Sermon: Maybe We’re Not All the Same

The following sermon was shared at the December 7, 2014 worship service at Chalice Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, an angry mob of white people numbering in the thousands burned down the Greenwood District, the African American part of town. More than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed—that’s 35 city blocks—and 10,000 black people were left homeless. I would guess that most of us here have never heard about this. Although the Tulsa race riot is thought to be the single worst incidence of racial violence in the history of our country, it has long been omitted from history books because the perpetrators were white.

It is easy for white people to not know the experiences of black people. It is easy to not know or see white violence. It is easy to be ignorant. This is what I want us to talk about this morning.

If you have been unaware that police and justice systems in our country target and oppress people of color, then you have—I imagine—been surprised and confused by the response of thousands of people protesting and demonstrating in cities across the country. Are thousands of people across the country really so very angry about the death of Michael Brown? Or Eric Garner? Or Tamir Rice?

Well…yes…we are. But the protests are about Michael Brown’s death in the same way that the Montgomery bus boycott was about Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. These events are catalysts, they are symptoms, they are signs that point toward upheaval. They aren’t really CAUSES.

Those of us who have read “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander have had SOME orientation to what is happening. I’ve recommended that book to you before, and if you haven’t read it, let me encourage you again. It takes effort to learn what we are not taught or exposed to.

But even having read that book and having some understanding of the pain and grief being expressed through the protests, I have not known what to DO these past few weeks. And I really want something to DO. There’s a problem; I want to help fix it. I don’t want to be a white person who is passive to the injustices of my time.

In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King wrote:

“Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.””

I do NOT want to be a white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.

I’ve thought a lot these past two weeks about what to do. Not just what I should do, but what I would encourage you to do. And I have two things to share with you.

The first is to re-consider the idea that all people are the same. We think that, as liberal thinkers, don’t we? We look for common ground as part of our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, our first principle. The idea that all people are the same is a progressive idea.

But that idea will only take us so far. Because we have real differences between us. Being black in our culture is a very, VERY different experience from being white. I recently read the idea that being white is like being a horse with blinders on. You can see, certainly, but you can’t see everything.

In the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we know that these men were confrontational with the place. Eric Garner said, “Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it.” I can’t imagine being confrontational with the police. (Well, not like that, anyway.) If I believed that Michael Brown and Eric Garner are just like me and have lives like mine, then I would think that their being confrontational with the police meant that they were…what is it some people think? That they were criminals. Maybe dangerous. Perhaps deserving of what happened to them.

But if I understand that their lives are not like mine, then my ability to understand what happened broadens. I may not understand everything—or hardly anything, really—about those two men, but I do know this: I don’t think the police should kill unarmed people. I expect better of the police. They’ve had training. They’re supposed to be able to deal with difficult situations.

When I let go of thinking that Michael Brown or Eric Garner should be like ME, I’m able to step back and see a bigger picture.

So that’s the first thing I want us to consider: Maybe we’re not all the same. And that’s okay.

The second thing I want to commit to, and to invite you to do, is to listen to the stories of people whose lives are different from yours. Listen to the people whose lives are most impacted by what is happening. To learn about immigration reform, listen to the stories of immigrants. To learn about police brutality, listen to the stories and perspectives of black people. The internet makes it incredibly easy to hear stories from people’s lives.

And then, as part of your listening, I invite you to take this radical step: believe what you hear.

It can be hard, when we hear stories that are different from our own life experiences, to believe what we hear. “That can’t be true,” we think. That’s why it’s important to keep listening, to listen to more than one story, to take in as much as we can. This is why thousands of people are protesting and demonstrating these past few weeks. Not because of Michael Brown’s one story or Eric Garner’s one story. No, it’s that their stories reflect dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands more stories. People are tired of police brutality. People are tired of injustice. All you have to do to know it is to listen to their stories.

It is easy for white people to not know the experiences of black people. It is easy to not know or see white violence. It is easy to be ignorant.

One of our Unitarian Universalist principles is to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We tend to understand this principle as referring to a spiritual search, the search for a belief system that “works” for each of us. But I think this principle calls us even farther. We have a responsibility to know the world around us. We don’t get to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t have to know about that,” or “I don’t WANT to know about that.” We are committed to search for the truth, to read, to learn, to do our homework. It’s not okay to live life with blinders on.

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Our reading this morning comes from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Here is part of it again:

“It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travellers to become vaguely hostile ‘others’. Village people view anyone not belonging to the village as suspicious ‘others’. For the native of a country, inhabitants of other countries are viewed as ‘foreigners’; Jews are the ‘others’ for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes.”

It only takes three travelers.

We all have Others that we define ourselves against, people who are just Not Us. Perhaps the Other for you is people with differing political beliefs. Perhaps people from fundamentalist religions. Perhaps the Other for you is someone from another country or someone from the other side of town. We think of ourselves as progressive, but we all have people in our lives that we are hostile to.

Beware your hostility. The hostility to difference is the source of fear and hatred in our world. We don’t need to be all the same. We don’t even need to understand each other, though I think we can. But we do need to commit to building and protecting a beloved community where each of us is treated justly and has the basic freedoms we value.

It is easy for white people to not know the experiences of black people. It is easy to not know or see white violence. It is easy to be ignorant.

It takes effort to learn what we are not taught or exposed to. This morning, I invite each of us here to make that effort, in ways big or small, to learn more about the world around us, to listen to the stories of people whose lives are different from ours, to take the radical step of believing those stories, and from that place of openness and curiosity, to let go our hostility to difference, that the world may be healed and made anew.

May it be so.