Our faith community holds the idea of belonging at its core. We value knowing one another in all our fullness to forge deeper, more meaningful connections with one another in order to create an ever-widening sense of belonging. Today, despite the trappings of social media, we too often find ourselves living in a world of false connections, exclusion, social fragmentation, and isolation.
 
All Our Fullness (AOF) is an initiative from the Beloved Community Staff and Communications Teams that aims to make authentic connections among us by sharing our stories with each other about identity, encountering difference, and dreaming big. It was conceived as a means to help us make progress, however slight, towards what we so often refer to as the Beloved Community, a place in which we all feel safe and accepted, and where we can all breathe in a true sense of belonging.
 
With this in mind, we warmly invite you to share your personal story in answer to one of the following questions and to which there is no right or wrong answer:
 
(1)   When did you become aware of your own cultural identity?
 
(2)   When was a time you encountered difference; what difference did it make?
 
(3)   What stirs your yearning for multicultural community?
 
We welcome videos (2 minutes or less, artwork, or your written response (300 words max.) via the online form.
 
We are grateful in advance for your participation. Responses will be shared with the congregation on Unity’s website and/or commUNITY in the coming weeks. Please note that your contribution may be edited for length, clarity, or typos.
 
Feel free to direct any questions about AOF to: [email protected]

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team
[Transcript of a talk presented as part of a larger report on ministries at the 153rd Annual Meeting of the Congregation on Saturday, December 7, 2024. Some details have been edited for readability.]

​The journalist and author on technology, Nicholas Carr, made an intriguing observation recently: “The aspect ratio of our lives has changed.” In September of 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held one of their most consequential meetings to standardize the aspect ratio of the movie screen, the proportion of width and height of an image or video frame for motion pictures. That standard would not only influence the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking but shape the viewing experience of audiences for decades to come. 

The attendees at the meeting were offered various aspect ratios to consider, but a horizontal screen was taken as a given. The reasoning? Because traditional landscape and narrative paintings were almost always horizontal in orientation, a more natural orientation for the telling of stories. Furthermore, human vision is itself horizontal. With the lateral placement of our eyes, our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias also makes evolutionary sense, with more opportunities and threats presented by the land than the vertical sky. A species like ours benefits from a broad landscape view, and a horizontally composed image feels truer to our human point of view, something closer to the reality of the broad and encompassing world we actually inhabit.

So imagine being forced to wear blinders and seeing the world in a narrow portrait view. Not only would the portrait view feel cramped and claustrophobic, it might even pose a danger in constraining our wider perception of reality. Consider the smartphone, our handheld devices designed to be held vertically, in portrait mode. According to studies, we look at our phone in portrait mode more than 90% of the time, even when viewing horizontally composed photos and videos. When the phones were first introduced, people routinely complained about feeling constricted and unnatural. But as the phone became our primary screen, we all got used to the narrowing field of view, cropping reality and its wider complexity to fit the size of our solitary screens.

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. It has narrowed, not just on our smartphones but on many fronts, from the polarization of our political life to individualization as a defining feature of contemporary life to the epidemic of loneliness and the search for deep belonging. The aspect ratio of our lives has narrowed, as complex, multifaceted social narratives get cropped and manipulated to fit into one narrow established perspective or another. But in his magisterial work, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), rather than narrowing the aspect ratio to racism alone, W.E.B. Du Bois expanded its frame to the conflict between capitalism and labor, to a class struggle and how racism is time and time again manufactured by the oligarchs and capitalists to keep the masses divided. In the evolution of his racial justice work, Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in Memphis supporting a labor strike, his aspect ratio expanding to capture the deep connections between capitalist exploitation and racial oppression and both tied to the militarism of the United States.

As the Beloved Community Staff Team attended to the many fronts of Unity’s antiracist multicultural work this past year, what became increasingly clear was the work of enlarging the aspect ratio of our prophetic imagination, the importance of complicating the narrative and reviving complexity amid false simplicities manipulated to fit one narrow established perspective or another. Foremost among complexities is the fact that racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism. We forget that George Floyd was unemployed and allegedly using counterfeit money, that Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes to earn a living, that Walter Scott was under warrant for delinquent child support payments, that Breonna Taylor lived in gentrifying zones where police sweeps regularly cleared the neighborhood for real estate valuation. Countless fatal police encounters result from minor infractions like broken taillights or unpaid tickets which are symptoms of economic hardship more than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resort to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of policing today. 

Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power produced by capitalist class society, relentless in securing conditions for compounded growth. A singular focus on race only serves the interests of neoliberal capitalism by reducing the question of obscene economic inequality to skin color and a distorted politics of identity, while obstructing discussions about healthcare, homeownership, unionization, progressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, childcare, education, and more. 

What are the stories about money and wealth that frame our relationship with money? Our values, policies, and economic imagination about debt,

spending, saving, investing, scarcity, abundance, enoughness? We have been living in the imagination of rich white capitalists for most of our history. What are other imaginaries that tell a different story? And how can we tell a better story of money? These are some of the questions guiding the work of the revitalized Development Ministry Team.

But just as a focus on racism alone frames an inadequate aspect ratio, neither does a singular focus on class address the multiple forms of racism that have historically and specifically harmed communities of color. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out to the Bernie Sanders campaign when making his case for reparations, that “Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty.” Such a view misses the way in which centuries of racism have hammered inequality so deep into American society that general solutions will not suffice. A rising tide will not lift all boats, not the boats that have been chained and tied down and wedged among the rocks. Without special repairs for descendants of chattel slavery, enacted alongside general efforts, the rising tide cannot help those boats.

What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class — especially as our nation’s racial composition complexifies — but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously. What is needed is a much larger aspect ratio, a larger focus and truer framing that imagines a cross-racial solidarity and movement that can match the complexities of our world today. These are the generative edges as we step toward the Ends Renewal process and the prophetic horizon of our shared ministry.

Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races [but as] a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land... Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less.
                                            — Martin Luther King, Jr., address at the conclusion of Selma to Montgomery march in 1965

In February 2021, Clyde Kerr III — a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and forty-three-year-old Black father — posted a series of videos delivering a searing critique of policing and our criminal justice system. He voiced deep sense of turmoil about his profession in the killings of Black people, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “I’ve had enough of all of this nonsense, serving a system that does not give a damn about me or people like me.” The videos served as an extended suicide note, at one point stating that his decision to take his life was an act of protest. Kerr took his life sitting in his patrol car outside the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office. 

Much earlier, in an 1960 essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” James Baldwin describes this collision at the heart of policing. He looks at the projects of Harlem and points to a deep inequality reflected in the geography of Fifth Avenue, the same street conjoining the opulent shopping corridors of midtown and the destitution of the Harlem ghetto uptown where police move “like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.” Baldwin draws particular attention to the damage this labor of occupation inflicts upon the police themselves who are tasked to manage the boundary dividing the different worlds along Fifth Avenue and throughout our country. The officer patrols the dividing line, and “he is not prepared for it [as] he is exposed as few white people are to the anguish of the black people around him.” How does he reconcile his purpose to serve and to protect with his daily work of ghetto containment? How does he manage the injustice of his occupation with the daily encounters of Black humanity that belie the underclass mythology of the inner-city poor as criminal, self-sabotaging, and unassimilable? How does the police officer live with himself? “He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction,” writes Baldwin, “into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.” And all the while, capitalist elites in midtown are less concerned with abolishing the conditions that policing has come to manage than with kneeling on the neck of protesters who threaten retail spaces, commercial real estate development, and capitalist interests of the market economy.

Policing and mass incarceration have always existed to serve and protect the dominant capitalist economy and class structures developed through slavery, and to control “surplus populations” of the unemployed and unemployable, those pressed to commit survival crimes to earn a living, those superfluous to capitalist accumulation and so racialized, exploited, and targeted for police control. For in the often-misleading race-class debate, the class character of policing remains largely overlooked by the power and expediency of the racial justice narrative. But racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism. We forget that George Floyd was unemployed and allegedly using counterfeit money; that Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes to earn a living; that Walter Scott was under warrant for delinquent child support payments; that Breonna Taylor, though not directly engaged in survival crimes, lived in gentrifying zones where police sweeps regularly cleared the neighborhood for real estate valuation. Countless fatal police encounters result from minor infractions like broken taillights or unpaid tickets, more symptoms of economic hardship than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resorted to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of Americans who are overpoliced. The problem of structural unemployment and poverty are not exceptions to capitalist economy but outcomes of the exploitation at the heart of profit-making. 

Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power produced by capitalist class society, relentless in securing conditions for compounded growth. A singular focus on race only serves the interests of late capitalism by reducing the question of obscene inequality to skin color and identity politics while obviating discussions about healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. If all we have to do is expunge the racism in the hearts of police officers, or just reduce the number of racist patrol officers, we can forestall the question about poverty or at least pretend that class conflict and racialized police violence are two separate issues. But Stuart Hall famously described race as “the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced.” What is needed is not the dismantling of police departments but the conditions that modern policing has come to manage. What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class, but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously.