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Live Report!
Where Race and Class Unite
Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris
(This essay is developed from a sermon preached at the Arlington Street
Church Boston, where I am a member.)
Race? In a word, white. Scots Irish, and a bit of German and English - to
be as precise as I can. My ancestors settled on land in Virginia, in the foothills
of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They were farmers and laborers. Like hundreds of
other Scots Irish, Scottish settlers in Northern Ireland, they had been dispossessed
of their land and immigrated in hopes of rebuilding their lives.
Class? No one word answer here. My mother was born on a farm in Amherst County
VA. Her family was tobacco sharecroppers. In the early 1940's, when her children
were in their late teens, my maternal grandmother left her husband (a man years
older than she with children her age) and came to the "city" with her three
children to make a better life. She got work as a dining room supervisor at
a women's college. My father was born in that "city" (actually small town) of
Lynchburg, Virginia. His childhood home was in a part of town that was also
home to many African American families, the all black high school and the Phyllis
Wheatley YWCA. His first job after the Army was in a "horse rendering plant"
- for one day! After work as a lineman for the local power company, he got a
civil service job - working on the mail train. My mother stayed home after I
was born, never returning to her secretarial job. When the mail trains were
discontinued, my father went to work in the post office on the night shift and
then to a rural mail route. By the time I was in third grade we had a brand
new home in a brand new suburb with its own elementary school and I got to pick
the color of the paint for my bedroom.
Poor to working class to middle class in two generations. And white. And I
wonder, from time to time, just how the hell I got here? - a woman, just one
generation out of the tobacco fields of central Virginia?
After thirty years as a Unitarian Universalist, I still struggle with that
question and, from time to time, with feeling like a fraud. Like I don't really
belong. Having learned ways of being middle and upper middle class I can, with
some skill, engage in "class passing."
My parents have visited the churches that I have served. In their visits they
adopt the formal behavior that comes with feeling out of place. The most respectful
way they know to speak to folks in the congregation who greet them is in the
language of smiles, and ma'am and sir. But here I am. Calling this place, in
which they will only be visitors, home. My mother's mother's dream of a better
life for her family come true! My father's hard work in providing for his family
paid off!
I cannot help but wonder how many of us are like me? And I wonder how much
of our Unitarian Universalist class identity is about history and heritage -
who we were - and how much about who we have become? And I wonder how complicated
the "class identity" of our faith community really is these days?
And I wonder - how much does race have to do with my being Unitarian Universalist?
Over the course of my journey to this religious community, and in spite of
sexism, how many doors opened for me because I am "white?" I never thought of
myself as privileged because of my whiteness (being white was just "normal")
until a decade or so ago. As I think back on my own past, it's hard to reconstruct
precisely where and how privilege made a difference. How much of what I accomplished
is due to my own intelligence, persistence, hard work? How much is due to the
social construct of race that privileges "whiteness" and my access to that collective
identity created by racism called white.
And I wonder in what ways my journey within Unitarian Universalism is about
access to "whiteness" - or more accurately, to more privileges of whiteness
than I might otherwise have been able to know because of class . . . or gender?
I have only been a white woman for a decade or so. Before that I was a simply
a woman, and one for whom gender was the defining category of oppression. Than
I started trying to figure out what it means to be white and what I am called
to do when my hard won, yet incomplete, justice as a woman comes face to face
with another's experience of injustice. What am I to do at the intersection
of gender and race? Or race and class?
What are we to do? I worry over the tender sore places in our religious community
where personal commitments to overcoming oppression are so identified with one
of its defining categories, or when by resistance to or denial of other categories
we can't seem to find a way to move toward justice. I worry we will get stuck;
arguing over where to start, what comes first, which is more important. I worry
that we will sacrifice courage for fear of making mistakes. I worry that useless
hierarchies and false choices will divert us. I worry that the "default option"
- divide and conquer - will work it's destructive worst as the interlocked oppressions
of racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, sexism and the rest. . . simply
carry on while we disagree, deny, and those of us who are white defend our precious
privileges.
Audre Lorde once wrote that the fight for justice takes all of our selves working
together, and that the struggle against any form of injustice generates energies
useful in our struggles against other forms.
We know how to separate the oppressions, and we must separate them to know
them well and engage them effectively. My life viewed through an anti-sexist
or anti-classist lens looks very different than my life through an anti-racist
lens. My effectiveness depends in part on my ability to sort out the oppressions
and privileges and know them for what they are. My strength grows as I am able
to bring my whole self to the struggle.
Remember. The work of justice is the work of the spirit and does not require
anything more, or less, than we already have - all of our selves - race, class,
gender, physical ability, sexual orientation. . . .those selves that fit the
categories and those that cross, mix, challenge, and move beyond them. . . As
Audre Lorde wrote "because it takes all of our selves working together to integrate
what we learn . . . into our consciousness and work, to effectively focus attention
and action . . . every one of these battles generates energies useful in the
others."
She also wrote that "tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as
belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy."
So may it be.
Reported for the web by Deborah Weiner; formatted
for the web by Jonathan Kinghorn.
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