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. 

As we begin the new church year, we are reminded that Unity is rich in numerous opportunities to be together as a congregation in all the ways that matter — joy, pain, grief, celebration, worship, social justice — and in learning about ourselves and one another. The arrival of Rev. Oscar brings our congregation an especially charged atmosphere of promise and renewal. The Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) is already at work exploring opportunities for deeper connection for this new year.

What is the BCST?
The BCST was initiated in 2016 by senior co-ministers Rob and Janne Eller-Isaacs to coordinate and sustain efforts across the congregation that explore and deepen learning explicitly through the lens of antiracist multiculturalism. Aspiring to achieve the Beloved Community, prophetic practice — developing meaningful ways to integrate our values into our day-to-day lives to make qualitative changes in our souls—is a constant. The BCST serves to expand and strengthen our collective capacity for antiracist multicultural understanding, and ensures that this remains foundational across the congregation from how we operate to our programs and activities, embedding our antiracist multicultural Ends throughout congregational life. 

It was the BCST, for example, that:

• Implemented congregation-wide learning opportunities with Team Dynamics that sharpened our awareness and understanding of intersectionality and dominant culture.
• Created the Double Helix Model interlacing faith formation and spiritual practice with antiracist multiculturalism. 
• Worked closely with the Ministerial Search Team to engage the congregation in examining biases surrounding identity and expectations for a senior minister. 

Under Rev. KP’s steadfast, inspired leadership, the BCST is committed to 1) critical discernment — keeping in mind the larger historical implications of this work, 2) connection — sustaining our humanity and empathy towards one another, 3) tracking hypocrisy — aligning what we say with what we do and noticing when we have failed, and 4) hope — empowering our creativity to reimagine the future in building the Beloved Community. 

The Unity Ends Statements that ignite the BCST work are:

• Know each other in all our fullness.
• Create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people.
• Create brave space for racial healing and dismantling the dominant culture.

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” — bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Who is in the BCST?
The Executive Team (ET), staff members, and lay leaders make up the BCST. The ET: Rev. KP Hong, Minister of Faith Formation; Laura Park, Executive Director; and now senior minister Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair. Staff members are Rev. Lara Cowtan, Minister of Congregational Care; and Drew Danielson, Coordinator of Youth and Campus Ministries. Lay member Angela Wilcox serves as project manager and scribe.

To better inform the congregation about this work, former BCST members Erika Sanders and Pauline Eichten created the Beloved Community Communications Team (BCCT). The team has been at work for over seven years and is charged with the task of sharing stories of the struggles, questions, and collaborations coming out of the multicultural work at Unity and in the wider world of our faith and city. The current team includes Shelley Butler, Becky Gonzalez-Campoy, Marjorie Otto, Suki Sun, Ray Wiedmeyer, and me, team leader and BCST liaison. Guided by the work of the BCST, the BCCT is responsible for collecting and writing Beloved Community News articles and blog posts that focus on the issues, ideas, and challenges of the antiracist multiculturalism work, and for positing questions and engaging in reflection that offers deeper understanding and multiple perspectives.

Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity. —James Baldwin

Antiracist multiculturalism work is inherently complex. As much as we wish it were simple — “love is love,” “we are one,” and numerous other aphoristic phrases we employ that invite complacency, to build the Beloved Community is to embrace the many layers of identity and experience that each of us represents. To dig down into our own human existence and examine ways to “know one another in all our fullness” is often difficult and sometimes painful, revealing uncomfortable truths about ourselves and how we influence others to the good or ill, but ultimately redemptive. 

The BCCT would like to hear your story! What illuminates your commitment to creating an antiracist multicultural community? Share a story, image, and/or video in the All Our Fullness program, or just get in touch to let us know you are interested in working with us: [email protected].

In this new church year, may we be guided by our faith and connected in love as we aspire to build the Beloved Community.