Open Hands Vol 18 No 1 - Racism: Our Incomplete Rainbow

Open Hands Vol 18 No 1 - Racism: Our Incomplete Rainbow

18

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2002

Summer

OPEN HANDS
Vol. 18, No. 1
2002
RACISM
OUR INCOMPLETE RAINBOW
editor’s word Chris Glaser
Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye
A description of the theme of this issue and a farewell from Open Hands.
wow 2000
Three views of “the racial incident” during the first Witness Our Welcome gathering in the year 2000:
How It All Began
Donn Crail
“What color?” I asked.
Witnessing Our Unwelcome
Irene Monroe
Open Hand’s 2002 Columnist describes what was offensive at the gathering and offers suggestions for WOW 2003.
White Privilege
Chris Paige
The description of a white lesbian’s conversion experience about racism as a result of the episode.
other feature articles
Born to Belong
Mab Segrest
Born into segregation, a Freedom Writer describes her journey toward truth.
Teaching the Roots of Racism
A Guide for Discussion
Mab Segrest
The history of colonialism invented the notion of race.
The Way Things Were
Reflecting on the Life of Bayard Rustin
Lila Frazier
An authentic gay African American civil rights hero.
A True WOW Experience
A Dialogue
Eric H. F. Law
The dialogue that should have happened at WOW 2000.
sustaining the spirit
Reflections for a Service of Confession and Repentance for Racism
Ralph Williams
Two churches separated by race long ago reach out to one another.
columns
you’re welcome!
“The Play’s the Thing...”
Clergy Dramatize the Church Conflict Over Homosexuality
Ron Skidmore
leadership
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Matt Smucker
Being ordained Brethren style.
editor’s word
Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye
This will be the final issue of Open Hands. Together we grieve the loss of a unique quarterly magazine that served as the voice of the Welcoming movement—individuals and congregations across many denominations seeking to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. There are a host of reasons for any publication’s demise, of course, but the main cause is financial.
Yet with what a vital theme for us to go out on: “Racism: Our Incomplete Rainbow.” The Open Hands Editorial Advisory Committee, whose work through our more than seventeen-year publishing history I hereby commend with gratitude, chose this theme as a result of issues raised during the first Welcoming movement gathering: Witness Our Welcome, WOW 2000.
An incident occurred at WOW 2000 which made some question how truly welcoming we were. Though invited, the offended party chose not to write of the episode, but it is well represented in Irene Monroe’s reflection on what happened. I personally asked Donn Crail to submit his own version of the experience, which I had heard from him some months later. Regardless of how one interprets “the incident,” Chris Paige, publisher of The Other Side, found it opened her eyes to something the Welcoming movement must recognize, and something we’ve tried to address in the other theme articles of this issue.
I believe the three opening pieces together remind us that, as with any justice issue, both intentions and perceptions must be taken into account. As the prophet Samuel was told when anointing a second leader for Israel, God looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). It’s the heart that intends and perceives. We must look into one another’s hearts to resolve our conflicts and find healing among us, the commonwealth of God in our midst. As a writer and an editor, I believe words help us do just that, thus the value of magazines like Open Hands.
Ending my four years as Open Hands editor with an issue focused on racism feels like coming full circle. It was the U.S. civil rights movement that prompted my involvement with justice issues and ultimately the LGBT justice movement. I became a Presbyterian because a local church was wholeheartedly addressing racism and the denomination had then recently produced a confession that focused on reconciliation, especially among races. As I resisted racial prejudice, I became aware of the prejudice that kept me from accepting my sexual identity. The courage of those who fought for racial equality challenged me to struggle for LGBT acceptance. The golden words of a deeply spiritual African American high school principal made me want to speak and write with such meaning and clarity and inspiration. And the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated that the church could be key to social change.
As I say goodbye with this issue, I acknowledge with gratitude Open Hands founders Mark Bowman and Beth Richardson, as well as Mary Jo Osterman, my immediate predecessor, and Jan Graves, who served as designer with both Mary Jo and then with me. I have such enormous respect for all of them. Jan became a special friend over the years (really, we were “sisters”!), and I will miss working with her.
I want to thank the Reconciling Congregation Program and the Reconciling Ministries Network, which, under the leadership of Mark Bowman and Marilyn Alexander, published Open Hands. RCP and RMN and their ecumenical partners (the Welcoming programs of other denominations) have made an outstanding contribution to the literature of the LGBT movement with their support.
I thank the writers, artists, and photographers who graciously and generously contributed content without compensation, the readers whose subscriptions and contributions and feedback kept us going, and the donors and advertisers who believed in Open Hands and an open church.
May God bless you all.
Chris Glaser
Editor, Open Hands
How It All Began
Background to the WOW 2000 Controversy
Donn Crail
Lest the reader think I’m nursing a grudge, the incident at the Witness Our Welcome (WOW) 2000 conference I describe here I put behind me soon after the conference ended, though I had found the experience “educative.” Learning of my experience some months afterward, the editor of Open Hands, Chris Glaser, asked me to share it so that any similar misunderstanding might be avoided at a future conference.
The “incident” occurred on the first evening of the conference during the opening plenary session. Someone on the platform was giving us a visual experience of how denominationally diverse we were by asking those from various denominations to stand, and then those from various regions of the country. Someone from the back hollered out that we should also ask “people of color” to stand. It was obvious that there were a number of racial groups present. Feeling the term in that situation lacked specificity I hollered out, “What color?” The intent was to show sensitivity to the racial diversity in the
room, but that was not its effect. An African American behind me said angrily “Any color but white.” Had the question come from an Asian or Hispanic person, it perhaps would not have been negatively perceived as it did coming from a “white-not of color” person.
I came very soon to regret having asked “What color?” the way one regrets having put one’s finger in a live socket. To some I apparently had been grossly “politically incorrect.” The next morning I came into the hall as someone who had requested the privilege of the floor was speaking about the “incident” the evening before. “What incident,” I wondered? Within a few minutes I realized that she was very angry and that it was because “someone” there had asked “What color?”
Immediately after she came off the platform I went to her to tell her that I was the one (I thought then that I was the only one though it turned out I was not) who had asked the question. I hoped of course that in explaining why I said those words the misunderstanding would be cleared up. What happened instead was that 8 or 10 persons pounced on me, shuttled me into the hallway because another program was starting, and began lecturing me about institutional racism (something I myself have preached and written about over many years).
I am accustomed to being attacked from the right but was woefully unready for this attack from the left—by persons I did not know (with one exception) and persons who did not know me. Defensively I tried to tell them something about myself; that I had hated racism virtually all my life, that I had been active in the Civil Rights movement, that I participated in the 1963 March on Washington, that I had directed an interracial ecumenical project in Roxbury, Massachusetts, that my sister-in-law and several of my nieces and nephews are African American, and that I live in an interracial neighborhood. All that was perceived as white defensiveness and seemed only to evoke rage from the two or three African Americans and several women who formed a semi-circle around me.
This issue came up either directly or obliquely at virtually every plenary session thereafter. Each time there was some inference to
“the thing that had happened” (though very few people knew exactly what that was), I found it increasingly painful to attend the large gatherings (though many of the speakers and panelists were excellent). Through the week the situation grew more and more surreal with a more general accusation being made that the gathering was “too white.” Since anyone who chose to attend would have been welcome it was difficult to know how those present were the cause of that. The planning group for the conference had been interracial, and the leadership of the conference was very interracial, including many African Americans in significant and high visibility roles.
Although it was said to me, and said from the platform—and applauded—that “intent” is not all that significant if the “output” offends, I believe that such an idea is at least worth some examination. Though I would certainly agree that persons must consider and take some responsibility for the effect of their words as well as the words themselves, I have a problem with that which places all the burden on what is said and removes all burden from how it is heard. Pentecost was an experience not only of how persons spoke but of how persons heard one another. If perception counts for more than reality, intent, or facts, then that will certainly work against GLBT persons, since their opponents often count their perception as being more significant than the reality of those persons’ lives. To quote my own denomination’s position on homosexuality as but one example: “It appears that what is really important is not what homosexuality is, but what we believe about it” (Statement of the 1978 PCUSA and 1979 PCUS General Assemblies).
In retrospect, I think that perhaps intentionally or unintentionally, the question, “what color?” was used as an opportunity to leverage the interracial issues to greater significance at this conference on homosexuality and ministry. I hope in the future any such issues will be brought forward directly. GLBT persons and their allies have enough on their plate without generating conflict among themselves.
Donn Crail is the executive director of the Lazarus Project, a ministry of reconciliation between the church and LGBT community in Los Angeles, supported by the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church.
Witnessing Our Unwelcome
Another Perspective on WOW 2000
Irene Monroe
Racism chokes the spiritual and political life out of a people and a movement.
The toll racism exacts up close and personal takes me back to the Witness Our Welcome (WOW) 2000 conference. WOW was a historic ecumenical gathering celebrating the nearly quarter century growth of the Welcoming Churches Movement, a movement of congregations and communities that have publicly declared they welcome persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities. To date there are over 1,500 Welcoming churches and ministries in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The conference was held at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb with nearly one thousand lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and heterosexual religious activists in attendance. And I was excited to be there.
WOW had every intention of being welcoming. It had an impressive list of racially diverse speakers. It had just about every Christian denomination represented. And unlike an era of lesbian and gay politics that once viewed bisexuals as “fence-sitters” who were believed not to want to give up their heterosexual privilege and transgenders who were seen as weak links in the struggle for sexual equality, both were enthusiastically invited. And they came.
But WOW’s intentions did not match its outcome. Two years later many of us are still reeling from its fallout. While the list of racially diverse speakers was impressive, the number of people of color in attendance at the conference was shockingly low. Was it because the number of people of color was so low that this racial event could happen?
On opening night the facilitator, Mary Hunt, a white lesbian, named all the oppressed groups included in WOW’s celebration of diversity. When the facilitator concluded her list and asked what groups had been omitted, an African American woman yelled out “people of color.” After several shouts from the African American woman, people of color and a few whites in the audience to get the
facilitator’s ear, several white men shouted in response, “What color?”
As a fractured group both politically and spiritually, African American LGBT people reside as resident aliens who too often live bifurcated existences in two communities. While our black skin ostensibly give us residence in our black communities, our sexual orientation, most times, evicts us from them. And while our sexual orientation gives us residence in the larger LGBT community, racism constantly thwarts any efforts for coalition building, which weakens the larger movement for sexual equality.
To be tangentially aligned to these communities dangles our lives precariously on a thin thread with the nagging feeling of marginalization, if not complete dispossession. For so long, African American LGBT people and other people of color have excoriated the white queer community for their flagrant forms of exclusion. But WOW purported to be different, and many African American LGBT people and other people of color came to WOW to be fully acknowledged.
How WOW handled the conflict was antithetical to its welcoming statement. “We know that at times our various traditions complement each other beautifully and at other times they crash against one another with great force. We acknowledge and ask God’s blessing on both the challenges and gifts of this ecumenical gathering. In fact, we celebrate the opportunities the challenges and crashes will bring. In our openness we will know God’s creative and renewing power...”
But the gifts and challenges people of color brought to WOW were dashed by the conference’s inability to address the racial incident immediately. Too many days went by and too much struggle ensued to be heard on the issue. The Rev. John L. Selders, Jr., an African American bisexual man and founder of Amistad UCC in Hartford, Connecticut attended WOW 2000 and said that “WOW called us black folks and people of color together to not have to systematically deal with race and their own racism. When we show up to these kind of events they think they have done their job and they
can just totally drop race off their map, and then they get surprised when we raise it.”
WOW as a Welcoming Church Movement must include the varied spiritual expressions of the life of LGBT church people where we embrace the image of the sacred in ourselves, the image of the sacred as ourselves, and the image of the sacred in each other.
WOW must also embrace the various hues, sexual orientations, classes, denominations, and gender identities of the sacred to become a “unified plurality” where no one is left behind and every voice is lifted up. WOW must ask itself the question, “How do we,” as Rev. Selders phrases it, “hold together our particularities in the holding of our commonality?
WOW 2003 is coming up and will people of color return?
“I would go back to WOW but it must look within itself by giving up the fear of having to give up power. These white organizations create environments that mirror themselves and they must move out of their comfort zones,” says Pam Selders, an African American heterosexual woman and Selders’ wife.
For WOW 2003 to truly be an ecumenical conference, it must shift its paradigm of leadership by becoming racially responsible. In order for WOW 2003 to be racially responsible it must be committed to anti- racist work not just in some things it does, but rather, committed to anti-racist work in all things it will do in putting together the upcoming conference.
Who WOW says it is as a movement must be followed up by its actions in order to be taken seriously, in order to have its own self- respect, and in order to invite people other than themselves into the fold. It is not enough for WOW to say it is a justice-seeking movement, and not be a justice-doing movement. White people who are involved with WOW must know that anti-racist work is intrinsically tied to their personal freedom as individuals and it is intrinsically tied to their collective freedom as an LGBT Christian movement.
For WOW 2003 to be racially responsible it must ask itself these three questions:
1. What would be the theological and spiritual fall-out for WOW 2003 should it not engage in anti-racist work?
2. What might be the ways WOW 2003 can incorporate anti-racist work as a priority in all its developmental stages of the conference?
3. And, what spiritual practices or ritual or liturgies should WOW 2003 develop in order to strengthen its commitment in doing anti-racist work?
Racism in the movement will separate us in this Herculean struggle against heterosexism that cannot afford to underutilize any of its people. The racial divide between white and LGBT people of color that existed in WOW 2000 cannot continue and must stop because we must understand that we all carry multiple identities into the world. The belief acted out among some of us that one oppression—sexual oppression—is greater than another person’s oppression only sets up a hierarchy of oppressions. This not only keeps us broken from one another, but it also keeps us fighting with one another.
We must also remember that as LGBT religious activists, our queerness is a prophetic call for justice not just in our home churches, but in Christian churches throughout the world. This calls us out at this specific time and place in history to unveil the parochial understanding of human sexuality. But it also calls us to challenge other structures and systems of domination by looking at the world from an involved, committed stance, in light of a faith that does justice. With this perspective, we must dismantle all discriminatory practices that truncate the full participation and livelihood of any people.
And our call, which we must take up for our own survival, is not self-appointed, but God given! As LGBT religious activists let us remember that the longing for God is also the longing for social justice. This moral and political imperative placed before us for WOW 2003 is to do anti-racist work. And consequently, this moral and political imperative will also show us that united we will stand as a prophetic movement or divided we will fall as a petty people.
Irene Monroe is a doctoral candidate in the Religion, Gender, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School. She has spoken in wide ranging settings, including Harvard, MIT, Brandeis, the American Academy of Religion, Outwrite, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. We thank her for this final contribution as Open Hands’ Columnist of the Year 2002.
White Privilege
The Challenge of the WOW Incident
Chris Paige
I have a lot of experience talking about what it means to be a woman and a lesbian and a queer in a sexually oppressive culture. I’ve wrestled quite a bit with understanding my own marginalization. But as a white person in a racist society, I have almost no experience talking about what it means to be white. That’s something about being privileged that’s really different from being marginalized. By and large, I just don’t notice my privilege. That’s part of the privilege: being able to take my identity for granted without any self-examination.
When I talk about being marginalized, it’s empowering—finding my voice, standing up to be counted, coming out of the silence. But when I talk about being privileged, it’s unsettling and scary in a very different way. It’s one thing to say that I (or another marginalized person) deserves better. It’s somehow quite different to talk about how I (or another person of privilege) somehow deserves less. Or that we have a responsibility to actively deal with our privilege. Somehow liberation is just a lot more romantic than accountability.
In the last 30 years, the language of marginalization has increasingly become a part of mainstream white American culture, in ways that I suspect it hadn’t been before. In places like church, we talk pretty comfortably about the disenfranchised, the poor, the oppressed, prejudice, discrimination, stereotypes, protests, press conferences, movements, civil rights, equality, solidarity, and
struggling for justice. There’s quite an extensive vocabulary of marginalization and liberation.
Yet when I begin to reflect on white privilege instead of just racial oppression, I lose my bearings quite quickly. I barely have any vocabulary to work with. I mean, let’s see, there’s: privilege, responsibility, accountability, guilt. My concern for racial equality is still there. But all of a sudden, I don’t know where I am or how to find my way around any more. I know almost nothing about how racism and white privilege have affected and shaped my life, my story, my self image, my view of the world. I just don’t have the words or the understanding.
Shifting my focus to my own white privilege instead of the racial oppression of others definitely moves me into unfamiliar territory. But my experience at the WOW conference helped me to make that shift—out of the familiar and into the wilderness where I have begun to find new vision.
On the opening night of the WOW conference, there was a racial incident during an ice-breaker. It was an incident that most of us—most of us white folks, that is—hardly noticed. No one used the "N" word or any other racial slur. There was no coercive racial segregation. And no physical violence. It was "just" the silence of certain voices being ignored.
Now, I was vaguely aware of it when it happened. Mostly through a sense of discomfort that something was a little out of whack. An awareness of tension in the room. Tension that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And that I didn’t quite know how to name or address. I noticed the tension, but it didn’t rise into my consciousness as something in need of follow-up in any way.
About 36 hours later, on the morning of the third day, a young woman took the microphone. Apparently, she had lobbied the organizers hard to get this 5 minutes to express her grief about that first night and the conference so far, and it had taken a day and a half for them to fit her in. Squeezed her in. Into those distracted minutes between breakfast and morning worship when people are mingling and eating and waking up and arriving late.
In those 5 minutes that she was given, she expressed her sense of alienation. She talked about her pain and frustration in attending the conference as one of a handful of people of color, surrounded by an overwhelming majority of white people. And as she expressed her experience, she was actively interrupted and confronted by white people from the audience.
She proceeded to issue an invitation to further dialogue at a caucus time later that day. But when she left the stage, she was followed. By more white people. White people who wanted to argue with her and confront her and defend themselves and assert their innocence. And apparently many or most of the people of color attending also followed her out of the main event space. People of color, who, I suspect, didn’t feel safe or supported or heard by their white sisters and brothers in the "welcoming" movement.
Of course, I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice them leave. You see, I’d been one of the white people in the crowd clapping for her. We gave her a standing ovation, in appreciation of her courage, I think. Or perhaps because we’ve been well trained that you clap after seeing a good performance.
I think it might have been easier to react as if it were a performance –easier than it would be to sit in the emotional tension and confusion of what had just happened. It would have been harder to sit in the dissonance and the conflict. The conflict between our own self-understandings as good white liberal church activists and this woman’s bold assertion of a deep racial divide between and among us.
So, after we clapped, I found my seat, finished the orange juice I’d carried in from breakfast, tried to let go of the discomfort, and directed my attention to the worship leader and the singing of songs. I wanted to get back to where I knew my way around. We sang nice multicultural songs with Hawai’ian or Native American words—I can’t remember which anymore, but it felt good to be back in familiar territory and able to breathe again, leaving the wilderness of the tension and conflict behind.
I certainly didn’t consciously think to myself "Oh good, the people of color have left. Now I can relax and enjoy what I came here for." But that is what happened. It was not my intention to disregard or patronize or minimize this woman’s sharing and the experience she was offering for our consideration. But that is what happened.
Later in the day, I listened in the dialogue time to which she had invited us, a relatively small group. I learned that many if not most of the people of color had left the room after that early morning moment. Some had spent quite some time in confrontation in the outer hallway, with the white folks who were arguing with their experience—all while I was back in the conference hall singing multicultural hymns and feeling comfortable again.
And maybe some others went out and got coffee someplace where they could talk freely, without white arguments, white defenses, and white deflections—probably while I was sitting in a plenary session nodding my head that yes, we must fight not only against heterosexism, but also against racism and other forms of oppression. And maybe some went to their rooms to cry, or scream, or to pack their bags to leave for home. Because I think that’s what I might have wanted to do in their place. I don’t actually know what they did while I sank back into the oblivion of my white privilege. And I don’t deserve to know. What matters to me, is that I didn’t notice. I couldn’t see it. Wouldn’t see it. Somehow, I’d learned not to see it. And the little bit that I did notice, I sat through in silence. I tried hard to put it behind me. It was both a public silence and a private silence. I tried not to think about it. And I tried not to feel about it.
An emotionally charged disconnect over race had occurred and been publicly acknowledged. The acknowledgment of that experience had been resisted, invalidated, patronized, and essentially sent from the room. And I hardly noticed. Even though it was right there in front of me. I went on with the day’s events without questioning what I had experienced, why it felt awkward, or why I had no framework for understanding it.
I was missing something—only I didn’t even know it. I didn’t know enough to go looking for healing. It took someone else’s invitation for the process to begin. And that healing process finally
began when someone took my hand and walked with me away from my comfort zone, and started pointing things out to me—started pointing out the hard realities all around me that I had learned to ignore.
And it was confusing. I’m still not sure what all I’m seeing from day to day, but it’s uncomfortable and strange. I’m beginning to see my own white privilege and a deep, deep racial divide. And it’s really unnerving to be this far from the familiar, and aware of such a need for healing.
The hard thing about being white is that we just don’t notice it. My vocabulary for understanding privilege is finally starting to grow. Although I have to admit, it’s still something of a mess to sort through. It includes words like: silence, denial, my best intentions, silence, oblivious, numb, clinging to my innocence, silence, disconnected, resistance, silence, silence, silence.
I’m beginning to see the things I’ve learned not to notice, and to feel the things I’ve learned not to feel. Racism is an integral part of my life, clouding and obscuring my vision on a daily basis, preventing me from seeing the world clearly. But I’ve started a new journey. A new coming out journey. Another journey of following Jesus and relying on God’s grace and my companions on the journey, instead of my own wisdom as I seek healing and liberation. I’d like to invite you to join me in this journey. In my opinion, the biggest weakness of the LGBT welcoming movement today is the dominance of white privilege within it. I’d like to invite us to become as well educated and outspoken about racism as we are about heterosexism.
We need to come out about racism. We need to find the words to talk about it—about how it looks in the 21st century and about how it looks in our own lives. We need to talk openly and vulnerably with one another, to talk honestly and lovingly with each other. We need to look deep and hard at ourselves. And if we do, it will change us. It will definitely take us out of our comfort zones, but that’s where Jesus is waiting for us.
Chris Paige is an elder at Tabernacle United Church in Philadelphia and publisher of The Other Side magazine (www.theotherside.org). This article was adapted from a sermon preached April 22, 2001 to her church, a federated Presbyterian and United Church of Christ congregation.
Born to Belong
Mab Segrest
Copyright © 2002 by Mab Segrest. All rights reserved.
Excerpted by Open Hands with permission from the prologue to her new book, Born To Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2002). We heartily recommend the full book to our readers!
I was born into segregation in Birmingham, Alabama on a late afternoon in February, 1949—four years after the end of World War II, when my father had returned home from a German prison camp, and five years before the U.S. Supreme Court would issue Brown vs. Board of Education, declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. I was born into a culture in which race colored everything, into a town saturated with anxiety and anger, with fear and hope of Jim Crow dying. Nor did that culture yet have public language for my deepest impulses, which twenty years later I would recognize in the word lesbian. At fifty-something, I am writing this book of travels, on the track of capitalism and white supremacy and heterosexism and misogyny. I am trying to get them in my sights from multiple locations to a point of convergence as yet beyond our ken, while a rampant and unchecked “free market” brutally reshapes the globe. To put it differently, I am trying to peel the onion: to find beneath the political, the economic, and the psychological, the spiritual questions that open into emptiness.
…
I began the travels recorded [in the book] in 1995, heading out to Beijing to the largest gathering of women in the history of the world, then to Atlanta to write an article on gentrification and the 1996 Olympics, to Memphis for the twentieth anniversary of Elvis’ death, to Honolulu for a gathering on linking queer and sovereignty struggles, to Johannesburg and Harare for the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, and back and forth to visit my brother Tim, who was dying of colon cancer. It was a serendipitous assortment of destinations, to which I set off on a variety of missions–to attend conferences, on contract to write stories, to remain faithful and say goodbye.
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My meditations on these journeys involving memory at a moment of danger are quirky and tentative efforts at a hard-won and fluctuating faith: that neither I, nor you, are born to segregation, separation, domination, subordination, alienation, isolation, ownership, competition, or narrow self-interest. The phrase that most resonates for me in this enterprise is the translation of a South African term, ubuntu, which I came upon like a revelation in a Delta Airlines magazine article on Nelson Mandela. Ubuntu translates as “born to belonging.” It’s a simple notion: we are all born to belonging, and we know ourselves as humans in just and mutual relationship to one another. It makes more sense to me as a political self-description than the term queer. It also offers a perspective from which to examine other concepts and practices, such as democracy or the free market. And what might our economic and political systems be like if they were based on an assumption of belonging?
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At the center of my inquiry is the question of soul, or spirit, and justice.
…
Everyone should have the luxury, the time and space, to think about what they do. And everyone should realize that their ideas have effects that can be tested in concrete situations. What we have more often now is a truncated process. We have on the one hand academics theorizing in universities and think tanks—theories that breed more theories; and on the other community organizers and advocates acting in non-profit organizations, often without resources for adequate reflection. Freire points the way to an engaged action—acting and reflecting as an integral, an essential component, not only of what we do, but of who we are (our ontology), how we know (our epistemology) and of how we act from within and also to shift our reality (our metaphysics). This praxis engages us at the deepest, spiritual level of meaning in our lives, of how we constitute our humanity, of what my friend Marta calls our “I AM-ness.” Then there emerges what I am calling a praxis of belonging that is both a political and a spiritual practice.
This is the biblical mandate to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. It is the tradition from the Torah of tikkun olam, the completion of a just world or by other translations repair of a tattered world. It is what Jesus meant when he said “love your neighbor.”
Indians brought down the British empire with the soul-power of satyagraha. It is the freedom to which the philosopher Sartre, also part of the French resistance to German fascism, said we are condemned. It is the “creative will” of Martin Luther King, Jr., that enables people to hew from a mountain of despair a stone of hope. It is Audre Lorde’s recalling for us the erotic power of our work when it engages our deepest desires. It is what Adrienne Rich meant when she said we must find an end to suffering. It is Alice Walker’s reminder that anything we love can be saved. It is the engaged Buddhism of monks and nuns who challenged French then U.S. imperialist wars, some of them maintaining their zazen postures even as they burned themselves to death in protest. “Once there is seeing there must be acting,” Thich Nhat Hahn explains. “Otherwise, what’s the use of seeing?”
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What’s at stake? Let me put it another way. Do you, dear reader, ever feel alienated? Scared? Anxious? Mistrustful? That you don’t really belong? Do you have such a profound distaste for that to which you belong that you prefer exile? Have you gone into some form of internal exile already? Do you ever find yourself reenacting those very behaviors that you deplore, that you have set your life to change? Do you ever despair that you have internalized stereotypes about yourself so deeply that they seem to have infected your very soul? Did you ever think that those feelings might be an effect of living in a racist system, a misogynist system, a heterosexist system, a class system, a colonial system shaped for centuries by domination, by masters looking for slaves?
Deep questions. I think many times we are so lost that we don’t even know it.
…
From my thirteenth year, there are two moments that return. I was coming home for lunch. We had been studying atoms, neutrons, protons, electrons—matter as maya, an illusion of solidity when all is space and energy. My foot on the top step, my hand on the screen door’s handle. I turned my head to the right, Mrs. Fort’s yard beyond the bamboo, oak leaves still lush from summer, azalea bushes, shades and depths of green. Suddenly none of it was familiar but as if in motion. I saw all the whirring molecules, heard a low oohhmmm. My eyes widened, I breathed in. It was gone. I turned my head back, opened the door, and went inside.
That moment’s vision of molecules in grass and leaves came to me after and because I had recently also finally seen white supremacy as a structure that had shaped me. I saw it because I was looking past its limits to black children moving freely in my segregated school. Alabama, 1963. Integration, it was rightly called. How many times have I circled back to that moment lying on my stomach in the grass, looking out through the legs of policemen to the black children integrating “my” school. That moment something shifted: the crack in the cosmic egg, sensation equally delight and terror. I saw that I saw it, the violent limitations of my white culture, and knew that I knew. With that knowledge came a sudden surge: what else was possible?
…
Here at the beginning of a new century, we are compelled, as Gramsci was, to re-envision transformative work for justice out of any narrow determinisms into which it has been cast. … Those of us who know ourselves perhaps do not yet have language to explain clearly that what we call justice is the door to wider realities, fuller modes of being. Marx was wrong. All politics, ultimately, is also metaphysics, matter and energy constantly shifting forms.
What does it mean to be a materialist, anyway, after twentieth-century science has shown matter and energy are interchangeable and matter itself in its subatomic forms is either waves or empty space or both? “The arc of a moral universe is long,” said Martin Luther King, drawing on Einstein, “but it bends towards justice.”
Mab Segrest teaches at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Her third book, Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice, was published this past summer from Rutgers Press.
Teaching the Roots of Racism
A Guide for Discussion
Mab Segrest
(Extrapolated by Open Hands from her notes for a plenary workshop entitled, “The Prophetic Voice and the Consciousness of History: 500 Years of Colonialism,” led by Mab Segrest during the gathering of That All May Freely Serve, Stony Point, New York, April 6, 2002. Copyright 2002 © Mab Segrest. All rights reserved.)
“One of the main premises…is an understanding of colonization. We might have used the word oppression. But we use the language of colonization because it brings to mind a picture of one people invading another and systematically taking over—economically, culturally, racially, sexually. Using this notion of colonization—the systematic takeover of another—we have applied it to sexuality and have explored the notion that sexuality, like race and economic class, is both a tool of colonization and has been colonized itself.” (From the Spirit of the Lakes newsletter, Currents, Vol. 12, #2).
In colonialism, all of the resources of the colony were/are sent to the colonizing/dominant country for use in their development. What is the result? Economically, patterns of permanent poverty and underdevelopment; emotionally/spiritually: not being able to live for or as oneself, a sense of huge constraint by systems we did not put in place; a loss of ourselves. How did this come about?
(The leader may want to chart a timeline for the group, beginning with 1500 and ending with the present year. A simple drawing of a world map may also help your group in visualizing the relationships of continents and nations described here.)
Phase One:
The Genocide of Indigenous People and the Enslavement of Africans
1492
“Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” “discovering” a “new world” in a search for trade routes to India. Spain and Portugal became the first two European countries to colonize Latin America and the Caribbean. Columbus’ journals reveal the colonizer’s mentality that he brought to
these shores: (1) he thought it remarkable that people indigenous to this new territory had no private property, and took it as a sign of their childishness; (2) he remarked on how beautiful their bodies were and concluded, “they would make good servants.”
Questions How did Columbus’s initial responses indicate how colonialism would work? Issues to point out: Private ownership was crucial in the colonizing process. For colonizers to extract the most profit for the “mother” country, they needed to own the land and its resources, and have a source of exploitable labor. Indigenous people were in the way of this scheme, because they had a different, spiritual relationship to land.
1500s
The beginning of the slave trade in the Caribbean. By 1650, the indigenous population of the area Spain and Portugal controlled shrank from 66 million to 3.5 million people, due to diseases and people being worked to death in silver mines. The silver sent back to Europe would be used to finance the beginnings of industrialism. One Jesuit priest remarked, “Who could have know that so many people would have died in so short a time.”
Questions How could they have known? Did they care? What happens to body/mind/spirit when some bodies are worked to death?
Bartoleme de las Casas campaigned to protect indigenous people, arguing that they had souls, part of a debate within the Catholic church on this question. He suggested, given the huge death tolls of indigenous people, that colonizers bring in Africans as slaves instead. Slave labor did not become profitable in the “new world,” however, until Europeans began putting sugar in coffee and cocoa, raising the price of commodities of sugar, coffee beans, and chocolate being grown on plantations in the Americas.
Questions What was the relationship of addictive substances (coffee & sugar, later tobacco as the main cash crop in Virginia) to the development of slavery? What implications are there for us today in terms of our relationship to addictive substances such as tobacco,
alcohol, sugar, cocaine? What is the impact on our communities when addiction is profitable?
Phase Two
Beginnings of Colonialism in the United States
1619
The first Africans are brought as slaves to Virginia (the first slaves in the English colonies). The English came to the Atlantic coast as part of their colonizing process. In the first several decades of slavery, it emerged in Virginia in its American form: lifetime servitude, inherited status, and dehumanizing attitudes and ideas about Africans as justification. Rape and sexual violence were characteristic of the treatment of Africans on plantations, with plantation owners asserting almost total control. There was no recognition of marriage or custody rights for enslaved people, whose families were often divided when members were sold to other owners.
Questions What did such a system of domination and concentrated power do to mind/body/spirit? To definitions of the family? Is there a difference in the legal family, the theological family, the biological family, and the emotional family?
1664
The Virginia legislature debated whether Africans had souls. They decided that they did but could/should still be enslaved. For both indigenous people and Africans, the alternative to being considered “human” was to be considered “animal,” including being more and wrongly sexual.
Questions How was the church complicit in colonialism? Should any religious institution have the right to decide who is human? What does slavery—one person and group owning another—do to mind/body/spirit?
1679
Bacon’s Rebellion was an uprising of slaves and poor whites in Virginia against the white plantation elite. It was repressed, and showed the danger of cross-racial class alliances. Slave owners
began to stress a common European identity, and the term for Europeans in Virginia shifted from “free” or “Christian” to “white.”
Questions What was the cost to poor white people of bonding around power and oppression? What are methods today that “divide and conquer” oppressed people?
Phase Three
Manifest Destiny of the New Country
1776-89
The English colonies break from England, the “mother” country, resenting that their resources are being used for England. “No taxation without representation” was part of the issue. Keeping the benefits of colonial processes on American shores was another. The Declaration of Independence named “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable rights. The U.S. Constitution did not abolish slavery and designated African slaves as 3/5 human for the purpose of determining propertied white male votes.
1787
Captain James Cook “discovers” Hawai’i.
1803
The US purchase of the Louisiana territory opened up the South and West. Settlers pushed West, believing that it was their destiny to conquer and colonize the continent. Thus began the long series of wars with Indian nations and broken treaties that ended at Wounded Knee in 1890.
1808
The international slave trade was abolished.
1830
Abolition struggles intensified. The tension between slave labor and “free”/wage labor heightened as settlers spread west.
1832
The removal of Southern Indians began in President Andrew Jackson’s administration.
1845-48
The U.S. went to war with Mexico, winning and claiming the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
1848
In Hawai’i, colonizers instituted the Mahele, or division. Land was privatized, divided up into parcels for individual ownership, dismembering the ‘aina and the dislocation of Kanaka Maoli people. Promoted and designed by the missionaries, white ruling families claimed 4.2 million acres of the island, and indigenous Hawai’ians were forced into labor on the growing plantations. Privatization of the land paralleled privatization of the body. Heterosexual marriage was being enforced by the church and displaced more fluid expressions of sexuality and more diverse ways of partnering.
1850
The Gold Rush in California brings more settlers, including immigrants from China fleeing destabilization of China, whose markets and resources were being forced open by European powers.
Phase Four
Reasserting Control
1860-65
The slave states secede, and the Union wins the battle of slave v wage labor, industrial v agricultural system, North v South. The 13th amendment abolish slavery; the 14th guarantees that “life, liberty and property” not be taken without “due process of law, that people born in the U.S. are citizens, and that the Bill of Rights applies to the states. The 15th amendment protects the vote.
1893
The Hawai’ian monarchy is overthrown by thirteen white planter elite, backed by United States troops. They imprisoned Queen Lili’uokalani in the Iolani Palace. The Blount Report, by Special Investigator James Blount sent by President Cleveland, condemns the illegality of the overthrow. Cleveland calls for a restoration of legitimate government that never happens. The indigenous resistance
movement intensifies, and in 1897 95% of Kanaka Maoli sign a petition resisting annexation.
1898
Having completed its “manifest destiny” by taking over all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific, the United States wins a war with Spain and takes over Hawai’i, Cuba, the Phillipines, and Guam.
1900
After a brief period of Reconstruction in the South, whites reassert control through violence and fraud, establishing segregation (“Jim Crow”) and voter disenfranchisement. The Dawes Severalty Act divides land on reservations into individual parcels of “private property” more easily bought or stolen. Asian immigrants complete the transcontinental railroad. Industrialism and finance capital create huge divisions of wealth and poverty, cycles of boom and bust. Corporations are granted the status of “bodies” under the 14th amendment, at a time when black and brown bodies/souls/spirits are losing the rights gained in the years after the Civil War.
Questions What is the relationship of capitalism to racism during this period? Should corporations be considered bodies in legal terms?
Phase Five
Decolonizing and Recolonizing in the 20th Century
The first half of the twentieth century brought a surge of movements in European colonies for independence. Europe controlled 80% of the globe by 1913, and power conflicts among European nations caused two world wars. Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence was one such anti-colonial movement. The struggle of the Vietnamese was another. In 1919, with the Russian Revolution, Russia emerged as a large Communist counterforce to European imperialism and capitalism. The “Cold War” that erupted between capitalist and communist—or “First” and “Second”—worlds, brought “Third World” countries into its conflict. The War in Vietnam was a major example of this tendency.
Newly independent countries had few economic resources and were brought back into neo-colonial relationships with the developed world through loans. The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement in the South, and was fueled by the example and energy of liberation movements all over the globe. The freedom movements of “people of color” helped to ignite a “second wave” of feminism, gay/lesbian liberation movements, and the disabled at a time when US products faced increasing competition from overseas markets. Faced with falling profits, increasingly large and powerful corporations decided to cut production costs by attacking labor and lowering wages and environmental standards. This lead to huge numbers of corporate mergers, “downsized” workforces, and factories automating or moving overseas for climates “friendlier” to business. A huge increase in deficit spending by the Reagan administration in the 1980s and a huge increase in the military budget were co-factors. The fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s brought the emergence of “globalization,” the freedom of capital to move across borders.
Costs of Colonization:
A More Intimate Look
Invite your group to spend time looking at the following particularly powerful passage that shows on many levels the cost of colonization and racism to people caught up in its systems. What happens to the body/mind/spirit as a result of colonization, the facilitator can ask again, or recap.
A summary: extreme systems of control, personal and social alienation, huge “boundary” violations, addictive patterns of consumption; splits in which privileged groups (men, the rich, white people, heterosexuals) are seen as having more “mind” or “spirit” and oppressed groups are seen as being primarily, or only bodies; extremes of wealth and poverty; economic “development” dependent on patterns of deliberate “underdevelopment.”
Divide the group into pairs and give each pair a copy of the paragraph below. Explain that it is taken from Mary Boykin Chestnut’s Diary from
Dixie, civil war diaries written by a white upper-class woman whose husband was a Vice President of the Confederacy.
Be sure people understand the context: The scene is a slave auction, where Chestnut witnesses the grief of an African enslaved woman whose husband and children have just been sold to another slave owner, guaranteeing their separation.
Ask each pair to spend 10 minutes reading and thinking about the quote together. What does it show about the cost of racism and colonialism to the black woman? The white woman?
Have the group come back together, and discuss the responses. You can work through the paragraph one sentence at a time, or ask each group to report what it made of the quotation.
“A mad woman taken from her husband and children. Of course she was mad, or she would not have given her grief words in that public place. Her keepers were along. What she said was rational enough, pathetic, at times heart-rending. It excited me so much I quietly took opium. It enables me to retain every particle of mind or sense or brains and so quietens my nerves that I can calmly reason and take rational views of things otherwise maddening.”
Questions Why is the woman “mad” (crazy, or angry, or both?)? What view of sanity does Chestnut have? Does she associate the madness with the loss of her family, or with her public grief? (It seems to be the latter). What is Chestnut’s spontaneous response? Why does her response—her sympathy and “excitement”—scare her? What does she do then, why opium? What are the constraints or limits that Chestnut is under as a woman? Is there a gender element to her fear of expressing herself in public? A class element?
What happens to her under the influence of opium? Is it a failure of courage on her part? What is the difference in “mind,” “sense,” and “brains”? What is the effect of a rationality that is split from feeling and from sensation? What is the effect of taking rational views of situations of extreme oppression and pain? What might she have
done instead of taking opium? (Draw out a range of responses, small and larger). In general, acknowledge the extreme system of domination and control that both women were operating under but assert that each of us in whatever situation still has responsibility for our own humanity, and to uphold the humanity of others.
Now bring the discussion to the present. How are we like the women in this drama? When have we had people numb themselves to our pain? When have we numbed ourselves to theirs? Ask for examples of such moments, and how participants responded. Emphasize the political importance of action in such moments, and the spiritual importance of such action. What spiritual resources do people have to keep them from turning away from pain and exploitation, to strengthen their resolve and courage to act? How might the group help each other with/in/through such moments?
Find a way appropriate to your group to close your gathering ritually, such as, standing or praying in a circle, or singing a song, or a ritual created or reinterpreted specifically for this theme.
Mab Segrest is a writer, teacher, and organizer who lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has been active in anti-racist, feminist, lesbian/gay and economic justice movements for more than 20 years. Her second book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, narrates her work against Klan and neo-Nazi movements in the 1980s. She teaches at Duke University. (For more, see her other article in this issue, “Born to Belong.”)
The Way Things Were
Reflecting on the Life of Bayard Rustin
Lila Fraizer
Before Racism Was Named
Bayard Rustin spent his life fighting racism, though that term was not in use in the early days of the struggle. People talked about segregation, discrimination, prejudice, bigotry. Rustin believed in integration. Being raised in a Quaker home he made a commitment to nonviolence. His grandmother, who raised him, influenced his life more than anyone or anything. She taught her family that God loves everyone, that all people must be treated with love and respect no matter who they are, and that nonviolence is the only way to fight for one’s causes. These Quaker beliefs provided the foundation for everything he did. Bayard grew up feeling loved and accepted and secure, even when, in sixth grade, he learned his “Ma and Pa” were, in reality, his grandparents.
As a child Bayard didn’t understand what lynchings were until his grandmother explained that even though no lynchings occurred in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, they occurred often in the South. But no one called it racism. At Gay Street Elementary School, Bayard learned about slavery, the efforts by some to educate the slaves, and by others to free the slaves. His class visited stops on the Underground Railroad in his area.
After Reconstruction blacks were often forced to work in agriculture. As World War I ended these same farm workers could no longer find jobs on farms so they moved north to look for work in industrial plants. This “great migration” led families to the Rustin home where Bayard and other family members had to give up their beds for travelers. He may not have understood at the time, but he was living with racism on a grand scale.
The welcome mat was always out at the Rustin home, whether for farm workers or famous persons traveling where no hotels accepted Negroes (the proper term then). As a child, Bayard met W. E. B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, James Weldon Johnson. He probably heard conversations about the segregationist policies toward Negroes in the United States. With his grandmother’s example how could he not be aware of racism and the need to fight it?
Learning About Prejudice
At age 16 Rustin decided to work for the election of Al Smith for president. He soon learned of the prejudices against Roman Catholics.
At the integrated West Chester High School, segregation touched him personally. Bayard loved music. Well liked by his classmates, they thought he had the best tenor voice in town. And his prowess as an offensive lineman on the football team added to his popularity. Thus he was successful instigating a revolt during an away game—the black players refused to play unless they were pulled out of their Jim Crow accommodations and moved in with their white teammates. In winter when the team went to the YMCA for extra practice, Bayard couldn’t join them. No Negroes allowed! When they went to the movies Bayard, assigned to the “Jim Crow” balcony, resented not being able to sit with his white friends. One time he decided to defy the rule, and this resulted in his first arrest. At a lunch counter Bayard could buy a sandwich and then eat it outside. Otherwise he would have been thrown out.
Bayard’s friends were welcome in his home but it was not reciprocal. One special friend would not go in Bayard’s home either because of his family’s rules, so they studied together in the library each evening. Bayard received top grades and graduated with honors as valedictorian of the class of 1932. He had hoped for a recommendation for a scholarship. That didn’t happen. This probably hurt more than the discrimination at the lunch counters, the movies, and the YMCA.
Through his grandmother’s efforts Bayard received a music scholarship to Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, an African Methodist Episcopal school. However, his desire to speak up for his classmates in the form of a protest against the bad food served in the dorm caused him to lose his scholarship during his second year. (Some biographers have questioned if Bayard’ s recognition of his homosexuality while at Wilberforce created the loss of scholarship funds.) He once said he lost his scholarship because he refused to join the ROTC.
He transferred to Cheyney State Teachers College, a Quaker school. He sang in the choir and was a member of the debate team, but got expelled after two and a half years. Again questions arise as to the cause
of his dismissal—was it his homosexuality? These colleges were both church supported. Denominational schools in the late 30's were certainly not welcoming, let alone affirming.
In the spring of 1937 Bayard Rustin moved to Harlem to live with his aunt. In Harlem he found acceptance for his Quaker beliefs, his pacifism, his nonviolent stance, as well as his race and his homosexuality. Here a whole new world opened up for him. He attended City College night school. As a member of the Young Communist League, Bayard worked on the school newspaper and traveled the state organizing YCL cells. But in 1941, when the YCL changed its emphasis, he quit the Communist party. He dropped out of school to pursue political activities. He found a job with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) as Youth Secretary. He wrote and produced an Interracial Primer, ways whites could help advance the cause of black equality, which included addressing blacks with respect, and the media paying equal attention to the race of accused criminals. (Blacks were identified by race, whites weren’t).
“I am fortified by truth, justice, and Christ.”
When most Americans thought of “us and them,” Bayard’s worldview centered on anyone being discriminated against. The year 1942 found him in California to protect the land holdings of Japanese Americans being interred.
Once, in 1942, when traveling from Louisville to Nashville, he decided to sit in the front of the bus. Refusing the driver’ s request to move back at each stop, thirteen miles out from Nashville the police stopped the bus and ordered Rustin to move. In his own words Rustin said, “As I would not move they began to beat me about the head and shoulders. I forced myself to be still and wait for their kicks.” He said to them, “There is no need to beat me, I am not resisting you.”
When a police officer asked why he wasn’t scared, Rustin replied, “ I am fortified by truth, justice, and Christ. There’ s no need for me to fear.” The district attorney, upon hearing his story, addressed him as “Mister” and released him. (In those days in the South, whites generally resisted calling black men “mister.”) Rustin believed his release and good treatment in the D.A.’ s office were due to his lack of resistance. Over and over he stated his philosophy that refusal to respond with fear or anger had a disarming
effect.
Rustin went to prison in 1943 as a conscientious objector. He soon organized the prisoners against censorship of the books they were allowed to read. He was also instrumental in integrating the mess hall. He believed in integration, even in prison!
Upon his release from prison, in the fall of 1945, Rustin traveled for the American Friends Service Committee speaking about his prison experience as a conscientious objector. His speaking abilities were outstanding. His belief in nonviolence never wavered. Rustin talked about “white privilege” long before that term came into general usage. Racism was always there, a part of his life, in the forms of discrimination and segregation.
After the U.S. Supreme Court Morgan Decision came down in 1946 declaring segregation on interstate travel unconstitutional, Bayard Rustin and George Houser, co-secretaries for Race Relations of FOR, knew the Morgan Decision needed to be tested. They convinced the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as well as FOR to sponsor what they called the Journey of Reconciliation. Rustin and Houser determined it was not safe to travel in the deep South, so a plan to travel from Washington, D.C. to Tennessee and back to Washington emerged. Cooperation from the NAACP gave them recourse to lawyers along the way. Rustin and Houser set up speaking engagements at NAACP meetings, colleges, and churches along the way.
The two of them traveled the route complying with the Jim Crow laws in order to make the arrangements for the real test. Sixteen men volunteered for that test, eight blacks and eight whites. Two days of training included role-playing and other techniques to help them remain nonviolent. On April 9, 1947, in Washington, D.C., the sixteen men boarded two buses, one Greyhound, one Trailways, sitting in prearranged seats. No incidents occurred between Washington and Petersburg, Virginia. From Petersburg on, several times riders were arrested and most simply charged a fine. However, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, things got scary when cab drivers made threats and four participants were arrested. Rescue came from a local pastor, who arranged to get the men to Greensboro by private cars, where they were scheduled to speak that evening.
When the cases came to court the conviction meant a fine or 30 days on a chain gang. One, a college student, paid his fine so he could get back to school. The other three, including Rustin, hoped to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. It didn’t happen. In 1949 they ended up in prison, Rustin in segregated Roxboro Prison in North Carolina.
Rustin had just turned 37 and he was not only in prison, but on a chain gang. He kept notes, and, upon his release 22 days later (shortened for good behavior), he wrote about the conditions on a chain gang. The piece, serialized in the New York Post, led to reform and the end of chain gangs for prisoners in North Carolina.
The 50's may have been the most explosive decade in Rustin’ s life. In 1950 he worked with Peacemakers, a consortium cosponsored by FOR, War Resisters League, the Catholic Worker Movement, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They were zealous for unilateral disarmament. Rustin proposed a week-long Fast for Peace as a protest against building nuclear weapons and American involvement in the Korean War. Though it had no effect on policy it brought public attention to pacifists and their willingness to put themselves at risk for their beliefs.
All This and Homosexuality, Too
Early in 1953, Bayard Rustin had just finished a speech at the Pasadena Athletic Club about political developments in West Africa when two young men approached and invited him to a party. Police investigating a parked car near Rustin’ s hotel discovered him in sexual acts with the two young men and arrested them on morals charges. Though he never tried to hide his homosexuality, Rustin was generally discreet about his sexual activity. He felt he had a right to be who and what he was even though homosexual activity was a considered a crime. But he wondered, did these two young men just happen to be at the place where he spoke? Did the police just happen to be walking by the parked car? Were these merely coincidences? Was this a “gay” thing, racism, or just two cops doing their duty? Rustin made a wrong decision, he would have to pay for it, and so would his fellow FOR workers. Bayard’s resignation came with a promise to A. J. Muste, friend and leader of FOR, to seek treatment for his “condition.”
The War Resisters League recruited Rustin in the summer of 1953 as
executive secretary (chief program officer), and he held that position for 12 years. He allied WRL with the international crusade against nuclear weapons, bolstered its relationship with the civil rights movement, and associated it with the African struggles.
The American Friends Service Committee assigned a group in 1954 to shape a pacifist stance toward the nuclear arms race and threat of American-Soviet confrontation. Meeting for one week, they produced “Speak Truth to Power.” Rustin asked that his name not be listed with the other writers’ names because of the bad publicity it might cause.
Bayard claimed that he and his partner “colonized” the apartment they rented on West 107th Street, he being the only black tenant. When the super objected, Bayard’s partner reminded him that the lease allowed a roommate of his choice.
Advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.
Rustin was urged in 1956 to go to Montgomery, Alabama, as an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., who was relatively new to Gandhi’ s philosophy and technique. The War Resisters League gave Bayard a leave of absence. King accepted Rustin’ s offer of help with the bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give her seat to a white person.
Rustin advised on proper Gandhian procedures, handling correspondence and publicity as well. He composed songs for meetings, organized car pools and other alternatives to riding the city buses. He raised funds by calling on friends for support, cars, and money. Rustin told them, “This is an effort to avoid a race war.” Some members of the Montgomery Improvement Association didn’t want Rustin working with the boycott, fearing unflattering publicity.
When asked to leave, he first went to Birmingham, secretly continuing to keep in touch with Dr. King. In March of 1956, just before his 44th birthday, Rustin returned to New York City but continued to aid King with fundraisers. On December 21, after 381 days, the boycott ended with a favorable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The next step was formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to maintain a broad strategy for protest in the South.
This group of black southern ministers elected King as leader. From New York, Rustin continued to help organize within the movement.
He also traveled to Europe for pacifist organizations. Rustin believed the struggle against weapons of mass destruction was related to the struggle of blacks for their basic rights. Back on U.S. soil in 1960 Rustin planned demonstrations for the national conventions of both political parties, demanding progressive civil rights planks in their platforms.
Bayard Rustin saw African American icon A. Philip Randolph as his mentor—always supporting him in every adventure he undertook. One of Randolph’ s dreams had been to have a march on Washington for jobs and freedom. In 1963 a coalition of organizations fighting racism came together to plan the march. Randolph was chosen to be the head. He then chose Bayard to plan and organize it. The goal was to have 100,000 peaceful marchers walking from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial where key players would deliver speeches. Rustin made all the arrangements—for food, water, sanitation, transportation, cleanup, and program. Nearly 250,000 people came that August 27 from across the country and Martin Luther King delivered his rallying “ I have a dream” speech. Rustin said later that this was the most exciting project he ever worked on and the most rewarding.
Globetrotter for Peace and Justice
During the 60's Rustin became a pacifist globetrotter, traveling to such disparate locations as England, India, and Africa. His work in the peace movement of Europe, and against colonialism in many African countries exemplified his world view. But in the 70's Black Power and the separatist movement seemed to go in the opposite direction of Rustin’ s approach to racism. By this time he was using that word. Writing in 1970 he said, “The word racism is thrown about too loosely these days, but considering what has happened in the last few weeks [Kent State killings], I think it accurately describes much of what goes on in white America.”
Rustin believed racism to be an economic problem. He felt trade unions were a step toward economic liberation. He also saw the need for African Americans to get involved with politics. Rustin was deeply committed to the triumvirate of democratic social reform, nonviolence, and racial justice. He believed you couldn’t have one without the other two.
Everything he did, every job he held, every committee he worked on, were always to further his belief that segregation/discrimination is wrong and he must nonviolently do whatever he can to fight racism.
From 1977 to 1987, the last ten years of his life, Rustin traveled
with his partner and administrative assistant, Walter Naegle, fighting
for justice and democratic values worldwide. In July of 1987 they went to Haiti to study the prospects for democratic elections following the downfall of the Duvalier dictatorship. Upon their return to New York City in late July, Rustin became ill with what he believed to be dysentery. The medications
prescribed only made matters worse. When Rustin entered the hospital
on August 21, a surgeon found a perforated appendix. Two days
later he went into cardiac arrest and died the next morning, August 24,
1987 at age 75, just one month after his last struggle for humanity.
Bayard Rustin recognized the interrelationship of peace with justice, and justice for one with justice for another. We may parse our causes into discrete movements, but the Movement of the Holy Spirit is one, even as God is one. Few have demonstrated this truth so potently in their life’s work as Bayard Rustin.
Lila Frazier describes herself as a seventies-something, single, free-lance writer, and member of Citrus Heights United Methodist Church in Sacramento. An active Reconciling United Methodist, she proudly wears her rainbow ribbon at her regional annual conferences and when she lobbied for inclusion at the 2000 General Conference. She counts lesbians and gay men among her friends, and contributes to our movement through diversity workshops, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces.
A True “WOW” Experience
A Dialogue
Eric H. F. Law
When I was invited to contribute to this issue of Open Hands addressing the relation between racism and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community, I struggled to give voice to the different perspectives that reside within me. Obviously there are complex issues involved and therefore, to write about them in such a short form without trivializing the different perceptions is a difficult task. I have chosen to address these issues in the form of dialogue between a GLBT person of European background and a GLBT person of color (in italic.) My purpose is to raise some of the issues through the voices of these two fictional characters. The context of this conversation take place at an ecumenical conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Christians. To understand the full dynamics of this dialogue, read it with another person, each taking a part, like reading a play. Be sure to continue this dialogue by sharing your reflections with each other afterward.
Wow! Isn’t it wonderful to see so many queer people in one place?
I suppose.
And we are all Christians! They can’t really ignore us, can they?
I guess.
Hey, are you okay?
I don’t want to talk about it.
Come on, you can talk about anything here. This is the most accepting and welcoming community I have even been in.
How can you say that?
I thought it was a very good evening. In fact, I thought the whole conference so far had been so well put together. (Silence.) Okay, tell me what’s wrong.
What’s the use?
I want to know because I am on the planning committee.
Oh, God!
I’m supposed to find out how people are feeling about this conference and report back to the committee every night. (Silence.) How are we going to improve ourselves if you won’t tell me what we did wrong?
Did you see what went on in there now?
What? Which part?
When the facilitator asked people of color to stand up, to be recognized I guess, a few people in the back yelled, “What color!”
I thought they were trying to be funny.
Apparently, quite a few people thought that it was funny too.
I guess it wasn’t for you.
It was very offensive. And the facilitator didn’t do anything or say anything.
I didn’t think they meant any harm. I guess they felt that since we are in this welcoming and accepting community, we don’t need to make distinctions between color and race. You know, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentiles, male or female.
But in this community, even though we are all GLBT, as we now say, there is still white and people of color. You can’t get away from it.
We are gathered here as GLBT people – to support and encourage each other. Why focus on things that divide us?
But, we are supposed to be a welcoming community and I don’t think the people of color here felt welcomed by what went on in there. Out of over a thousand people in there, how many people of color did you see?
I don’t know – about 50?
That’s less than 5 percent. There must be more people of color who are GLBT.
I know. We really tried to recruit people of color to come. We sent out brochures to Christian communities of color. We even made sure we had people of color in the planning committee. I guess we can do better. Hey, you came.
I guess I am one of the naïve ones.
Naïve?
The rest of the people of color knew better.
What do you mean?
I thought coming here and being with all the gay and lesbian Christians, I would feel accepted. But judging from what I see, this so-call welcoming community is the same as any white community. Doesn’t matter whether they are gay or straight.
I’m confused. I saw people of color as our speakers. Every time anybody up front spoke, they always included people of color in their remarks.
It’s not what you say. It’s a look here, a whisper there. And supposing funny remarks like “What color?” that indicated to me that this community is just as racist as any.
Wait a minute. I wouldn’t go as far as saying we are racist.
What would you call it?
We might be little insensitive but . . .
If you don’t believe me, talk to other people of color in this conference.
Don’t you think you’re a little too sensitive? I thought the whole racism issue is over with in this country.
I don’t believe what I’m hearing.
Hey, at least the government has laws against discrimination based on race.
So, you think having these laws and policies, we have gotten over racism.
Yes, . . . No. I mean, there is of course work to be done to make them enforce these laws. My point is that we, as GLBT people, we don’t have the same civil rights yet as people of color in this country. People can say awful things about gays and lesbians, not to mention bisexual and transgender people, and there is no law to stop them. No one will dare to make the same kind of remarks about race in public anymore. That’s why we must stand together to work for justice for the GLBT community just like we did in the civil rights movement in the sixties.
Yes, we must stand together and work together. But when we are standing together, we have to know and admit that there is racism even among us good-hearted welcoming folks.
Why are you buying into what the conservatives want us to do?
And what is that?
Every time, the gay and lesbian movement tried to push a policy through in one of the mainline denominations, the conservative always argued that if we accept gay and lesbian as NORMAL people in the church, than we are rejecting the cultures of our ethnic Christian communities. They are saying that homosexuality is against their cultures. So, if we accept gays and lesbians, we must be racist.
May be they are right.
They can’t be right. To be gay does not mean I am a racist.
But the gay and lesbian movement basically was a white movement from the start.
Wait a minute.
Yes, the whole concept of coming out is a privileged white concept.
What?
All this talk about being courageous, being yourself, telling the truth and to hell with your family, your friends or anybody who can’t accept you, are but ideas from very privileged people.
You lost me.
In order to come out, you have to believe that you do have some rights as an individual to start with, am I right? And these rights are protected by society.
Right.
To believe that you have these basic rights is a privilege that is not shared by many people of color in this country.
You have as much rights as I do. The civil rights movement changed that.
We might have changed some laws, but people of color sure get checked at the airport more, still get stopped by police for wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong neighborhood.
I guess there is something to that.
Since most of us don’t have the basic rights to start with, we rely on our ethnic communities to support us. We don’t have the luxury to come out and risk losing what little security we had. That’s why in
many communities of color, we don’t talk about who is gay or lesbian, we just know and we accept it. If we come out in public, that would give the racist system another excuse to take another beating on us.
That’s more the reason why we have to work together.
But as long as you want people to be out as the only way to be a good gay person, as long as there are TV cameras in this conference, as long as your mailing has your conference title on it, many people of color will not come.
With all due respect, won’t that be homophobic on the part of the communities of color?
No, that is your perspective. To us, the white gay and lesbian movement is not sensitive to our situations, our cultures and our needs.
So, what do you suggest that we do? Affirm the conservative position and let them divide us again and again?
No, work with communities of color on their terms. Support the GLBT persons of color with full appreciation of our contexts.
Okay, I can buy that. But this thing about making the distinction between whites and people of color—I still have a problem with that. While we are here, isn’t there something we can do together?
I don’t know.
You have to know that even though we are mostly white here, we do care about dismantling racism.
Yes, I don’t question that. But again it’s not what you say, it’s how you behave that counts.
So, what do we do?
I don’t know. That’s for you to figure out.
(Silence.) Liberation theology!
What?
Like the speaker said in the last session, as GLBT people, we are an oppressed people, but God is on our side. God will liberate us and empower us to bring justice to our people. Surely, we can work together on that!
That was another thing I had trouble with in the last session.
Oh, no. That too.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a group of mostly white people in this context to talk about liberation theology.
We might be mostly white but we are still oppressed as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Okay, I agree that in the bigger scheme of things, the GLBT community should live and practice liberation theology. But in the context of this conference, when we are together as the GLBT community, who are the powerful and who are the powerless?
We are all powerless.
No, I mean, in these three days we are together, who are the majority, who are the ones with influence and power?
I guess the majority here is white.
Yes, so, for the powerful majority to practice liberation theology is inappropriate.
But you can also say the same for gay men and lesbians who are the powerful majority in relation to the bisexuals and transgender people.
I would agree with you on that too.
So, it is not appropriate for gay men and lesbians to practice liberation theology too?
When they are working with bisexual and transgender people here.
If liberation theology is not the theology the most of us should practice here, what theology should be use?
(Silence.) What does Jesus say to the powerful and rich in the Bible?
To sell what they had and give to the poor.
Take up the cross and follow Jesus.
How do we do that?
By letting go of control and power and listen.
Listen to GLBT of color.
Yes.
Listen to the experiences of the bisexual and transgender folks.
Yes.
I have a proposal.
What?
I am the speaker for tomorrow’s worship. I would like to invite you to speak instead.
What?
I want you to address the whole conference.
In front of a thousand people? Are you mad? What am I going to say?
Say what you just said to me in the last conversation. I think everybody in the conference should hear that.
What will the organizers of this conference say?
They’ll just be surprised, won’t they?
Are you sure?
Yes. I am sure.
(Silence.) I have a proposal.
I really want you to do this.
Why don’t we do it together?
No, as you said, they don’t need to hear from me—a white person.
Yes they do. They need to know how we came to this—how you arrived at giving up your power so that someone like me can have a voice.
Wow. This is what liberation is about, isn’t it?
Wow.
Eric H. F. Law has been a consultant and trainer in multicultural organization development helping educational, health care, and religious institutions deal with issues of cultural diversity for over ten years. An Episcopal priest, he has authored three books, including Inclusion: Making Room for Grace (Chalice Press, 2000).
sustaining the spirit
Reflections for a Service of Confession and Repentance for Racism
Ralph Williams
On Palm Sunday, I was asked to be one of the representatives of my congregation, Foundry United Methodist Church, in a service of confession and repentance for racism. The service took place at Asbury United Methodist Church, a predominantly black United Methodist congregation that broke with the Foundry Congregation in 1836 because of the prevalent racism of the time and the specific racism within the congregation. Below are my remarks, some of which were quoted in one of the local papers.
The poet Maya Angelou writes that, "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
These words, which she spoke at the first Clinton presidential inauguration, speak of the past and of the future. Today, we the members of Foundry United Methodist Church are here to repent of the sins of the past and to join with you, the members of Asbury United Methodist Church, to envision a new future.
As I have brooded over the historical events for which we now offer this service of repentance, I have asked myself, how could they have happened? How could so many of those who understood and proclaimed the transforming love of Christ and God's Good News to all of humankind have been so blind to the profound sin of racism? How in the mid-19th century could the community of Christ known as Foundry Methodist Episcopal Church not know and not act to affirm God's love to red and yellow, black and white?
How, when other voices were screaming out for the end of slavery, could some bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church have condoned slavery? How could the community of Christ relegate others and indeed fellow Christians to positions of inferiority? Was it ignorance, or greed or pride or the simple desire for lives of privilege
and comfort? For those who call themselves the followers of the Christ, how could they not have known? I grieve when I think of these sins of our past.
We are here today to confess that the Foundry United Methodist Church, through acts of commission and omission, participated in acts of racism. One of the specific ways we practiced racism was in our discriminatory acts that caused and encouraged black members of our Foundry Church Community in the 19th Century to establish a separate congregation because of their race. Today we acknowledge and celebrate the great work that God has done here at 11th and K Street NW in Washington, DC. And, we wish to declare in this time and place that those acts of racism were wrong and had no place within the community of Christ. We are here to say that we do not intend to practice acts of racism any longer.
But … we wish to do more than that. We wish to join with you, the members of Asbury United Methodist Church, to begin to envision a new community of faith and love. What would it look like if 11:00 o'clock on Sunday morning was not the most segregated hour in our city and country? How might it effect the complexion of our prisons and jails? Could it reduce the academic achievement gap, or the economic gap, where we are stratified largely by race? If the gifts of all were welcomed and used in the community of Christ, could we better realize the potential of all our people?
If our congregations were not separated by race, how might we see and teach our common history differently? Who would be our heroes and sheroes? How might we re-conceive our role as salt of the earth? Who would be friend or foe? When we see rich Christians in a world of growing economic inequity, might we even see God's purposes and our actions in the world differently?
My friends, the segregated pews we have created and maintained in this city and nation have a profound impact on our psyche, our national life and our vision of the world. We cannot, we will not begin to move toward a new vision of our future unless we squarely face what is wrong with our past. We must completely renounce this legacy of racism in church and society which continues to distort our lives down to the present.
We must, furthermore, acknowledge that we, as Christians, are not immune from inflicting injustice and atrocities upon fellow Christians and our fellow humanity…all of whom are children of the one Creator. We must look honestly at our history and how at times and in profound ways we have simply missed the mark of that higher calling.
We must carefully reconsider today's policies and practices and the words and acts that flow from them. We must look at how we, the Christian church, often stigmatize and marginalize and stereotype. We are, at times, the ones who provide the moral justification for government actions which inflict harm or cause harm to be inflicted on God's people—and we are all God's people.
While we cannot unlive the wrenching pain of our past, that past need not be lived again and again. Together, with courage, we the members of Asbury and Foundry United Methodist Churches, can leave a new legacy to succeeding generations. We can say, like the Apostle Peter, that: "I now see how true it is that God has no favorites, but that in every nation the one who is godfearing and does what is right is acceptable to God." (Acts 10: 34-35.) We can leave a vision of a God whose grace welcomes all with full equality.
The Peace of God and the Love of Christ be with us all. Amen!
Ralph Williams is an African American member of Foundry United Methodist Church and its Reconciling Congregation Task Force, as well as the founder of Foundry’s Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Group.
you’re welcome!
“The Play’s The Thing…..”
Clergy Dramatize the Church Conflict over Homosexuality
Ron Skidmore
In a small café, in an unnamed town, two men, David and Jim, sit drinking coffee and talking. David, a minister, has just finished a rather heated conversation with another man named Randolf, a leader in his church who is homophobic. Randolf is upset that David has been “going too far with this ‘diversity’ business.” As far as he is concerned, homosexuality should not even be discussed in the church. Randolf leaves abruptly when Jim, a gay man, comes in:
Jim: Did I interrupt something?
David: Yeah, I guess you could say that.
Jim: Old-time religion, huh?
David: Yeah. Good thing you didn’t come in five minutes earlier. You would have been at his throat for what he said.
Jim: Well….I don’t think there would be any point in trying to out-hate him. My philosophy is to try to out-love them. Love the sinner and hate their sin… ….Change is scary to a lot of people. Anything different is scary to a lot of people…..When I first figured out I was gay it scared me. I grew up in a world where gay was bad. Gay was perverted. Gay meant eternal damnation. So naturally, when I started adding up two and two and realized that the textbook definition for everything I felt and thought and everything that seemed natural to me was “homosexuality,” I panicked. I panicked worse than – what’s his name? – Randolf?
David: Yeah. Did it challenge your faith?
Jim: Yes, I had to re-learn that God loves me. That God made me this way. The world, as I grew up to know it, was wrong. That’s a huge, mind-blowing revelation.
David: How did it make you feel?
Jim: Like Randolf.
David: Excuse me?
Jim: We’re not that different, you know. Why do you think people like him resist so strongly? Why do you think it’s so important for them to protest anything or anyone that questions the way they look at religion or God? Because it’s all so close to not being true. It’s the unknown factor. Nobody really knows. It’s all fear. Pure and simple. If your religion is different than mine, if your sexual orientation is different than mine, then your world is different than mine…and it’s easier to defend my world than it is for me to live in yours.”
This scene is an excerpt from a play entitled Come in from the Rain, by Michael Smolinski. The play was commissioned by a local clergy group in Grand Rapids, Michigan and ran for two weekends to sell-out audiences in October 2000.
The local clergy group, known as “Concerned Clergy of West Michigan” is an inter-denominational group of ministers of “mainline” Protestant churches. We began to work together in 1996 because we shared a concern about the fact that when “Christian” responses to sexual orientation issues were presented in our local media, they were almost always speaking from a perspective of condemnation of gay or lesbian “lifestyles.” We knew there were plenty of us who did not share this perspective and did not believe that a faithful understanding of the Bible demanded it. We felt that we needed to make our voices heard.
The first thing we did was to draft a “Pastoral Letter” stating our concerns and position, which was signed by more than 30 of our colleagues. Much to our surprise and gratification, this letter made front page news in Grand Rapids in June of 1996. The letter said, in part:
We are a group of Christian pastors and church leaders from several denominations. We are concerned about what has often been represented as the only Christian response toward gay and lesbian people……we believe it is to the peril of the Church that it neglects the humanity and gifts of people strictly on the basis of sexual orientation…
Subsequent to this letter we sponsored two workshops, in 1997 and 1998, with nationally known figures in Biblical scholarship and theology. Both were attended by nearly 300 people. Following the success of those events, we began to wonder if there was a way (using the language of a later press release)“to explore this issue using a medium that touched both the head and the heart.” It occurred to us that a play might be the perfect vehicle.
In 1999 we commissioned an original play from a local playwright who was a member of one of our churches. We wanted the play to be about the experience of gay and lesbian persons in the church and the struggle of the church to come to terms with gay and lesbian persons who were (and always have been) in our midst.
It was a tall order, not just for the playwright, Mike Smolinski, but for “Concerned Clergy.” We were a very loose affiliation, a kind of an ad hoc group gathered around this single issue. We had no real structure except to assign tasks as the previous projects we had undertaken required. We had no real budget or financial backing. This project required us to stretch our organization and energy beyond anything we had done before. It meant fundraising, advertising and most importantly, working with Mike to help shape a script that fairly and realistically represented the struggles of the church without being either polemical or “preachy.”
Mike was an ideal partner in this project, open to many of our suggestions regarding certain details, such as how real ministers behave (more like actual human beings than lots of people seem to think). He was able to take (or leave) our prolific suggestions (can you imagine trying to write a play with a committee—of clergy!—looking over your shoulder?) and shape them creatively with his own dramatic sensibilities? His humor, both in our meetings and in the
play itself, never flagged as the play went through at least four revisions in a little over a year. By the summer of 2000 we had a script we all liked, which many of us felt we had helped influence in some detail or another, yet which was clearly the result of Mike’s own understanding of the issues and his considerable skill as a playwright. We also had secured the services of two experienced directors who assembled a cast of some of the best actors in Grand Rapids. And we had found we had an ideal venue in a recently renovated historic theater that seated about 300 people.
We also had a certain amount of anxiety. We had taken on a considerable financial obligation and faced the unavoidable question, “What if nobody comes?” We scheduled “Come in From the Rain,” for four performances on two successive weekends in early October, 2000. We arranged for the playwright, directors, and actors to be available for a “talkback” after each performance. Members of our clergy group, as well as the playwright and directors, were interviewed on local radio and TV programs discussing and promoting the play. Having built it, we waited to see if they would come.
They did. Not only were the performances a sell-out, but also, every night, at least half the audience stayed to participate in the talkback. The play succeeded beyond any of our expectations. Actors and audience alike spoke of being moved deeply in their experience of both performing the play and watching the performance. So often we approach this issue in both church and community only by argument and analysis of Biblical texts or psychological, sociological or medical “evidence.” Argument and analysis have a place, but our experience with this play showed us again the power of drama to humanize a debate.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Prince arranges a play to be performed that he hopes will reveal, by its emotional impact, the identity of his father’s murderer. He says, “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Come In From the Rain caught the consciences of many who saw it with its emotional impact. There were no one-dimensional characters in the play. Those characters that embodied the most problematic attitudes toward gay and lesbian persons were shown to be human beings struggling with their own wounds and fears, including three teenage boys, members
of David’s church, who attack a gay man. The more sympathetic characters, including the minister, were shown to have their own points of narrowness, their own process of gradual growth in understanding the perspectives of others in which they learn, as Jim says, what it really means to “Love the sinner and hate the sin.”
In one of my favorite scenes in the play Clarence, an African-American man, addresses a gay pride rally and says:
White people see a black guy like me walking toward them and you can see them get nervous and hang on to their wallet or purse. Because that’s what they know. That’s what they’ve been taught. Well, I found myself asking white people, “What if…? Just what if everything you were taught about black people turned out to be untrue? What if…? That usually got them thinking. Then one day a gay man said to me: What if…? What if everything you were brought up to believe about gay people were untrue? And that got me thinking…
It used to be very easy for me to be prejudiced when I thought I didn’t know any gay people. But someone came into my life—our life—and introduced us to gay people. And ever since then [he jokes], my wife has a better hairdo, and we get better service at restaurants and clothing stores. We also learned a lot about love. And I became a better person. My life has been enriched.”
Come in From the Rain showed us that all “sides” in the debate over sexual orientation in the church have a lot to learn about love. It showed us that, if we are willing, the church is the right place for us engage this issue and learn love’s lesson together.
Ron Skidmore has been an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ for 19 years. He has lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan for 12 years and is currently working as the Adult Education Minister at First (Park) Congregational UCC.

leadership
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Matthew J. Smucker
It did not feel like I had a vacation this past summer. But it did begin with an unexpected emotional and spiritual high. The first week of June I was planning my ordination service, scheduled to take place on June 9 at Skyridge Church of the Brethren in Kalamazoo, Michigan. With a sense of great joy as well as numbness, I outlined with my pastor, Debbie Eisenbise, the components of a remarkable celebration; one that I never expected to occur for me in the denomination of my childhood.
Earlier, on April 29, the Michigan District Board had approved my candidacy for ordination through an intentionally thoughtful discernment process. This group of risk-takers affirmed my call to ministry in seminary administration at Chicago Theological Seminary. It marked the first time that an openly gay man was received in ordained ministry in the Church of the Brethren. As I anticipated their decision, I was prepared for a negative outcome, not expecting that God would open the hearts and minds of the Michigan district board. I was shocked when I learned the results of their discussion, and I had no idea what the rest of summer had in store for me.
While there were protests and objections, my ordination service moved forward with the official support of the district and jubilant surprise of my faithful congregation. For the past three years, the Skyridge congregation had supported and nurtured me through this journey, yet always expecting that each milestone would be the last. In the spring of 1999, the district ministry commission had approved me for license ministry, also a first for the denomination. Together we walked faithfully together, trusting that God would guide and protect us without knowing where our path would lead or where it would end.
During the Sunday morning worship, my ordination service took place with the love of family and friends celebrating the transforming power of God’s Spirit. The service was amazing; full of music, dance, scripture, prayer, joy, and thanksgiving. One of my seminary professors delivered a message using images of living water (John 7:37-39) and the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-
40), to offer her thought that “Maybe it is all about you.” Yes, the gospel of Jesus Christ is radically inclusive.
The joy of this day was quickly suppressed by objections from across the denomination. The news of my ordination spread rapidly. In early July, the Brethren’s Annual Conference gathered in Louisville, Kentucky. A query was on the agenda calling for discussion of the licensing and ordination of gays and lesbians. The query had been sent by another district the previous summer in reaction to my licensing, my graduation from Bethany Theological Seminary (Richmond, Indiana), and my search for congregational employment. While the query came with a particular bias, it did present an opportunity for the denomination to move into dialogue, both theoretically and practically. It was time for the Church of the Brethren to break the silence about homosexuality.
In the pre-conference discussion, the standing committee was clearly divided on how to proceed. But the conservative faction of the church prevailed. A motion was brought to the delegate body which called for the Church of the Brethren not to recognize the licensing and ordination for homosexual ministers. Without insisting on further study and deeper conversation, a delegate vote was called after less than an hour of conversation. The motion was passed with a 70 per cent vote of the 900 delegates. While this quick action provided comfort for some, it created deep distress for others. This action stirred up various concerns in terms of our congregational polity. I was shocked that a vote occurred so rapidly. While I had hoped for more thoughtful discernment and openness to God’s leading, I realize that fear and ignorance prevailed.
In concern for my spiritual well-being, I had previously decided not to attend Annual Conference. Yet separation from my spiritual family and the negative vote created a sense of isolation and loneliness for me. My ordination and the decision at our Annual Conference attracted the attention of the national media. It compounded my sense of isolation. As time progressed, the story felt less and less like my own. As friends from across the country informed me that they had seen it in their local paper, the breadth of the publicity dumbfounded me and I felt frustrated by the lack of my personal participation in the process. To my surprise, I have not received one piece of negative correspondence as a result of this publicity.
By mid-August, church leaders and members were voicing their reactions and opinions. Some called for the withdrawal of my ordination; others affirmed the district board’s bold decision. For some, the Annual Conference vote drew a distinct line in the sand, while others questioned the action and raised questions about the local church’s authority. The battle lines were drawn as the Michigan District Conference approached.
The district leadership embraced the gathering with a faithful, discerning spirit. Unlike the process at Annual Conference, they hoped to provide a space for more dialogue and less action. As one side brought a petition to affirm the annual conference vote, the other side drafted a query for clarification to send back to next summer’s annual conference. Knowing that this gathering would be even more heated and more personal, I again decided to stay away to nurture myself and protect my spirit.
As expected, the district gathering was well attended. Unlike most district gatherings, virtually every church sent delegates and Skyridge had nearly 20 members present. Leaders from the national body were there, including a church parliamentarian and the general secretary. In the business sessions, the conversations and speeches were passionate. The final outcome was that the delegates tabled the petition for one year and passed the query. These two actions allowed more time for dialogue.
My summer never felt like a vacation. It was a time for great joy as I was recognized for my gifts and ministry. I am grateful for the love and support of my family and friends. The Skyridge congregation and the leadership of the Michigan district boldly proclaimed their love and support for me. Emotionally and spiritually, I experienced pain in the silence of the spotlight and isolation as an instrument of change. I learned that those who oppose my gifts and ordination often retreat from personal engagement as they fear me and my story. As a result, they don’t see me as an authentically gifted and called servant of God.
I learned to remain grounded and strong, watching and praying for the in-breaking of God. This summer I caught a glimpse of Jesus’ life when he was taunted by the Pharisees and discovered why he took time in the wilderness to rest and recuperate.
At this point, I am still grateful for the opportunity to continue to walk this road less traveled. I am blessed to do work and ministry at Chicago Theological Seminary, where my gifts are affirmed and I am not under the daily stress of church conflict and commentary. I am hopeful for the possibilities for this year. I pray that this fall will provide opportunities for me to share my story and describe the amazing moments in my journey toward ordained ministry. I hope for safe places where I can proclaim the ways that God has been present to me. While I cannot say that my summer had the qualities of a typical vacation, it was nonetheless a journey down a wilderness road with unexpected turns and blessings.
Matthew J. Smucker is a member of the development and external affairs staff at Chicago Theological Seminary. He and his partner, David, live in Chicago.