"Juneteenth"

Fundamental U.S. Contradiction

A terrible contradiction lies at the heart of U.S. history.  On the one hand, the country was founded on the wonderful concept of freedom.   “All men are created equal,” according to the Declaration of Independence, meaning that, regardless of the condition they were born into, they are free to pursue the life they choose.   They are not bound by a feudal class system that determines their fate.

On the other hand, within the concept of freedom, was the freedom to exploit other people.  A person had the freedom to increase his wealth, and doing so depended, in part, on taking things from others.  It involved taking the land from the Native peoples of this continent.  And it involved exploiting the labor and denying the freedom of others.

Labor exploitation came in two major forms.  One was the exploitation of propertyless workers, who had to sell their time for a wage in order to survive.  This really means the selling of a big chunk of your life.  Wage workers have to give up a good deal of freedom, most of their waking day, in order to do the employer’s bidding.  They have little or no say over what they do during the work-day.  The degree of control can be so total that workers are told the exact words they must speak, and even the emotions they should express.  It is ironic to call this form of employment “free wage labor” when the only sure freedom the worker has is to quit.  While the workers typically, although not always, are paid just enough to cover their own survival and the survival of their families, the employer uses their labor to accumulate wealth for himself.  The freedom of employers to pursue wealth without restriction came at the denial of freedom for the workers.

The second form of exploitation involved the purchase and ownership of the workers and their progeny for their entire lives, or slavery.   The enslavement of Africans enabled their owners to grow rich and powerful.  In the U.S. slavery became the basis of some major agricultural industries, especially cotton.   U.S. slave-based cotton was the key raw material of the industrial revolution, which began with textile production in Britain.   New York financiers and merchants made fortunes from the cotton trade.  Later, New England got into the textile industry.  All this European and Northern wealth depended on slave-grown cotton.

Again the freedom to pursue wealth without hindrance clashed with the freedom of the workers who helped to create that wealth.  Again the meaning of “freedom” was polluted by the concept that one should be free to exploit others.  Except that, with slavery, the denial of freedom to the workers was absolute, and extended from one generation to the next. 

How could one claim to be a nation dedicated to freedom and permit slavery at the same time?  The riddle was solved by the interjection of RACE.  The thinking went like this:  White men were free by nature.  Black people were not the same as white people.  They were less intelligent, less capable, less independent.  They were like children, unable to control themselves.  They were violent and emotional.  They deserved to be enslaved.  Indeed, they needed to be slaves.  They were better off, they were happier as slaves.  An exception needn’t be drawn to the claim that all men are created equal and have the right to be free because Black people were not fully “men.”  Slavery wasn’t an equal-opportunity horror.  It was racially restricted, and that enabled white society to tolerate it without too much unease.

I want to go back to those British and New Englanders who were engaged in the textile industry.  The textile magnates could claim that they did not support slavery, employing only “free” wage labor, however poorly paid.  Their hands were clean.  And yet they were tied to the slave system, and benefited from the cheap cotton it produced.  The Black workers in the South were the foundation of the industrial empires that emerged in Britain and the Northern US.   The freedom to grow rich, even in the North, depended to some extent on Black slavery.  The whole country was, in a sense, deeply implicated in the slave system.  We can’t blame the evil South.  Slavery was not just a “peculiar institution.”  It lay at the heart of the American experiment.  

I am, of course, aware that an abolitionist movement developed both in England and the United States, and that many people were repulsed by slavery.  Religion played an important role in the movement to abolish slavery, and Unitarians were among the leaders of the movement.   This is a tradition we can feel proud to be connected with.

However, the motives behind anti-slavery are quite diverse.  One strong source of it arose from the Northern white working class that sought the opportunity to homestead in the West, and feared that, if slavery moved West with them, they would be driven out.  They couldn’t compete with slave-based agriculture.  This did not make them pro-Black.  In fact they were able to be anti-slavery and anti-Black at the same time.  They feared that, even if Blacks were not slaves, they would still be exploitable, and therefore a threat.  (This theme obviously gets replicated in the immigration debates of today.)

Some Northern industrialists and merchants connected with the cotton trade in New York spoke out against slavery, and yet when it came to cries for immediate emancipation, they hesitated, and sometimes even participated in anti-abolition riots.  We need to move slowly, they said.  We don’t want to disrupt the economy.  These things take time.  Eventually, through modest reforms, we will be able to get rid of this odious institution.

Emancipation was, of course, achieved, and it is the reason we are celebrating today.   Juneteenth represents the removal of the last vestige of official slavery from the land.  What a joyous moment!  What a cause for celebration!  Is it not an amazing victory for human freedom?

And yet, as we know, it was a very incomplete victory.  The virtual enslavement of African Americans in the South continued for another 100 years.  Labor exploitation continues and grows in certain industries.  And the Black community is still suffering.  Racism is far from dead.  African Americans still face discrimination in many institutions, including the work place.  Black unemployment is the highest of any ethnic group in the country.   In April 2010, the unemployment rate for whites was 9%, for Latinos, 12.5%, and for Blacks, 16.5%.  For Black males it was 19%, and for Blacks age 16-19, 37%.  And we all know that official unemployment statistics grossly undercount real levels of unemployment.

I am working with a group of people at the UCLA Labor Center in an effort to build a Black Worker Center in Los Angeles.  The conditions for a large number of African Americans in South LA are abysmal.

Globalization, and the deindustrialization of South LA, has hit the community hard.  Weaknesses in the public education and transportation systems make it almost impossible to find a way out of poverty.  Far too many young people get caught in the criminal justice system.  We held a series of Focus Groups, and I was especially struck by the comments of a Black minister.  He described a typical experience: A young Black man gets out of prison and wants to set up a life where he can support his girlfriend and child and stay out of trouble with the law.  He has an eighth grade education and a criminal record, and asks for help.  What can the minister do?  Of course there are things that he tries, and yet, as he put it, “the whole system is geared towards returning him to prison.”  It is too common a story.  The Black Worker Center aims to address this and a myriad of other problems faced by Black workers and aspiring workers in this city.

Contradiction in Our Church

What does this have to do with our church?  Unitarianism harbors its own contradictions.  On the one hand, our church is very good at supporting principles of social justice.   As I’ve already said, Unitarians were among the major abolitionists.  We also supported the Civil Rights movement.  And we have stood up publicly against other instances of racial injustice.  We clearly believe in racial equality.

Yet we remain an overwhelmingly white denomination.  I recognize that this isn’t completely true, and I am very glad that we have members and friends of color in this congregation.   But it is largely true.

Why, despite beliefs in racial equality, do we remain largely white?  I think there are a number of reasons.  First, despite our support for abolition, the Unitarian Church has sometimes discriminated against people of color.  Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed visited us recently, at the invitation of Rev. Stephen Furrer, and spoke about what he and others face as Black ministers in a largely white denomination.  In the introduction to one of Morrison-Reed’s books, a guest author points out:   “The first time a Black minister became the senior minister of a predominantly white Unitarian church was in 1961, in Chico, CA….  How sad that it took a century for the fruit of the Civil War to be reaped in the denomination that had contributed so singularly—in the ministries of William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker—to the cause of the abolition of slavery.”

But I think the essential problem lies in our cultural style.  We seem to be stiff, intellectual, and introverted.  We have trouble reaching out to people we don’t know.  More important, we are put off by Black religious styles.  We are uncomfortable with a belief in God, and especially a belief in Jesus.  We do not want to challenge our sense of being in charge of our own destinies, which comes, I believe, from being mainly middle class and not needing a God to help us.   The result is that, while we can speak out courageously against racial injustice, we have much more difficulty making it a part of our daily church practice. 

What can our church do? 

But what CAN we do as a church?  That is the question I’d like us to consider in honor of Juneteenth.   I would like to suggest two possibilities, for starters, but welcome your ideas about this.

Reaching out to those people of color who visit our church.    We could certainly be more welcoming to those African Americans who visit our church, seeking a place of worship.  This involves not only being personally friendly.  It may also involve changing our style of worship a bit. 

I am aware that, deep down, I am hesitant to invite Black friends to try out our church.  What is that about?   I’m not so much concerned about the religious aspect—that we don’t talk about God.  I think I’m worried about how they will react to how “white” our cultural style is.  This may be my own neurosis.

Anyway, what I would like is for us to make a serious assessment about how to make our church experience more attractive to African Americans and other people of color.

Reaching out to Nearby Churches.  I think we can do more to reach out to the African American community in and around Santa Monica in an effort to break down some of the dreadful segregation that still permeates our society.   We already have an excellent beginning in the RE program that gets our 6th and 7th graders to visit “Neighboring Faiths.”  Relationships have been forged through this program, but they are generally one-shot-per-year affairs.  This is something we could build upon.

As adults, we have made one serious effort to connect with a couple of Black churches and a synagogue on Martin Luther King’s birthday, and I think everyone felt it was a glorious experience.  We need to do more of that kind of thing.  We need to build relationships, and see if we can make them have some staying power.

As far as I know, there are at least three Black churches in Santa Monica: Calvary Baptist just around the corner on 20th St; the First African Methodist Episcopal Church on Michigan Avenue, near 18th St; and the Greater Morning Star Baptist Church on 17th near Pico, which Phil and I bicycle past on the way home from church.   This last church has not yet been incorporated in the RE Neighboring Faiths program.   I think we should reach out to these congregations, and attempt to do things together.  

The goal, let me be clear, is not to try to raid these churches and recruit more members for our church.  Rather, the goal is to break down the barriers of segregation.  An important first step is to get to know one another. 

I personally believe there is a lot we can learn from African American styles of worship.  Our middle class confidence that we have the power to control our own destinies deserves to be challenged.  We could learn something about the pain of not having control, the yearning for support from a higher power in times of suffering, and the expression of great joy in believing that God will help us in time of need.  Whether or not we believe that a God really exists, we can benefit from letting go of our own stiff certainties.  We could benefit from stretching ourselves in joining with Black congregations in expressions of gratitude, humility, and prayer.  We could elevate our own religious experience.

So let us celebrate Juneteenth, not only with the joy of recognition that a major step towards freedom was achieved by the abolition of slavery, but with a commitment to build upon it by reaching out across the racial divide.  Let us start by making friends.  Let us do things together.  Let us worship and sing together.  Let us learn about each other.  Let us accept that we may not always agree about everything, but that we can still love one another.  Let us take the first small steps against a racially structured society by actually changing our own behavior and getting to know our African American neighbors.