All you Black folks, you must go All you Mexicans, you must go
And all you poor folks, you must go
Muslims and gay boys, 
we hate your ways
So all you bad folks, you must go
— "We the People" by A Tribe Called Quest, from the album, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)

I confess, I have to make an effort these days, not to give in to a sense of hopelessness — a sin, according to the nuns who taught me. The all too prescient lyrics above by the hip hop band A Tribe Called Quest, written prior to 2016, now seems to serve as an anthem by the current Administration. All that I value is being challenged, tossed into the wind like fragile tissue. I am heartened that Jodi Pfarr, author of The Urgency of Awareness, came to Unity Church to help us figure out a way to make sense of our world and its cruel inequities; determined to change the status quo workshop by workshop. 

Working through the various lenses of individuals, institutions, communities, and, ultimately, policymaking, Pfarr has built an accessible framework through which we can better understand ourselves and others outside of our own narrow cultural and societal groups. Facilitating with humor and blunt vulnerability, she provides tools to help us visualize how our identities have been informed by our experiences and situations beyond our control. 

We live in a society that normalizes certain things or groups. Normalization means not having to think about how we are perceived, or worry about how we navigate the institutions and systems in our daily lives, or be misinterpreted or merely dismissed. 

Pfarr imagines groups as triangles that either point up or down according to their having been “normalized.” Left-handedness is considered a down-pointing triangle; right-handedness is a triangle that points up. A person with three or more up or down triangles is typically generalized by individuals, institutions, and communities in the dominant norm. As a consequence, individuals lose their personhood, and their needs are dismissed. The alternative is to become aware of our biases and assumptions, own and process them, acknowledge our emotions, and hit the “pause” button when we experience an emotion such as anger or shame in the process. 

It is becoming apparent to some of us that the dominant norm is moving us further away from a just world at an alarming rate. We need to start listening to those in non-dominant spaces who appear to be better positioned to tell us what is needed for true justice.

In reflecting on Pfarr’s engaging workshop, I am struck by the trajectory of Unity’s antiracism efforts, and sometimes wonder how much the needle has moved — if it has moved at all. For 25 years now, we have participated in workshops, read and discussed judiciously, listened to sermons, taken pilgrimages, educated our children and youth, taken cultural audits, and formed partnerships with moral owners. Our Ends Statements embed antiracism into every aspect of church community life. And yet, I know there are some who struggle with this work, even question its relevance, and/or effectiveness. 

I can recall a time, years ago, when an antiracism workshop experience would inevitably end in tears and even shame for some. Pfarr’s Urgency of Awareness takes a different approach, one that is relatively gentle. It is no longer a needle, tortuously sharp, that needs to move, rather, it is a noodle — a soft, slippery one that slides along a continuum. I am getting anxious. If we are to move that noodle, more of us need to share our stories of growth, discovery, and failure. 

Please do read, and share your stories (written or on video) with, the All Our Fullness project. This is an ongoing communal spiritual practice, all of it in service of the antiracist, multicultural world we profess to long for. 

For more tools to help you understand your inherent biases in the ways that you perceive others and how you can build the capacity to truly see others, visit Jodi Pfarr’s website, listen to her podcasts, and/or read her book, The Urgency of Awareness.
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Thanks to Ray Wiedmeyer for our conversation that helped to inform this article. 

Excerpts from a sermon by Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair on March 2, 2025
Emerging in our discourse about race and class at Unity Church, is the deeper consideration of the wider world, our current socio-political situation, and how we got here. In his sermon on March 2, 2025, Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair described a phenomenon characterized by Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, in his book, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, as “third order suffering.” Here are excerpts from his sermon, Barnraising, in which he describes the origins of this phenomenon and its antidote.

… Despite the preacherly temptation to repeat myself, I really don’t want to get in the habit, for the next four years, of starting every sermon with a litany of crises of the week. I don’t want to, because when we do we lose track, a little, of what is going on. The crises aren’t the underlying problem. Donald Trump isn’t even the underlying problem. They are symptoms. Now, symptoms can be dangerous: anyone who has had the stomach flu can tell you that. But you do not cure a disease by treating its symptoms: you seek to understand the cause, and address that.

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn knows the symptoms well. A psychologist and theologian, he’s seen a “marked change in the people he sees now in his practice compared to 30 years ago. His patients are more on edge, experiencing an amorphous dread. The selves he encounters are more diffuse and fragmented, prone to greater levels of addictive behavior, haunted by shame and loneliness, unaffiliated, and burdened with many private sufferings.” Rogers-Vaughn also has a possible cause in mind: he sees this deterioration tied up with cultural shifts over the last generation and a half, particularly the rise of neoliberalism in creating what he calls ‘Third Order Suffering.’ (…)

First order suffering is suffering that is intrinsic to life: illness, death, heartbreak, natural disasters. This suffering presents challenges to theologians and utopians alike, but it is unavoidably part of the human condition. Second order suffering is suffering caused directly by human actions. It is the suffering of Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan, the Rohinga people, so many caught up in the system of crime and punishment in this country — both victims of crime and those who are in prison.
In third order suffering, the cause of suffering becomes more opaque. Rogers-Vaughn calls this suffering “the new chronic” rising from the cultural moment we are in. Neoliberalism (we’ll unpack this in a bit) leaves individuals more or less on their own, cut off from communities of support and consolation, left to interpret suffering as a sign of personal failure. Third order suffering is the suffering of not being able to get ahead of the bills, even when you grew up understanding that you are supposed to be better off than your parents, who never seemed to struggle in the same way. (…)

Rogers Vaughn argues that Neoliberalism turns everything into a marketplace, where value is understood in economic terms. So, education is not valuable because “an unexamined life is not worth living,” education is valuable because it is an investment in your future, specifically an investment in future earnings potential. A house is not valuable because it is a home, it is valuable because it is the vehicle for the majority of the net worth of most American homeowners. (…)

Rogers-Vaughn describes folks caught in this kind of suffering: “the terms used to describe first and second-order suffering now fail them, largely because the sources of their suffering are no longer easily identified. Their oppressors… no longer have faces. Yet to say the oppressor is some abstract ‘evil’ seems not to capture the thing. Their options are either to look within, blaming their sufferings on themselves, or to stare into the fog. Most people today take the first option. The primary [symptoms] are either profound but diffuse depressions or… addictions. An apparent symptom for the second option is a violent striking out into the fog, literally in a blind rage.” 

We can see these symptoms all around us. The symptoms are the crises we are seeing weekly in the world. “A violent striking out into the fog, literally in a blind rage,” is a description of the election last November. The system is broken, we don’t know how, so we will throw a human wrecking ball at the fog in the hopes that somehow that makes it better. That’s a symptom of third order suffering. Striking out is a response. But it is not our response.

On Sunday we tell each other we can make the world a better place. When things don’t improve that week, we repeat ourselves. What is our response, our faithful response, to this kind of suffering in the world? Religion is always concerned with understanding and alleviating suffering. What should our response be, as a church, to this particular kind of suffering? (...)

Ministry is an antidote for third order suffering, because rather than see value as economic, ministry sees value as intrinsic and connection as a need. (….)

Community Outreach Ministry Teams here at Unity, and all of them are, in different ways, courageous responses to third order suffering. In the midst of a diffuse and fragmented world, with anxieties rising and fog about who or what is to blame, these are groups of people who choose not to descent into nihilism and striking out at the fog, but to deepen their sense of ministry; to engage in connection, service, and lives of faith. (…)
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We have tools in this community, we have hope in this place, we have courage to look straight at suffering in the world, see that it is still in need of improvement, and then we repeat ourselves and get to work.