A Response to “Why Anti-Racism Will Fail” by Thandeka (Written by the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Committee, 2000)
Editor’s Note: This post is a reprint of the 2000 response from the Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Committee to Rev. Thandeka’s workshop and article “Why Anti-Racism Will Fail.” Though this response has long been in print in Leslie Takahashi, Chip Roush, and Leon Spencer’s The Arc of the Universe Is Long: Unitarian Universalists, Anti-racism, and the Journey from Calgary (Boston: Skinner House, 2009), it has not been available on the internet for some time, having been long removed from the UUA’s website.
However, Thandeka’s twenty-five year old article continues to be circulated among some Unitarian Universalist spaces as if it was never responded to. It should be noted that this was only the official response of the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Committee to Thandeka’s article; other Unitarian Universalists at the time responded as well, and some were reprinted in the previously mentioned The Arc of the Universe is Long.
I reprint this article here under the assumption that it is fair use because it is now a historical document, because it is not widely available elsewhere online, and because I am making no profit off its circulation. If I am mistaken, I invite an email of accountability letting me know so. I am reprinting this response here because I believe that, if Rev. Thandeka’s article is going to continue to be circulated, the committee’s response should be as well and it should not be implied that the article was so good and damning that there was never a response. The views here are those of the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Committee.
The printed form of Rev. Thandeka’s workshop contained numerous points and several threads of argument. Our letter is intended to address some of those we consider to be the most egregious. There are several major points regarding the content of her workshop that we want to address. There are also a number of issues regarding the manner and the venue in which she chose to express her critique that deserve response. She asserted that there are three “basic problems” in the UUA’s anti-racist strategies. We will address them one at a time.
(1) “They violate the first principle of our UU covenant together to actively affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Her analysis leading to this conclusion is based on two basic points. First, she argues that those of us who support the initiative have blamed the exclusiveness of our congregations on the fact that they are racist, rather than on their clubbish exclusion of just about everyone. She cites a white friend of hers who reported about a minister’s leaving his congregation when its members met to consider whether he should be ordered to shave off his new beard. That the clubbishness of many of our congregations has been known to lead to such prejudicial action is certainly true. We agree that the exclusiveness of clubbish congregations results in the lack of admission to a range of identifiable social categories (e.g. class). In response to this critique, however, we would ask two simple questions: “Who does make up the racial majority of our congregations?" and "What races are most consistently excluded from our congregations?" Analyzing who remains and who is, in fact, excluded along racial lines gives us an important window into UU exclusiveness. The percentage of people of color versus whites in our Association is nowhere near the percentages in society at large. If our congregations were excluding almost everyone as Rev. Thandeka asserts (who would remain is an interesting question), why would the demographics demonstrate a bias against persons of color so out of line with the configuration of society? As a linked oppression, class is certainly interwoven into the institutionalization of exclusiveness, but to deny that race plays a critical and significant part seems, at best, like tunnel vision.
A further error concerning demographics and congregational size is her assertion that the UUA's Journey Toward Wholeness actually teaches that our congregations are small due to their racial exclusiveness. This is simply false. Our focus is not on size, but rather on constituency and the quality of their members' experience. Our analysis does concern itself with why people of color are not in congregations, and how they are kept from participating but that is not our only focus. How we can participate in dismantling racism, both in our congregations and in society, is equally important. An additional and compounding difficulty with Rev. Thandeka's critique is the blurring of just who she is critiquing in her workshop. When she says "What these anti-racists fail to notice is...." We ask, who are the "anti-racists"? To which programs is she directing her remarks? Does she know what UUA anti-racism programs actually exist? In this response we will demonstrate that her confusion about the UUA's anti-racism programs is so great her analysis cannot help but be seriously flawed.
The lack of substance and the uninformed nature of her critique leads us to question why she chose to assault an initiative which she seems to so thoroughly misunderstand. Why has she distorted the fundamental facts about the Journey Toward Wholeness Initiative?
Secondly, she states that as a result of believing that all whites are racist and “through careful and protracted training, [JTW’s strategy is to call] upon… congregants to confess their racism.” She then spends considerable time critiquing some dimensions of the theology expressed in Rev. Joseph Barndt’s book, Dismantling Racism. She assumes that her interpretation of those aspects of his theology is what the JTW advocates and teaches, and upon which it bases its strategies for transformation. Her assumption is wrong and her conclusions are far off the mark. Three points are relevant here: (a) Selecting out portions of Rev. Barndt's theology for critique and criticism and assuming that they are what JTW bases its analysis of racism on is guilt by association, rather than by actual observation. Had she observed any of the actual workshops led by UU trainers, she would be unable to find any such doctrine serving as the underpinnings of our understanding of racism. (b) She has distorted Rev. Barndt's analysis of a relationship of accountability that whites must develop with people of color in order to come into right relationship into an argument for a "savior." Setting up a straw dog of a savior as being necessary for "salvation" from racism is an achingly unfair and mistaken interpretation of our theology and practice. (c) Her erroneous assertion that our programs cause UUs to depend upon some outside salvation from their racism leads her to state that our workshops indict 95 percent of us as helpless and passive sinners. This is a distortion that can only be due to a thorough unfamiliarity with UU facilitated workshops. One of the major sessions of each Jubilee weekend workshop is the creation of action planning groups. Participants consistently leave these sessions empowered, enthusiastic and more deeply committed to transformative action than ever before.
We have statistics and anecdotal evaluations of several hundred Jubilee workshops written by thousands of UUs. The data has been accumulating for over twelve years and was freely available to her had she chosen to use it.
(2) The second critique Rev. Thandeka makes is accusing the JTW of being in error about the nature and structure of power in America. She claims that the privilege that exists in white America only belongs to a “tiny elite.” We wonder which privileges she is talking about. Surely she cannot mean the ability to purchase property with virtually no restriction, as long as the funds are available. Surely she was not referring to the freedom to drive an automobile without the fear of being stopped by the police because of one’s color. Nor could she have been referencing the privilege of consistently seeing one’s race reflected throughout the media, represented in government, and holding the vast majority of the upper levels of management and ownership of U.S. companies of all sizes. We know she must not have not meant the safety of escaping incarceration in percentages radically lower than those for people of color, especially with sentences of death. Nor could she have meant the freedom from tragically high rates of alcoholism among the indigenous peoples of our land, nor from the major crises in indigenous health care whose proportions and oppressive neglect are unknown in white communities. But then she could also not have been suggesting the privilege of white Americans whose (on average) net worth is 50 percent higher than Latino Americans no matter what their socio-economic level. We would assume that she did not mean the privilege of consistently learning a version of history from textbooks sanctioned by state education programs that make the white race appear to be THE most creative, productive, moral, and important people on earth. If she was not referring to all of these privileges, securely held by the white middle-class, just which privileges was she referring to?
The list is one that could go on, and we are surprised that she avoided trying to factor it into her analysis. Further, her denial of white middle-class privilege disregards its role as gatekeeper for the elites. Rev. Thandeka has rightly cited the use of the lower classes to create a buffer for the elites. What she has failed to understand is the similar role held by the white middle-class, which is an even more powerful tool in keeping the races divided, and people of color oppressed. We applaud any discussion that shows links between oppressions such as racism and classism, but to excuse the profit that whites of all classes derive from the oppression of people of color, misses the complexity and, more importantly, the tragedy in the day to day degradation experienced by persons of color. That degradation is intensified in today’s unstable financial reality because people of color at the bottom of the economic scale must vie for lower and lower level jobs as those above them push them out of their already substandard employment.
Rev. Thandeka’s analysis of the present financial instability we are experiencing that causes so much anxiety and economic vulnerability for whites is accurate, but what she fails to include is the deeper trauma that this causes persons of color, which is experienced in a reality that is much more brutal and murderous. Leaving the trauma and oppression of people of color out of her arguments creates an aura of eerie disconnection that has caused many UUS of color to ask, “Where are we in her analysis?” Labeling the vulnerability of whites as “middle-class poverty” can be helpful to see the fallacy of living by appearances but it does not eliminate nor account for the privilege of being able to avoid living at or very near the bottom, economically, politically, and socially that is the lot of the majority of persons of color in our nation. Nor does it account for the better housing, employment, education, police protection, nutrition, geographic mobility, cultural support/affirmation, media representation, etc., etc., etc., that middle-class whites enjoy.
(3) Third Rev. Thandeka states that we misinterpret actions resulting from feelings of shame and powerlessness as evidence of white racism. She is making a critical distinction here that misses the complexity, subtlety and systemic nature of racism in our times. She seems to be arguing, as some whites do, that racists are those people who act out of a conscious conviction of race prejudice, e.g. members of the Klan. She places high priority on exposing the shame that some (and we emphasize the word “some”) whites carry about their conditioning about persons of color, and their “capitulation” to authority in order to belong. We believe that her emphasis is out of balance and disregards the holistic and devastating nature of learning racism which few, if any, white persons can escape in our society. She seems not to have been listening when Shirley Chisholm, esteemed African American legislator, said, “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal." Her emphasis upon shame is helpful, but limited. It does not take into account how other powerful formative emotions which contribute to the individualization and internalization of racial prejudice do not just contribute to shame, but are powerfully debilitating in their own right. Such emotions as the lust for power, fear, helplessness, and rage — as well as the processes of denial— all serve to betray an individual's sense of relatedness to others and are powerfully present in constructing white identity.
But more importantly, the shame some whites experience can not discount their behavior. Although Dan [a person used in Thandeka's address as an example] was ashamed of himself, he did in fact act in ways that were oppressive. Her denial that his behavior was racist, because he was not acting out of an overt, personal desire to oppress blacks is far too superficial an analysis of how oppression operates. Her argument suffers from a lack of understanding of the difference between intention and impact, which are hallmark dynamics used in most diversity trainings and were especially developed in relation to the gender oppression of women. Dan needs understanding regarding his intentions, AND he needs to be accountable for the impact of his behavior. Early childhood education has shown us the deep complexity of learning that goes into the building of values and behaviors. It is clear that something as complex as racism is built out of a thick web of interactive forces that certainly include shame, but also include many other factors in the shaping of the child’s malleable mind and heart, not the least of which are overt and covert racist actions witnessed and/or carried out by the growing child. It is also clear that unlearning negative personal attitudes and behaviors (such as racism) requires consciously directed corrective action.
Finally, her emphasis upon shame as the central construction of racial separation in whites, and her denial that racism exists except in those consciously convicted of their prejudice, misses the reality of the systemic nature of racism in today’s world. The Journey Toward Wholeness programs do not hold that any of us are racist at birth, we “have to be carefully taught." That teaching comes from and results in the construction of ideologies, language, life ways—in short, culture. This sets up patterns of oppression within institutions and the systems to which they belong. No individual alone can dismantle them and all individuals suffer from them whether or not they are conscious of it. That teaching sets up target populations and non-target populations which serve the underlying dynamic and structure of oppression. In our society today we believe it is eminently clear that nonwhites are the target of oppression no matter what their class; it is also clear that whites of all classes profit from that targeting on many levels and in many ways. To disregard or minimize this reality is to live in an illusion that is both costly and dangerous.
There is another problem in Rev. Thandeka's analysis that is troubling: Casting the racial dynamic on this continent in Black/White terms. There are several points we want to make in this regard. First, although there was an oligarchy in the south who owned the majority of slaves, their rule would have been impossible without the direct involvement of the other classes in enforcing the institution of slavery: night riders and patrols, overseers, and the very consciousness of gaining status as whites which served as a wedge between the elites and the imported Africans that she also cites, created a wide spread commitment of whites of all classes throughout the south against blacks; the undermining of reconstruction was also a widely systemically coordinated assault on “Negro” freedom by all classes of southern whites.
Further, what her arguments concerning slavery leave out, and the omission is glaring, is the struggle between the colonizing white population and the indigenous peoples they oppressed. Certainly there were class issues intermixed with the overt practices of conquest, removal and extermination, just as there are today with the strategies employed by modern corporations; the problem is that it is impossible to remove race from the equation; it is impossible to declare that the only reason populations of color were so widely targeted was solely due to economics. To do so is offensive to persons of color throughout the history of this continent who have suffered no matter what their class membership. To do so represents academic thinking in its most arcane and narrow form.
A further error Rev. Thandeka made in delineating the origins of racism is that of arguing that etiology determines maturity. That is, although a cancer might start because of the exposure to carcinogenic material, once the cancer takes hold in the body, it does not matter how it started. Its infection spreads. Its destruction dominates. Its life-threatening potential has a life of its own. The same is true of racism. Once the institutionalization of racism has fully taken root, its effects extend well beyond class issues alone, if they were ever solely limited to them, which we dispute. Once white individuals have been "infected" with the internalization of race prejudice, the oppressive use of power, the life numbing forces of denial, and the continual seduction into taking advantage of the florid expression of that prejudice as it exists in its systemic institutionalization, to argue that it can't be racism because it originated in economic causes, is simplistic and misses seeing the reality of the on-going tragedy. Beyond responding to the specific content issues of her workshop, we want to address some dynamics of process and history that we find unacceptable and misguided.
A first point is the failure on Rev. Thandeka’s part to collaborate with her UU colleagues (especially those of color) and with lay folk who are responsible for promoting the Association-wide Anti-Racism Initiative. We believe that personal anti-bias and healing work are a necessary part of any authentic effort to dismantle oppression. Her lack of intentional and collaborative dialogue, however, leads us to believe her interpretation of the social justice mission of our religious movement is thoroughly privatized and suffers a disconnection both from the facts and the spirit of the Anti-Racism Initiative. Her lack of collegial conversation clearly underlies many of the serious errors in her thinking and in her perception of what she believes are the facts. Her workshop was filled with errors in judgment, scholarship, perception and reasoning.
Rev. Thandeka distorted the learnings and the underlying intention of the Crossroads training she attended and disrupted the workshop itself by shouting expletives at the trainer. She distorted the interfaith collaborative effort of our work by unfairly and inaccurately characterizing our interfaith partners as being locked into a belief in a debilitating conception of original sin. Her gross critique of Christianity is a parody that would offend the faiths with whom we have so successfully collaborated at the cutting edge of anti-racism work.
We are saddened by the above list of misperceptions and distortions; we believe their negative impact is even more serious due to Rev. Thandeka’s status as a responsible teaching professional and clergy person. Rather than the GA Initiative, and the institutionalization of it through the Journey Toward Wholeness Anti-Racism programs, violating our First Principle, we believe Rev. Thandeka’s workshop did a serious disservice to the UU women and men who have worked for so many years to collaboratively forge a dynamic and multifaceted process for addressing one of the most debilitating oppressions in human history.
Our sadness, however, does not prevent us, and will not prevent us, from moving ahead inclusively and collaboratively with a healing vision of freedom, equity and justice based on clear analysis and articulated through practical, concrete and powerful anti-racism programs that are consistent with and in the spirit of the General Assembly vote in Phoenix, June 1997.
[Signed] In the Faith,
The Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Committee
The Rev. Susan Suchocki, chair; Ruth Alatorre, Dr. Ivan Louis Cotman, Ken Carpenter, the Rev. Linda Olson Peebles, and Dr. Leon Spencer; the Rev. Kurt A. Kuhwald, liaison from the Jubilee Working Group; the Rev. Melvin Hoover, Robette Dias, Susan Leslie, staff.
