As I have read this week of the suspicious death of Billey Joe Johnson, the haunting refrain from Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song" has echoed in my head:
"We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers' sons ..."
There is no national outcry over the death of this young man. Perhaps we think it is a story too old to still be news: and yet, if our hearts do not break, and are not outraged, something in us has died, too. We need to hear Bernice Johnson Reagon's words, written to commemorate civil rights freedom-worker Ella Baker, and live into them.
The young Mr. Johnson was a football star in Mississippi, according to a story in Mississippi's Sun Herald, "a tailback who rushed for more than 4,000 yards in his three-year high school career. A national recruiting service said Johnson had scholarship offers from Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU and others.
"'He was one of the kids that was out front," Al Jones, the high school's head football coach, said Monday. "It's hard to believe. I was getting ready to take him to a banquet that day. All of sudden you go from that to this tragedy.'"
The tragedy is that Mr. Johnson is dead of gunshot wounds. The story of how he came to die is not yet clear. Official reports record a traffic stop of Mr. Johnson for running a stop sign. As the deputy, Joe Sullivan, returned to his car to run a license check, he reports having heard a gunshot, whereupon he "found Johnson lying on the ground on the driver's side of the teen's vehicle."
The official report asserts a self-inflicted gunshot, either suicide or accidental.
Family and friends are outraged, disbelieving a young man with everything going for him would do such a thing. Family members add disturbing details, reported by longtime civil rights activist Ruby Sales of SpiritHouse in Washington, D.C., who visited Mississippi this week.
Following the traffic stop and its tragic ending, police held Billey Joe Johnson's body for more than seven hours, not allowing his parents to "see or identify their son's body. The parents waited all day, hoping and pleading to see their son. Over and over, the sheriff denied their requests, although they permitted the high school coach and school superintendent, Barbara Massey, to identify the body." Police subsequently took Billey Joe Johnson's body to Jackson, Mississippi, for an autopsy, "without seeking or receiving the permission or approval of the parents," according to Sales.
The parents were not allowed to see their son's body until three days later; the father reports "they butchered Billey's body like a pig."
The family and community of Billey Joe Johnson want answers; they are working with the NAACP to obtain a second autopsy.
If the death of this black mother's son matters to you, you can write to the sheriff of George County, Mississippi (Garry Welford) and/or the District Attorney (Tony Lawrence) and let them know that you are watching to see how justice is done.
Sheriff Garry Welford
George County Sheriff’s Office
4263 Highway 26 W
Lucedale, MS 39452
Tony Lawrence
Jackson County District Attorney
P.O. Box 998
Pascagoula, MS 39568
Billey Joe Johnson will be buried December 20, 2008.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Comfort, Comfort O My People
We all have ideas about what President-elect Obama needs to focus on. I think he'll need our help, specifically with bringing down some mountains. And providing comfort. More on that below.
It's the Economy. With bubbles bursting in the housing, auto and stock markets, multiple sectors of the economy are melting down as if there was no "there" there. Representatives of both the companies and those who used to work for them (or are about to lose jobs) are all clamoring for help, and quickly. The magic of "first 100 days" is invoked repeatedly, and -- given the failure of confidence in the current administration -- Obama has had to move quickly to begin providing answers and describing plans.
Of course, the list does not end there, although the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Ford do seem to be getting more attention than we do.
It's Health Care. Health care reforms are on the horizon; even the insurance companies are pitching their own proposals, perhaps recognizing that the brokenness of the system cannot be plastered over so easily as in years past. I don't think health care will get fixed during Obama's term; probably not even a second one. It's obscene that 50 million people in the US have no health insurance; what's worse is knowing -- as a sandwich generation daughter/mom/graduate student -- that neither private insurance nor government programs like Medicare have figured out how to keep from wasting the time and money of consumers, marketers, and bureaucracies. And meanwhile, we get sick and put off care until we get sicker and the bills are higher ... and somebody is profiting from this madness. Profiting in ways that do not make us or the system healthier.
Don't forget immigration. The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) reminds us in a December 7, 2008 editorial that "Obama needs to remember immigration reform." The lead paragraph states: "On Jan. 20, President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will have their hands full with two wars and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will be easy to overlook a problem that received relatively little attention during the presidential campaign: the need to develop an immigration policy that acknowledges the reality that our economy depends on immigrant workers - far more than current law allows - and the presence of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose precarious status needs to be resolved."
It's Racial Justice. More than 75 percent of women ages 18-29 say President-elect Barack Obama should make civil rights and racial justice top priorities, according to a survey by the YWCA. When I first read that statistic, I thought that was a high figure, and I realized my cynicism was showing. Perhaps it is because the YWCA's stated mission includes racial equality ... but I don't think the questionnaire was limited to YWCA members.
I have some questions. What does "civil rights and racial justice" mean today? Can it be described with a clarity compelling enough to get past the typical responses of "Civil rights got done in the '60s" or "We just elected a black president. Isn't that enough racial justice for anyone?"
I was curious enough to check with the Y's own press release, which stated:
"The representative phone survey, 'What Women Want: A National Survey of Priorities and Concerns,' conducted on behalf of YWCA USA by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI), included interviews with 1,000 women aged 18-70 between October 28 and November 2, 2008. The findings reveal that significantly more Generation Y women (18-29) than older women (30-70) say that the new administration needs to make several domestic issues 'top priority' in the first year, including healthcare reform (87% v. 76%), quality and cost
of education (85% v. 76%), the housing crisis (83% v. 69%) and HIV/AIDS (66% v. 45%). The findings also show that more than seven in ten (77%) Gen Y women say that civil rights and racial justice should be a 'top priority' for the first year of the new administration, compared with 54 percent of women aged 30-70. Gen Y women are similarly more worried about personal experiences with discrimination; half (50%) of these younger women say that racism or discrimination based on ethnicity or religion will be a 'major obstacle' to the progress
of women like them over the next decade, compared with only 31 percent of older women."
Then I wondered about the racial makeup of the women surveyed; the instrument description said 534 of those surveyed identified as white (non-Hispanic) and 451 identified as non-white; 368 of these women identified as Black. (A link to the .pdf of the report can be found at www.ywca.org.)
Looking in more detail at the survey instrument revealed a lot of consensus among women of all races surveyed: 92% agreed the financial crisis needed resolution; 87% highlighted health care reform; 85% were concerned with the quality and cost of education; 83% mentioned the housing crisis; 77 % spoke about racial justice, and 66% spotlighted HIV/AIDS. On none of these issues did responses shift significantly based on race.
That doesn't mean we are in a post-racial society. It means that when you get down to the real issues affecting our quality of life, we are all affected by (if not to the same degree) and concerned about the same things. We have a lot of common ground on which to meet and work together.
William Julius Wilson saw this same thing, 25 years ago. In his book The Bridge Across the Racial Divide, he highlighted both the great commonalities among interests expressed across racial groups -- good jobs, education, family, religion, law enforcement, civic responsibility -- as well as the tendency of divisive politics to scapegoat particular people groups and prevent cross-racial coalitions from forming.
Some make the classist assertion that racism most rears its head among lower-class whites, the NASCAR Bubba crowd. Two facts are worth noting here. One is that systemic racism is hurtful to people of color on a much greater scale, and that is perpetrated by people with more organizational power: the 78% of the managerial/professional class who are white, the 87% of CEOs who are white, the nearly 100% of legislators who are white, the 78% of HR managers, education administrators, medical/health service managers, business and financial operations people, architects and engineers who are white ... plus the 88% of lawyers who are white, the 83% of magistrates who are white, the 79% of teachers who are white, the 76% of health-care practitioners who are white, the 80% of dentists who are white, the 75% of pharmacists and 72% of physicians who are white. (Statistics courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007)
(If you got tired of reading "who are white," guess how it feels to be a person of color running up against all that white power everywhere you go.)
Here's the second thing, about that perception that it's lower-class whites' racism that is the problem. What lower-class whites are actually concerned about, according to the findings of theologian Tex Sample, are "the centrality of family, religion, cooperation, commitment to family, school and church, respectability and moral living." Sounds familiar. Sounds a lot like Wilson found as the concerns of people across all racial groups.
So, what's my point here?
That we have a remarkable and widespread consistency of viewpoint and values: we all know what we need, and we all need pretty much the same stuff. The problem is, a very few of us have plenty of all those things -- health care, education, jobs, housing, ability to care for family and community -- but many of us do not have enough, and way too many of us have no good prospects for getting enough.
Which brings me to Advent. And mountains. And comfort.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am missing church, badly. And during the season of Advent -- roughly the four weeks leading up to Christmas -- I miss it even worse. I miss the purple, the candles, the music. The words about hope, peace, joy, love. So I've been having a DIY Advent, looking at the texts, thinking about them, writing my reflections to my long-distance beloved instead of preaching to a congregation or leading a class or reflection group.
This week's texts include some old favorites. First there's Isaiah 40, where Isaiah tells us God wants us to comfort God's people. The voice of the prophet says "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
That's a different kind of public works project ... but we can relate to it. I hope. Many of us do feel we are in a wilderness, having lost our former security (maybe it wasn't that secure ...). But in the midst of that wilderness, we are called to work: to prepare the way of the Lord. Valleys shall be lifted up, and mountains brought low. Is it too far a stretch to see that preparing the way of the Lord means filling in the economic troughs with the mountains of capital accumulated elsewhere? If we as a people -- with our shared values and needs -- could agree to a great leveling, would the glory of the Lord be revealed? Who is it, anyway, that poo-poohs the notion of moving hoarded wealth into productive use? Who tells us "that's socialism, and socialism is baaaaad." Maybe in this day of financial implosions and incredulous revelations we don't believe those voices anymore. Maybe we can see those voices as mouthpieces of a very few benefiting at great cost to a great many.
Isaiah goes on ... We are to cry out, "Here is your God!" because we see God coming, with might, with reward, with recompense, to feed the flock, to gather up the lambs in a loving embrace, and to gently lead the mothers. God is bringing a reward, and recompense: a young pregnant teenager saw that God coming, according to Luke 1:52-53, and her song has lifted weary hearts for millenia. "[God] has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."
Then there's Psalm 85, which tells us "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps."
There it is again: righteousness makes a path for God to come to us ... a righteousness that is intimate with peace ... rooted in a faithfulness that springs up, wrapped in steadfast love. All this movement -- love is a dance, and our need to be whole is all the invitation we need.
No one person can dance this dance alone: not Jesus in the past, not Christ in the present, not Martin Luther King or Barack Obama, not you and not me.
I know that full well, remembering the drums of Advents past, pounding out the beat to a favorite old hymn: Comfort, comfort O my people ...
That comfort will not come until we muster the will to give it to each other: by filling in the hole of debt we owe peoples we enslaved in the past and exploit today, by making good on the promises of our commonwealth, by pulling down the mountains of wealth stored up, by learning that enough is enough, and more than enough is unjust.
It's the Economy. With bubbles bursting in the housing, auto and stock markets, multiple sectors of the economy are melting down as if there was no "there" there. Representatives of both the companies and those who used to work for them (or are about to lose jobs) are all clamoring for help, and quickly. The magic of "first 100 days" is invoked repeatedly, and -- given the failure of confidence in the current administration -- Obama has had to move quickly to begin providing answers and describing plans.
Of course, the list does not end there, although the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Ford do seem to be getting more attention than we do.
It's Health Care. Health care reforms are on the horizon; even the insurance companies are pitching their own proposals, perhaps recognizing that the brokenness of the system cannot be plastered over so easily as in years past. I don't think health care will get fixed during Obama's term; probably not even a second one. It's obscene that 50 million people in the US have no health insurance; what's worse is knowing -- as a sandwich generation daughter/mom/graduate student -- that neither private insurance nor government programs like Medicare have figured out how to keep from wasting the time and money of consumers, marketers, and bureaucracies. And meanwhile, we get sick and put off care until we get sicker and the bills are higher ... and somebody is profiting from this madness. Profiting in ways that do not make us or the system healthier.
Don't forget immigration. The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) reminds us in a December 7, 2008 editorial that "Obama needs to remember immigration reform." The lead paragraph states: "On Jan. 20, President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will have their hands full with two wars and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will be easy to overlook a problem that received relatively little attention during the presidential campaign: the need to develop an immigration policy that acknowledges the reality that our economy depends on immigrant workers - far more than current law allows - and the presence of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose precarious status needs to be resolved."
It's Racial Justice. More than 75 percent of women ages 18-29 say President-elect Barack Obama should make civil rights and racial justice top priorities, according to a survey by the YWCA. When I first read that statistic, I thought that was a high figure, and I realized my cynicism was showing. Perhaps it is because the YWCA's stated mission includes racial equality ... but I don't think the questionnaire was limited to YWCA members.
I have some questions. What does "civil rights and racial justice" mean today? Can it be described with a clarity compelling enough to get past the typical responses of "Civil rights got done in the '60s" or "We just elected a black president. Isn't that enough racial justice for anyone?"
I was curious enough to check with the Y's own press release, which stated:
"The representative phone survey, 'What Women Want: A National Survey of Priorities and Concerns,' conducted on behalf of YWCA USA by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI), included interviews with 1,000 women aged 18-70 between October 28 and November 2, 2008. The findings reveal that significantly more Generation Y women (18-29) than older women (30-70) say that the new administration needs to make several domestic issues 'top priority' in the first year, including healthcare reform (87% v. 76%), quality and cost
of education (85% v. 76%), the housing crisis (83% v. 69%) and HIV/AIDS (66% v. 45%). The findings also show that more than seven in ten (77%) Gen Y women say that civil rights and racial justice should be a 'top priority' for the first year of the new administration, compared with 54 percent of women aged 30-70. Gen Y women are similarly more worried about personal experiences with discrimination; half (50%) of these younger women say that racism or discrimination based on ethnicity or religion will be a 'major obstacle' to the progress
of women like them over the next decade, compared with only 31 percent of older women."
Then I wondered about the racial makeup of the women surveyed; the instrument description said 534 of those surveyed identified as white (non-Hispanic) and 451 identified as non-white; 368 of these women identified as Black. (A link to the .pdf of the report can be found at www.ywca.org.)
Looking in more detail at the survey instrument revealed a lot of consensus among women of all races surveyed: 92% agreed the financial crisis needed resolution; 87% highlighted health care reform; 85% were concerned with the quality and cost of education; 83% mentioned the housing crisis; 77 % spoke about racial justice, and 66% spotlighted HIV/AIDS. On none of these issues did responses shift significantly based on race.
That doesn't mean we are in a post-racial society. It means that when you get down to the real issues affecting our quality of life, we are all affected by (if not to the same degree) and concerned about the same things. We have a lot of common ground on which to meet and work together.
William Julius Wilson saw this same thing, 25 years ago. In his book The Bridge Across the Racial Divide, he highlighted both the great commonalities among interests expressed across racial groups -- good jobs, education, family, religion, law enforcement, civic responsibility -- as well as the tendency of divisive politics to scapegoat particular people groups and prevent cross-racial coalitions from forming.
Some make the classist assertion that racism most rears its head among lower-class whites, the NASCAR Bubba crowd. Two facts are worth noting here. One is that systemic racism is hurtful to people of color on a much greater scale, and that is perpetrated by people with more organizational power: the 78% of the managerial/professional class who are white, the 87% of CEOs who are white, the nearly 100% of legislators who are white, the 78% of HR managers, education administrators, medical/health service managers, business and financial operations people, architects and engineers who are white ... plus the 88% of lawyers who are white, the 83% of magistrates who are white, the 79% of teachers who are white, the 76% of health-care practitioners who are white, the 80% of dentists who are white, the 75% of pharmacists and 72% of physicians who are white. (Statistics courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007)
(If you got tired of reading "who are white," guess how it feels to be a person of color running up against all that white power everywhere you go.)
Here's the second thing, about that perception that it's lower-class whites' racism that is the problem. What lower-class whites are actually concerned about, according to the findings of theologian Tex Sample, are "the centrality of family, religion, cooperation, commitment to family, school and church, respectability and moral living." Sounds familiar. Sounds a lot like Wilson found as the concerns of people across all racial groups.
So, what's my point here?
That we have a remarkable and widespread consistency of viewpoint and values: we all know what we need, and we all need pretty much the same stuff. The problem is, a very few of us have plenty of all those things -- health care, education, jobs, housing, ability to care for family and community -- but many of us do not have enough, and way too many of us have no good prospects for getting enough.
Which brings me to Advent. And mountains. And comfort.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am missing church, badly. And during the season of Advent -- roughly the four weeks leading up to Christmas -- I miss it even worse. I miss the purple, the candles, the music. The words about hope, peace, joy, love. So I've been having a DIY Advent, looking at the texts, thinking about them, writing my reflections to my long-distance beloved instead of preaching to a congregation or leading a class or reflection group.
This week's texts include some old favorites. First there's Isaiah 40, where Isaiah tells us God wants us to comfort God's people. The voice of the prophet says "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
That's a different kind of public works project ... but we can relate to it. I hope. Many of us do feel we are in a wilderness, having lost our former security (maybe it wasn't that secure ...). But in the midst of that wilderness, we are called to work: to prepare the way of the Lord. Valleys shall be lifted up, and mountains brought low. Is it too far a stretch to see that preparing the way of the Lord means filling in the economic troughs with the mountains of capital accumulated elsewhere? If we as a people -- with our shared values and needs -- could agree to a great leveling, would the glory of the Lord be revealed? Who is it, anyway, that poo-poohs the notion of moving hoarded wealth into productive use? Who tells us "that's socialism, and socialism is baaaaad." Maybe in this day of financial implosions and incredulous revelations we don't believe those voices anymore. Maybe we can see those voices as mouthpieces of a very few benefiting at great cost to a great many.
Isaiah goes on ... We are to cry out, "Here is your God!" because we see God coming, with might, with reward, with recompense, to feed the flock, to gather up the lambs in a loving embrace, and to gently lead the mothers. God is bringing a reward, and recompense: a young pregnant teenager saw that God coming, according to Luke 1:52-53, and her song has lifted weary hearts for millenia. "[God] has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."
Then there's Psalm 85, which tells us "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps."
There it is again: righteousness makes a path for God to come to us ... a righteousness that is intimate with peace ... rooted in a faithfulness that springs up, wrapped in steadfast love. All this movement -- love is a dance, and our need to be whole is all the invitation we need.
No one person can dance this dance alone: not Jesus in the past, not Christ in the present, not Martin Luther King or Barack Obama, not you and not me.
I know that full well, remembering the drums of Advents past, pounding out the beat to a favorite old hymn: Comfort, comfort O my people ...
That comfort will not come until we muster the will to give it to each other: by filling in the hole of debt we owe peoples we enslaved in the past and exploit today, by making good on the promises of our commonwealth, by pulling down the mountains of wealth stored up, by learning that enough is enough, and more than enough is unjust.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Longing and Belonging
“Already and not yet” is a phrase that gets used often in theological and preaching circles to talk about the basiliea of God. (I like using the Greek word; it keeps me from having to choose from inadequate translations, such as reign of God, kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven … for a while, I used the phrase “kin-dom of God,” which I picked up from Ada María Isasi-Díaz, but in all honesty, family is not my favorite metaphor for the divine. So, for today, let it be basiliea.)
Jesus talked about the basiliea as something that had come very close, and indeed, many believed his presence as the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, meant that the basiliea of God had arrived. But then Jesus was killed, and his followers scattered, and one generation led to another without Jesus’ return, which had been expected, imminently. We Christians believe in Jesus’s resurrection, in God’s resounding “No!” to the ultimacy of death, and yet, still we live between times; Jesus’s first coming inaugurated the basiliea of God, but it has yet to arrive in all its fullness. We are surrounded by and all too often complicit with violence and vitriol, hurt and heartache; our history is rife with exploitations, expulsions, and executions.
There is a longing in the heart of all who live between times, between the already and the not-yet. We want to live in a world unbroken by prejudice against and oppression of those who differ from some mythical mainstream, those deemed expendable in the interests of profits or efficiency or expediency.
We feel the hope inspired by such possibilities as those arising with President-elect Obama. And yet, he is one man. He is not our savior, and he cannot transform the world alone. That is our job, all of us together, and it is the together part we must learn.
Beyond this corporate, historical, faithful longing, there are also the personal longings: for connection, surcease, community, joy, meaning, peace. The list gets long; and yet our efforts to satisfy these longings get shorter and shorter shrift; we believe – or are tempted to believe – the messages we hear from the marketing machines, that this thing or that activity will satisfy the longing. So, we buy. We do. And yet the longing … persists.
The African bishop Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The Persian mystic Rumi said (by way of Coleman Barks) in the poem “Love Dogs” that the longing we express is the return message, the answer to our prayers. These men lived centuries ago. Why has it taken me so long to accept that longing seems to be an inherent aspect of the human condition? (Note my prevarication; I still am not happy that this may be the case.)
In 1997 I quit my job with Price Waterhouse to try to find work that I loved that loved me back. It was a privileged thing to do, though scary; our family’s income dropped by two-thirds. That same year I joined a church, which was just beginning to dream of starting an anti-racist church, a dream that resonated deeply for me. I also applied to seminary, longing to get to the heart of my passionate curiosity about the intersection of divinity and humanity, God and folk. I was not able to attend until 2000; that longing felt like it lasted a long while.
In my first couple of years at seminary I kept trying to recruit a pastor for our dreamed-of anti-racist church, and the people I was trying to recruit kept asking me why I didn’t do it.
Eventually, long(ing) story short, five years into the journey toward this anti-racist church, I finally did agree to a leadership role, along with a Latina co-journeyer who was as scared as I was to jump into pastoring a new church, but whose heart would not wait for someone else to do it. We worked and struggled together for several years; there were sermons and services and service that brought hot tears to our eyes as we wondered “How long, O Lord?” How long till we figure this out? How long till something feels right? How long till some more people catch this dream? There was some “already” going on; but it felt like a whole lot of “not yet.”
And then I figured out I was (am) gay; and that both ended some chapters and opened up a whole new set of longings. Slowly but surely, satisfactions have come: the new wide-open life, chances to learn full-time and teach through this Ph.D. program, the new love with whom I am slowly but surely building a life and a new family. Prayer, dancing, biking, running, friends and small sets of unrelated communities have sustained me. There has always been longing, and yet there has also been just enough of everything I need. To complain would be ungrateful.
That doesn’t stop me.
I keep wondering, where is my church? Where is my place of belonging? I loved the Mennonite church, especially Many Peoples, the big-dreaming little anti-racist version of a Mennonite church we started in Oak Cliff; but their inability to accept and love gay people took me out of that setting. I appreciated the United Church of Christ church that provided a place for our family to come apart and reassemble, with its acceptance and affirmation of gay folk, but I missed the sense of Spirit-moving I had come to treasure at the Church of Many Peoples. I loved the spirited worship and open conversation at City Church, and its welcoming of lgbt persons, but both the community and the discipleship ended up being too thin. And neither of these churches was ready to embrace an anti-racist identity.
I know; I’m too picky. But church shouldn’t hurt; it shouldn’t take you apart. It should be a place you can live into all of who you are, not to mention all of who God is helping you to become.
Is it impossible for church to be both a place of accountability and comfort? Where you can confess your complicity with society’s failures and commit to and do something about those failures and find comfort and strength for another day’s journey?
I do not find these characteristics in white churches.
Maybe I would find them in churches peopled by and led by communities of color; African-American churches in particular have a long, hard-won history of offering “creative, healing power,” as Sharon Welch puts it in her essay, “Human Beings, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice.” She uses this language in responding to the despair she sees in white people working for racial justice.
Welch notes that what these people needed was comfort: “not the comfort that elides suffering and injustice, that promises an easy resolution to complex problems, but a comfort, a sustenance that comes from acknowledging the immensity of injustice and the cost of working against it. Such comfort is expressed well in music, in the resonance of spirituals that embody hope for justice and the costs of injustice, and in voices and instruments joining together, manifesting the beauty of human community.” (192)
Welch had turned to African-American spirituality as a source of creative, healing power. That power is certainly to be found in African-American spirituality: hard-won insight that cannot be simply appropriated by other peoples who have not shared that struggle, that reality. As much as I appreciate African-American spirituality in sermon and song and service, it is not mine to have. As much as I have loved worshipping with my Latina/o brothers and sisters, surrounded by the sibilant whispers of simultaneous prayer, my spirit lifted by the choritos y alabanza, neither is their spirituality mine to have. And the slope from appreciation to appropriation is so slippery; I had better not go near it.
I want what is mine to have.
The problem is finding it.
Having grown up in South Texas, I used to bring enchiladas to potlucks where we were supposed to bring the comfort food of our childhood. Recognizing that’s not my culture, I tried exploring the Germanic heritage of my dad’s side of the family, but I didn’t find food or music to feed my soul. My mom’s side of the family centered in East Texas, so I have adopted myself into a gumbo and zydeco culture that has the heat I love. Still appropriating, yes, but at least not exploiting an already-exploited culture.
Too often I dwell in words for lack of access to a communal Word; but I am thankful for the comfort I find there. I learn from and am inspired by African American, womanist, Latina, mujerista, and post-colonial scholars, as well as the habitats to which I more nearly belong, feminist, queer and anti-supremacist theologians and theorists. But when it is the touch of Spirit I need, I turn to poets, most often Mary Oliver and a new favorite, John O’Donohue (who unfortunately passed away earlier this year).
I am just now beginning to explore O’Donohue’s book, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. I have usually avoided things Celtic; it seems too easy and romantic a white identity to latch onto, and I don’t know myself to be Irish … more of an English mutt on my mother’s side. But O’Donohue has seduced me despite my arch protestations, not least with his exploration of longing and belonging.
Sometimes our longing is to belong: “Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life – truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing.” (xxii)
This passage struck me tonight as I was reading it. Earlier this year, when my relationship with CityChurch came apart, one of the keenest aspects of the loss was having to accept not being part of a church while writing this dissertation. I want to be part of a church: for the spiritual companionship and strengthening, yes, but even more than that I want the accountability of community. I want there to be a community who holds me to my highest and best effort, and helps me to produce it. And yes, it would be wonderful to have a community that wanted to look at and comment on and question the work; it would be stronger and better as a result.
I am blessed to be part of a small prayer group that provides a good balance of accountability and comfort. I am so thankful to be part of them, and to have them be part of me. And … I want more. Spirit-filled corporate worship, deep discipleship, both burdens and studies shared.
I knew going in that writing this dissertation would be an abnormally isolating experience that runs counter to Christian notions of the necessity of community for discernment and discipleship. I did not know how hard that isolation would become. I do feel more prone to fear and negativity; I fear that I no longer know what I am talking about, because I am no longer part of the actively anti-racist spiritual community that gave rise to this work. I fight the negative thought that I will not be able to do justice to the idea. The task of pushing aside children, ailing parent, beloved partner, household management is itself immense, and is taken on in the name of a greater immensity, the focus required to get this dissertation figured out and written down.
It all begins to feel beyond me.
I need the coracle of a community of faith to believe for me when I can’t.
I ask God bitterly why I do not have this community, now, when I feel I need it most.
I wonder what part of my spiritual longing will have to go unanswered, that some other desires might be fulfilled; and I grow so weary of amputating parts of my self to fit in.
I need to belong somewhere that I am accepted as a strong female with leadership gifts, as an educated, impassioned person who wants to serve and teach and pray and preach, who wants to lift her hands in praise to God, who wants to hold her lover’s hand during prayers, who wants accountability and comfort and wise counsel on the road to God’s loving justice.
Doesn’t seem like much to ask. Just, everything. Already. Not yet.
Jesus talked about the basiliea as something that had come very close, and indeed, many believed his presence as the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, meant that the basiliea of God had arrived. But then Jesus was killed, and his followers scattered, and one generation led to another without Jesus’ return, which had been expected, imminently. We Christians believe in Jesus’s resurrection, in God’s resounding “No!” to the ultimacy of death, and yet, still we live between times; Jesus’s first coming inaugurated the basiliea of God, but it has yet to arrive in all its fullness. We are surrounded by and all too often complicit with violence and vitriol, hurt and heartache; our history is rife with exploitations, expulsions, and executions.
There is a longing in the heart of all who live between times, between the already and the not-yet. We want to live in a world unbroken by prejudice against and oppression of those who differ from some mythical mainstream, those deemed expendable in the interests of profits or efficiency or expediency.
We feel the hope inspired by such possibilities as those arising with President-elect Obama. And yet, he is one man. He is not our savior, and he cannot transform the world alone. That is our job, all of us together, and it is the together part we must learn.
Beyond this corporate, historical, faithful longing, there are also the personal longings: for connection, surcease, community, joy, meaning, peace. The list gets long; and yet our efforts to satisfy these longings get shorter and shorter shrift; we believe – or are tempted to believe – the messages we hear from the marketing machines, that this thing or that activity will satisfy the longing. So, we buy. We do. And yet the longing … persists.
The African bishop Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The Persian mystic Rumi said (by way of Coleman Barks) in the poem “Love Dogs” that the longing we express is the return message, the answer to our prayers. These men lived centuries ago. Why has it taken me so long to accept that longing seems to be an inherent aspect of the human condition? (Note my prevarication; I still am not happy that this may be the case.)
In 1997 I quit my job with Price Waterhouse to try to find work that I loved that loved me back. It was a privileged thing to do, though scary; our family’s income dropped by two-thirds. That same year I joined a church, which was just beginning to dream of starting an anti-racist church, a dream that resonated deeply for me. I also applied to seminary, longing to get to the heart of my passionate curiosity about the intersection of divinity and humanity, God and folk. I was not able to attend until 2000; that longing felt like it lasted a long while.
In my first couple of years at seminary I kept trying to recruit a pastor for our dreamed-of anti-racist church, and the people I was trying to recruit kept asking me why I didn’t do it.
Eventually, long(ing) story short, five years into the journey toward this anti-racist church, I finally did agree to a leadership role, along with a Latina co-journeyer who was as scared as I was to jump into pastoring a new church, but whose heart would not wait for someone else to do it. We worked and struggled together for several years; there were sermons and services and service that brought hot tears to our eyes as we wondered “How long, O Lord?” How long till we figure this out? How long till something feels right? How long till some more people catch this dream? There was some “already” going on; but it felt like a whole lot of “not yet.”
And then I figured out I was (am) gay; and that both ended some chapters and opened up a whole new set of longings. Slowly but surely, satisfactions have come: the new wide-open life, chances to learn full-time and teach through this Ph.D. program, the new love with whom I am slowly but surely building a life and a new family. Prayer, dancing, biking, running, friends and small sets of unrelated communities have sustained me. There has always been longing, and yet there has also been just enough of everything I need. To complain would be ungrateful.
That doesn’t stop me.
I keep wondering, where is my church? Where is my place of belonging? I loved the Mennonite church, especially Many Peoples, the big-dreaming little anti-racist version of a Mennonite church we started in Oak Cliff; but their inability to accept and love gay people took me out of that setting. I appreciated the United Church of Christ church that provided a place for our family to come apart and reassemble, with its acceptance and affirmation of gay folk, but I missed the sense of Spirit-moving I had come to treasure at the Church of Many Peoples. I loved the spirited worship and open conversation at City Church, and its welcoming of lgbt persons, but both the community and the discipleship ended up being too thin. And neither of these churches was ready to embrace an anti-racist identity.
I know; I’m too picky. But church shouldn’t hurt; it shouldn’t take you apart. It should be a place you can live into all of who you are, not to mention all of who God is helping you to become.
Is it impossible for church to be both a place of accountability and comfort? Where you can confess your complicity with society’s failures and commit to and do something about those failures and find comfort and strength for another day’s journey?
I do not find these characteristics in white churches.
Maybe I would find them in churches peopled by and led by communities of color; African-American churches in particular have a long, hard-won history of offering “creative, healing power,” as Sharon Welch puts it in her essay, “Human Beings, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice.” She uses this language in responding to the despair she sees in white people working for racial justice.
Welch notes that what these people needed was comfort: “not the comfort that elides suffering and injustice, that promises an easy resolution to complex problems, but a comfort, a sustenance that comes from acknowledging the immensity of injustice and the cost of working against it. Such comfort is expressed well in music, in the resonance of spirituals that embody hope for justice and the costs of injustice, and in voices and instruments joining together, manifesting the beauty of human community.” (192)
Welch had turned to African-American spirituality as a source of creative, healing power. That power is certainly to be found in African-American spirituality: hard-won insight that cannot be simply appropriated by other peoples who have not shared that struggle, that reality. As much as I appreciate African-American spirituality in sermon and song and service, it is not mine to have. As much as I have loved worshipping with my Latina/o brothers and sisters, surrounded by the sibilant whispers of simultaneous prayer, my spirit lifted by the choritos y alabanza, neither is their spirituality mine to have. And the slope from appreciation to appropriation is so slippery; I had better not go near it.
I want what is mine to have.
The problem is finding it.
Having grown up in South Texas, I used to bring enchiladas to potlucks where we were supposed to bring the comfort food of our childhood. Recognizing that’s not my culture, I tried exploring the Germanic heritage of my dad’s side of the family, but I didn’t find food or music to feed my soul. My mom’s side of the family centered in East Texas, so I have adopted myself into a gumbo and zydeco culture that has the heat I love. Still appropriating, yes, but at least not exploiting an already-exploited culture.
Too often I dwell in words for lack of access to a communal Word; but I am thankful for the comfort I find there. I learn from and am inspired by African American, womanist, Latina, mujerista, and post-colonial scholars, as well as the habitats to which I more nearly belong, feminist, queer and anti-supremacist theologians and theorists. But when it is the touch of Spirit I need, I turn to poets, most often Mary Oliver and a new favorite, John O’Donohue (who unfortunately passed away earlier this year).
I am just now beginning to explore O’Donohue’s book, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. I have usually avoided things Celtic; it seems too easy and romantic a white identity to latch onto, and I don’t know myself to be Irish … more of an English mutt on my mother’s side. But O’Donohue has seduced me despite my arch protestations, not least with his exploration of longing and belonging.
Sometimes our longing is to belong: “Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life – truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing.” (xxii)
This passage struck me tonight as I was reading it. Earlier this year, when my relationship with CityChurch came apart, one of the keenest aspects of the loss was having to accept not being part of a church while writing this dissertation. I want to be part of a church: for the spiritual companionship and strengthening, yes, but even more than that I want the accountability of community. I want there to be a community who holds me to my highest and best effort, and helps me to produce it. And yes, it would be wonderful to have a community that wanted to look at and comment on and question the work; it would be stronger and better as a result.
I am blessed to be part of a small prayer group that provides a good balance of accountability and comfort. I am so thankful to be part of them, and to have them be part of me. And … I want more. Spirit-filled corporate worship, deep discipleship, both burdens and studies shared.
I knew going in that writing this dissertation would be an abnormally isolating experience that runs counter to Christian notions of the necessity of community for discernment and discipleship. I did not know how hard that isolation would become. I do feel more prone to fear and negativity; I fear that I no longer know what I am talking about, because I am no longer part of the actively anti-racist spiritual community that gave rise to this work. I fight the negative thought that I will not be able to do justice to the idea. The task of pushing aside children, ailing parent, beloved partner, household management is itself immense, and is taken on in the name of a greater immensity, the focus required to get this dissertation figured out and written down.
It all begins to feel beyond me.
I need the coracle of a community of faith to believe for me when I can’t.
I ask God bitterly why I do not have this community, now, when I feel I need it most.
I wonder what part of my spiritual longing will have to go unanswered, that some other desires might be fulfilled; and I grow so weary of amputating parts of my self to fit in.
I need to belong somewhere that I am accepted as a strong female with leadership gifts, as an educated, impassioned person who wants to serve and teach and pray and preach, who wants to lift her hands in praise to God, who wants to hold her lover’s hand during prayers, who wants accountability and comfort and wise counsel on the road to God’s loving justice.
Doesn’t seem like much to ask. Just, everything. Already. Not yet.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Epistemological Privilege: Worth Voting For
The quick and dirty definition of epistemology is the study of what we know and how we know it. White feminists and women of color have expanded the definition, usefully, by telling us the knower matters, too. Who you are changes what you know, how you can know, what you consider to be knowledge. There are things women know that men don't and can't. And there are things people of color in our society know about our society that white people don't -- and sometimes won't hear or learn.
Epistemology matters, because what we know underpins what we are willing, motivated, and able to do.
That's something Ignacio Ellacuría knew; he was a scholar, philosopher, community activist and priest in El Salvador, who was gunned down in 1989 along with five other priests and two women of their community. A key part of Ellacuría's work was the establishment of an epistemological basis for theology and other forms of knowledge. Embued as he was with the pain and hope of the Salvadoran people, Ellacuría asserted the only adequate form of knowledge was knowing that became critically aware of reality (particularly realities that were not as they should be), took responsibility for that reality, and worked to transform that reality.
This epistemology has implications for who can know adequately. People who live in a given reality and are most directly affected by it have the best chance to be able to perceive with a critical awareness, and certainly will be most strongly motivated to take responsibility for and work to transform that reality. People who benefit from a certain reality will tend to want to maintain it, even if others report they are injured or oppressed by it. In order to protect our benefits, we will choose not to see the reality that others are hurt by the same reality that benefits us. We wear epistemological blinders.
These dynamics operate everywhere someone benefits and someone is oppressed by a given reality, in ways too long to address in this post (but I promise to return to the topic).
My focus here is on the piece called "epistemological privilege," and my argument that Barack Obama has it.
Obama's middle-class upbringing and work as a community organizer give him a sense of the challenges faced by people whose work supports our society and way of life, even as the marketing and political machines hide or misrepresent their reality. In a society that enculturates poorer people -- especially poor white people -- to identify with the values of wealthier people, and to vote against their own best interests because of that identification, this knowledge matters.
Obama is biracial, and was raised predominantly by white women, and yet his appearance is such that he is "read" as black in our society. Accordingly, he knows our society from both of these perspectives, and can see reality from both of these vantage points. In a society still shaped by racial prejudice and privilege -- in ways white people do not want to and often cannot acknowledge, in ways that hurt the life chances of people of color -- this knowledge matters.
Obama is not a perfect candidate, and will not be a perfect president, if we elect him today; but he is more in touch with the realities in this country that need to be transformed than any other candidate has ever been. I am under no illusion that his leadership will overcome all partisan and pork-barrel politics; he cannot undo our well-ingrained selfishness and fear all by himself.
But if we elect Barack Obama president, we will at least have the opportunity to follow a leader who will try to take us by a different road.
And you know what happens when you take the same old road ... you end up in the same old place.
We must all become critically aware of reality (particularly realities that are not as they should be), take responsibility for reality as it is, and work to transform that reality into what it should be: a society and culture that values and works for the abundant life God intends for all.
Epistemology matters, because what we know underpins what we are willing, motivated, and able to do.
That's something Ignacio Ellacuría knew; he was a scholar, philosopher, community activist and priest in El Salvador, who was gunned down in 1989 along with five other priests and two women of their community. A key part of Ellacuría's work was the establishment of an epistemological basis for theology and other forms of knowledge. Embued as he was with the pain and hope of the Salvadoran people, Ellacuría asserted the only adequate form of knowledge was knowing that became critically aware of reality (particularly realities that were not as they should be), took responsibility for that reality, and worked to transform that reality.
This epistemology has implications for who can know adequately. People who live in a given reality and are most directly affected by it have the best chance to be able to perceive with a critical awareness, and certainly will be most strongly motivated to take responsibility for and work to transform that reality. People who benefit from a certain reality will tend to want to maintain it, even if others report they are injured or oppressed by it. In order to protect our benefits, we will choose not to see the reality that others are hurt by the same reality that benefits us. We wear epistemological blinders.
These dynamics operate everywhere someone benefits and someone is oppressed by a given reality, in ways too long to address in this post (but I promise to return to the topic).
My focus here is on the piece called "epistemological privilege," and my argument that Barack Obama has it.
Obama's middle-class upbringing and work as a community organizer give him a sense of the challenges faced by people whose work supports our society and way of life, even as the marketing and political machines hide or misrepresent their reality. In a society that enculturates poorer people -- especially poor white people -- to identify with the values of wealthier people, and to vote against their own best interests because of that identification, this knowledge matters.
Obama is biracial, and was raised predominantly by white women, and yet his appearance is such that he is "read" as black in our society. Accordingly, he knows our society from both of these perspectives, and can see reality from both of these vantage points. In a society still shaped by racial prejudice and privilege -- in ways white people do not want to and often cannot acknowledge, in ways that hurt the life chances of people of color -- this knowledge matters.
Obama is not a perfect candidate, and will not be a perfect president, if we elect him today; but he is more in touch with the realities in this country that need to be transformed than any other candidate has ever been. I am under no illusion that his leadership will overcome all partisan and pork-barrel politics; he cannot undo our well-ingrained selfishness and fear all by himself.
But if we elect Barack Obama president, we will at least have the opportunity to follow a leader who will try to take us by a different road.
And you know what happens when you take the same old road ... you end up in the same old place.
We must all become critically aware of reality (particularly realities that are not as they should be), take responsibility for reality as it is, and work to transform that reality into what it should be: a society and culture that values and works for the abundant life God intends for all.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
About that Running Thing ...
Earlier in this blog I wrote about learning to play guitar, and how beginning to play guitar had many useful similarities with learning to write a dissertation, not to mention learning to live into an anti-racist identity.
The most important similarity, of course, is being willing to mess up. You may recall the mental bumpersticker that goes along with that: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." At first.
I loved learning to make fairly musical noise on the guitar, but hit a wall when it came time to switch over from finger-picking notes to actual chord-strumming. My beloved M. -- a guitar player from way back -- has tried to help me, but learning to play the guitar requires a basic willingness to make noise, and somehow I don't have that. Yet. Maybe because my noises just aren't musical enough yet. Or, maybe I have just retained a certain childhood certainty that quiet is safe, and safety is not a sure thing, and so quiet is best.
There is another and more obvious reason for laying down the guitar, for a little while: the posture for guitar playing -- at least when you are learning -- is a lot like the posture for writing or reading. And I spend way too much time in that posture already. Too, the activity of learning musical notation and to make music is a lot like learning a foreign language, and right now I need something completely different.
Like running.
I started running at about the same time I set the guitar aside, though that was unintentional. I just wanted to get a little more exercise without driving to the gym for a workout class or to lift weights. (Somehow driving somewhere in order to get exercise just makes less and less sense.)
I had heard about this music source called Podrunner: Intervals (you can find it on iTunes or at the creator's web site, http://www.djsteveboy.com/intervals.html) and I tried it out. The idea is that you listen to the music as you run, and music changes cue shifts in running or walking speed and duration. Using Podrunner, I have worked up to an 8k distance, or a little over five miles in about 50 minutes.
Which is astounding to me. Less than a year ago I was in a workout class and the instructor had us run an indoor lap and I could barely finish.
But intervals are a great way to increase speed and strength and distance gradually, and I am happy for anything that helps me keep moving and relatively fit.
As my distance and fitness increased, a funny thing happened: I began to be able to think while running. And I noticed that when I am thinking about my dissertation, I run a little faster and with less discomfort. Alternatively, when I am thinking about something that I feel worried or sad or angry about, I have more trouble running. I am intrigued by these signs of the connections among my thoughts, feelings and physical abilities.
I remember in the year after I came out to God and myself and lost a bunch of weight in the process, there was a day when I was playing with my kids (who were then 11 and 9) and realizing I could chase them around. I was running. Out of curiosity, I began running then, back in 2003, but could not get more than a mile or so into a run before I was too bored or tired or something hurt. I kept up with workout classes and biking, but let the running go.
Until I discovered intervals, and slowly began increasing my distance, and learned that the first mile or two is always the hardest; even now that I am running a little over five miles, it is the first part of the run that is the hardest, even if I stretch and warm up really well. I've also discovered that the more often I run, the easier that beginning stage is.
And that got me to thinking about writing.
Back when I was in college, I picked up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is about writing as a Zen practice. Natalie says you should write every day; that writing is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs work to be strong, and stretching to be flexible.
I tried that for a while ... got bored and distracted and quit.
And then I read the same thing in Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. And then a third time the advice came, when a friend and I decided to read (and do the work in) Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.
I usually get the hint when the universe tells me a third time to do something, so I adopted Cameron's "morning pages" and have stayed fairly regular with the discipline of writing something every day. I fall off the wagon now and then, and have learned that not judging myself too harshly makes it easier to climb back in. I have accumulated about ten years' worth of spiral notebooks (the writing equivalent of running shoes and a road).
In writing, as in running, as in any disciplined activity, regular practice or exercise makes regular performance or execution far easier. Your thinking mind or your bicep or your lungs or your writing hand ... makes no difference. Your body needs your mind to tell it to keep going; your mind needs your body to be fit enough to sit and write, or focus and read.
And of course, body and mind are incomplete, too, without spirit. This I learned for real only after my coming-out process began. I did not know how dis-integrated I was, until I became integrated, body, mind and spirit. Prayer was revolutionized in the process: I had asked my spiritual director for years why I could not feel God's love. I knew it was pouring down on me, like a constant and invisible rain, but I thought I should be able to feel it, and I could not. This felt like a failing to me.
Slowly but surely, as the realization of my lesbian identity unfolded, so did my prayer life. I could feel myself going to deeper and deeper places in my self and in God when I prayed, or -- as it felt -- when prayer was happening in me. I realized that my self-knowing and self-loving were key ways that God knew me and loved me. If I could not love myself, then God could not love me through that avenue, either. In being cut off from myself, I had cut myself off from God. In coming into a fuller awareness of myself, I came into a fuller awareness of God.
This integration was startling in the intensity and viscerality of its effects. My coming out process began the year before I started this Ph.D. program, and I remember in the first year of the program, there were times I was sitting in class, participating in discussion, reading a new text, when I felt as if I would jump out of my chair, I felt such a keen and physical excitement. Sometimes the heat of intellectual passion literally ignited a sensual response in my body, and I knew what Audre Lorde said about erotic energy being the life force in an integrated self was absolutely true. I knew it in my own body. I know it still.
Which brings me back to running. And writing. And the natural interconnections of an integrated life. Just as I got to thinking about these interconnections, I stumbled across a book title and knew immediately I had to read it: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir writting by a long-distance runner who also is a novelist.
Murakami notes some interconnections among his writing and running; some of them we share, and some we don't. As I read the book, I realized I experience some interconnections that are unique to me. Here are a few of the first and the latter.
Like Murakami, I have learned the value of momentum: if you stop running at a point when you still feel strong, you are more likely to run again; similarly, if you stop writing at a point when you are going strong, it will be easier to get started again the next working day.
Murakami says he often writes to know what he thinks; I do this, too. I often don't really know my thoughts clearly on a topic until I have written about it (and, I have noticed, what I will write and how I will say it changes over the years, as time and experience shape my perceptions, even if I am writing again about the same event).
Murakami describes himself as someone who is capable of being happy on his own -- an important trait for a writer, which requires long hours of solitude -- and that he is not interested in team sports or particularly competitive sports; he really only competes with himself. I too need a certain amount of alone-time, and typically am happy on my own; but I have such an abhorrence of competition that I really will not even compete with myself. I do not time my runs, or set goals to exceed; I just try to keep running, and writing, and living, as well as I can, on any given day. Each outing, each effort has its own integrity, and I try to be my best in each one, simply because that is the simplest, truest way to experience abundant fulfillment.
Like Murakami, I am happy with running's low-maintenance nature; all you need are shoes and a road (well, and a good sports bra, I have to add). And a dose of discipline: all runners and writers know that you have to get through the days you don't want to run, or to write, and do it anyway. That's the nature of discipline; and that's where treating all running and writing as practice is useful. When the running isn't going well, or the writing feels stiff or blind, treat it as practice and keep moving. That way tomorrow has a chance to be better.
Murakami decribes the three necessary qualities of good writing (and running) as talent, focus and endurance. Murakami describes focus and endurance as qualities that can be developed; he is less sanguine about the ability to cultivate talent.
Focus is something I struggle for, and balance is important, too ... rather than talent, I think a third ingredient is "something to say." Which seems not to apply to running, unless you generalize to something like "desire." Maybe I am kidding myself, but I think desire or passion are more important even than talent. If you have a reason to and want to run, or write, you will, and nothing will stop you.
Running is schooling my mind and my body ... and my spirit. My legs are stronger, and so is my belief in my own ability to endure and persist. My "wind" lasts longer, and so does my ability to stay in the flow of a writing. My tolerance for struggle is growing, as is my willingness to stay in that struggle. When my mind is tired of reaching for the words, I think of how I felt in the third mile yesterday, and how much better the fourth and fifth miles felt, and I push a little harder until the words are flowing again.
When I am running, there are voices in my head that say "this hurts, let's quit" or "that's far enough" or "maybe I won't be able to run all the way back." I have learned that these voices are impostors, and that I can listen for and hear the truer voice whispering from somewhere in the back of my head. That voice just says "keep going." And "it's worth it." And "you can do this."
I need to know the sound of that voice when the world interferes with the dissertation. Those impostor voices say "Who wants to read about love?" and "This is all so obvious." Or "you are not post-colonial enough" or "you are not anti-racist enough" or "you are talking to yourself and no one will want to read this." Or, worst of all, "You are not doing and can not do justice to the idea God has put in your head ... if it was in fact God."
The true voice says, "You can do this. It's worth doing. It needs doing. Just pray some more ... write some more, pray some more, run some more, and then rewrite. Some more."
Two more chapters and an epilogue -- by Christmas, I hope -- and the first draft is done. The block of marble will have been assembled, and I can begin to carve. Because the process of rewriting is where all good writing gets done.
Help me, Beloved. Help me do justice to this idea. Your love, your justice, your grace, which we all need so much more of.
(And then maybe I can get back around to that guitar ... and maybe a triathlon? That should get me through the job search process!)
The most important similarity, of course, is being willing to mess up. You may recall the mental bumpersticker that goes along with that: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." At first.
I loved learning to make fairly musical noise on the guitar, but hit a wall when it came time to switch over from finger-picking notes to actual chord-strumming. My beloved M. -- a guitar player from way back -- has tried to help me, but learning to play the guitar requires a basic willingness to make noise, and somehow I don't have that. Yet. Maybe because my noises just aren't musical enough yet. Or, maybe I have just retained a certain childhood certainty that quiet is safe, and safety is not a sure thing, and so quiet is best.
There is another and more obvious reason for laying down the guitar, for a little while: the posture for guitar playing -- at least when you are learning -- is a lot like the posture for writing or reading. And I spend way too much time in that posture already. Too, the activity of learning musical notation and to make music is a lot like learning a foreign language, and right now I need something completely different.
Like running.
I started running at about the same time I set the guitar aside, though that was unintentional. I just wanted to get a little more exercise without driving to the gym for a workout class or to lift weights. (Somehow driving somewhere in order to get exercise just makes less and less sense.)
I had heard about this music source called Podrunner: Intervals (you can find it on iTunes or at the creator's web site, http://www.djsteveboy.com/intervals.html) and I tried it out. The idea is that you listen to the music as you run, and music changes cue shifts in running or walking speed and duration. Using Podrunner, I have worked up to an 8k distance, or a little over five miles in about 50 minutes.
Which is astounding to me. Less than a year ago I was in a workout class and the instructor had us run an indoor lap and I could barely finish.
But intervals are a great way to increase speed and strength and distance gradually, and I am happy for anything that helps me keep moving and relatively fit.
As my distance and fitness increased, a funny thing happened: I began to be able to think while running. And I noticed that when I am thinking about my dissertation, I run a little faster and with less discomfort. Alternatively, when I am thinking about something that I feel worried or sad or angry about, I have more trouble running. I am intrigued by these signs of the connections among my thoughts, feelings and physical abilities.
I remember in the year after I came out to God and myself and lost a bunch of weight in the process, there was a day when I was playing with my kids (who were then 11 and 9) and realizing I could chase them around. I was running. Out of curiosity, I began running then, back in 2003, but could not get more than a mile or so into a run before I was too bored or tired or something hurt. I kept up with workout classes and biking, but let the running go.
Until I discovered intervals, and slowly began increasing my distance, and learned that the first mile or two is always the hardest; even now that I am running a little over five miles, it is the first part of the run that is the hardest, even if I stretch and warm up really well. I've also discovered that the more often I run, the easier that beginning stage is.
And that got me to thinking about writing.
Back when I was in college, I picked up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is about writing as a Zen practice. Natalie says you should write every day; that writing is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs work to be strong, and stretching to be flexible.
I tried that for a while ... got bored and distracted and quit.
And then I read the same thing in Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. And then a third time the advice came, when a friend and I decided to read (and do the work in) Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.
I usually get the hint when the universe tells me a third time to do something, so I adopted Cameron's "morning pages" and have stayed fairly regular with the discipline of writing something every day. I fall off the wagon now and then, and have learned that not judging myself too harshly makes it easier to climb back in. I have accumulated about ten years' worth of spiral notebooks (the writing equivalent of running shoes and a road).
In writing, as in running, as in any disciplined activity, regular practice or exercise makes regular performance or execution far easier. Your thinking mind or your bicep or your lungs or your writing hand ... makes no difference. Your body needs your mind to tell it to keep going; your mind needs your body to be fit enough to sit and write, or focus and read.
And of course, body and mind are incomplete, too, without spirit. This I learned for real only after my coming-out process began. I did not know how dis-integrated I was, until I became integrated, body, mind and spirit. Prayer was revolutionized in the process: I had asked my spiritual director for years why I could not feel God's love. I knew it was pouring down on me, like a constant and invisible rain, but I thought I should be able to feel it, and I could not. This felt like a failing to me.
Slowly but surely, as the realization of my lesbian identity unfolded, so did my prayer life. I could feel myself going to deeper and deeper places in my self and in God when I prayed, or -- as it felt -- when prayer was happening in me. I realized that my self-knowing and self-loving were key ways that God knew me and loved me. If I could not love myself, then God could not love me through that avenue, either. In being cut off from myself, I had cut myself off from God. In coming into a fuller awareness of myself, I came into a fuller awareness of God.
This integration was startling in the intensity and viscerality of its effects. My coming out process began the year before I started this Ph.D. program, and I remember in the first year of the program, there were times I was sitting in class, participating in discussion, reading a new text, when I felt as if I would jump out of my chair, I felt such a keen and physical excitement. Sometimes the heat of intellectual passion literally ignited a sensual response in my body, and I knew what Audre Lorde said about erotic energy being the life force in an integrated self was absolutely true. I knew it in my own body. I know it still.
Which brings me back to running. And writing. And the natural interconnections of an integrated life. Just as I got to thinking about these interconnections, I stumbled across a book title and knew immediately I had to read it: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir writting by a long-distance runner who also is a novelist.
Murakami notes some interconnections among his writing and running; some of them we share, and some we don't. As I read the book, I realized I experience some interconnections that are unique to me. Here are a few of the first and the latter.
Like Murakami, I have learned the value of momentum: if you stop running at a point when you still feel strong, you are more likely to run again; similarly, if you stop writing at a point when you are going strong, it will be easier to get started again the next working day.
Murakami says he often writes to know what he thinks; I do this, too. I often don't really know my thoughts clearly on a topic until I have written about it (and, I have noticed, what I will write and how I will say it changes over the years, as time and experience shape my perceptions, even if I am writing again about the same event).
Murakami describes himself as someone who is capable of being happy on his own -- an important trait for a writer, which requires long hours of solitude -- and that he is not interested in team sports or particularly competitive sports; he really only competes with himself. I too need a certain amount of alone-time, and typically am happy on my own; but I have such an abhorrence of competition that I really will not even compete with myself. I do not time my runs, or set goals to exceed; I just try to keep running, and writing, and living, as well as I can, on any given day. Each outing, each effort has its own integrity, and I try to be my best in each one, simply because that is the simplest, truest way to experience abundant fulfillment.
Like Murakami, I am happy with running's low-maintenance nature; all you need are shoes and a road (well, and a good sports bra, I have to add). And a dose of discipline: all runners and writers know that you have to get through the days you don't want to run, or to write, and do it anyway. That's the nature of discipline; and that's where treating all running and writing as practice is useful. When the running isn't going well, or the writing feels stiff or blind, treat it as practice and keep moving. That way tomorrow has a chance to be better.
Murakami decribes the three necessary qualities of good writing (and running) as talent, focus and endurance. Murakami describes focus and endurance as qualities that can be developed; he is less sanguine about the ability to cultivate talent.
Focus is something I struggle for, and balance is important, too ... rather than talent, I think a third ingredient is "something to say." Which seems not to apply to running, unless you generalize to something like "desire." Maybe I am kidding myself, but I think desire or passion are more important even than talent. If you have a reason to and want to run, or write, you will, and nothing will stop you.
Running is schooling my mind and my body ... and my spirit. My legs are stronger, and so is my belief in my own ability to endure and persist. My "wind" lasts longer, and so does my ability to stay in the flow of a writing. My tolerance for struggle is growing, as is my willingness to stay in that struggle. When my mind is tired of reaching for the words, I think of how I felt in the third mile yesterday, and how much better the fourth and fifth miles felt, and I push a little harder until the words are flowing again.
When I am running, there are voices in my head that say "this hurts, let's quit" or "that's far enough" or "maybe I won't be able to run all the way back." I have learned that these voices are impostors, and that I can listen for and hear the truer voice whispering from somewhere in the back of my head. That voice just says "keep going." And "it's worth it." And "you can do this."
I need to know the sound of that voice when the world interferes with the dissertation. Those impostor voices say "Who wants to read about love?" and "This is all so obvious." Or "you are not post-colonial enough" or "you are not anti-racist enough" or "you are talking to yourself and no one will want to read this." Or, worst of all, "You are not doing and can not do justice to the idea God has put in your head ... if it was in fact God."
The true voice says, "You can do this. It's worth doing. It needs doing. Just pray some more ... write some more, pray some more, run some more, and then rewrite. Some more."
Two more chapters and an epilogue -- by Christmas, I hope -- and the first draft is done. The block of marble will have been assembled, and I can begin to carve. Because the process of rewriting is where all good writing gets done.
Help me, Beloved. Help me do justice to this idea. Your love, your justice, your grace, which we all need so much more of.
(And then maybe I can get back around to that guitar ... and maybe a triathlon? That should get me through the job search process!)
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Running for Love of Women
October 19, 2008 was Race Day in Dallas; Race for the Cure, that is.
I have had friends over the years who have had breast cancer; many have survived and thrive still. Some have died of the disease. Breast cancer has come closest to home in the person of my beloved M., who is a 20-year survivor. I marvel at the stories of what she went through during her two surgeries, with subsequent chemotherapy; and I whisper small grateful prayers for our meeting, and our life together. It so could have been otherwise (and when I think this, I always think of Jane Kenyon's poignant poem of that name, "Otherwise").
Given that I started running this year, and -- much to my surprise and delight -- have stayed with it, and given that my daughter decided to walk with a team of women from the office where she worked this summer, it occurred to me that I could run in the race this year. I've been running five miles at a whack pretty regularly, so I figured a three-mile run was doable.
We got to the race location early, riding transit with many other pink-clad women down to the massively-crowded site; about 25,000 runners and walkers participated in the 25th anniversary Race today.
We walked around for a while, since we got there early; I noticed a strong representation of African-American women; some Latinas were there as well, but it did not seem to me there were a number representative of their overall population in Dallas. That got me wondering ...
And then it was time to run. As a novice, I was one of the few runners clueless enough to start at the back of the pack; the first two miles were bumper-car running through yards, among walkers and strollers, and sometimes on the street where I was supposed to be. About halfway through we ran by a high school, and a bunch of kids were passing out water; I noticed they were mostly Latino/a.
The sweetest moments came in the last mile, as the road opened up for a clear run, down and then uphill, and then around a corner where a high-school group was cheering and clapping. I knew it wasn't personal, but applause and a band playing is rare for those of us who are not playing high school football, so I got a lump in my throat. I noticed the group was all Latino/a kids, too. And then the finish line was in site, and I was looking for my beloved M., who promised to wait for me and watch me cross the line.
It felt great to run across the finish line; it felt even better to see the grin on
M's face as she snapped my picture and gave me a big hug. I was thinking about a finish line she crossed 20 years ago, done with surgeries and chemo and learning to live into her survivorhood.
We walked around afterwards, waiting for our teenager to finish, and got to participate in donating to a local tissue bank that is supporting breast health research.
As we walked around, I wondered about the representation of ethnicities among the women involved, and got curious.
When I got home, I Googled up some statistics on breast cancer findings by ethnicity. In a report titled "Trends in Breast Cancer by Race and Ethnicity"*, I read that "The average annual age-adjusted incidence rate from 1996 to 2000 was 140.8 cases per 100,000 among white women, 121.7 among African Americans, 97.2 among Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, 89.8 in Hispanics, and 58 in American Indians/Alaska Natives."
Although more breast cancers are diagnosed in white women, tumors found in women of color tend to be larger (by the time they are found) and tend to be at later stages, with resulting increases in rates of death. Racial disparities in access to health care, including mammography and other screening and diagnostic services -- particularly for low-income women -- are primarily to blame. Other contributing factors leading to a higher rate of death from breast cancer in women of color include delays between abnormal mammographic findings and definitive diagnosis, more limited access to health characteristics, and variances in follow-up care. For instance, studies have shown African-American women are less likely to have follow-up radiation therapy after surgery.
When treatment protocols are equalized, death rate disparities are substantially less. For instance, "An analysis of the survival experience of women with breast cancer treated in US military health care facilities suggest that the disparity in breast cancer survival between African American and white women could be reduced by 70% by providing
equal treatment to all women."
The study referenced above asserts that "Passage of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Act of 2000, which states the option to provide medical assistance through Medicaid to eligible women who were screened through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, should reduce economic barriers to those who meet the eligibility criteria."
Options ... shoulds ... well. Laws don't always have intended outcomes. What's the funding level? Who qualifies through Medicaid? What about women who don't qualify?
The authors of this study note the truth that much additional research is needed on the causes, prevention, and treatment of breast cancer; but they also note that "much progress can
be made by applying current knowledge
fully and equitably to all segments of the population."
Indeed. That's a race I'd like to be helping to win.
* Here's the citation for the journal article that provided the statistics I quoted: CA Cancer J Clin 2003; 53:342. Asma Ghafoor, MPH, Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Robert Smith, PhD and Michael Thun, MD, MS
I have had friends over the years who have had breast cancer; many have survived and thrive still. Some have died of the disease. Breast cancer has come closest to home in the person of my beloved M., who is a 20-year survivor. I marvel at the stories of what she went through during her two surgeries, with subsequent chemotherapy; and I whisper small grateful prayers for our meeting, and our life together. It so could have been otherwise (and when I think this, I always think of Jane Kenyon's poignant poem of that name, "Otherwise").
Given that I started running this year, and -- much to my surprise and delight -- have stayed with it, and given that my daughter decided to walk with a team of women from the office where she worked this summer, it occurred to me that I could run in the race this year. I've been running five miles at a whack pretty regularly, so I figured a three-mile run was doable.
We got to the race location early, riding transit with many other pink-clad women down to the massively-crowded site; about 25,000 runners and walkers participated in the 25th anniversary Race today.
We walked around for a while, since we got there early; I noticed a strong representation of African-American women; some Latinas were there as well, but it did not seem to me there were a number representative of their overall population in Dallas. That got me wondering ...
And then it was time to run. As a novice, I was one of the few runners clueless enough to start at the back of the pack; the first two miles were bumper-car running through yards, among walkers and strollers, and sometimes on the street where I was supposed to be. About halfway through we ran by a high school, and a bunch of kids were passing out water; I noticed they were mostly Latino/a.
The sweetest moments came in the last mile, as the road opened up for a clear run, down and then uphill, and then around a corner where a high-school group was cheering and clapping. I knew it wasn't personal, but applause and a band playing is rare for those of us who are not playing high school football, so I got a lump in my throat. I noticed the group was all Latino/a kids, too. And then the finish line was in site, and I was looking for my beloved M., who promised to wait for me and watch me cross the line.
It felt great to run across the finish line; it felt even better to see the grin on
M's face as she snapped my picture and gave me a big hug. I was thinking about a finish line she crossed 20 years ago, done with surgeries and chemo and learning to live into her survivorhood.We walked around afterwards, waiting for our teenager to finish, and got to participate in donating to a local tissue bank that is supporting breast health research.
As we walked around, I wondered about the representation of ethnicities among the women involved, and got curious.
When I got home, I Googled up some statistics on breast cancer findings by ethnicity. In a report titled "Trends in Breast Cancer by Race and Ethnicity"*, I read that "The average annual age-adjusted incidence rate from 1996 to 2000 was 140.8 cases per 100,000 among white women, 121.7 among African Americans, 97.2 among Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, 89.8 in Hispanics, and 58 in American Indians/Alaska Natives."
Although more breast cancers are diagnosed in white women, tumors found in women of color tend to be larger (by the time they are found) and tend to be at later stages, with resulting increases in rates of death. Racial disparities in access to health care, including mammography and other screening and diagnostic services -- particularly for low-income women -- are primarily to blame. Other contributing factors leading to a higher rate of death from breast cancer in women of color include delays between abnormal mammographic findings and definitive diagnosis, more limited access to health characteristics, and variances in follow-up care. For instance, studies have shown African-American women are less likely to have follow-up radiation therapy after surgery.
When treatment protocols are equalized, death rate disparities are substantially less. For instance, "An analysis of the survival experience of women with breast cancer treated in US military health care facilities suggest that the disparity in breast cancer survival between African American and white women could be reduced by 70% by providing
equal treatment to all women."
The study referenced above asserts that "Passage of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Act of 2000, which states the option to provide medical assistance through Medicaid to eligible women who were screened through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, should reduce economic barriers to those who meet the eligibility criteria."
Options ... shoulds ... well. Laws don't always have intended outcomes. What's the funding level? Who qualifies through Medicaid? What about women who don't qualify?
The authors of this study note the truth that much additional research is needed on the causes, prevention, and treatment of breast cancer; but they also note that "much progress can
be made by applying current knowledge
fully and equitably to all segments of the population."Indeed. That's a race I'd like to be helping to win.
* Here's the citation for the journal article that provided the statistics I quoted: CA Cancer J Clin 2003; 53:342. Asma Ghafoor, MPH, Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Robert Smith, PhD and Michael Thun, MD, MS
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Coming Out Day
Coming Out Day is a chance to celebrate the courage and freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (who have been able to choose) to be open about who they love. It’s also a chance for straight allies to express their support.
Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.
Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.
My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.
A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.
What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?
The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”
This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.
I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”
Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.
Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”
Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.
I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.
And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”
And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.
There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.
To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.
I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.
I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.
Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.
I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.
Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.
Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.
My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.
A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.
What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?
The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”
This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.
I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”
Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.
Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”
Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.
I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.
And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”
And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.
There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.
To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.
I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.
I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.
Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.
I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.
Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.
I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:
"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."
Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.
I don't live in that world.
In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.
I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.
It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.
I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.
White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.
I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)
Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.
You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.
My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."
So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.
Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.
"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."
Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.
I don't live in that world.
In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.
I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.
It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.
I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.
White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.
I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)
Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.
You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.
My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."
So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.
Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Of Bailouts and Reparations
I'm sure I'm not the only person looking at that number -- $700 billion -- and listening to the debate and wondering where the national will to responsibility comes from.
When I listen to the back-and-forth on the bailout, I can't help but think about the much-less-ballyhooed topic of reparations for African-Americans who are generationally disadvantaged and continue to be oppressed by the historical legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow, as well as racial prejudices in the present.
When the topic of reparations does come out, white resistance typically takes the form of such challenges as "I'm not responsible; I never owned slaves, and neither did my family." Or, "How could we ever figure out how much was owed to whom?" Or, "They would want too much; we as a nation would be bankrupted."
Hmm.
Consider the following, from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, making final appeal for the bailout: "This is a day of consequence for the American people. ... None of us is an island. We're all bound together in boom or bust."
Well. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it.
None of us is an island ... not white people, black people, or people of any other hue ... and we are all bound together, in boom or in bust.
So, given that we are all bound together, and given that $700 billion is a number we are willing to talk about as an estimate of the amount required to restore "faith" in a crumbling system that was established primarily by white people and that primarily benefits white people, maybe that will be a good (re)starting point when we do get around to that reparations discussion.
And that is a discussion we should have, because there is a besetting original sin in the US economy: that fact that it is constructed on the stolen life energy, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved and exploited people of color -- from Africa, Mexico, and China, among other nations -- imported legally and illegally to do the dirty work of building a nation and its wealth.
Oh, to live in a Micah 6:8 world ...
When I listen to the back-and-forth on the bailout, I can't help but think about the much-less-ballyhooed topic of reparations for African-Americans who are generationally disadvantaged and continue to be oppressed by the historical legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow, as well as racial prejudices in the present.
When the topic of reparations does come out, white resistance typically takes the form of such challenges as "I'm not responsible; I never owned slaves, and neither did my family." Or, "How could we ever figure out how much was owed to whom?" Or, "They would want too much; we as a nation would be bankrupted."
Hmm.
Consider the following, from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, making final appeal for the bailout: "This is a day of consequence for the American people. ... None of us is an island. We're all bound together in boom or bust."
Well. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it.
None of us is an island ... not white people, black people, or people of any other hue ... and we are all bound together, in boom or in bust.
So, given that we are all bound together, and given that $700 billion is a number we are willing to talk about as an estimate of the amount required to restore "faith" in a crumbling system that was established primarily by white people and that primarily benefits white people, maybe that will be a good (re)starting point when we do get around to that reparations discussion.
And that is a discussion we should have, because there is a besetting original sin in the US economy: that fact that it is constructed on the stolen life energy, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved and exploited people of color -- from Africa, Mexico, and China, among other nations -- imported legally and illegally to do the dirty work of building a nation and its wealth.
Oh, to live in a Micah 6:8 world ...
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Hiding the White Numbers
Many theorists on race have pointed out that the white race is the one that need not speak its name; this certainly pertains in the case of theology, where we can now find black theology, womanist theology, Latina/o theology, Latin American theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, African theology, Asian theology, queer theology, Native American theology ... a plethora that points out the obvious: anything without a label or hyphen is by definition a white theology.
But not a consciously white theology; not theology written from a perspective informed by a critical understanding of what it means to be white. Rather, before the critiques and constructions of marginalized communities, most theology was written by white (presumably straight) men who regarded their perspective as either objective or universal.
The advent of people of color and feminists and eventually lgbt people noted the falseness of that objectivity and universality. (Of course, the white feminists immediately got it wrong, too, thinking there was a universal female perspective and failing to realize white feminists could not speak for women of color, but that women of color needed to speak the learnings and visions of their own experience.)
Perhaps not too surprisingly, the U.S. government continues to do its part to render whiteness invisible ... conveniently also making white privilege more difficult to discern. For instance, the Census Bureau's Quick Facts web page on the United States as a whole notes that of the total number of business firms documented in 2002 (22,974,655), Hispanic persons own 6.8 percent of those firms, African-Americans own 5.2 percent, Asian persons own 4.8 percent, and indigenous peoples own .1 percent (i.e., one-tenth of a percent).
Conspicuously absent is the statistic for white ownership of business firms, which – based on the figures for other ethnicities – I would estimate at around 83 percent (a figure that might be rounded down somewhat for the inclusion of some Hispanics who might designate themselves as being white). And these are predominantly male owners, across all racial/ethnic category: the percentage of woman-owned firms, unparsed by race or ethnicity, is 28.2 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also organizes its data in a way that renders whiteness invisible. Its Current Population Survey data on employment and income is tabulated for workforce totals and then presented in subsets for women, African Americans, Asian and Hispanic/Latino workers. Data for men and/or white people must be extrapolated. But even as one extrapolates from the data, one finds that the data is presented in such a way that it can only be used to estimate white workers or male workers, but not – for instance – white male workers.
There are changes afoot; many authors and bloggers and theologians and just plain folks are working to make whiteness more visible, in order to render it critique-able ... and ultimately, many of us hope, transformable.
But not a consciously white theology; not theology written from a perspective informed by a critical understanding of what it means to be white. Rather, before the critiques and constructions of marginalized communities, most theology was written by white (presumably straight) men who regarded their perspective as either objective or universal.
The advent of people of color and feminists and eventually lgbt people noted the falseness of that objectivity and universality. (Of course, the white feminists immediately got it wrong, too, thinking there was a universal female perspective and failing to realize white feminists could not speak for women of color, but that women of color needed to speak the learnings and visions of their own experience.)
Perhaps not too surprisingly, the U.S. government continues to do its part to render whiteness invisible ... conveniently also making white privilege more difficult to discern. For instance, the Census Bureau's Quick Facts web page on the United States as a whole notes that of the total number of business firms documented in 2002 (22,974,655), Hispanic persons own 6.8 percent of those firms, African-Americans own 5.2 percent, Asian persons own 4.8 percent, and indigenous peoples own .1 percent (i.e., one-tenth of a percent).
Conspicuously absent is the statistic for white ownership of business firms, which – based on the figures for other ethnicities – I would estimate at around 83 percent (a figure that might be rounded down somewhat for the inclusion of some Hispanics who might designate themselves as being white). And these are predominantly male owners, across all racial/ethnic category: the percentage of woman-owned firms, unparsed by race or ethnicity, is 28.2 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also organizes its data in a way that renders whiteness invisible. Its Current Population Survey data on employment and income is tabulated for workforce totals and then presented in subsets for women, African Americans, Asian and Hispanic/Latino workers. Data for men and/or white people must be extrapolated. But even as one extrapolates from the data, one finds that the data is presented in such a way that it can only be used to estimate white workers or male workers, but not – for instance – white male workers.
There are changes afoot; many authors and bloggers and theologians and just plain folks are working to make whiteness more visible, in order to render it critique-able ... and ultimately, many of us hope, transformable.
Monday, August 4, 2008
White by the Numbers
Several months ago, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz challenged me to consider the question of what it would mean for white people to experience liberation from oppressing. That sent the chapter I was working on into a deeper place, which was a good thing.
I had been writing about Latina calls for liberation, and was about to document the white response so far. As I developed that section, I also began to address the question from Isasi-Diaz about liberation from oppressing, and as a result ended up with a 100+ page chapter, which I have now split into two chapters, one on Latina calls to liberation, and another on white liberation(s).
The chapter on Latina calls to liberation is about 25 pages. The white liberation chapter is about 80 pages. Hmmm. Maybe that's as it should be? Maybe that's what it looks like when white people do their own work? To be determined.
At the moment, I want to share a few numbers. One of the points of the chapter on white liberation is to illustrate the reality of white privilege (historical construction and present reality). Along the way, I did some research on white representation in certain job types. I was recalling a photocopied article I saw some years ago called "Blinded by the White," which noted the heavy preponderance of white people in positions that count, either by virtue of being highly salaried or societally powerful or both.
While the representation of women and men of color has risen in many positions, white people are still heavily over represented in the positions that count. We white folks represent about 66% of the (census) population. Hence, any position where we hold more than 66% of the jobs is a position where white people are overrepresented, in my simple way of thinking. So, here's what I found:
I had been writing about Latina calls for liberation, and was about to document the white response so far. As I developed that section, I also began to address the question from Isasi-Diaz about liberation from oppressing, and as a result ended up with a 100+ page chapter, which I have now split into two chapters, one on Latina calls to liberation, and another on white liberation(s).
The chapter on Latina calls to liberation is about 25 pages. The white liberation chapter is about 80 pages. Hmmm. Maybe that's as it should be? Maybe that's what it looks like when white people do their own work? To be determined.
At the moment, I want to share a few numbers. One of the points of the chapter on white liberation is to illustrate the reality of white privilege (historical construction and present reality). Along the way, I did some research on white representation in certain job types. I was recalling a photocopied article I saw some years ago called "Blinded by the White," which noted the heavy preponderance of white people in positions that count, either by virtue of being highly salaried or societally powerful or both.
While the representation of women and men of color has risen in many positions, white people are still heavily over represented in the positions that count. We white folks represent about 66% of the (census) population. Hence, any position where we hold more than 66% of the jobs is a position where white people are overrepresented, in my simple way of thinking. So, here's what I found:
White representation in higher-salaried positions of power (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2007*)
| Occupation | Percent held | Males | Females |
| Chief executives | 87 | 75 | 25 |
| HR managers | 78 | 30 | 70 |
| Education administrators | 79 | 36 | 64 |
| Medical/health service managers | 76 | 30 | 70 |
| Property/real estate managers | 79 | 50 | 50 |
| Business/financial operations | 76 | 44 | 56 |
| Architecture/engineering | 79 | 86 | 14 |
| Lawyers | 88 | 67 | 33 |
| Magistrates | 83 | 57 | 43 |
| Education/training occupations | 79 | 27 | 73 |
| Post-secondary teachers | 79 | 54 | 46 |
| Health-care practitioners | 76 | 26 | 74 |
| Dentists | 80 | 71 | 29 |
| Pharmacists | 75 | 47 | 53 |
| Physicians/surgeons | 72 | 70 | 30 |
By the numbers, white people still hold a preponderance of the positions that count, out of proportion to our presence in the population, from which I would argue we are able to maintain white-privileging control over the systems and institutions that shape our society, including business, legislative and judicial systems, property sales and management, education and health care. (Note that the percentages of non-white, non-male legislators was considered too small to be tabulated.)
Of course, not all white people are employed in positions that afford economic power and privilege. Whites represented 44 percent of the 37 million
Tim Wise put the point admirably his book, White Like Me:
"I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that all whites are well-off, or even particularly powerful. We live not only in a racialized society, but also a class system, a patriarchal system, and one in which other forms of advantage and disadvantage exist. These other forms of privilege mediate, but never fully eradicate, something like white privilege. … But despite the fact that white privilege plays out differently for different folks, depending on these other identities … whiteness matters and carries with it great advantage. … [A]lthough whites are often poor, their poverty does not alter the fact that relative to poor and working class persons of color, they typically have a leg up. No one privilege system trumps all others every time, but no matter the ways in which individual whites may face obstacles on the basis of nonracial factors, our race continues to elevate us over similarly situated persons of color." (ix-x)
* Sources of data include "Household Data Annual Averages: Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex," Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf. as well as personal calculations.
** Although women outnumber men in HR management positions, men are compensated more highly, earning a median weekly wage of $1581 compared to women’s $1073, as reported in “Median Weekly Earnings.” A similar discrepancy exists for education administration, where women hold 64 percent of the positions, but receive less compensation than men, $1371 to $960.
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