The Beloved Community

February 8, 2004

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Reading

Henry Louis Gates interview on DemocracyNow.com.  

Sermon

There was an interracial couple in the congregation I served fifteen years ago. One day I had an interesting conversation with the husband who had some African ancestry.

I approached the conversation carefully. Since my time in seminary in the late sixties, I had been in discussions about racism and had learned not to make too many assumptions. One of my classmates was African American. He became involved in the black power struggle, participating in the leftish form of that, which they identified as Black socialism.

My class mate preached my ordination sermon. He had just been to a black empowerment conference and the issues were very much on his mind. I was being installed in a small New Hampshire town where the cows outnumbered the people. His sermon was powerful. Towards the end he talked about what the American flag meant to those he worked with. He said they saw it most frequently on the shoulders of policemen. There was an American flag near the pulpit, and at that point he learned over towards it with a gesture of disgust.

And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing – the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no... Sethe had refused – and refused still....

What she had done was right because it came from true love. (READING 106)

Is this sadness and rage the only black space safe from pervasive white supremacy? This is no Aunt Jemima kind of love, feeding its way into satiation. This a love confronting not only the tragedy of the human condition, but tragedy of some of its most oppressed people.

What are the roots of this raging despair? Why racism? In our reading this morning, Gates suggests that racism is not so much about skin color, as about economics.

“Remember,” Gates said, King “didn’t die in a civil rights march, he died in a march for garbage workers, for striking garbage workers. He had realized, I think, before any other civil rights leader, that -- well, that the struggle had faces... It turned out that race was a metaphor for deeper economic, structural discrimination. Everyone was confused. I think the African American leadership is still confused about the nature of the problem. It's easy to rally around obviously blatantly racist incidents. It's much harder to figure out how to divvy up the pie, how to make structural adjustments in the American economy, at a time of scarcity -- at a time of scarcity and at a time when the pie is perceived to be shrinking.”

The hatred and rage that buttress racism in America comes about because of economic competition. Like the birds flying in the sky, people flying about claiming to be better than others. The metaphor of race has been but one way of masking the issue of competition and economics. We see it emerge in the struggle for women’s liberation. The womanist moment, largely middle and lower class African American women, has had to maintain intense dialogue with the feminist movement, by and large middle to upper class white women, to unmask not only sexism and racism, but also classism. Womanists point out that “even victims can victimize the weaker and that no one is free from the potential of oppressing others.” (Park 12)

The economic competition which generates the hatred called racism is most commonly illustrated by the immigration of the Irish to 19th century urban America and their competition with African America laborers. The Irish knew well the heavy hand of oppression in there homeland. Lord Clarendon, one time English viceroy in Ireland spoke of the “policy of extinction.” In 1780 Andrew Young observed that “A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a server, labourer, or cottier dares to refuse... Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane.” The Potato Famine, brought on by English policies, killed thousands of Irish and many fled to America.

Here in America, they were just as hungry, but given an option of joining the white majority to despise blacks. They began kicking black stevedores off the docks of New York City. The exclusively Irish Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society carried each year in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade a banner, “We know no distinction but that of merit.” Elsewhere was the small print, “The Society’s goal was that “work upon the dockside ... shall be attended to solely and absolutely by members of the Longshoreman’s Association, and such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.” (Jensen 397ff) It was economic competition which set blacks and Irish at each other.

What is competition? It must be very old. The Buddhist story which I read to our young people talks about the birds proclaiming that each is better than the other. One supposes that it was about resting places, which bird was entitled to the best tree.

While very old, perhaps our culture has raised competition to an extreme. Fundamentalism is about lifting up one value above all others. Fundamentalism is an evasion of the collision of values. And the value here is not love, it is not cooperation, it is not togetherness. The value of American fundamentalism is competition.

The primary re-enactment of our central value of competition, our American sacred drama, took place last Sunday. Once upon a time, it was about football. Two teams compete. There was some togetherness --as team work.

But football is no longer what the Superbowl is all about. What is the Superbowl about? It is becoming the superbowl of advertising. I consider it remarkable that several ads were rejected. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal's commercial was rejected because it was too sexually explicit. Instead, there was a beer commercial featuring a dog trained to bite its owner in the crotch. Let’s not forget the erectile dysfunction ads. Horses are incapable of passing gas, gas build up kills them. Never let reality intervene in the virtual world of advertising. A Superbowl ad featured a flatulent horse. Of course reality must be denied when we are celebrating the American fundamentalism of ambition, competition. [ http://truthout.org/docs_04/020304F.shtml ]

Competition sets people against one another. When it is unmoderated by co-operation, when conflict has the field to itself without love, there is little left. In his article on “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” Cornel West describes that twilight civilization, our own, with the word ‘gangsterism.’ Unremitting competition? When a society is based solely on competition, somebody’s got to be down there at the bottom of the hole, somebody has to be down there so we can be better than them. Perhaps that is in part what Richard Wright meant when he said “The Negro is America’s metaphor.” Metaphor reveals and masks truth in the same moment.

Our culture’s deep foundation of competition creates waves of rage and hatred. This anger gets misdirected because it’s easer to express it against the powerless, and we are routinely pitted against others of the powerless. (Jensen 507) Our culture forces us into competition with all others with whom we should be cooperating, having been coerced into believing that coercion is natural or inevitable.

As I struggle with these issues, as I have struggled since seminary, I now come back to West’s remark that the “fundamental point of [his essay is] the basic full-fledged humanity of black people continuous with that of others.” (READER 87] Does not West here suggest that what is important is not what divides us, the competition of advertising and political media, beating out one another for jobs, but something else. Our culture urges us to seek division, competition. It needs moderation. We need cooperation as well. Thus the story of the birds for our children.

If we look at African culture itself, we see it is different. Almost the opposite.. African culture is based on cooperation. Bishop Desmond Tutu tells us that the central concept of the African world view is “ubuntu.” It speaks to the very essence of what it means to be human. Tutu tells us “A person is a person through other persons.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.” Rather, “I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.”

Since being brought to this new world on crowded slave ships, Africans and their descendants have sought to maintain something of African culture. Perhaps we are most aware of the spirituals, blues and jazz as examples. If the word African implies cooperation, and the word American implies competition, how great the challenge!

One wintry day in seminary, my African American classmate and I drove to class. As we got out of the car, I sought to articulate something which troubled me. I wanted to be honest, authentic with him. I suggested that I had racist feelings. He avoided my remarks, painful to both of us.

I have struggled with that since. And it has meant a lot to me to hear Bishop Tutu’s experience with the issue. He tells us that:

On my first flight to Nigeria, I happened to travel to northern Nigeria in a plane piloted by Nigerians. Coming from South Africa where blacks did not do such work, I really grew inches with pride in black achievement. The plane took off smoothly. Then we hit turbulence. At one moment we were at one altitude and the next we had left our stomachs up there as the plane shuddered and dropped. I was shocked at what I discovered – I found I was saying to myself, “I really am bothered that there’s no white man in the cockpit. Can these blacks manage to navigate us out of this horrible experience?” It was all involuntary and spontaneous. I would never have believed that I had in fact been so radically brainwashed. I would have denied it vigorously because I prided myself on being an exponent of black consciousness, but in a crises something deeper had emerged: I had accepted a white definition of existence, that whites were somehow superior to and more competent than blacks. Of course those black pilots were able to land the plane quite competently.

If Cornel West is right, and I stake my life and my ministry on it, that the basic full-fledged humanity of blacks is continuous with others, we must all have a sense of what racism is, as we all know what trust its. We all know about the bottom of the barrel We all must know what competition is, as we must all know about cooperation. We must all know about despair, just as we all know about hope.