“Which Side Are You On?”

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
To Introduce the Test of the New UUA Curricula
Building The World We Dream About
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, September 30, 2007

I was raised on a steady diet of protest songs. The Morel family would while away the hours on long car trips with all the old songs of free-dom that my father, a CIO organizer, had learned at Highlander Folk School in Tennesee in 1940, songs like “Union Maid,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Joe Hill” and of course, “We Shall Overcome.” My sermon title comes from an old favorite of my dad’s, a song written by a Kentucky coal miner’s wife in 1931. The lyrics question whether the lis-tener is on the side of the striking miners and their hungry families or on the side of the rich owners, declaring,

They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there;You'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.

The original chorus resounds, “Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?” As years passed and issues grew, the song was given new momentum and additional lyrics by folks in the Civil Rights Movement, the farm workers’ union, the peace movement, and many others. Which side are you on? Seventy-six years after the song was first written, the question still haunts us. Which side are you on?

As we prepare to begin a series of workshops to test the new curric-ula on race and ethnicity being developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association, it is good to ask, “Which side are you on?” Is it possible for anyone in America to be neutral about racism and ethnic discrimination, or in a way, do we all live in Harlan County, Kentucky? When it comes to race and ethnicity, which side are we on, as white people, as New Orleanians, as Unitarian Universalists?

I know, I know, none of y’all is going to raise your hand right now and say, “Oh yeah, count me in, I’m on the side of racism and ethnic cleansing.” But what does it mean when we say we’re on the right side? What are we willing to do? What are we willing to change? To paraphrase an old question about Unitarian Universalism, if it were against the law to oppose discrimination and inequality based on race, class, and ethnicity, would there be enough evidence to convict us?

Perhaps we in New Orleans are like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. (Back in the day, coal miners brought caged canaries down into the mine with them; this was not for entertainment, but for safety – the little bird would be the first to be visibly affected by poison gas or a lack of oxygen, and the miners would know to evacuate a dangerous situation.) Race, class, and ethnicity affect all of America, but there’s almost never a good media illustration of how this plays out – but Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath changed all that.

In September 2005, nearly everyone in our country with a working television witnessed a graphic, on-going example of how race, class, and ethnicity make a difference in people’s lives. We saw that race, class, and ethnicity could put a person in danger in a catastrophe; we saw that race, class, and ethnicity could add to a person’s burdens during a time of crisis. We saw that race, class, and ethnicity could affect a person and family’s ability to rebound and recover from a disaster. Now, the real fact is, people in oppressed racial, class, ands ethnic groups in our country already knew this – as the New Orleans expression goes, “They been knowing it” – just as they been knowing that race, class, and ethnicity add to a person’s burdens every single day, even when there isn’t a catas-trophe – but for comfortable privileged Americans all across the country, the Katrina survivors on their TV sets were like dying canaries in a mine: clear illustrations of a dangerous, poisonous situation that invisibly and insidiously affects each and every one of us, every day, but that many of us hardly notice.

The purpose of this morning’s sermon is not to accuse or blame or elicit guilt. These feelings are useless in fighting oppression; they are numb-ing and deadening and self-defeating. They result only in denial and paralysis and inaction. As long as those of us who are privileged and comfort-able, those of us who are white or middle-class, get mired down in accusation, blame, and guilt, we are unable to work to effect permanent change. The best that “liberal guilt” can do for people being adversely affected by race, class, and ethnicity is exactly that – “do for.” “Do for” is a nice way of saying “noblesse oblige;” it is good works done as charity from a standpoint of privilege. While I am not here to condemn anyone for getting involved in charitable good deeds for those in need, I do say unequivocally that such work, however noble and well-intentioned, does not change anything. As Unitarian Universalists, we ought to be about the business of changing systems and structures – real, systemic change that alters the paradigm of haves and have-nots, of justice and injustice, equality and inequality.

There is an alternative to accusation, blame, and guilt. We can learn and develop ways of being true allies in the struggle for justice and equality. We can start to offer our hands horizontally in friendship instead of downward in hand-outs. We can stand with people in need instead of standing over them. We can place ourselves squarely where our Unitarian Universalist principles say we’ll be – on the side of justice, equity, and compassion; on the side of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, on the side of the democratic process. In short, we can transform ourselves from passive complicity with an unjust system into active anti-oppression allies, working to dismantle racism, classism, ethnic distrust, and all other oppressions.

But the very first step in that direction is often painfully difficult. The first step requires that we UUs acknowledge that we are not already “saved.” (In general, UUs dislike traditional religious language, but this is an example where we UUs rely on the old religious language to extricate ourselves from an uncomfortable secular position.) We Unitarian Universalists want to believe that we are already on the right side, that we are the good guys by virtue of being UU, that we are “saved” from the All-American sins of racism, classism, and ethnic discrimination. Most UU congregations insist they don’t need to do anti-racism workshops or Welcoming Congregation programs, because of course we’re not racist or classist or homophobic or discriminatory in any way.

We like to point to our denomination’s racial history: our support for abolition, the activism on behalf of the franchise to male former slaves, and our activism in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. We honor our UU martyrs, Jim Reeb and Viola Liuzza, killed in 1965, and the untold number of Unitarian Universalist ministers and lay people who answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to Selma. We may be hazier on the less savory aspects of our denomination's record on race, but we are sure that we UUs have more to celebrate than to regret.

We look back with pride on the UUA’s record on rights for gays and lesbians, on being the first American denomination to ordain an openly gay person, the votes at General Assembly supporting same-sex marriage rights long before it was fashionable. Again, we may prefer not to know about the times and ways that UUism supported the status quo on BGLTI rights, but on the whole, we’re pretty sure it’s a record to boast of – and boast we often do.

I can hardly wait for the next issue of the UU World magazine, for there is sure to be a barrage of defensive letters about this month’s cover story about classism in Unitarian Universalist theology. Good religious liberals that we are, we are positive that “isms” are someone else’s problem, that we are not implicated in racism or classism or ethnic discrimination, since we are good people who do not feel or practice bigotry or hatred towards anyone.

I understand that reaction, because it’s exactly how I felt the first time I participated in an antiracism workshop with the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond. When I think back on it, I’m mortified by my insufferable smugness; I don’t know how my old friend Ron Chisom put up with me. “I’m just here to help out,” I thought to myself at the start of the 3-day workshop, mentally patting myself on the back, “Racism certainly has nothing to do with me – my parents were civil rights activists who worked for integration; I’m one of the good guys.” I wanted to continue to believe in my own innocence; I wanted to be “good” – and not only that, I wanted my purity and goodness validated by people of color and poor people. But I have to come to know, slowly and painfully, that when it comes to oppressions in our country, none of us is innocent, none of us is neutral, none of us is uninvolved. All of us are implicated in an unjust sys-tem that is part of the very fabric of our lives.

The system we’re enmeshed in is not only unjust, it’s complicated. A gradated set of privileges and comforts are doled out, carefully calibrated by gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and culture. A single person can straddle different discriminatory categories – one can be a black or Latino middle-class woman, or a poor white gay man, or an Asian-American adopted into a white family or a formerly working class Italian man now identifying as a white professional. But however mixed (or mixed-up!) our category, it’s clear that being against oppression is not about the good people identifying the bad people and then fighting them. That would be easy. It’s really about recognizing where we ourselves and the institutions we love are caught up in the unjust system, and then committing to working to make things systemically better, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much it hurts.

One way to get started with what might turn out to be a life-long process of learning and growing would be to register for and attend the sessions of “Building The World We Dream About,” the brand-new UUA curricula being developed for adult programs in UU congregations. It is an honor that our congregation was one of the churches selected as a test location for this important new course, and it is more than likely due, at least in part, to the scenes of post-Katrina apocalypse that UUA officials viewed from 2 years ago. Your participation in this course will help to shape it, as it in turn helps to shape your new perceptions and perspective on race and ethnicity; you will be in on the ground floor of some-thing very important for Unitarian Universalism as well as for this church and this city.

Classes will be held on the first and third Thursdays of the month. The first session will be held this Thursday, October 4, from 7 to 9 pm; participants are asked to make as strong a commitment as possible to attend at least 75% of the total sessions for maximum impact and group cohesion. There will be a minimal registration fee assessed to cover copies and mat-erials, which can be waived in case of hardship. Flyers are available on the Greeters’ Table, and our course facilitators, Howard and Tina Mielke and Esther Scott, will be able to answer questions about the course during Coffeehour. I am excited to be a participant, and I hope to see many of you there too.

The words used for our Chalice Lighting came from an essay entitled “Family Values” in the UU World magazine several years ago; in it, Dr. Ronald O. Valdiserri of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned us all:

...Our world is defined by the people who live in it. People who aren’t all the same, who differ in color and sexual orientation and social circumstance, are part of our human race. If we refuse to listen to them, if we refuse to share societal resources to meet their ex-pressed…needs, we will pay a price. We will lose something of what it means to be human. [UUW, Jan./Feb. 1995]

Our city, our country, our world, is made up of many different people – white, black, brown, red, and yellow; rich, poor, middle-class; professional and blue collar; Northern and Southern European, African, Creole, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, Asian; straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexed, trans, and queer. The many ways we can be categorized can be sources of enrichment or they be used as bases for discrimination. There can be no neutrality. We are either working for justice and equity and diversity, or we are passively accepting the sad world as it is now.

Which will we choose? Which side are we on? The right decision will change our lives forever. So might this be, for ourselves and for our children! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!