Beyond Anti Racism and White Guilt: Why the Dream Still Matters

Lone Jensen

January 19, 2003

The first time I saw Martin Luther King was in 1964. The Danish Television was giving full coverage to the Nobel Price winners and in the process explaining just who he was. Brutal images of police with dogs and Billy clubs beating women and children flashed across the screen. People marched, sang, cried bitter tears brought on by tear gas canisters, bled, fell and were arrested on the 12 inch TV screen in black and white. And then there was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. himself, calm, dignified, patiently answering impossibly naïve questions posed by Swedish reporters who, though well meaning, had no idea, could not possibly have any real idea of what it meant to be black in America. I do remember that in his speech, standing there among the bejeweled royalty and all those stiff dignitaries with chests full of medals, he seemed to be the real royalty. He was a true king anointed not by the accident of his birth but by his own actions and by the heavy mantle he had picked up back in Montgomery, Alabama. He seemed to me to embody in that moment the conscience, tragic paradox and hope of a rich and powerful nation, whose very name stood for freedom even as it oppressed its citizens. This, I thought, is America at its best.

Yesterday as I prepared for this sermon I went on the Internet, and made the mistake of looking at the comments posted on a site dedicated to the question of what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. meant to you today. Among the expected accolades, there were not many, and the openly racist comments, thankfully equally few, were the comments by young people that showed at best ignorance. It was clear they did not care nor really knew who he was or what he had done. Comments like this: “He means nothing,” or “So what, everyone tells me he had a dream, so what, I dream every night, last night I dreamed I kicked a white man’s behind,” made me at once angry and sad. And then I wondered, “Have we sanitized King and thus made him irrelevant to the young in our adoration of him? Have we turned him into a obligatory national symbol as remote and frozen as the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln in whose shadow he gave his ‘I have a Dream’ speech?”

If so, we have done him a great disservice. King was far more controversial, radical, searching and still growing into his role at the time of his assassination. This preacher was a thorn in the side of the status quo and against the Vietnam War. Whether you agree with their sentiment or not, his heritage is closer to those who marched yesterday against the war with Iraq than to those who will tomorrow gather for fine speeches and accolades. He was no saint, but he gave his voice so eloquently to a just and noble movement that it was heard around the world. America, you have failed your own ideals, America whose name stands for freedom: Set all of your children free! He became our collective national conscience. What would he be saying today?

I believe his words would disturb us, challenge us and maybe anger some of us. And most of all he would goad us into action. Yes, we have thankfully changed as a nation. Alan Wolf wrote: “After King we argue how his dream can best be fulfilled. We forget how significant it is that we no longer argue about whether it should be fulfilled.” That to a large degree is true. But it gives me little comfort. The distance between our ideals and our reality can sometimes seem so immense. Take us for example.

There is a familiar poem I often use when I have to explain to a non Unitarian Universalist audience what we as a religion are all about: “They drew a circle and shut me out, a heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the grace to win, we drew a circle and took them in.“

Which to me is what we can be at our best: An inclusive, embracing, loving and caring people who welcome the stranger among us with easy hospitality and open arms. A place where each person is valued and respected, a place where all those divisions and walls that keeps us apart in the larger society no longer matter. As in this responsive reading: “If you are white and I am black: it will not matter. If you are straight and I am gay: it will not matter. If you are Jewish and I am Christian it will not matter! “To this litany of restoration we can add any number of words that otherwise divide us. How about: If you are an Immigrant and I am Native Born, it will not matter. If you are Arab and I am Israeli. We can say these words as a prayer, as a litany of hope, as a fervent wish, as a battle cry. We pray that none of these differences will matter to us as we meet face to face. But how often is it true? How often do we live up to our own aspirations and to our deeply held beliefs? How often do we see the human faces of those with whom we disagree or those we call our enemies? How often do we find the courage to live our faith in our daily lives and in those myriad small acts, which is after all, where it really matters?

Let me answer for myself: not often enough, not nearly often enough. There are times when I feel bone weary and tired out, when I draw the circle very small and circle the wagons close in defense. For the struggle seems never ending, it is often painful and seldom clear cut or easy. It is hard work to change, to get beyond the images, the anger, the injustices, the prejudices, the assumptions we hold about each other to find some common ground. Will it ever not matter in America whether one is born black or white ? It seems not likely to happen within my life time. It is easy to get cynical and lose hope. So what we need at such times is a different kind of courage. And new hope.

To overcome racism takes more than a sense of obligation or guilt. The world will not change by being told how bad it is any more than we will. And conversations about racism usually end up telling us far more about the people in the group than they do about the topic itself. No one’s hands are clean when it comes to this issue. Even the words we use date us: African American, Black, Negro, and in the last few years people of color have emerged as a respectable and honorable term when it was once, some thirty years ago, a hated sign of segregation. In South Africa not so long ago by law you had to have at least four different kinds of restrooms. One for whites, one for blacks, one for mixed race and one for all the rest: Indians, Chinese, Asiatic, etc. Since they also separated the sexes that meant a total of 8. How utterly ridiculous and sad, a civilization stuck in the iron grip of race fixation, inequality, and injustice.

How much better though are we? Certainly and thankfully we have come a long way since the days when Martin Luther King wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail. The right to vote is ours but how many use it? 60%? Or less in some elections? Color still matters. Under the surface racism is far too often alive and well. Since I do not look Hispanic I have had people tell me in great details just how bad immigrants are and why we should stop them from coming here. When I tell them that I am one, they are unabashed and say: “Oh, but you are the right kind!” What is the right kind? Blue eyes and white skin? Well actually kind of pinkish skin something like a baby pig. I too am a person of color only it is kind of a pale pink color highly susceptible to skin cancer. Black and white do not in fact exist as colors within our human race, but they sure do within our minds. Artists mix all kinds of colors on their palette when they paint portraits, but it was not too long ago that Crayola Crayons had only one color for flesh: a pinkish peach. Racism is often invisible to those whom it does not affect. All of us harbor prejudice. All of us need to do the hard work of looking at ourselves and our own often unconscious prejudices and assumption. That is a healing act and it is only from a place of healing ourselves that we will have enough energy to heal the world.

In the past politics in the South kept poor whites in their place by convincing them that the greater danger was integration. If you feel powerless and disenfranchised it is easy blame others --  women, gays, Jews, blacks, foreigners -- for your plight. An African American colleague of mine told me how often her son, a successful cooperate lawyer, had been picked up in Chicago for the crime of driving while black. There are people who really believe that most black young men are dangerous and that most black women are on welfare. Never mind that drug abuse does not discriminate and flourish in the mostly white suburbs and that the majority of people on welfare are classified as white. Facts have very little to do with it.

But fear does! Lance Morrow describes his reaction to a terrible crime. He writes: “We oscillate between two moral poles. The left brain says “nothing human is foreign to me and the right brain meanwhile goes to the other extreme and lays down: nothing foreign is human to me.” His first statement draws a very wide circle: nothing human is foreign to me. It recognizes that we share a common humanity even with those whose acts we may deplore and cannot imagine doing ourselves. The second statement recognizes that there are acts of such horror and cruelty that they seem utterly alien, foreign to us. But the second statement is also the cry of the lynch mob and xenophobes, of those who would divide the world into us and them. Nothing foreign is human to me can easily be extended to cover color, race, nationalities.

Next time someone utters a racist slur or comes up with a bad joke about gays, or in these times says something derogatory about all Arabs or Muslims, speak up! It was because of the compliance of otherwise good people that slavery continued for as long as it did. “But,” you may say, “a bad joke hardly compares to slavery.” And no, it does not, but it is the many small daily acts that we over time change the culture. Martin Neimoller wrote: “They came for the communists and I said nothing, for I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unions and I said nothing for I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews I said nothing for I was not a Jew. And when they came for me no one said anything because there was no one left to speak out.” It takes constant vigilance to keep our freedoms. Civil rights are never a given and must be won again and again. Clarence Page writes: “Many demand that we get past racism. But denials of cancer no matter how vigorous they may be will not make this malignancy go away.”

If today we have no institution of slavery we do have far too many people enslaved by drugs, poverty and perhaps most of all by a lack of hope and faith. The abolitionist teachings were that God made of one flesh all nations of men and women. To deny this equality was blasphemy. I still think it is. Our first principle is the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. What does this really mean?

In Universalist theology it is not by cool logic that hell is abolished but by experience, on a daily basis, of the power of love, immanent and certain as the dawn.

We must begin with ourselves. What judgments do we make about others? Through what colored glasses do we see them? Nationalism is not the same as racism but there are similarities. When I attended a women’s conference in Goslar, Germany I discovered how hard it is to let go of old prejudices. The town was beautiful and the people very friendly. I enjoyed myself and loved meeting the women. But whenever I saw a German who was old enough to have been in World War II, my gut reaction was anger. I wanted to ask: “Did you occupy my country? Did you kill anyone? Did you torture people?” The lederhosen became in my mind’s eye a Nazi uniform. It was unfair and not based on any factual knowledge, yet so strong were those feelings that I, ashamed, understood the power of racism.

We have got to be taught to hate and yet hate is not the root cause of inequality. Injustice has a thousand causes and racism is a reflection of personal and collective anxieties and fears. How do we overcome it? We act on our beliefs and we find new hope to give us the strength we need. We take a leap of faith that we can and will make a difference. We name the problem. In 1964 in Oslo the Reverend Martin Luther King said these words: “I accept this award with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind… I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can not become a reality… I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into a hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality… I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies; education and culture for their minds; and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits...This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. ..When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a civilization struggling to be born.”

I pray that we will have the courage and the faith to make of our dreams a living reality. This genuine civilization he dreamed of is still struggling to be born. And we are its midwives.