Tuesday, July 15, 2008

#70 Drilling for Truth

There are at least three quite different ways of seeing the issue of race and racism—-all of them true. There is the lens of our personal experience: the messages we got as children, the people we have known, the experiences we’ve had, the things that have stretched and moved us, the things that have been hard.

Then there is the lens of history and society: the impact on African Americans of slavery followed by over a century of government-sanctioned discrimination, the current reality of segregation and inequality, the growing barriers to immigration, and attitudes about race that range from passively unaware to actively hostile in much of the population.

Then there is the third lens of the Spirit: the understanding that ultimately we are all children of God, that in the most profound sense race is an artificial construct that serves to divide people who belong together.

If we think of these as three layers, one on top of the other, most of us tend to relate to one of them more than the others. With the top layer, we see race personally, our own experience is our primary reality, everything else seems too far away, too abstract. With the middle layer, we are acutely conscious of the enormous damage of institutional racism and feel that the main job has to be exposing that reality. With the bottom layer, we cling to, and hope to rest in, the knowledge that we are all one, and can’t imagine anything more fundamental.

I think much of our difficulty in addressing issues of race and racism comes from trying to communicate with the folks who relate to a different layer than the one that so clearly reflects reality to us. We get so frustrated. Those other folks seem so insular and blindered, or so grim and guilt mongering, or so simplistic and other-worldly. I think there’s a solution though: it lies in moving from the horizontal to the vertical, inviting everybody to get together on top of the whole thing and start drilling.

Drill into that layer of personal experience. Remember what we were told when we were little, who we had access to and who we didn’t, who we loved, what was hard. Tell our stories to each other. Drill a little deeper in that first layer. Reflect on how our experience has shaped our attitudes toward race. Dare to celebrate our loves and our deep connections. Dare to imagine how naïve unawareness can be experienced as hurtful and seen as racist. Nobody is bad here—-it’s just a rich opportunity to uncover more and more truth. It’s an important layer where we could spend a lot of time, but there’s more below.

Drill into that hard layer of institutional racism. Learn about slavery, about the tragic long-term impact of a corrupted and aborted Reconstruction, about how discriminatory lending policies made it almost impossible for Black Americans to build wealth through home equity till well after World War II, about how structural racism continues to segregate and bar equal access to education, jobs and health care. Share what we learn. Be willing to grieve. There’s way more here than any of us want to know. But until we get through this layer, until we interact with this truth, we don’t have full access to what’s below. We can imagine the good clean water down there. We can talk about it. But we can’t drink it.

Only when we’ve done the hard work of drilling, through the cloudy water of personal experience, through the bitter water of institutional racism, only then will we be able to drink the life-giving water of oneness in the Spirit, the deepest truth of all.




Margins

There is something about margins.
Weeding the garden
I like to start at the edges
claiming everything they enclose.

Most of the show is at the center
rich and beautiful--
It calls out to be tended.
But if you tolerate weeds at the margin
they grow in.

Starting at the margin
is a decision
to have everything.




Some things that have made me hopeful recently:

Members of a historic peace church in Kenya who have found renewed life in taking leadership in the resettlement of refugees after the ethnically-charged violence of the winter.

A modest little man who created a wetland out of waterlogged and abandoned cornfields in western Pennsylvania, offering a home to hundreds of species of birds, insects, amphibians and fish.

A group of ten-year-olds who were thrilled to spend a week without electronic entertainment, using their own imagination, simple found and recycled materials and hand tools to create--and create, and create.

In the absence of leadership on the federal level, the governors of US states who are taking the lead in thinking about the well-being of their constituents and developing innovative social welfare and environmental policy.

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