It was another Sunday and another invitation to learn (from a guest on the NPR show, On Being. Today the topic was “Opening up the Race Narrative”. The guest speaker was John A. Powell. Mr. Powell “was born on May 27, 1947[4] in Detroit, Michigan. Previously powell was the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University.[5] He also taught civil rights law, property law and jurisprudence and held the Earl R. Larson Chair of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.
He is founder and former Executive Director of the Institute on Race & Poverty (IRP), which is located at the University of Minnesota Law School.[6] He has taught at Columbia University School of Law, Harvard Law School, University of Miami School of Law, American University and the University of San Francisco School of Law.” (Wikipedia)
Mercy! That tells us something about this mean and his “professional” achievement. It does not tell us he that he is identified as an African Amarican (identifying label has changed over the years) and as the son of amazing parents. Both of his parents seemed to have taken the message of that man Jesus about love very seriously. His father was, in addition to working another job, a minster in a Christian church. Although Mr. Powell can and does use very erudite academic language, two if the words which he seems to use most frequently are ‘love” and ‘we”. In my mind this says a lot about who he is as a person. This reminded of my history ties to various change movements and institutions including my own role as a minister of a Christian church. Often these change movements or organizations were perceived as dangerous by those who opposed the changes.
In the sixties and the early seventies, many in the civil right movement, the non-violence /anti-war movement, the women’s movement and the gay rights movement were eager to convince themselves and the general populace that the changes that they were proposing were not dangerous. That seemed to me to be a lie. I came to this movement with a background in the study of systems (engineering, psychology, theology, physics and psychology). I maintained that “Yes, we were and are dangerous. The changes we were proposing threatened the very structure of our culture. We were advocating that we explore how we identify ourselves, how we live or avoid living in community, how we use laws and how we use and are used by the basic institutions of this country. We were proposing changes, which were going to change all of these. I knew this was going to feel frightening to many. I thought that we needed to quit lying about this fact. We needed to remember how frightening change can be for all of us. These were profound changes we were proposing.”
Indeed these many years later some of the basic beliefs of the fundamental institutions of this country are being challenged. Painfully for many we are in the second term of our first African American President. An action of the Supreme Court has legalized same sex marriage. The Episcopal Church in the United States outgoing presiding Bishop is a woman and the incoming presiding Bishop is a black man. In 2003 that same church body appointed the first openly gay person as a Bishop, Gene Robinson. Although we have yet to elect a Female President we have had more than one woman as a serious contender for that job. There have been powerful back women such as Shirley Chisholm as the first female African American Congress Woman.
At the very same time we are today still arguing about the role of the Confederate Flag as a public statement of who we are. Just this past weekend a woman was arrested for taking down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse. This morning, while looking out the window of the gym from the vantage point of a treadmill, I saw a pickup truth which proudly displayed two large flags from flagpoles attached to the back of his pickup truck – a Confederate Flag and a U.S. Flag. The next to me who assured me that she did not agree with the display of the Confederate Flag. I suggested that we need to love and pray for/with that young man. My best guess is that young man was responding to the renewed effort to stop the official display of the Confederate Flag from such place as the statehouse in South Carolina. My further guess is that this young man feels that the flag is a part of his identify.
As always the challenge is to see the action of the young man as a mirror for that part of me who holds on to various parts of my identify, some of which is racist. Early on in my involvement in the various social justice movements it was suggested that all of us involved in the struggle needed to examine our own racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia and other internalized biases. This is what some such as Mr. Powell calls implicit bias. Implicit bias is:
1 Also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. N
Understanding Implicit Bias kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/.../understanding-implicit-bias/
Part of the core of our identity is all the biases we have learned since birth. Anytime I have served with others on committees such as the racial justice committee at the YWCA of Wheeling the first challenge was to write about and then present to the full committee my own history of learning to be racist. All of us on the committee had to do this several times because it was assumed that all of us who had grown up in this country– black, brown, white, yellow – had learned racism since we were young. As we continued to grow our “memory” would change. Even prior to this I had been told that I had a plethora of biases including sexism, ageism and homophobia. This was not said with anger or rancor. It was just assumed that one could not live in this culture without learning these biases. We might not have had some of the obvious, overt behaviors but others were there. Today I still have to dig for another level of honesty regarding these implicit biases.
Mr. Power talked about Nelson Mandela in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom talking about the following example of implicit bias. This is the one to which he was referring,
In his memoir, Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela recounts an incident that occurred early in the anti-apartheid movement on one of his trips to garner support from other African leaders. The incident caused him to experience what he called “a strange sensation” as he was boarding an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. He noted that the pilot was black, and because he had never seen a black pilot before, in the instant he saw this pilot, he writes that he had to suppress the panic that arose within him. “How could a black man fly an airplane?” he asked himself.
Mr. Powell further reminds us that being human is about being in relationships. Perhaps the most powerful implicit biased we have to identify and unlearn in this culture is that of individuality – “the notion that we can control everything when we cannot control ourselves” Over and over again Mr. Powell uses the pronoun we. This is very powerful. From my informal study of speakers and authors for many years, it is unusual for a male speaker or author to use the term we very often. It is much more common for women to use the term. I suspect that I would find in a more careful study what we white males are less likely than males who official identify as non-white to use the pronoun “we”. I believe that the “we” is social and moral imperative if we want to make changes.
The other word Mr. Powell uses so frequently is that four-letter word love. All great thinkers have suggested that if we want to have a relationship with others and mother earth we must first have an honest, loving relationship with ourselves. This is going to be uncomfortable because as Mr. Power says, “if you suffer it does not imply love, but if you love it does imply suffering.” He would go on to remind us that without love we do not have joy. I would go so far as to suggest that the most profound suffering has to do with a sense of aloneness - being disconnected from ourselves, each other, and mother earth. When I am not lovingly honest with myself I am not lovingly present with myself and thus really alone. When I cannot be lovingly present I cannot be present with others, my higher power or mother earth. Without love I am alone – there is no we.
I think we all long to be a part of. To be a part of may mean facing that uncomfortable feeling of not having the anchors of racism or other learned “truths” to hide behind. That may feel dangerous, but together we can do this. If the only way one knows how to be a part of is to be a part of a group of racists or terrorists or some other right wing groups that is what one will do. When one uses anger to respond to the person whose need to be a part of has led him/her to connect with a racist or terrorist group, it will only reinforce his/her anger and sense of separateness. When I am not in touch with my implicit biases I am likely to respond with anger to those I perceive as biased. When I am in touch with my own implicit biases I can respond with love to those who mirror my own history. At that moment I becomes a we.
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