Beloved Community Communications Team

As part of Unity’s Ends Statements — and our commitment to “understand the interconnected roots of oppression” — three newsletter articles from Rev. KP Hong (Oct 2024, Sept 2025, Dec 2025) examine how racial justice and economic justice are bound together within the structures of racial capitalism. To broaden this conversation, we invited several Unity Church members to offer brief “letters to the editor” in response. We asked them what insights or questions feel most pressing, and how those reflections shape their stance in the broader struggle for racial and economic justice. We are grateful for their thoughtful, lightly edited contributions, inviting us all to keep wrestling with the inseparable ties between racial and economic justice.

By and large diversity, equity and inclusion conversations and trainings have left out economic diversity. 

For Unity to fully lean into antiracism, we must do the difficult work of tackling economic justice. There is economic diversity within the congregation, but we must acknowledge that, overall, the congregation is one of economic privilege. 
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Reparations are increasingly, and rightly so, a part of the discussion around racial and economic justice. While reparations are vital to racial and economic justice, it is a starting point, not an end point. If the current economic structures are left in place, mass inequality will continue.

This requires a much more arduous approach to economic justice. One that requires us to wholly examine our privilege, the comfort we have grown accustomed to, and challenges us in every sense of the word to ask what we are willing to give up for an antiracist society. 
— Jennifer Bubke

With the new ends statement we encounter a first for Unity Church — a mandate to discuss economic justice. 

Discussing economic justice should terrify you. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That means your economic model has to shift — your asset strategy has to be just. If you don’t hear about economic justice and shutter a little for the health and wellbeing of your 401k then you’re not taking this mandate seriously. 

We (Unitarians) love a hard conversation. Digging into dangerous words is our jam. . . But shifting your retirement savings from the extractive stock market into regenerative and local investments is not a “difficult and transformative conversation.” It’s the practical application of our values in the world. It has consequences — to you — to your money. 

Economic justice is terrifying — if you're committed. 
— Jesse Williams

As a welfare worker 56 years ago, I was assigned to a no-go zone for the Boston Police who would not enter the area because of the danger. These “projects” have since been torn down and progress made but the root causes of economic inequality remain. How do we build an economically just society, one that cares for all? I still believe that real change must come from the ballot box. A guaranteed minimum income, access to child care, quality education, universal health care, and getting money out of politics are just a few issues to be addressed.

I am drawn to a concept in Judaism called Tikkun Olam which refers to the pursuit of social justice and the cultivating of godly qualities throughout the world and based on the belief that each person bears responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but for the welfare of society at large. 
— Jim Mulvey

I agree with that racism, capitalism and, relatedly, colonialism have operated together for centuries — with the social construction and legal imposition of “race” having devastating economic, political, and environmental consequences for othered individuals and communities. 

Overlooking the centrality of capitalism to the creation and maintenance of racism means that many of us have mistakenly sought to address discrimination at an individual level (“liberal antiracism”) rather than at the systemic level (“radical antiracism”). This mistake is not surprising because it appears less daunting to address an issue from an interpersonal instead of a structural standpoint. In addition, some of us have benefitted significantly from the capitalist system. My question is whether all of us are now willing to walk the walk — dismantling the systemic sources of racism — rather than solely talking the talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I remain convinced that anything less than systemic analysis and action, informed by individual and communal experience, will not build the beloved community we need and deserve. 
— Justin Cummins

Your brief essay has provoked more thought than any other social commentary I’ve read this year… and raised more questions. 

I would suggest that most governing systems have fallen somewhere into the middle of these opposites. By putting a ceiling on liberty, a limit to how rich or powerful you are allowed by law to become, governments have tried to use some resources to install a floor to keep the least wealthy members of the population from sinking too far into inequality, hence injustice: poverty and all that goes with it. So for most systems, whether more or less autocratic or democratic, the tension and the conflict arise from questions of how high we can allow the ceiling to rise? How low can we allow the floor to sink? 

Added to all of the issues surrounding capitalism and racism, we face seeming determination to render our planet inhospitable and perhaps uninhabitable. Perhaps, having risen to dominate a complex and beautiful biosphere, we are destined to become footnotes to history, if anyone out there is recording the history of the planet Earth.
— Dutton Foster

News of George Floyd’s lynching came on a perfect spring afternoon in 2020. Following surgery for breast cancer and during chemotherapy I had a long-lasting respiratory virus with high fevers, sore throat, and headaches, likely COVID. Feeling shaky, but better, with only a couple of weeks of radiation to go, May’s blooms and walks brought hope. Then I heard and saw George Floyd calling for his Momma and plummeted into dark waters. 

Three nights later, I huddled in the basement of my home with Lou, my older child. Home from grad school to help care for me, Lou would have been with the protesters but for my fear of getting sick again. As we watched on our cell phones, we saw our local businesses, post office, and police station fall as Black and white ally protesters confronted law enforcement. Protesters were thrown to the ground, injured and bleeding. A conflagration, torched by inflammatory white outsiders come to take advantage of the pain roiling our city, sent acrid smoke into the air. Some of the worst of the chaos and flames were less than a mile from our home. I shivered in the dark, eyes pasted to images of people wrestled to the ground, library windows shattered, store support beams twisted. Lou’s reassurances failed. I had never been so afraid. 

In the morning, I braved the kitchen window to see unscathed yards outside. Despite reports from neighborhood watchers of white people with out-of-state license plates driving through our neighborhood overnight, the mainly-Black church two doors down stood untouched. My heart pounded in my throat. I was afraid to step out. The radio played voices of Black neighbors in north Minneapolis mourning the loss of local businesses, speaking of fear that was not new to them, of anger at another lynching. That was how many saw George Floyd’s death — yet another execution, without judge or jury. A lynching.
Something inside me broke open. The Black voices touched the fear at my core. Hiding in my home, a “go” bag packed in case I had to flee, the fears that BIPOC neighbors had carried for centuries were manifest in me. While mine were new and small in comparison, I understood at my core what it might be to live with this fear every day of my life. I understood that all the antiracism work I had done in the past had not taught me to feel fear this way. I broke open and was transformed. The transformation was a somatic understanding that my BIPOC neighbors, friends, co-workers, people of my city, all were caught in a vise of fear. 

My underlying faith allowed me to break open, and to be transformed. Our new ends statements tell us to “understand the interconnected roots of oppression and yoke ourselves to the demands, sacrifices, and hard work of antiracism, multiculturalism, and climate and economic justice . . ..” They also exhort us to “practice lifelong faith formation. . . that breaks us open and allows us to be transformed.” 

On that day in 2020, I knew that my faith had taught me that we are all inherently worthy, and that babies are born with a divinity that entitles all of us to love. I had practiced prayer and silence enough to have found ways to allow myself to open to what, for me, feels like a divine presence. I had experienced hearing the still small voice within and allowed myself to follow its wisdom. I had an intellectual understanding, from participating in antiracism workshops, of the causes and effects of systemic racism. I thought I had done what I could to point out systemic racism at work in the world.

But before George Floyd was lynched and I was terrified of the uprising so close to my home, I did not understand how oppression is a Human problem. The people who are oppressed are not the only victims of oppression. We are all victims of oppression. The difference is that the people who are the oppressors have the power to change the status quo. Isabel Wilkerson has said, “We are all one race. The Human Race.” We Humans created and interwove oppressions ingeniously — to benefit some at tremendous cost to others. As we did so, we lost control of the weaving. Cost and benefit can no longer be controlled. We all lose now. Using some of us to benefit others at a cost to the ones being used is a loss to all. Pull one thread and the entire piece unravels.

Since that day at the end of May in 2020, my focus has changed. I was able to experience, if only for a moment, how it feels to be a BIPOC person in this country. That transformation released me to transform further. I am grateful for the underlying faith that continues to inspire me on this journey.

LauraSue Schlatter is a longtime member of Unity Church. She has recently joined the Beloved Community Communications Team.

​In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in U.S. history surged across the nation and reverberated in global demonstrations of solidarity. Voices in the streets demanded the dismantling of prisons, borders, and police, calling not for reform but for abolition, redistribution, and radical transformation. Protesters understood racism as a structural force, asking not for infrastructures of violence to be softened through better officer training or diversity workshops, but for the defunding and dismantling of policing, carceral systems, and border regimes themselves. And for a moment, it seemed as if a true racial reckoning might be underway. 

Yet the revolutionary clarity of those demands was swiftly absorbed and deflected as Amazon, Walmart, and other corporate giants declared that Black Lives Matter, branded themselves as allies, poured resources into diversity trainings, and rescripted the cry for abolition as calls for representation and more “Black faces in high places.” This is the hallmark of liberal antiracism, a politics of inclusion and interpersonal bias correction that leaves intact and untouched the machinery of racial capitalism. In contrast, the Black tradition of radical antiracism — carried forward by luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Kwame Nkrumah, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jamil al-Amin, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor insists that racism is inseparable from capitalism itself, and that justice requires dismantling the structures of policing, prisons, borders, and militarism that sustain the extraction, expropriation, and exploitation of an underlying racial capitalism.

When Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the largest multinational investment management company in the world, wrote a letter in 2020 to colleagues of racism as a “deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level,” did he mean canceling his donations and corporate influence on the New York City Police Foundation?1 Terminating BlackRock’s investments in arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, and the military-industrial complex supplying weapons for the wars in the Middle East? Redistributing the vast wealth he manages to confront the grotesque scale of global inequality? No, his response to “systemic” racism was not to focus on systems at all, but to “talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships... and [build] a more diverse and inclusive firm.”2 In other words, the solution to structural racism was to double down on interpersonal bias work and liberal antiracism’s familiar script of diversity and inclusion.

Interpersonal remedies matter, but they are painfully inadequate for structural injustices. Antiracist work “within” and “among” remain necessary, but it must not be confused or substituted for the work “beyond.” The racially differentiated effect of Covid was not rooted in individual prejudice, poor health habits, lack of education, or other narratives that gaslight communities of color. Such factors may always be present, but the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on nonwhite people was structurally rooted in the political economy of racial capitalism: the exploitation of “essential” labor, precarity of housing, unequal access to healthcare, policing of lockdowns and health mandates, unchecked outbreaks within prisons and detention centers, and the scapegoating and intensification of racial discrimination. It is the structural which frames the interpersonal, as racial capitalism organizes our reality through educational apartheid, mass incarceration, segregated neighborhoods, redlining and bluelining, segmented labor markets confining workers to unequal tiers, persistent wage gaps and job insecurity, and militarized borders that inscribe violence on collective life. From the slave patrols of the plantation to the strike breaking squads of the factory, policing has always functioned to guard property and control labor. Border regimes allow capital and goods to freely move across borders, while migrant labor remains violently restricted. The vilification of migrants as terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, “illegals who are taking our jobs” and “bogus asylum seekers” rehearses the old script of colonial racial capitalism. Most forcefully, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, renowned public scholar-activist, punctuates how racism and capitalism have always been structured together:

Detention and deportation are not aberrations at the edges of racial capitalism but border violence designed to preserve a global racial division of labor. 

The violence persists not because officers or capitalists fail to examine their biases, but because the system itself requires racialized control to sustain exploitation. Racism has never been incidental to capitalism; it is one of its core operating principles. To be an antiracist, then, is not merely to change minds or diversify institutions, but to collectively expose structures that require diseased imaginations to rationalize inequality. Antiracism means dismantling the infrastructures of racial capitalism hiding in abstract financialized economies, systems of land ownership, and global trade agreements that codify and normalize extraction. Antiracism means committing to the redistribution of wealth, repairing deep inequalities inscribed upon our world for centuries, and prophetically reimagining beyond the strictures of racial capitalism where political economies serve life rather than devour it. 

1 Morris Pearl, “Dear Larry Fink: it's time to stop lavishing your wealth on the police,” Guardian, August 1, 2020.
2 Alexandra Sternlicht, “We Must Do More—What CEOs Like Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink Say About Racial Inequality Protests,” Forbes, June 1, 2020.