• Woodrow Wilson, January 22, 1917

Address to Senate

• Robert Browning, 1882

What can two straight white guys whose ancestors came from Northern Europe, and who are college graduates, consider themselves middle class, have white collar jobs with regular pay checks, and own their own homes in ‘good’ neighborhoods offer about diversity that might be useful? After all, neither one of us has any visual characteristics that mark us as ‘different’ and consequently we almost never experience overt discrimination or oppression on the basis of who we are.

In almost every setting we’re likely to be in, Dan and I can melt into the crowd and are seldom picked out as potential troublemakers. We are almost never assumed to be a threat. I’ve only been stopped once by the police because of my appearance – my truck matched the description of a getaway vehicle in a gas-station robbery that took place minutes before, and my friend and I, both young white men, matched the sketchy description of the perpetrators.

Most of the time Dan and I can walk down the street and never stand out. The rare exceptions are sometimes frightening. Years ago in Atlanta, on a Sunday morning during Lent, I was in front of Ebenezer Baptist Church when the church doors opened and a crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk. My companion and I were the only white guys in sight. A radical group of black protesters stood across the street with signs protesting the worship of a white Jesus, and as the church doors opened, they began to shout at the worshippers. We made our way past the church to the tiny memorial park next door where Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sarcophagus is. We were approached by a black man who was obviously high, and when we refused to give him money, he shouted ‘They gonna kill you white boys!’ I can still hear his voice ringing after almost 20 years. The actual danger was nil, but the adrenaline kicked in and both of us were shaking with fear.

More often we melt in. A month ago I watched people boarding the flight Judy and I were on from Baltimore to St. Louis. In what was claimed to be a random additional security check at the gate, every person of color was pulled aside and had their carryon luggage taken from them to be searched by hand while they were subject to additional body scans and swipes for explosive residue analysis. Not one of the white people on the flight was asked to submit to the additional check.

Dan and I are part of the powerful majority. Like it or not, we are part of the problem when it comes to oppression, and until we understand how the oppression that arises from use of power and prejudice to maintain privilege hurts us, too, we’re not likely to become part of the solution.

Statistically speaking, we are not far from average – or at least that’s the myth that we readily assume. But are we really?

Well, no, we are not really average if there is such a thing. Men have higher birth rates than women, but our death rates are higher, too, and consequently there are more women around than men. Men are the majority of the under 35 population in the US, but at every subsequent age there are more women. The proportion of men grows steadily lower with age. Our gender doesn’t put us in the majority.

And so-called white folk – people with pink skin – are certainly not in the majority of the world’s population. Our wealth is far greater than that of most of the people in the world, and we live in a privileged society that has far more access to resources and much more autonomy and free choice than most of the world’s people enjoy. We have more education, better health care, and more access to communications than most of the world – though there are a few countries that exceed the United States on each of those counts.

As religious liberals we stand outside the mainstream in a tradition that has experienced horrible oppression for our heretical faith stance. During the radical reformation of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, many of our religious ancestors were burned at the stake or drowned in cages that were lowered into the water.

But despite not really being average, we pass for the norm. But at what cost? First we have lost a sense of pride in our particular heritage and second we have lost many benefits of creative interchange with folks who are not like us.

A rich heritage has been reduced to a couple of kinds of Christmas cookies. One of the stories from my family is of my German paternal grandfather, when he realized that each of his five children had married a Norwegian, crying out in despair, "All my grandchildren are damn Norwegians!" From the other stories about him, I believe this was not said in jest.

But in fact we were not brought up to be Norwegians or anything else but plain white vanilla Americans. We understood that we were expected to go to college, though my generation was the first in any of my family to do so. We were expected and we expected to have good jobs in an expanding technological economy and to marry, have children, to own our own homes, and to be part of our communities. In short to be "normal" Americans. And nearly every one of my grandfather’s grandchildren did just that, with more or less success. Well, OK, that’s a myth, too. Most of the eight of us had failed first marriages, one of us is gay, and more than half of us found careers in the service sector. Most of us eventually owned our own homes and several of us have been active community volunteers.

None of my immigrant grandparents spoke their native languages in their homes, and they all made real efforts to assimilate so that they would not stand out as different. I believe this was at least partly because they wished to forget their difficult childhood and put the shame of family alcoholism and abuse behind them. In part the loss was because my maternal grandmother died far too young, when my mother was just six years old, leaving my grandfather the daunting task of raising two young daughters. He wisely sent them to live with their aunt and uncle. But despite all those reasons, I believe a significant effort was made to fit in, to be normal, and not to stand out.

If asked about their religious preference, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and parents would not hesitate to say Lutheran, giving away their ancestral heritage, though in truth only the great aunt who raised my mother attended church.

My immediate forebears were largely successful, and became minor pillars of their new community with only a few minor scandals to add interest to their stories. But the loss of cultural identity grieves me. Most of what I know about my Norwegian heritage has come from sources outside the family. My mother is in the process of attempting to reconstruct the family genealogy, but she keeps running into ancestors who changed their names or who were namedThomas Moe, a name apparently as common in 19^th century Norway as John Smith is in America. Even in the old country my ancestors didn’t stand out.

The German side was no better at maintaining its culture and passing it along. It’s not even clear which of the two Oldenburgs my grandfather’s family came from. The primary parts of that heritage that I inherited are impatience and a quick temper, along with an unhealthy dose of perfectionism.

But it was with great pride that we were told again and again that my paternal great grandmother’s parents had come to the Oregon Territory on a wagon train from Pennsylvania, and that she was one of the first white babies (in some versions the very first) born in the Territory. Not only do we fit in; we’re almost natives!

There is a loss of separate identity and of pride in a particular cultural heritage that must be endured in order to fit in. The melting pot produced the myth of a single American white culture with its amalgam of European (mostly western and northern European) parts, each of them dissolving into the whole. It’s a dish sadly lacking in spice and flavor.

I participated in anti-racism training a couple of years ago. The people of color who were present spoke in detail and with passion about the things they appreciated and found difficult in their cultural heritage while the white folks present struggled to find any unique cultural roots. When we were processing the results of the exercise, many of the white people present complained that they had been tricked by the exercise and blamed the facilitators for the relative lack of richness in the descriptions of our heritages.

The facilitators pointed out that indeed we had been tricked, although it was not by the process of the exercise. We had been tricked to give up what makes us unique by the desire to fit in, to be normal, and to be a part of what Dan called the smooth surface on which every other culture acquires relief and is given definition.

But a word of caution seems in order. While I am advocating pride in our own culture, I don’t mean to imply the sort of false pride that believes it is superior. I don’t mean the misplaced pride in being white, male, straight, and Protestant Christian that leads to a supremacist stance that is exclusionary and xenophobic. But rather the pride that goes hand in hand with humility, and that knows it has something to share and to offer to the world, but at the same time expects to learn by experiencing what other cultures have to offer.

The experience of difference is powerful, and it draws us in. There us an inherent value in difference. Cultural differences enrich our lives, stimulate creativity, and indeed lead to novel ideas and solutions to problems. It is against the foil of difference that we are able to ask ourselves why we do things in a particular way, what it is in our ancestral experience that has drawn us to particular ways of being and relating. It is in this quest that we clarify and find meaning in our own unique heritage.

If we are well grounded in our own heritage and proud of it, we can then engage with the other in a relationship of mutuality and appreciation. Then a multi-cultural experience can be richly rewarding.

But we ought to guard against claiming unity in our diversity when we have little understanding of the deeper significance of ancestral experience – our own as well as that of the other – let alone of the day-to-day experience of being different in the midst of a domineering and oppressive culture. Such premature claims of unity endanger our sense of the qualities that make us unique. We are not all the same.

We would benefit from efforts to seek a deeper engagement with the other, from being open to the possibilities of learning and of being changed by our encounters.

If, on the other hand, we lack a healthy pride and have substituted the bland flat surface of assumed normalcy for the richness ofa particular culture, then the shadow side of relating to others emerges, and we can only do so by putting the other down and pretending that ours is the only valid truth.

It is in this hubris that prejudice finds its roots. The insecurity that arises from our lack of real pride leads to the false pride which fuels both overt and subtle oppressions. This is the source of hate crimes like the threatening racist slogans painted on Carrie’s and Nathan’s cars, to the horrible torture and murder of young gay men like Matthew Shepherd, and to arson fires in churches that support same-sex marriages, like the one at our sister congregation in York nearly two years ago.

We Unitarian Universalists have a mixed record of anti-oppression work. We’ve been on the forefront of many progressive causes – abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, and accessibility issues have all gotten our attention. Our anti-racism efforts have been marred by internal squabbling and disagreements over strategies. In recent memory we have made some horrendous gaffs, which have caused deep wounds to be reopened – like holding a Jefferson Ball at one General Assembly where delegates were invited to attend in period costume, which of course offended the African American descendents of slaves who were present.

But as a denomination we have also made a commitment to being an anti-racist, multicultural body. It is not easy work getting there. There is deep resistance, some of which is grounded in honest difference in strategy and some in the subtle liberal racism and denial that is so hard to root out of our midst.

Our anti-racism efforts have shifted from counting people of color in our pews to understanding power and privilege. The theological basis for our work has shifted from one based on the model of Christ’s suffering and redemption to one based on the inherent worth and dignity of every person. (We have abandoned the failed strategy of attempting to induce white quilt in order to promote action.) This is progress, even though at times it seems painfully slow and for every step forward we seem to take one almost as big backward. Our current president, the Rev. Bill Sinkford, who was in seminary with Judy and me, is the first African American leader of a major historically white denomination.

Within our congregation, we have made an intentional decision to focus our anti-oppression efforts on heterosexism. Through the Welcoming Congregation program, we are actively seeking to overcome our homophobia with an open welcome of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. It is hard work, and we have stumbled on the path, but the steering committee is picking itself up, and its members are examining their group process to develop a covenant and mission statement. They are recommitting themselves to the process of education leading to an eventual congregational vote that affirms our intention to be welcoming.

One of the goals of our capital campaign in April will be to make the building more accessible. We hope to add a lift between this floor and the lower level for wheelchairs and to improve access to the bathrooms so that those of us with limited mobility can fully participate in our programs.

We have made significant progress in becoming a part of the broader religious community in the area, but we have a long way to go to promote interfaith tolerance in our community.

However, I am even more chagrined by our own intolerance of religious diversity than I am by the intolerance we experience from others. We are more like the folks we so quickly deride than we are different. Our differences are important and significant, but they are only part of the story.

And although intolerance of other denominations troubles me, it is our intolerance of each other’s beliefs that I find most difficult. Some of us are quick to jab at Christians, pagans, or humanists, often not realizing that many of us self-identify as one (or more) of those. We are a diverse group on virtually any scale of religious belief, and as a people who pride ourselves in being non-creedal and open, why are we not more accepting and tolerant of each other’s beliefs?

Our religious heritage includes the experience of horrible intolerance, of people being put to death for their beliefs, and of whole communities being forced to uproot and flee oppression. As recently as the late 20^th Century, Unitarians in Transylvania were brutally repressed and prohibited from practicing their religion under the regime of Nicolae Ceauçescu. From these lessons we ought to have learned to be more tolerant, especially of each other’s heart-felt beliefs.

We have much to learn from each other, and a creative interchange between those of us who are Christian and those who profess atheism, or between those whose spirituality is pagan and those who consider themselves rational humanists, has the potential to enrich us all and to make UUCV an even more dynamic and exciting liberal religious community.

The interchange just might help each of us clarify and deepen our own spirituality. It need not be threatening if we are grounded in a humble pride in the spirituality that our hearts lead us to – a pride that is also open to the possibility of change.

Let us practice a radical tolerance of religious diversity right here among ourselves as a starting point. Then we may just find the unity that we so deeply long for to bind us in love and community. As the martyr Francis David said, we need not think alike to love alike. In fact, we need not believe alike, look alike, behave alike, or feel alike to love alike.

¹ Dedicated to Carrie Kelso and Nathan Martin, a local interracial couple whose cars were painted with threatening messages on February 7. This stunning evidence of racial bigotry and intolerance is a nasty and shameful reminder of the depth of xenophobia right here in our communities and of the work we have to do to overcome oppression. I pray that the fear and hatred for their relationship will not result in harm to either of them.

²The Revs. Duane H. Fickeisen serves the Unitarian Universalists of the Cumberland Valley, PO Box 207, Boiling Springs PA 17007; 717/249-8944; www.uucv.net. Dan Fancher is one of the congregation’s lay worship associates.

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