Rev. Ruth MacKenzie, Minister Emerita of First Universalist Church of Minneapolis and member of Unity Church–Unitarian

I’ve had two truly transformative experiences in my life. One was my learning and work with my family of origin and how the traumas of my upbringing had shaped my life in surprising ways. In my late twenties, my family and I began a process of listening and truth telling. It wasn’t easy but it transformed me and my family into something more whole. We all grew up. The other seismic experience has been my learning and work with racial justice beginning at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis in 2011 and continuing today. I guess I might describe it as “growing up as a white person.”

Early in my ministry at First Universalist, Revs. Justin Schroeder and Jen Crow worked with Heather Hackman and Black members of our congregation to train one tenth of the congregation in basic understandings of racism, white supremacy, and integrating racial justice into the very fabric of our congregation. We wanted to create a sea change in who we were and how we did things.

The trainings were intense, uncomfortable to say the least, absolutely necessary, and life changing. At the same time, a number of killings of Black men by police officers took place in Minneapolis and Saint Paul: Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, Daunte Wright, and George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement was building power, and many of us were compelled to leave the church pew and move into the streets.

I found myself doing things I’d never done before. I sat with young Black men outside the fourth precinct police station and listened to their stories as night descended at the BLM occupation. I lay down on the asphalt of 35W in protest. We gathered musicians, and faith leaders in several vigils to mourn the dead of the Black community. Our church doors were flung open to all kinds of groups working for racial justice, providing meeting space, sanctuary housing, and more. Unity Church was in the thick of it as well, and many collaborations and partnerships emerged and still do. I started to understand at a base level that faith and racial justice were essential to one another. Faith keeps my racial justice work tender, humble and courageous. Racial justice keeps my faith relevant, true and tethered to the real world.

There were plenty of times I was scared, plenty of times I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, plenty of times I made hurtful mistakes, plenty of times I felt overwhelmed and still do. There is no way to do this work and not feel off balance, jostled, unsettled. I cannot do the work of racial justice without prayer, without listening circles, without a faith community that lifts up the compelling truth of our interconnection with all people, that our liberation is bound up together. I cannot live a life tethered to God and Gai of many names, the worthiness and dignity of every human being without a powerful connection to racial justice. I can’t divorce my spiritual life from the real world reality of how race, racism and white supremacy deeply shapes all our lives with profound detriment to Black and brown folk. Just as in my family, I ache for a world that is more whole.

I’ve rejoined the Unity faith community having retired from full time ministry and I’ve been privileged to join the Racial Justice Team of Unity Church, continuing to grow and learn and transform. Last spring I attended the Interconnected Roots of Oppression series created by the Beloved Community Staff Team and was so moved and awakened once again. The Racial Justice Team will build on that series this coming October with a series called From Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism. I hope you’ll join us in this transformative work of spirit and antiracist multicultural practice.

Moving from Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism
Four Wednesdays: October 14, 21, 28 and November 11 
7:10-8:30 p.m. | Ames Chapel
Topics include: The Masks We Wear, The Necessity of Discomfort, Expanding Our Heart Center
Unity’s Racial Justice Team will follow last year’s Beloved Community Staff Team exploration of The Interconnected Roots of Oppression and expand on Unity’s Double Helix model with a series of Wellspring Wednesday experiences. Interconnected Roots taught us how racial capitalism informs political, economic and social systems. Moving from Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism will help us recognize and reckon with somatic dimensions of our white racist heritage. Circle conversations will be used to share insights that potentially “break us open and allow us to be transformed.” Follow-up programming on activation will be offered in early 2027. Please attend two fall sessions in preparation for spring sessions. 

LauraSue Schlatter, Beloved Community Communications Team

It may feel as though Unity's Board of Trustees presented us with too daunting a task when it asked us, the members of Unity Church, to “understand the interconnected roots of oppression . . .” in the opening challenge of our Ends Statements. But we have willing and patient teachers among our Beloved Community Staff Team, congregants, and partners in the community who can help us. 

The six-week “Interconnected Roots of Oppression” Wellspring Wednesday series was designed to teach and engage participants during weekly dialogue circles about: 

• Foundations of Racial Capitalism;
• Land, Ownership, and Housing Justice;
• Borders, Policing, and the Politics of Belonging;
• Finance, Debt, and the Cost of Inequality;
• Universal Care and the Struggle for Collective Wellbeing; and 
• Fossil Capitalism and Imagining New Futures. 

​Who, we wondered, was showing up at this well-attended series? Why? And are these conversations leading to new possibilities, cultivating collective action, and genuine transformation? To find out, we spoke to some participants, recorded their responses, and share them now with you.

The ongoing and violent occupation of Minnesota by thousands of illegally masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained Federal immigration enforcement agents is shocking — but it is not surprising. This increasingly dangerous situation in Minnesota and in the country overall has arisen in the context of racial capitalism that currently dominates the nation.
Despite the nice-sounding rhetoric about capitalism, that it promotes freedom and prosperity, capitalism involves the exploitation of people, other life, and resources to the benefit of a privileged few. In other words, capitalism means the freedom to exploit so the proverbial one percent can prosper to the detriment of the planet and life on it. 
​
The socially constructed concept of race has been used to rationalize this systematic exploitation and its resulting disparities. Put simply, people of color have been mischaracterized as somehow inferior or even deserving of the mistreatment they have experienced in the United States since before the country’s founding and around the world since colonialism began before that. 

Vilification and outright dehumanization based on “race” have coincided with even self-described liberal or progressive individuals and institutions participating in racial capitalism as it obscenely concentrates wealth and power. This does not mean that people and organizations who identify as liberal or progressive should feel ashamed; the existing capitalist economic system makes it difficult to think and behave differently. Much like the closely related phenomenon of white supremacy, racial capitalism is all around us — akin to the air we breathe — so the sustained awareness of, and active engagement against, racial capitalism (and white supremacy) is vital.

Consistent with racial capitalism, the so-called immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota and around the nation have targeted people of color. The occupying Federal paramilitary force has engaged in documented and repeated racial profiling, requiring immigrants of color to prove they are United States citizens when seized from their homes, their cars, their medical clinics, their workplaces, their schools, or other supposedly safe places. These Federal immigration agents also have abducted, detained, and deported immigrants of color — including young children — who are citizens of this country. In fact, the occupying paramilitary force has murdered in broad daylight native-born whites who, in solidarity with immigrants of color, served as peaceful legal observers to document the escalating violations of fundamental rights.

The message is clear: one’s rights and humanity may not be recognized when one is an immigrant of color. People subjected to such abuses are more easily exploited because of the understandable fear they feel under the circumstances, fueling the racial capitalism fire that has consumed the nation with devastating consequences up to the present. 

In this context, and in response to complaints by immigrants of color about wage theft and other violations of their rights, unscrupulous companies threaten to call or actually call the same types of Federal immigration enforcement agents who have been terrorizing Minnesotans everywhere in recent months. Similarly, unscrupulous lawyers who represent employers or other defendants in labor and employment or civil rights cases use the perceived or actual immigration status of claimants of color or of claimants’ family members to coerce immigrants into settling their compelling claims for little or even into not pursuing their claims in the first place.

In my experience litigating numerous labor and employment and civil rights cases on behalf of immigrants of color as well as on behalf of native-born whites, I have observed a clear difference in how cases are handled by opposing counsel and courts. Generally, my clients who are immigrants of color have been regarded with suspicion or, to put it more legalistically and euphemistically, as lacking credibility when compared to their native-born and white peers. 

Consequently, when it comes to immigrants of color versus native-born whites, opposing counsel typically has made invasive demands for information and documents, insisted on burdensome depositions, and used other abusive litigation tactics to discourage immigrants from seeking recourse for violations that flow from racial capitalism. In addition, courts often have tolerated such conduct by opposing counsel when my clients are immigrants of color. This bias may be unconscious at the individual level, but the adverse impact remains powerful at the institutional and systemic levels regardless.

In sum, immigration enforcement is racialized because capitalism is racialized. The labor of immigrants of color continues to be essential to the nation’s capitalist economic system, and the exploitation of that labor continues to be essential to the profiteering of that system. An economic system recognizing the inherent dignity and interconnectedness of all people — and, therefore, one based on the love underlying the yet-to-be-realized Beloved Community — would look vastly different than the one we have now. Indeed, we cannot have Beloved Community so long as racial capitalism and the related scarcity mindset obscure the vital spirit of mutuality and our radical imagination for a just and sustainable world.