At the urging of our niece (a journalist), I'm reading Mark Lilla's book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. This is the recent book that has caused a firestorm on the left by asserting that the Democratic Party is in a long term state of decline as a result of it's addiction to identity group politics.
Much is being written about this viewpoint from both ends of the political spectrum. Shelby Steele, an African American scholar at Stanford (who like Barack Obama is the offspring of a black father and white mother) had a major op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about 10 days ago entitled Why the Left Can't Let Go of Racism. Being a self-described black conservative, his perspective is different from Lilla's, but what they are describing is pretty much the same phenomenon.
Today I looked at the UCC Daily Devotional written by Marchaé Grair, the UCC's Digital Content Manager. And I started thinking about Grair's remarks in the context of the book and article mentioned about, and also in the context of a conversation I had with John Little years ago. I'm sharing this with the CUCC community as illustration that different ones among us think of racism in quite different ways.
First, here are Marchaé Grair's words in today's Daily Devotional ...
In an effort to love despite differences, some Christians ask people to dilute their differences so they don't have to deal with them.
It is the experience I have when white church folks look at my brown skin and brown experience and say they don't see color. It is their attempt to eliminate racism by acting as if race doesn't exist. They feel they can be closer to me if the thing separating us magically disappears.
But I don't need people to claim they are honoring my experience by negating it: I want them to recognize that working towards unity doesn't equate to reaching for uniformity of experience or perspective.
Instead, it requires the recognition that we have different boundaries, pains, and experiences that inform what we bring to the table.
And the differences in those experiences shouldn't lessen our desire to have respect for or share community with each other.
My conversation with John Little years ago pertained to the value of specific gay and lesbian friendships that we had formed. My comment to John was something along these lines. My deep relationship with gays or lesbians is no different from any other deep relationship. But at the same time I'll admit that there are some gays and lesbians who are so enmeshed in their "gayness" that I can't find a common area where depth easily develops. It can be a bit like trying to interact with a stamp collector whose very being is so wrapped up in stamp collecting that there's no other interface for interaction. John agreed that he too has known folks where that issue seemed to handicap the relationship.
Marchaé Grair suggests that I might attempt to eliminate racism in my interaction with her by acting as if racism doesn't exist. Yet it is (by her own admission) HER focus on her own racial identity that mandates that others focus on her brown skin and brown experience. In other words, she doesn't allow for the possibility that I might not have much interest in her brown skin and brown experience (just as I might not give a rat's ass about somebody's stamp collection). And from that perspective, Marchaé is the one who becomes the racist. She's the one who forces race into the equation by not allowing others to choose any other interface she offers as the point of interaction.
I'm sure that Marcha´ is a wonderful person and that we would get along splendidly. The interesting aspect of this dialog is not who is right and who is wrong. It's that what we actually think of as racism is so tied up in who we are that the word itself becomes almost meaningless. About 20 years ago after yet another MLK Sunday sermon in January by my dear friend and pastor Dave Barber, I commented to Dave, "Dave, usually when you give your MLK sermon all I feel is the urge to give a rebuttal, because what you're calling racism isn't racism, and what you're proposing as a solution isn't a solution."
The CUCC work trip to Puerto Rico in 1986 introduced me to a situation I had never encountered. For the first time I was in a group of people that were of so many shades and ethnicities that classification by race was not only useless but impossible. While flying home I was thinking about Tony and Wiggy, a man and a boy in Puerto Rico whom I had come to know well and spent a lot of time with. It occurred to me on the plane that not only did I not know what their racial composition was, but also that the question had never come to mind. Both of them almost certainly had some Latino blood, but it would have been hard to say how much. And whether they had any African ancestry was quite ambiguous, as well as whether they had any other European ancestry that was not Hispanic. According to Marchaé Grair, when I look at Tony or Wiggy and don't see color I'm attempting to eliminate racism. My response to that is when I look at Tony or Wiggy and try to classify, I'm inventing racism.
My hunch here is that both Marchaé and I have a valid point. But that simple statement doesn't help much with clarifying what racism is.
