In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

Written by Roy Anaclerio, Liz Clayton, Mary Kilian, Jessica Mendoza, and Katie Ray.

Community can be complicated: it feels like a mythical, if not impossible idea, and yet we have a God given longing for a return to Eden and to true fellowship. Our diverse micro-community consists of four women and one man, ages twenty-seven to sixty-two. Four of us are white, one is Latina; three had previously been in classes together, but two did not know any of the others. Our educational backgrounds in California, Mississippi, Northern Virginia and Ohio were in science, business, art, and the humanities. As psychology and theology graduate students, four of us come from an interpersonal perspective, and one from systemic/institutional, antiracist community organizing. In short, our group created fertile ground for exploration of diversity in community.

Because multicultural issues, racism, and white privilege can be explosive topics; and because each person in a community brings their own backgrounds, experiences, and prejudices, the obstacles to addressing race and racism are real and complex. An invitation is extended to the reader of this text to join our dialogue around the process of disintegration, repentance and restoration with regard to racism in our hearts and in the United States today. Consider this an invitation to join us in the hope of transforming a difficult and uncomfortable conversation into healing and productive action that will enable all of us to stay together and thrive within community.

Where there is joint work toward the common goal of dismantling racism, group diversity both enriches and further complicates the process. The hope is for diversity to expand the breadth of life, but unfortunately, (and in our group’s experience) communal movement and understanding slows in order to continually honor each individual as well as the larger systemic functioning. Individuals are challenged to communicate across broad ranges of experience, some with training and in-the-trenches field experience, and others with only a slight understanding of racism or white privilege. Outside life-events involving family, work, or school obligations, impact the levels of participation and emotional energy required to work within the sensitive area of race relations. Even with a common passion to engage in conversation around power, authenticity, forgiveness and reconciliation, drains the people addressing racism. Despite the struggle of creating a community of difference around the emotionally charged topic of race relations, we carry on because we hope to,

enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives.

Each individual must authentically bring themselves, equipped with their different perspective, and create, invite, and participate in an environment that is safe and life-giving for all parties. To facilitate through the fog of the process, an ongoing framework of support, openness, and accountability is necessary. This will help all to steer clear from the pull of imprisonment within the exact race construct and power dynamic we are addressing.

In beginning to address the race construct, we must be aware of different perspectives. Our ability to rightly engage different perspectives increases as we all commit to untangling, understanding, and enjoying our individual cultural identities. For many people, the identity process begins by naming the idol of white skin and culture. Living with white privilege has endowed Euro-Americans with false power that imposes an internalized oppression on people of color. Jessica has invited the reader to hear part of her story of uncovering authentic ethnic identity. Jessica is a Latina woman, who as a member of our group process, longs to see history redeemed and individual glory restored.

Jessica’s Story

I thought it was normal that I hated my curly black hair and wanted straight, manageable blond hair. I thought it was normal that I hid the fact that I was bi-lingual, and that shame was normal over anything coming from my Colombian culture. I thought it was normal to push my parents to be more like my white friends’ parents. I became brilliant at imitating the white world around me. To solidify my white identity, I became a Christian: Even Jesus’ blood helped me to be White Euro-American. Is that not salvation in America? Be white and you will inherit the American dream!

Then someone told me I was not white…and my world fell apart. How was I not white? I lived in a white world, played by white world rules, talked white language, went to white schools, worshiped a white Jesus, and loved and cherished my white friends.

My dark Latino skin suddenly felt like a neon sign saying “Look at me, I’m not white!” I wanted to run and hide. I began to uncover negative stereotypes of Latinos and I realized that I had grown up my whole life in fear of being seen as Latina. I had not authentically brought myself. I had lost any and all sense of “me.” I had spent my life with a false identity: My futile attempts to be white left me exhausted. I began, quite literally, creating for myself a Latina identity based on my family and culture. I found that I was growing a stronger self, and developing a larger capacity to be engaged authentically with my Latino family and friends.

Jessica’s development of her ethnic identity is a necessary and painful process shared by many persons of color within our culture. It illustrates incredible personal leadership in self-awareness and authenticity, and a powerful example of dismantling the internal affects of racism. For both white people and people of color, the forced socialization process into racially-defined roles is “part of our identity formation and starts at the very beginning of our lives.” No one is immune from this process, and understanding individual ethnic identity as it relates to interpersonal conflict is essential in addressing today’s racism. Jessica, in painfully exploring her inner turmoil as an extension of external socialization, makes room within herself and her relationships for true celebration of life, not restriction.

Jessica’s process of identity development is repentance, turning away from this societal idol and turning towards the reality of who God has created her to be. Trying to be white kept Jessica from embracing her God created image. Without the white community’s recognition of their commitment to the white idol, and the hard work of all individuals embracing their personal reconciled ethnic-identity, there will be no repentance towards the beauty of how all people are created in the image of God. Without this wholeness, people will continue to oppress and/or shame themselves and their own culture. In this oppression and shame there cannot be authentic forgiveness and racial reconciliation.

Just as we stay stagnant without individual, responsible recognition of identity, we cannot move forward without recognition of our country’s inherited wounds from slavery, racial internment camps, the dissemination of native populations, segregation, and other gross injustices. “And so we turn to history not to wallow in a fruitless nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise that is rooted in the living ingredients of our own lives.” Our shared history was created as we individually and systematically adopted racialized roles. We are not called to wallow, but act differently while acknowledging grief. We must grieve how we have harmed and been harmed by the actuality of white idolatry in our culture and in our institutional systems. Grief precedes the humility and authenticity that will open the door to justice and love in relationships and systems of racial and ethnic difference.

Racism in the 21^st century is unconscious, indirect, and subtle. Because of these characteristics, racism is difficult to point to, but the result of secured power for white culture is less hidden. The white ideal is held close in order to keep an illusory white privilege and power that has equally robbed both Euro-Americans and people of color of their dignity. All of us function in ways

that conform to societal norms dictated by racism. All of us to one degree or another end up doing what racism wants us to do in order to survive in this society. All of us, by our very participation in systems and institutions of this society, willingly or unwillingly support the perpetuation of white power and privilege. And most of us conform to such an extent that we even feel natural and normal in doing so.

White people within the institution have particular work to do before they can truly hear and honor the voice of the community of color in their midst: understanding both the history of resistance to racism, and where they stand today in relation to that history within the institution. The work of the whole community is to become aware of white power and white privilege within the race construct, as well as to mourn the fact that no one in the community had a choice in being born into it. Supportive space needs to be created within the institution for all of us to hold ourselves accountable to resist the white supremacy that is unavoidably and unconsciously brought into community. Although systemic racist oppression involves both individuals and institutions, it is institutions and their leaders that perpetrate the violence of racism; and institutional power that controls and dominates individuals: “It is through the operation of the system that the power of evil imposes itself so irresistibly on people.” Racial justice through authentic forgiveness, reconciliation, and the equitable sharing of power can only occur when institutions and their leaders are genuine with their present and historical agendas with respect to the race construct.

Racism in the 21^st century is an institutional and systemic issue, as well as an interpersonal nightmare. The question of how to address racism and racial problems from both a systemic and relational perspective is a difficult one: How is each perspective understood and included within the other? There needs to be an expanded understanding both of the ongoing, systemic devastation of racism, and how the race construct acts to destroy interpersonal relationships within it. First, we need to make sure we are all addressing the same core problem. Let us begin by establishing a core understanding of the term race. A working definition of race, shared by hundreds of leaders in today’s fight for racial justice in our culture is:

An arbitrary (specious, false) socio-biological construct created by Europeans during the time of worldwide expansion and adapted in the political and social structures of the United States, to assign human worth and social status, using themselves as the model of humanity, for the purpose of legitimizing white power and white skin privilege.

The concept of race is dubious at best. “The consensus among most scholars in the fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology, and other disciplines is that racial distinctions fail [in that] they are not genetically discrete, are not reliably measured and are not scientifically meaningful.” Thus, racial prejudice is a personal expression of the specious race construct; and racism is that prejudice backed up by systemic and institutional power. Tim Tyson’s autobiographical text Blood Done Sign My Name reveals from opening sentence to final chapter that racism was created to oppress people of color. Racism was created in order to legitimize and maintain white power and privilege. The ultimate and most insidious purpose of racism has always been to annihilate human community by destroying authentic relationships between human beings. The human family was created for relationship in community; but the race construct is designed to destroy the very possibility of just, merciful community on which all of our existence depends. It is at this juncture where the needs of individual, relational persons and the institutions they create and maintain intersect. An intentional decision to stay together in dialogue, in community, and in relationship, becomes necessary in the face of a race construct working relentlessly for division.

The power of redemption is found only in conjunction with the praxis and theory of staying, both in the analysis of systemic racism and in the interpersonal tension of difference. By staying we are committing to the dignity of all parties and allowing the space for dignity to grow. Walking away is indifference, a violent act, and part of the underbelly of racism. Granted, our concept of staying never includes remaining in abusive contexts at all costs. Our hope is that there is a way for everyone to have space to exist and have an impact without being harmed. As a group of students wanting to challenge racism, we have stayed in an experience that was at times harmful, and wrestled to write a paper with the hope that all of us would live into our dignity. We took space when needed to address the harm, and then tried to return, in a more dignified way to the concept of staying.

Staying in community is both difficult and beautiful; sometimes injustice is engaged in beautiful ways, and sometimes in ways that must lead to tension. The tension is part and parcel to the process, and should not be immediately abandoned in the desire for the more manageable experience of resolution. People come with past history and experience. We discovered that being real in community has the potential of becoming difficult and “ugly as sin.” It is often easier to put each other into categories, rather than deal with the confusion of how wonderfully complex each of us was created by God. If we are not comfortable with our own identities, how could we expect others to embrace us? “The identity with oneself—a personal centeredness—must be preserved for the sake of difference.” This is an essential interpersonal requirement for racial reconciliation, surrender of privilege, and forgiveness. “Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly.” To know and be genuine with ones’ self first and foremost is a prerequisite to being genuine and authentic with others.

Once we can hear ourselves more clearly, we need to stay by continually addressing our failures in hearing one another. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire claims, “I engage in dialogue because I recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character of the process of knowing. In this sense, dialogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing.” If we are able to stay in conversations and dialogue, there is hope for arriving at an understanding and celebration of difference.

The importance of counting the cost of staying was mentioned earlier, but crucial enough to now address in greater detail. Staying comes at great cost, and at times the cost is considered too great to risk. Freedom allows each of us to continually make this decision, despite the disappointment and disagreement of others. Staying should never include the cost of either oppressor or oppressed to be annihilated in order to stay. Staying should never foster humiliation, but the life and fullness of all those that stay. Martin Luther King Jr. warns against the danger of merely shifting the recipients of shame and hate. He neither called the black man nor the white man to be diminished in efforts to struggle for community: Staying is for the sake of justice and existence of both black and white persons. Racial injustice, interpersonally and institutionally, distorts us all in community: The concept of staying hopes for diminishing this distortion and for encouraging the fullness of all human beings, which can only happen fully in community. There must be a love that holds the wounds and truth of injustice, but not at the cost of cutting self or other off from wholeness.

In the same address, Martin Luther King Jr. weaves in the reality of the Holy Spirit for the need and creation of community. We cannot be honest in our humanity without acknowledging that the concept of staying causes us to cling to the power of the Spirit to move. With the help of God’s Spirit, communities will allow for the fullness of human beings to exist, and hence, diminished injustice.

The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation. Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community.

Along with the movement of the Holy Spirit, Christian thought on justice “is rooted in the fiery protests of prophets and in the engaged reflection of the apostles.” For example, Micah answers the question of what is required of us: “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah presupposes that listening and hearing the voice of the oppressed is prerequisite to understanding justice and therefore to acting justly. Institutions, as well as individuals within those institutions, must hear the combined voice of their constituents of color if institutional racism is to be met with commensurate acts of mercy, justice and transformation. In doing this, we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds, and our neighbors as ourselves, both as individuals and institutions.

In turning to the healing power of love, Christians look to the gospel. Are people still hopeless in the face of Christ’s gospel? Howard Thurman, an African American theologian whose writings helped fuel and inform the civil rights movement, believes that Jesus’ gospel, rescued from distortion by the privileged and powerful, will lead us away from enemy status with one another and into a realization of the kingdom of God within and without.

What, then, is the word of the religion of Jesus to those who stand with their backs against the wall? There must be the clearest possible understanding of the anatomy of the issues facing them. They must recognize fear, deception, hatred, each for what it is. Once having done this, they must learn how to destroy these or to render themselves immune to their domination. In so great an undertaking it will become increasingly clear that the contradictions of life are not ultimate. The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of men. For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, he can live effectively in the chaos of the present the high destiny of a son of God.

This gospel resides within the concrete experience of our lives in community. Thurman calls for more than good intentions. He implores us to enter the chaos of today, and stay in a manner of “painstaking discipline” and “inner authority,” trusting that God travels with us.

Addressing relationships and oppressive systems is complicated and painful. Nonetheless, we hope to encourage a path that honors the concept of staying engaged in communities addressing racial injustice. Movement toward a redeemed reality continues when individuals grow in their capacity to stand individuated and engaged in the face of power and chaos. When moving forward feels incredibly dangerous, those threatened must choose to temporarily step away in order to confirm identity, and thus avoid internalizing other peoples’ harm or playing part in their violence. We are not to submit to an unchanging person or system, but neither are we to work harder to control another. We need to never forget that our “fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s humanity, not to ‘win the people over’ to [our] side.” Change will occur when those wielding power become aware of their power and choose to responsibly lead a supportive institutional process for addressing institutional racism. Institutions are responsible for treading the same path as individuals; one of reflection, repentance, and change. In the face of unchanging oppression, energy should be focused on grieving horrendous loss, battling to keep hope alive, and searching for life-giving people, activities, and communities that incite the spirit and body to sing.

The concrete experience of our group, as we labored to write this paper, mirrored the chaos of other communities confronting the monster of racism. We became mired in conflict, power struggles, and interpersonal pain that often felt like a failure of ourselves, each other, and our larger passion to work for racial justice within an interpersonally honoring process. Our journey together has not arrived at a beautiful ending, although we continue to meet and attempt to face the reality at hand. While we did not experience, learn, and create what we had originally hoped, we have all been greatly affected. Staying is admitting that we cannot do life alone, despite the barriers in relationships, institutions, and systems. “For one man needs another to live, and the deeper he is willing to enter into the painful condition which he and others know, the more likely it is that he can be a leader, leading his people out of the desert into the promised land.” We grieve the present circumstances of division and we grieve the current suffering of all racist oppression. Present in the grief is a hope that staying in community will lead to new possibilities. “It is exactly in common searches and shared risks that new visions reveal themselves and that new roads become visible.”

Although we are in new and strange territory, we are not alone on this path of change; nor are we the first ones to walk on it. We have been brought this far by many people who have been on this path before us; and there are many joining us now and many who will come after us…

Thank you to all who have blazed the path we now trod, and thank you to all who will continue to walk where it is not always safe. Let us move forward together in understanding, resolve, courage, humility, faith, and hope, and may we await together the coming celebration of communal glory for all people.