population, is one more source of shame and frustration. At a time when whites are slipping more financially they are doing more status shopping and debt spending than any other group no matter how it is measured. Middle class whites are basically consuming themselves out of existence. Instead of addressing the real social and economic issues that threaten most of our society in the long term, we are desperately trying to measure up to an almost impossible standard of what it means to be white and American. Thandeka concludes that the only dynamic that can coherently explain this mad dash to the bottom by the white middle class poor and the resulting fear and rage is white shame. (p.101) Yet, while she is a good diagnostician, she offers little in the way of prescription to address these issues.

So what do we do with all of this and so much that was not even mentioned? Within our current social construct we as Euro-Americans have a color or racial identity. We carry it like a razor in our pocket, ready to cut us lest we forget it. We are white and it is an identity which has been forced upon us, just as other racial identities have been forced on other people. Race is a relatively recent human social construct and we can socially deconstruct it or reconstruct it as we see fit. Thus we do have power over our reality. Things have not always been this way nor is it foreordained by God or biology.

I urgently recommend resisting the consumer culture which continues to tell us we are not enough. It is a lie and resistance is not futile. We, you and I have always been enough and we do not have to destroy ourselves, each other or the world in order to prove we have a right to exist. We already do exist and we are powerful, precious and holy.

Whites, like most people, fear not the loss of privilege so much as fearing rejection and the withdrawal of love. That they will have to admit that they have hurt or participated in a system that has hurt other people. It is a fear of the inhumanity we have suffered and may have inflicted on others in our willful ignorance, in order to survive. We are afraid that if we acknowledge our feelings we will be abandoned and our hearts will break.

Finally, we all need to explore our own stories and talk to each other white to white to black, brown, yellow and to everyone with whom we share this most amazing life. By breaking the chains of our shame and isolation we maybe able to forge the bonds of community, with the world made fair and all her people, one.
 
 

Closing words (Adapted from) "Epilogue,"

Learning to be White, Thandeka, p. 135

The end of this service is a beginning, a place where new conversations about money, race and religion can commence. With this new beginning, loyalties need no longer be skin-deep. Here our broken humanity can be healed. Difference will be affirmed as the grace of human engagement. The term person of color will now refer to every human being.

Dare we dream of such a day? I say, "yes!"

Let the congregation say, "Amen!"

Benediction (Adapted from SLT 711, Numbers 6)

May the Eternal bless you and protect you!

May the Eternal smile upon you and favor you!

May the Eternal befriend you and prosper you and

bring you peace!

Amen and blessed be.

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