The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

Publications

The New Racism

by the Reverend Richard R. Davis

UUCS January 21, 2007

The High School I attended in Columbus , Georgia in the mid ‘60’s had the dubious distinction of being the least racist school in Georgia ’s second largest city.  Which is to say, the blacks students who began attending this school during my sophomore year (1965) were socially marginalized or completely shunned by most white students, but they were not in danger of physical harm as they would have been at the other High Schools in town.  The black students were not accepted, but their presence was grudgingly endured.   Yet how hard this must have been on them.   My hope is that they realized that the scorn they endured had nothing to do with who they were and everything to do with the racist attitudes we white students had unwittingly inherited from our elders. 

            But racism was not the only troubling “ism” at this school.  There was another one that made life hard for me and some other students.  

Some background.  My two sisters and I were being raised solely by my mother who worked as a secretary for the civil service.  Today, given her intelligence (she graduated at the top of her high school class and excelled in college) and her conscientiousness she would certainly rise to a high managerial level, but in those days, the glass ceiling was very low - so she worked as a secretary until she retired in her early seventies.   Sexism certainly had an adverse economic impact on my family, but that’s not the troubling “ism” to which I’m referring.

            The salary level for secretaries was not meant for a primary breadwinner, but that’s mostly what we had to live on since my father often neglected to send child support.  Money was tight and financial anxiety always hung like a cloud over us.  Such a cloud did not hang over many of my fellow students who attended Columbus High School – it was where the children of the movers and shakers, the wealthiest people in town went to school.   Many of my fellow students dressed in expensive clothes, drove nice cars, belonged to fraternities and sororities whose high initiation fees kept out lower income students – like me – and they often talked about the social goings on at the country club – a club my family lacked the social connections and financial wherewithal to join.  

In this micro-feudalistic system, wealth equaled worth.   If your family was well to do, you were in the inner circle.  Everyone else got pushed out to the social margins – forced to be outside observers peering through the window at the party inside.  Really nothing unusual here.   Many have felt the harsh sting of exclusion more forcefully and persistently than I ever have. 

What still strikes me as truly odd about all of this is that somehow, deep down inside, I felt that my being excluded from the inner circle was somehow justified, that I must be lacking some specially endowed quality that got passed through the bloodlines.   Sad to say, this kind of irrational thinking is very common and insures that many injustices and inequities are never challenged.  It is called “internalizing the oppression”--believing in the social lies that diminish your worth.  It’s a perverse, powerful force that keeps people from feeling whole and living fully.  And once you internalize such oppression, once you’ve believed such lies, it’s very hard to overcome them.  It’s a psycho-spiritual infection that almost never completely clears up.

Have you ever internalized any oppression? – that is, have you believed some lie that society, or someone, told you – some lie that led you to believe that because of your race, your class, your sexual orientation, your physical appearance, your intelligence or your abilities - that you didn’t measure up, that you were destined for some lower rung in the social hierarchy?   If the answer is yes – and I know in many cases it is, because I’ve talked to some of you about this -  then you know how hurtful and demoralizing this can be. 

Internalized oppression – this psychic wound – can send people off in two basic directions.  

Consider one direction.  When I was growing up in the south racism was nearly universal among whites, but it tended to be most virulent among whites on the lower end of the social ladder.  That’s where the KKK recruited their members.  The poor white response to their own socio-economic oppression was to react in the safest, socially sanctioned way – which was to convince themselves that at least there was some other group – i.e., blacks – who were even more inferior. 

When we are hurt, we want to hurt back, but often the one who hurts us is too powerful, so a safe substitute is found.  In psychological circles it’s called “displaced anger.”   I daresay a good deal of the hurting and the scapegoating that goes on in our society is some form of displaced anger.   It’s so easy to be caught by the lure of displaced anger in the subconscious realms of our minds.  So many riots and wars are fueled by such blind rage.   

Then there is the other direction.  Say you are oppressed, and naturally internalize this oppression at an early age.  But then, later in life, insight and awareness deepen and you begin to see through the lie - at least to some extent - and you realize how diminished you have been.  Such awareness and insight begin to bring healing and wholeness.  And beyond this comes a firm moral resolve, born of your own familiarity with the pain, to do whatever you can to prevent such pain being inflicted on others.  It’s an amplification of the “Golden Rule” found in most religious traditions.  As the Jewish version, spoken by Rabbi Hillel says:  “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.”   You find that you want not only to refrain from hurting others, but to help stop such hurting in general. 

We have a special sensitivity about this in our religious tradition.   In the early 19^th Century both the Unitarians and the Universalists (two separate movements then) were maligned as heretics, “no-hellites,” and who knows what other disparaging terms?   Being the brunt of anger and even oppression from larger and more powerful religious movements could have sent us on a misplaced mission to prove our worth to these mainstream movements by attacking others even further out on the theological fringes.  

Instead, knowing what it feels like to be rejected, our tradition has displayed a special sensitivity to those who are scorned by the society.   To cite just one of many possible examples:  Years ago, during the era of segregation my home Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Atlanta , Georgia , insisted on integrating and welcoming blacks.   When they tried to build a new church, civic and commercial powers conspired to insure that they could not buy any prime property.  Eventually, they landed up on the edge of town next to the freeway.  Better to give up prime property than a primary mission - reaching out to those who are excluded elsewhere.   I could not be prouder of our Association’s steadfast commitment to confront racism.  

And which organized religious movement was one of the first to welcome and affirm gays and lesbians?  It was the Unitarian Universalists.  To support the rights of women?  Unitarian Universalists. 

We have our eyes and our hearts and our doors open to welcome those who encounter too many closed minds and closed doors, those who have felt the sting of rejection. 

At our finest we have a spiritual vision that helps us see through the superficial categories that all too often divide, damage and diminish people –  the type of spiritual vision Jesus had when he naturally gravitated toward the poor and the outcastes, the kind of vision the Buddha had when he welcomed untouchables into his sangha, the type of spiritual vision that Gandhi had twenty five centuries later when he called these “untouchables”  “Harijans” – Children of God, and worked closely with them until he was murdered by a Fundamentalist Hindu who could not abide such practices.

Being aware of and welcoming to those who are rejected elsewhere, and championing their rights is one of our core missions.   And so, on this Sunday, when we remember the American who did so much to win a place at the table for the descendents of former slaves – Martin Luther King, Jr. – it is good to pause and look around with insight and awareness with this question in mind:  “How can we continue this work today?  Who is being left out in our society?  Who is being oppressed and is internalizing that oppression?   

Considering that near the end of his all too short life, Martin Luther King, Jr. was focusing more and more on issues of economic justice, I believe that such a concern inevitably will lead us to a recognition of an insidious “ism” in our society which is too often overlooked and yet it is one that causes social, economic and psychic harm to millions of all races in our society.  I am speaking of classism, which some call “the new racism.”

Classism, a mild version which I experienced in my high school days, is an oppressive system which ranks people according to their economic status, their so called “breeding,” their jobs and their level of education.   It rests upon the crude socially Darwinian belief that upper class people are smarter, more articulate, simply better than working class and poor people.  Classism is akin to racism in that worth and dignity are assigned to people according to their objective status and appearance, not upon their inherent worth and dignity.  Classim is a construction of social fictions that casts many people in demeaning roles in the drama of life, and such roles are mistaken for reality. 

The American myth is that we are a classless society, that in our New World we left behind the aristocratically imposed caste system of the Old World in Europe .  Of course we never fully left such social hierarchies behind, but still, we have had the ideal of a classless society, and the possibility of upward social mobility was held out as a real promise.  Yet today, the great danger is that it classism is becoming more pronounced and more entrenched.

Consider the ever widening economic gap in our country – it’s becoming a chasm.   Wouldn’t you say things are seriously out of balance when investment bankers at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street earn more in a single hour than many American families do for an entire year?    This matter of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer can’t continue indefinitely and our nation remain intact.   As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned years ago:  “You can have an economic system that allows for unlimited wealth or you can have a system that allows for democracy, but you cannot have both.”  

There are worrisome signs that even class mobility is becoming a thing of the past as the ground begins to harden underneath an un-level playing field in our country. 

Consider:  The average income level of student’s families at the elite colleges and universities around our country is well into the six figure range, and any student who comes from a lower income family is in for a culture shock as they are surrounded by students who drive nice cars, wear expensive clothes and are already managing their own stock portfolios.   But this isn’t too much of a problem because there are very few low income students in these institutions, as the school administrators guiltily acknowledge.   To be sure, there is little racial diversity in these institutions, but there is a more shocking lack of economic diversity.   Contrariwise, the same holds true in our prison system in which most inmates come from the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder.  These examples are indicative of how our society is becoming ever more class stratified.    No wonder there is talk of a growing “economic apartheid.”

So what can we do?   Well, raising our own consciousness on this issue is a beginning.  As I’ve been thinking about this recently I am chagrined to note how oblivious I have been to the insidious nature of classism, this system that brands people and relegates so many to an inferior status and a more stressful, beleaguered and diminished life.  I think this is because it requires looking at humanity through that spiritual lens that corrects the distortions of our usual social vision, and it takes a special refocusing, a re-viewing of the human family to really notice this.  But when you do begin to notice this, when you look to see the inherent worth and dignity of all people, you can’t help but be deeply troubled by the unjust and unequal system that is entrenching itself in our world. 

 And this makes me feel ever more resolved to help create a religious community here that will work, not only to challenge such oppressive “isms” like racism and classism in our society, but that we will seek to look also at ourselves and be aware of how our own thoughts (that we have unconsciously absorbed from our society) and actions might unwittingly perpetrate prejudicial attitudes against working class or low income people.   There is some soul searching to do here, a call to deeper awareness and greater sensitivity.   This is not an easy journey, but it is one we are called to take – a journey toward wholeness, a journey toward the “Beloved Community” the one we remember and honor today dreamed about before his life was cut short by the assassin’s bullet.   Now may the dream be ours.  Now may we have a conviction that we create new ways of being together so that words like “cliques” and “exclusivity” need never be used to describe any among us.