I was looking at this photograph of Alyssa, Owen, and Julissa this week. It is a wonderful picture of the solidarity of the human race. Alyssa’s parents are Caucasian. Owen’s parents are Caucasian and Filipino. Julissa’s parents are Mexican. Seeing these little children playing at my parent’s home on Easter Sunday 2003, showed me the salvation that Jesus extended to all of the world when he rose from the dead on that Easter over 2000 years ago. It reminds me of a meme published a number of months ago of a Caucasian child embracing another child of Color. The banner underneath the meme was “Racism is not natural. It is learned.” These are very true words.
Now contrast this photograph of our common humanity, to the horrific racism exhibited by certain people of our executive and legislative branches of government and echoed at a political rally this week.
When I was in graduate school at the St Paul Seminary School of Divinity, among the many wonderful texts given us during school was one entitled Dangerous Memories: House Churches and American Society, written by theologian, Rev. Bernard J Lee, and Psychologist and theologian, Dr Michael A Cowan. In the book, they examined how people learn the important values in their lives. A child’s values is the result of an nteraction of those taught by the child’s parents and relatives, with that of the culture in which the child lives. They call this the child’s “Assumptive World.” Those values taught by the child’s parents and the community in which the child lives will shape the behavior of the child in adulthood. These values or “ethos” are hard to change. Something dramatic must happen for the child to challenge or reject the values that the child has learned. This is a very important concept for us to absorb and upon which to reflect. All values, good and bad, will shape our lives up to the time we take our last breath. It is important for us to look at those values we have learned, and how we have passed them on to our own children.
In working with people suffering from domestic violence, I have found, and it is documented, that abusive behavior is a learned behavior. The perpetrator of abuse learned this behavior from one of his/her parents. The behavior is passed on, like an evil gene, from parent to child, and summarily passed on by the child’s to his/her own children. It is a horrible chain of violence that is hard to break. Children in a household of domestic violence have two choices: 1) to become a perpetrator of abuse; or, 2) to become a victim of abuse. The victim will commonly marry a perpetrator of abuse, because the victim believes that the normal relationship between a married couple is one of abuse. The perpetrator will seek out someone to control and abuse. Tragically, this is more common than not. This learned behavior of abuse and the circle of violence it spawns is very hard to break and change. For the victim, it is not impossible. For the perpetrator, it is so deeply rooted in his/her life that it is close to impossible.
Now apply this same concept to the sin of Racism, especially so graphically portrayed for us on national television this week. With the passage of the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960’s and the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, many thought America had been cured of the Sin of Racism that has afflicted our nation from its very beginnings. Racism passed on from generation to generation over 200 years is not so easily eliminated. The racism has just gone underground continuing to fester and infect the many, many lives of innocent children.
In order to address the Sin of Racism in our society, we must first do the hard work of addressing the racism we have learned. I started to do this my freshman year of college.
MY STORY
My parents never taught me racism nor any prejudices, because they themselves suffered discrimination for being children of immigrants, Swedish, Irish, and Polish, and being Roman Catholic. At the time they grew up there was a great deal of prejudice leveled at many Roman Catholics in the United States. My father had to change his name from Wojnar to Wagner, to make it sound more Protestant in order to get a job as a mechanical engineer in his company. My mother lost her job as a home economics teacher in the Pittsburgh Public Schools because she was Roman Catholic. Being victims of religious prejudice, growing up poor in the Great Depression, they made sure that prejudice of any kind, classism, religious or race, would never be passed on by them to their children.
So, as a freshman talking three city buses to and from college every day, I was surprised to find myself very uncomfortable when the color of the bus changed from exclusively white to black in color at the intersection of University Ave and Snelling Ave. I was dismayed to find myself feeling this way. I was in no danger, yet I felt threatened. I realized at that moment as a young man that I harbored racist thoughts and feelings. Where did I learn it? It certainly was not at home.
I tend to be introspective and wanted to examine where I learned this behavior. After some considerable thought and reflection, I determined it was from television and the communities in which I had lived. As a child, my home was in exclusively Caucasian neighborhoods. From fellow students I learned that when driving in certain neighborhoods of St Paul, namely the Selby/Dale neighborhood, it was important to “roll up your windows” and lock the doors in the car to protect myself from “those dangerous people.” It was also from my fellow students I learned racist and cultural jokes, from Afro-American to Polish jokes, and sexist jokes e.g. “Blond jokes”. All of these jokes were baseless in fact and were clearly meant to demean and degrade the people or cultures targeted in the jokes. The same could be said for prejudice against “queers”, or what we would call the LGTBQ community today. Much of the prejudice I learned was from my own peers, who had been taught what they passed on by their parents, relatives, and communities.
I also found that my prejudice was influenced and reinforced by television. At that time, the only people you saw on television in television shows and advertisements were Caucasian. There were no people of Color playing important roles on television, with the exception of roles as servants or criminals. So the portrayal of people of Color on television isolated those people to roles that were perceived as either demeaning or criminal. Portrayals of Asian people were isolated to those running Chinese restaurants or laundries, or the Japanese whom our parents fought in World War II. In general, people of Color were portrayed on television as people who served or harmed the Caucasian race and were not worthy of the American Dream to advance themselves culturally or economically.
Once I found the source of my racism, I set to the task of reversing what I had been taught. It is a lifelong of relearning. In pursuing friendships with people who were from other races and cultures, and listening to their stories, I discovered the reality of the world of “White Privilege” in which I had been raised. The obstacles in the path of many people of Color to better education, better employment, a more fulfilled life were far more numerous than any I had. I naturally presumed the playing field was level for all races. I learned that my presumption was totally false.
Being educated formally as a musician, I also had many good friends among the gay and lesbian community. In listening to their stories of discovering their sexual orientation and the fear of being “found out” by family, church, and society upset me greatly. Their sexual orientation never shocked me. How they were treated for being gay and lesbian upset and shocked me. Then as I studied the lives of the composers whose music I performed and admired, I discovered that many of them were homosexual. Tschaikovsky feared his homosexuality would be discovered all of his life. To hide his homosexuality he got married to a woman who was nymphomaniac. She blackmailed him his entire life. Since homosexuality was a capital offense in Russia, he feared being executed for the crime of homosexuality. Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, and Ravel, all hid their homosexuality. Leonard Bernstein came out when he was director of the New York Philharmonic. He ended up resigning his position. I admired their great courage living in a world that hated them for being homosexual. Homosexuality is not a learned behavior. As in the color of our skin, it is how God created us. I once asked one my of gay friends when he knew he was gay, he replied by asking me how I knew I was straight. I answered him, “I just know.” He said, “It is no different for me.”
UNLEARNING FALSE AND DANGEROUS VALUES
How do we unlearn the harmful values that we have been taught? The key to this unlearning is “relationship”.
The first we thing upon which we must base our unlearning are the words from the first chapter of Genesis. We are all made in the image and likeness of God. This is exclusively true for all races, gender, or sexual orientation. In the Hebrew Testament, it is written that God is the God of all nations. In the Christian Testament, it is doctrine that Jesus died for all people of all nations. Salvation is not isolated to only a small group of people. The salvation for which Jesus died and rose from the dead is extended to all of humanity. God’s love and acceptance is always exclusive, never inclusive! To be taught otherwise is nothing more than the false teachings of our own fears and prejudices being projected on God. In short, heresy.
Secondly, we need to cultivate relationships with people of other races, cultures, and sexual orientation. When we do this, we find that our differences are very few. I remember when I was at St Stephen’s parish in South Minneapolis, if I sat after Mass with a heterosexual family and then with a homosexual family, the topics talked were about all the same things of family life. The diversity of people on parish staff and Human Services staff enriched my life so greatly that I was completely, utterly changed shattering many false values I once believed. We all share in the same pain, sorrow, joys, and worries regardless of our family of origins, religion, race and culture. Whether we be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, we may call God different names and religious rituals may differ, but our need for salvation and our desire to be united to God for eternity remains the same. Forming relationships with people different from us expands our understanding of the world, destroys the fears we were taught by our parents, relatives, and community, and shatters forever false and dangerous values.
Thirdly, it is important to pass on to our children and our grandchildren values that values that build up the reign of God in our world. This is the mission that Jesus entrusted to us at his Ascension. There is no place for fear in God’s reign. There is no place for racism in God’s reign. There is no place for sexism or sexual prejudice in God’s reign. There is only one law that holds primacy over all human laws, “Love one another as I have loved you.” These words were spoken to the Apostles as Jesus prepared himself to be arrested and executed. These words continue in perpetuity until that time that Jesus returns again. These words of Jesus must be imprinted in our heads and our hearts and must be not just mere words but the mission statement of our lives.
Perhaps this is what shocked me the most at the political rally held this past week. The complete and utter lack of love present there. There was no visible or audible sign of Jesus’ commandment to “love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus’ last words to his apostles the night before he was executed, must become our life’s mantra and must hold primacy over all other values we hold in our lives. This must include the hard task of loving others who hate us, fear us, and act against us.
It is a lifelong mission and task of our lives.
