by Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given January 18, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Individually we are many and uniquely gifted.

Together we are One in Love and in Spirit.

Let us worship together.

Responsive Reading: #732

Great Spirit of light and darkness;

We gather once again to remember a fallen friend, and nourish ourselves from the fountain of reflections.

Open our hearts to the anguish of our pain, to the tired taste of swallowed tears, and to our unrealized vision.

In this place we bring our scattered lives together, groping for meaning and looking for truth.

Be with us as we continue our search for understanding of the mystery of the temporal.

Stay with us as we wander through our memories, seeking pathways to the future.

Move with us as we unravel the implied imperatives of hopes unfulfilled.

Justice makes tireless demands, and we grow weary.

As we touch one another in common cause, and with the great Spirit in our midst,

Let us find the way and the courage to realize the dream which still lives within us. Amen.

Reading         

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

Being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence.

It means being part of the company

Of the bruised, the battered, the scarred, and the defeated.

Being a Negro in America

Means trying to smile when you want to cry.

It means trying to hold on to physical life

Amid psychological death.

It means the pain of watching your children grow up

With clouds of inferiority in their mental skies.

It means having your legs cut off,

And then being condemned for being a cripple.

It means seeing your mother and father

Spiritually murdered

By the slings and arrows of daily exploitation,

And then being hated for being an orphan.

Being a Negro in America…

Means being harried by day and haunted by night

By a nagging sense of nobodiness

And constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness.

It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations

Where hopes unborn have died.

Sermon

My first lessons in diversity came during kindergarten. I was five, and it seemed I’d waited forever to go to school. My big brother was a third grader, and my big sister was already in fifth. I counted myself lucky because they could tell me all the things I really needed to understand about school. You know, the important things that you don’t hear from teachers and parents.

The school was just two blocks away, so we walked together. My sister turned to me, talking in a confiding manner. “I just want you to know there’ll be a lot of colored people at school. But don’t let it bother you.” Frankly, I had so much on my mind for my first day of kindergarten that I forgot the warning. I didn’t even think about it again until at the end of the week she said, “Well, what did you think about all the colored people?”

Stephen’s Elementary on Capitol Hill in Seattle was pretty well integrated in 1951, as it still is today. I suspect that there were maybe 25% African Americans, maybe 10% Hispanics, maybe 20% Asians, and the rest mostly of European origin. But “colored people?” I insisted, as much as a five-year-old can with a sister twice his age, that there were no “colored people” at the school. Frankly, I was disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing people that matched the hues in my Crayola box. But, as far as I could see there weren’t any.

Mine was the experience of the oneness of people who are together in a community. It is one of the gifts of children to be open and loving. We may recall the challenge of Jesus of Nazareth, that we should be as children if we would live the fullness of our spiritual potential.

What I saw in my classroom were kids like me, trying to survive their first week of kindergarten. We worked and played together with little awareness of our differences—in appearance, in culture, in history. I learned a lot about living in an ethnically diverse community in that school. But to say I learned all I really need to know about multiculturalism in kindergarten would not be true.

My earliest understanding of multiculturalism was this: we are all the same. We laugh, we cry, we work, we play, we think, and we feel all pretty much in the same way. For me this is an important part of the story of living together as a people. We have much in common: the reality of joy and pain in our lives, our desire for love and happiness, and our expectations of being treated fairly. Deep down, at the soul level, we come together in our spiritual longing for unity—in our desire to really be one people.

However, a point of view that asserts the sameness of different people is half-false. Because we are not the same. We are also different. Multicultural sensitivity requires that we not get lost in how we are the same because there is such great value and learning in the celebration of how we are not the same.

Theologian Miroslav Volf, author of the book, Exclusion and Embrace, argues that an isolated intention of sameness towards people who are actually very different from us can become a subtle but powerful form of prejudice. When I do not notice what is different about another human being, based on culture, history, or life experience, I will project onto the other all the ways that I imagine that they are the same as me. In my mind I force them into the categories of my own experience. I assume that their preferences will be the same as mine, even though culturally our backgrounds differ widely. For Volf this most common and insidious mode of prejudice causes harms that we don’t even intend.

So, my second lesson in multiculturalism was about overcoming my fear of differences between myself and others, so that I might begin to take those differences into account in my relationships and in my work. In 1980 I was invited to set up a medical clinic in the Rainier Valley community in Seattle. This area of the city is richly diverse, representing cultures from all parts of the world. Some people are new in our nation, with scarcely enough command of the English language to get by, and others have been here for generations. Incomes range from the poverty level through the middle class. Our task was to build a clinic and staff it in a way that would serve the needs of the multi-cultural community effectively and sensitively. Clearly, it was no longer enough simply to say, “We are all the same.” If the clinic team was going to be successful it would need to mark the differences and to craft health services accordingly.

With about twenty different languages among our consumer group, we had to use translators. Furthermore, words alone are only a part of total communication. With certain ethnic groups, for example, I learned that “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.” When I asked, “Do you understand what to do to care for your condition?” the patient’s “yes” was often the expression of desire to please the doctor or nurse, not necessarily the acknowledgement of understanding or the agreement to carry out the recommendations.

The clinic was led by a community Board. If we were going to be culturally sensitive, they argued, we would need to hire nurses and doctors that matched the community’s ethnic and cultural character. So, this we did, ensuring especially that Hispanic, African American, and Asian providers were included.

The ten years I spent at that clinic were both challenging and rewarding. I had to climb a steep growth curve in my own cultural competence, and as the leader of the project, I made my share of mistakes. As I was becoming more familiar with working in the context of diversity, I rather suddenly became aware of racism’s evil twin, privilege. I realized that I was also a member of a cultural, racial, and economic sub-group that held unwavering dominance in our nation.

Author Peggy McIntosh demonstrates in her book, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, how hidden the reality of un-earned opportunity is in the life of the dominant American culture. She states,

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Privilege is hard for us to talk about. When, again and again, I realize the power of privilege in my life as a white, professional, middle-aged, middle-class, male, my first emotional reaction is a combination of defensiveness and guilt. It feels as if I am being accused of, or accusing myself of, something I didn’t intend. Why must I take responsibility for a system I didn’t directly create, even though I may benefit from that system in ways I have not fully earned? I feel hurt. I feel embarrassed.

But guilt gets us nowhere. Only by acknowledging the power of hidden privileges can we actively embrace those for whom our society denies full opportunity.

It was hard to find African American and Hispanic family physicians to staff the clinic. There just weren’t many. In my medical school class of one hundred students in 1969 there were only three African Americans and only a few from other minority cultures. Was I admitted because of privilege? Objectively perhaps, I met the school’s criteria: grades, test scores, enriching extracurricular experiences. But I’d had opportunities to make that happen that other students, equally motivated to serve the community as physicians, did not. Were the school’s criteria effective in identifying the best doctors of the future? Were the criteria themselves scrutinized for their cultural inclusiveness? Is it possible, by the way I spoke, dressed, and asserted myself, that I matched an image that the doctors on the admissions committee had of themselves? It is in such ways that institutions can be blind to their contributions to racism.

I believe that the medical-care system in our nation itself promotes privilege. I had offered attentive care of an older man at the clinic who happened to be African American. We had delightful conversations, and I did all I could to keep his heart and lungs functioning in spite of advanced emphysema and heart failure. When he finally died, I grieved his passing. Then, I got a threatening letter from his daughter, accusing me of neglect and inadequate care of her father. In her grief, she asserted that I had failed her father because of my racial prejudice. My first reaction to this challenge was hurt, defensiveness and denial. I had offered all the services to him that I would have offered to any other patient in the clinic. From my perspective, he’d had an excellent extension of his life in the face of advanced cardiac and pulmonary problems. I, too, would miss him.

It was only later, when my defensiveness abated, that I realized she was right. Over the years, her father had struggled with no or inadequate insurance, finally depending on State Medicaid. Until the new clinic was built in the Rainier neighborhood, it was challenging to even get to the doctor for on-going care, especially as his condition worsened. Her father hadn’t received the kind of attention from the American healthcare system that might have helped him much earlier. Her anger was less against me personally and more against a whole medical system that had not served him well, that I represented as his doctor. I realized that my accountability as a leader within the medical system was to work for change or not to be party to a system that is not equally accessible to all.

There has been one more step in this journey to multiculturalism that I’d like to share with you this morning. It brings together both our oneness as a human family and our unique individuality. It is the paradox of simultaneous unity and diversity that we find daily in our friendships and our working relationships. On the one hand we feel our soul-level bond. On the other hand we learn to value our differences and thrive on them because they allow us to be more and do more than was possible alone. What is it the French say? “Vive la difference!” Although it may feel easier to be friendly with people who are just like you, the real opportunity for learning comes when we take the risk to reach for friendship across lines of difference.

In our work and community service settings the dominant culture tends to mentor people who remind us of ourselves at a younger age, promoting past privilege into the future. To build multicultural systems we must establish mentoring relationships with persons who are not like ourselves—in gender, in ethnicity, in culture, in age, in class, or in lifestyle. The rewards here are many. The protégée finds doors opening that were formerly held closed by the patterns of the dominant culture. The mentor discovers new approaches to old problems. Institutions are enriched by myriad gifts that come across the lines of difference. And opportunity proliferates. Multicultural competence, finally, enriches the lives of all of us.

In my 24 years as a Unitarian Universalist, I have heard many of us express a longing for greater cultural diversity in our churches. Yet, we have struggled to find ways to make this happen. First Unitarian has a unique opportunity here. Within our social justice structure is a committee called “Beloved Community.” Their stated purpose is to support the First Unitarian congregation in a deepening awareness, that we are one people together. By strengthening our spiritual connections, human being to human being, and by honoring the variety of our preferences and gifts, we will become ever more able to invite people from diverse backgrounds to join our spiritual family. 

May it indeed be so.  Amen.

PRAYER

Holy Creator,

You have made us into one people.

Yet, we are still only learning how to live together.

Help us to overcome our fears of the unfamiliar.

Help us to find rich relationships across the lines of our differences.

Help us remember that we are One

In the Spirit of Life.

Amen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis, Intern Minister.  All rights reserved.