The sermon was preceeded with a reading of:
In the Twilight Zone All I
Know Is the Commercials
with the assistance of:
Rosalie A. Clavez
My mother taught me accountability with two lessons and I responded to both with fear and embarrassment. The first lesson occurred in a large shopping mart – a K-mart maybe. We had checked out and were engaged in conversation. I was about 9. My mother led us to a door and as we pushed on it to exit an alarm blared. It was an emergency exit – she hadn't noticed. I wanted to run straight out that door – my face flushed and my skin puckered with a nervous sweat. My mother instead – started jumping up and waving her arms! "It's not an emergency," she said "I made a mistake, it was me – I opened the wrong door ... don't worry."
"Mom! What are you doing ... let's go!" But she persisted, till the alarm stopped and it seemed like everyone in the store was looking right at us ... my mom laughed and shared loudly once more, now in a goofy voice "only me ... sorry!" ...and only then did we leave.
The second lesson occurred many years later – I was looking at a college in Nashville Tennessee. My parents and I took the evening off from the college hunt to hear a band down at a city park. We were packed in with a crowd, milling outside a tall chain link fence. Someone from one side of the fence stuffed a small package through a link. Then a couple of bills were returned. Many of us watched with a sort of morbid curiosity. My mother shouted – "Drugs! What are you doing with drugs here! There are children around. Police – are there any police?"
This time when I wanted to hide, my fear was more potent than my embarrassment. Should we duck? Where will the shots come from? I remember whispering to my Mom – "What are you crazy! You could get us all killed!" She stared at me ဣ quite angrily and responded ဣ "If I... if we don't do something, who will!" Mom, if you are listening to this right now, please know, I am finally there, at a place where I can understand, and I pray I will have the courage to do what I must ... because you are right, if I don't, if we don't, who will.
Accountability, accountability is a way of relating to our world. Being accountable often means standing up, in spite of fear or embarrassment for a cause that demands your attention. But accountability is more than responsibility – more than a grudging acceptance of the hard work you think you must do to be good. Accountability is about relationship – it is about love ... and it can be difficult for Unitarian Universalists; because accountability often begins with confession – with admitting that no matter how hard we try, we too have stumbled, have erred, have remained silent when love begged us to speak.
John Beurens, minister of All Souls in New York City and co-author of the popular UU book "A Chosen Faith" asserts – "It is hard for someone in a religious movement that prides itself on being non-confessional to confess, even to oneself, one's failings." Beurens then goes on to confess how he, in the face of police discrimination against people of color in the white enclaves of Dallas, was silent. "If my spirituality has grown over the years," he says, "I hope it is in this area of accountability."
I stand with Beurens and remember when I was silent as well.
I was in junior high. I remember a dark hallway and that sense of uneasiness that I felt every day in those long halls. And I remember a woman's face – a young woman I had seen a few times before walking toward me. She was African American, one of two, maybe three African American students in our small once rural Connecticut town. Then I heard someone shout horrible, unspeakable slurs at her. I heard them and I watched her face shutter and her pace quicken, and I felt my idealism crumble – everything I had believed the world was made of shook – but I was silent. I kept walking, and a knot grew in my stomach and my lungs and my heart and my mouth.
I was silent then. I know I cannot be silent anymore, and I promised as much in an anti-racism multiculturalism class I took for new Unitarian Universalist ministers. The final exercise was to come forward and share who or what we were willing to be accountable to. I shared that I would be accountable to "the other" to any one that I or that our society ever dared deem "other" – "other than white, other than affluent, other than powerful, other than human, other than deserving my witness, "other."
My promise didn't fix anything, but it was a new beginning. The work must continue. A small group from our congregation meets here once every two weeks for an adult education class called "Soul Work." In that class we confront racism – and we confront our own fears ... Soul Work is not easy work, but it is necessary.
Buddhist theology explains why. There is a Buddhist doctrine known as the interdependent chain of causation or the endless knot. Similar to our affirmation of the interdependent web of life, this theological doctrine declares that no event, no encounter, no circumstance or occasion can be disconnected from the great chain of causes that have led up to the present moment, nor all those that will come after.
According to this doctrine, my silence, in that junior high hallway, in the face of overt racism, was racism itself, because I refused to break the chain of causation – the chain that perpetuates the evil of racism. By remaining silent I participated. By remaining silent I refused to accept my relationship to that girl, to "the other", I denied my accountability in the chain of causation.
But when we are willing to be accountable we see how necessary it is that we do speak up, stand up, and break the chain that perpetuates racism.
This congregation has a history of reaching out in love and building relationships of accountability – we did so with our Muslim brothers and sisters at the ADAMS center when society deemed them "other" in the wake of 9-11; we did so with our Gay, Lesbian and Transgender brothers and sisters when we became a welcoming congregation and when we stood proudly on February 14th on the side of love; and we did so with our Spanish speaking brothers and sisters when we led English as a Second Language classes and reached out in solidarity with our tenant congregation. We are willing to be accountable. Sometimes what we need to do is obvious, sometimes the wrongs we must confront are insidiously subtle.
Tim Wise writes in his recent book, "Between Barack and a Hard Place" about what he calls Racism 2.0 – the subtle, insidious form:
Racism is not partisan but it is often employed in the political arena. When Newsweek can put a picture of Sarah Palin on its cover holding a rifle, as it did in its September 15th, 2008 edition, and millions of white folks can find that image reassuring, we know whiteness (racism) is being played to, and deployed, quite effectively. After all, were Michelle Obama to be pictured with a gun, any gun, it is doubtful that white readers would {see the image as} little more than a patriotic hat-tip to the Second Amendment. Black people with guns scare most white folks. White people with guns (on the other hand) are the first line of defense against the dangerous "other." (1)
You might recall seeing the picture of Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek. Now picture Michelle Obama with the same rifle. We do not live in a color-blind world. How can we be accountable, how can we as Unitarian Universalists break the chain of racist causation?
It is important that we ask why the political assertion "Vote for these folks ... because they are like you," was so compelling. What does that mean ... does it hide a subtle undercurrent – "If they are like you, if they are white – they are American. They are safe."
Again, racism is not partisan, it is more insidious than that. You might recall how the southern democrats raised the greatest opposition to integration. Racism is not partisan. Claiming that it is, is just another way to shirk accountability, to say it is someone else's struggle, not mine. But racism is American, and we are American. These are our struggles.
But saying that – that we are accountable, is not the same as saying that we are horrible, that we are lost, that we are the cause of all the world's and this country's malice. Accountability is not another form of self-hatred or a means to guilt.
Rather saying that we are accountable is admitting that the struggles of our brothers and sisters are bound up in our own – that we are all, somehow, in some astounding web of interconnection and chain of causation, bound up in this together – that our salvation, our liberation, our freedom, our peace, is bound up with the salvation, liberation, freedom, and peace of all our brothers and sisters. Accepting accountability is accepting... not guilt, but the beautiful burden of our wholeness. Guilt leads to angry denial and in-action, it enforces the walls that separate us and them. The call to seek wholeness on the other hand, (the call to understand our connections, our unity) has room for acknowledging feelings of guilt (and anger, and fear, and frustration,) room for accepting appropriate responsibility and plenty of room for moving toward personal and communal transformation. The beautiful burden of wholeness is a shared burden – it is both the chance to see that we are in this together – and what a gift that is, but also, that we are in this together – and what a challenge that is – a challenge to witness all the forces and powers, the systems and institutions that move among us and perpetuate the fallacy of "otherness," and perpetuate racism.
We saw some of these forces and systems unfold in Post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans... We watched as 7,000 residents, mostly white were rescued from St. Bernard's Parish, while nearly 30,000 or more African Americans languished in the unsanitary conditions and heat of the convention center and superdome. We listened as the media reported on the mass violence – including rapes, murders and molestations in the refugee centers. We listened, and many believed – many whites and many African Americans believed these reports to be true – reports that were soon proved false – reports that began as rumors. What does our willingness to believe say about race and racial inequality in America?
Imagine that the hurricane had struck Nantucket. What if someone started a rumor that whites were raping and killing people in the basement of the local Nantucket Episcopal Church. Would the media report such a charge? If they did, would we doubt or believe its accuracy? In calling ourselves to account we are saying that we will listen deeply to the rumors and reports – listening to hear if they carry the subtle strains of racism.
Our country has made great strides, but we are not whole yet. We need to keep listening to our brokenness ... listening for our brokenness. Here is what Patricia Thompson, a flood survivor and longtime New Orleans resident who lived near the convention center after Katrina has to share:
At this point these cops, whoever they were, they came up the street, they got these guns with the lights on them, and they were pointing them at people saying "Sit your so-and-so down before I blow your so-and-so head off, you black so-and-so." I mean, God, at that point, it really felt like I was in the twilight Zone. They're treating us like criminals. But everybody had to adhere to what they said, so once they passed me, I pretty much stayed low, in just about a crawling position, trying to get across to the other street to get to the Convention Center to use the restroom.
What I seen when I came out I will remember for the rest of my life... At this time, I'm crouched trying to get back into the parking lot... Everybody is sitting on the ground with their hands in the air. I look at my 5-year-old granddaughter, Baili McPherson, and the light from one of the guns was actually on her forehead.
Baili is sitting with her hands in the air. And she's past afraid, she's terrified. And she's asking her mama, Gaynell, "Am I doing it right?" because even babies know police kill in New Orleans. So she's asking her mama, "Mama, am I doing it right, am I doing it right?" (2)
Recent news reports about how unarmed African American citizens were murdered in New Orleans stand side by side with Patricia's report and clarify Baili's fear. Indeed whites, both police and citizens perpetuated the most horrendous acts of violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Why did all the rumors allege a different reality?
It is this discrepancy between what is true and what is assumed that has moved our Unitarian Universalist association of congregations to take a stand against racism. Some ask, why – what is all this clamoring over anti-racism, this clamoring over increasing our sensitivity to diversity all about? What will it lead to? bell hooks, the African American feminist author and teacher offers this in response:
...all this clamoring after difference? ...all the clamoring is for us to recognize that our lives are intertwined, so intertwined, that each is accountable to the other. Each particular story or truth calls us to accountability, calls me to accountability for my life, my limits, my individual and our collective transformation...
I don't dare retreat in silence. Too much is at stake. The words that Baili uttered, crouched on a sidewalk are with me. If I have the courage to be accountable, I put myself in the place of her mother and her grandmother, I imagine what it would feel like to see the light from a riffle on our little girls petrified face. And she becomes my little girl, and the brokenness that has allowed that gun to be raised, the brokenness that caused a child unspeakable fear ... I know that brokenness is mine as well, and that if it is to be healed, I know I will have to speak and stand and love. Because this brokenness is not acceptable, nor is silent indifference acceptable ... we have miles to go before we sleep, and we are in this together... because if we aren't who is?
May it be so and Amen.
| 1. | Tim Wise, 2009, "Between Barack and A Hard Place", p. 77 |
| 2. | ibid. p. 175 |