From Pauline Eichten, Past ARLT member and current member of the 
Beloved Community Staff Team

In 2002, a few people thought that Unity Church, a worthy institution, could do better around the issue of racism. They presented a proposal to the Board of Trustees that resulted in the church commissioning the Anti-Racism Leadership Team in January 2003. Made up of church members, the team’s stated mission was to help lead the church into becoming an actively anti-racist institution. This meant organizing from the inside, looking at policies and practices that would need to change to realize that mission. With institutional endorsement and mandate, these “leaders without authority” worked in an uncharted area, reporting to both the Board and the Executive Team and relying on them to execute team recommendations. 

The first significant piece of work of the team was to look at church history through an anti-racist lens. We asked, “Was Unity Church part of the resistance to racism in this country or was it complicit in supporting white supremacy and thus racism?” In spring 2005, after much research — going through archives, interviewing people, and reading and discussion — the team produced a 53-page document titled “The History of Race Relations and Unity Church-Unitarian, 1850-2005”. The team’s final assessment of Unity Church and its stance regarding racism was that we “engage[d] in charitable works instead of initiating a deeper exploration of racism and how we might be complicit in its continuing existence. That work would have forced us to feel a great deal of discomfort, and to be willing to be changed.”

Over the following years — and many programs, educational opportunities, sermons and workshops later — changes began. In summer 2005, the Board of Trustees developed a new definition for moral owners as those “who yearn for the Beloved Community and see Unity Church-Unitarian as an instrument for its realization. The Beloved Community … is community at the highest level of reality and possibility, where love and justice prevail.” 

Then in 2009-2013 the Ends Statements, the guiding documents for the work of the church, spoke to a commitment to anti-racism and racial healing. It was noted that the multi-million dollar construction project, proposed in 2011, had no stated commitment to the use of minority businesses for goods and services. A group of concerned church members initiated policy language to spell out how the church could address that issue with this project and into the future. The Board of Trustees used that as the basis for Policy J, added to its governing policies in the fall of 2012.

The new Ends Statements, adopted in 2018, included the following commitments to:

• create a multicultural spiritual home built on authentic relationships, and 
• create a brave space for racial healing and dismantling dominant culture.

Over the years the Anti-Racism Leadership Team has continued to work on influencing the progress of Unity Church toward becoming an actively anti-racist institution. Most recently, it had been serving in a strictly monitoring role. In its 2018 report, the team noted that it was the Board’s job to measure and evaluate the implementation of the church’s Ends. Given the new Ends Statements, and the strategy and implementation work envisioned with Team Dynamics, the team recommended bringing this monitoring task back to the Board. In February 2019, the Board passed such a motion and the Anti-Racism Leadership Team was dissolved.

This past June the Board and the Executive Team hosted a gathering, inviting anyone who ever served on the team. The event was both to thank everyone for their work and to solicit input to help guide the Board going forward. There are plans to have a congregational recognition sometime this fall of the Anti-Racism Leadership Team and the 60-some church members and staff who served on it over the past 17 years. 

From Pauline Eichten, Beloved Community Staff Team

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”  – Cynthia Occelli
 
With the development of Unity's new Ends statement – “create a multicultural spiritual home based on authentic relationships” – the Beloved Community Staff Team created an experimental group called Multicultural Conversation Partners.[1] Among the dozen or so in the group, half the members are persons of color and half are white. These multiracial partnerships are in regular conversation, both as duos and as the larger group.
 
The idea is to foster an ongoing conversation/learning process, which KP Hong describes as risking “an encounter with another that distances ourselves from our familiarities” -- going beyond the usual racialized forms of self-protection and moral shelter.
 
I am struck by the phrase “moral shelter.” I interpret it to mean the ways in which I affirm my identify as a “good” white person, someone who is aware of systemic racism and opposed to it. I don’t easily admit to the racist thoughts that bubble up from my subconscious. I’m active around issues of racial equality, but I’m not sure I’m willing to put my life in danger. When I traveled by myself to a one-time Sundown town in southern Illinois, it never occurred to me that it could be dangerous for my bi-racial daughter to do the same.
 
“I’m doing enough,” my comfortable white self says. And then I read about another white person calling the police on black people going about their lives, playing golf or having a picnic in the park, or another black man being shot by police. And I know that there is an urgency to change and I must do my part.
 
As the Unity Church congregation works to live into our aspiration to create a multicultural spiritual home, there will be change.  And from that change will come growth. The hope is that these conversation partners can help to develop a possible reality beyond racialized barriers that will offer new ways of doing/being that can apply to congregational life.
 
“We cannot obtain what we lack if we tenaciously cling to what we have.” – Charles F. Haanel
 
[1] The Multicultural Conversation Partners include Sheila Bosc, Jessica Burton, Rico Duran, Pauline Eichten, Kevin Harris, Heidi Johnson, Rich Lau, Mary Pickard, Lia Rivamonte, Erika Sanders, Jon Vaughan-Fier, Ray Wiedmeyer

A Reflection
Erika Sanders, Beloved Community Staff Team

Over six weeks in May and June, I was honored to be a volunteer photographer documenting seven marches, rallies and protests ("actions," in short) organized by the Minnesota Poor People's Campaign. Actions took place to take a moral stand on several issues: to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); to urge environmental justice and stop Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline proposal; to call for fair treatment of workers and a living wage; and to publicly and collectively imagine a budget built for peace, not militarism and war. 

As an amateur but avid photographer I've photographed many events and political actions. Each has a distinct mood, or combination of moods, including grief, pain, outrage, fury, love, pleading, demanding, longing, buoyancy, diffuse or focused energy, humor, and awkwardness. The Poor People's Campaign events had elements of all these, but they also had unusually potent feelings of joy, hope, and possibility. And that felt miraculous. I came to look forward to each action with greater and greater eagerness, and I don't think I was alone in that sensation.

I suspect there are a lot of reasons the Poor People's Campaign actions felt and looked that way through my camera's lens. But there's one reason that strikes me most: these events were the embodiment of what we have come to call intersectionality: the understanding of how different types of oppression and injustice compound and magnify one another, and how any one thread of collective or individual identity is woven alongside many others. They gave fresh life to Dr. King's admonishment that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." 

We talked about how protecting our environment is bound up in fighting racism. We learned about a living wage as not just a matter of economic justice — but as a matter of racial and gender justice, too. We dreamed of a world where refugees and asylum-seekers are greeted with radical hospitality, no matter their race, national origin, or socioeconomic status. The participants and planners of the Poor People's Campaign modeled and reflected this sense of interwoven destiny. They were an incredibly diverse group, and partners came from many faith traditions and many organizations, including Jewish Community Action, CTUL, 15 Now Minnesota, MIRAC (Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee), Minnesota Council of Churches, the Center for Sustainable Justice, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Minnesota, Veterans for Peace, the Rye House, the Center for Prophetic Action, Ujamaa Place, and Women Against Military Madness. Unity Church people were there, of course, in the thick of it all. Many put their bodies directly in service to the group purpose, and were arrested.
​
As my shutter clicked thousands of times, capturing people speaking, yelling, singing, marching, and being handcuffed, I was struck by how rare this embodiment of intersectionality really is. It's one thing to understand it intellectually, but another to witness it. To do it, feel it, be it. And we did. It was precious. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, has a list of 13 books that he hopes readers of his book will also read. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans. He is also the writer of the current Black Panther series for Marvel Comics launched in 2016.
http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/ta-nehisi-coates-list-of-13-recommended-books.html
​

Want to learn more about racism and its effects on all of us? The Unity Library has many resources – books, videos, and online content – that are appropriate for children and adults.

Published in 2016, "Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education," by Mychal Denzel Smith explores the question, “How do you learn to be a black man in America?” while coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama and witnessing the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and too many more.

CLICK HERE to access the Unity Library Catalog. Search “Anti-racism / Racism Collection.” If you only want resources for children, then do a search for “racism, children.” The catalog can also be accessed under "Additional Resources" in the column to the right (below on the mobile version) and from the Library page at http://www.unityunitarian.org/library-and-bookstall.html. 

​Some suggested resources from Pauline Eichten

I’ve always blamed banks and insurance companies for redlining neighborhoods, essentially creating slums and causing “white flight” to the suburbs.  Instead, I learned that it was deliberate actions on the part of government at all levels that created, promoted and enforced segregated neighborhoods and white-only urban and suburban communities.  It was these actions, as well as those of banks, insurance companies, realtors, etc., that created the conditions that left African-Americans little choice in where to live and almost no opportunity to create assets through homeownership. 

Read Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law, to learn the details.  Then check out the “Mapping Prejudice Project,” an effort to identify the racial restrictions embedded in Minneapolis property deeds.  (Might the deed to your home contain racially restrictive language?)

I’ve also included a link to a recent talk by a Harvard University sociology and public health professor, “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” discussing how the physical and mental health of all Americans is threatened by institutional racism.  And last, but not least, check out “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a devastating recounting of the ways in which African-Americans have been deliberately denied access to all the ways in which White Americans have prospered.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein, Liveright Publishing Corporation, May 2, 2017
Rothstein is a leading authority on housing policy. In this extensively researched book, he makes abundantly clear that it was laws and policy decisions passed by local, state and federal governments that promoted the discriminatory housing patterns that continue to this day.  The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded.
See also Pedro Nicolaci da Costa's article: "Public housing plays a huge role in racial segregation and inequality — but not in the way most people think"

The “Mapping Prejudice Project” is working to identify and map racial restrictions buried in historic Minneapolis property deeds. Their goal is to find every single racially restrictive covenant — a now-illegal type of deed restriction that prevented the sale of a home to a black person or, in some cases, anyone other than a white person — and plot them on a map of Minneapolis. The early results show, not too surprisingly, that the neighborhoods where racial covenants were clustered in the early part of the 20th century are still some of the city’s whitest. Mapping Prejudice is looking for volunteers to review property deeds online to determine if there are racial restrictions.

By Erika Saunders, Unity Church member

It was born in Cleveland.
 
It was born in frustration.
 
It was born in love.
 
It was born in a cross-pollination between the Movement for Black Lives and Unitarian Universalism.
 
Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism was birthed in all these places and more.
 
What is Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU), you ask? In short, BLUU provides “information, resources and support for Black Unitarian Universalists and works to expand the role and visibility of Black UUs within our faith.” Through a variety of initiatives, BLUU connects faith with direct liberation work and a more inclusionary vision of Unitarian Universalism. As BLUU organizer Leslie Mac told the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), “I have a dream that Black people will know they can go to any UU church and be welcome,” she said. “I can’t say that now.” Along with Leslie Mac, BLUU’s organizing collective includes Takiyah Nur Amin, Lena K. Gardner, Kenny Wiley, CDR Royce W. James and Elandria Williams.
 
The seeds of BLUU germinated at the Movement for Black Lives Convening in Cleveland in July 2015, where Black UUs talked about their faith, whether Unitarian Universalism had a place within the Movement for Black Lives and conversely, whether black lives had a place with Unitarian Universalism. Some of those present felt alienated from Unitarian Universalism, and concerned that their faith communities weren’t equal to the task of providing support for the transformative, challenging work of racial justice. Following these conversations, members of what would become the BLUU organizing collective reached out to one another to form both a recommitment to Unitarian Universalism and a dedication to creating a growing edge of their faith – including a new set of principles that would embody and expand Unitarian Universalism’s spiritual and practical ways of being in the world.
 
The seven principles of BLUU are:
 
Principle #1: All Black Lives Matter.
Queer Black lives, trans Black lives, formerly incarcerated Black lives, differently-abled Black lives, Black women’s lives, immigrant black lives, Black elderly and children’s lives. ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER and are creators of this space.
 
Principle #2: Love / Self-love is practiced in every element of all we do.
Love and self-love must be drivers of all our work and indicators of our success. Without this principle and without healing, we will harm each other and undermine our movement.

Principle #3: Spiritual growth is directly tied to our ability to embrace our whole selves.
A principled struggle must exist in a positive environment. We must be honest with one another by embracing direct, loving communication and acknowledgment of all that we are and all that we hope to be. The spiritual growth of UUs of color is directly tied to our ability to stand in the truth that black lives matter, both in the wider world, and just as importantly, in our UU congregations.
 
Principle #4: Experimentation and innovation must be built into our work.
Embrace the best tools, practices, and tactics, and leave behind those that no longer serve us. Evaluation and assessment must be built into our work. Critical reflection must be part of all our work.
 
Principle #5: Most directly affected people are experts at their own lives.
Those most directly affected by racial injustice and oppression should be in leadership, at the center of our movement, and telling their stories directly.
 
Principle #6: Thriving instead of surviving.
Our vision is based on the world we want, and not the world we are currently in. We seek to transform, not simply to react.
 
Principle #7: 360-degree vision.
We honor the past struggles and wisdom from our elders. The work we do today builds the foundations of movements of tomorrow. We consider our mark on future generations. Acknowledging the ways in which a Supremacist society diminishes us ALL is a critical part of the work of the Movement for Black Lives.
 
One example of BLUU’s work is its involvement in the #ReviveLove tour this past autumn. The tour brought an energizing combination of music and activism to Knoxville, Nashville, New Orleans, Saint Louis and Atlanta, and was organized by BLUU along with Standing on the Side of Love and Reverend Sekou and the Holy Ghost, a gospel and neo-blues band. The #ReviveLove tour “provided a spiritual offering to the movement” and space for Black leaders and supporters to reflect and replenish, says organizer Lena K. Gardner. “It lived out the deepest values of our faith, by providing musical sustenance, as well as training and support, for organizers in local communities.”
 
In October, BLUU presented to the UUA Board of Trustees about its work and goals, and the UUA committed $300,000 in immediate support to BLUU, with the promise of an additional $5 million over the long term. According to Lena K. Gardner, "The lead organizers are bringing people together in March at the first ever BLUU convening in New Orleans so that Black UUs from across the country can come and be a part of building the collective. We want many voices to have a role and input in building BLUU and utilizing the financial resources that the UUA has committed."
 
What is Unity’s role? Unity has been, and can continue to be, a fortifier, a supporter, and a safe and sustaining place for BLUU and its work, as well as other racial justice efforts. In May 2016 Unity became BLUU’s fiscal agent and served as such until the UUA provided initial funding and became the fiscal agent in February 2017. According to organizer Lena K. Gardner, “Unity has led by saying yes, by looking for ways to say yes. Unity has been able to be flexible, to find routes around logistical challenges, and more UU churches need to step up this way.”  

Perhaps, for Unity, attention to BLUU’s Principle #5 is most critical: the people most directly affected by oppression are the experts on their own lives, therefore must be leaders in directing the movement’s work. For those of us who reside most often in positions of privilege, this means finding ways to be effective followers and learners, even when that feels uncomfortable or alien. Christena Cleveland, professor at Duke Divinity School, wrote recently in an essay called “How to be last: A practical theology for privileged people,” “Justice and equity work should be led by the marginalized — by those who have firsthand knowledge of the unjust systems that are in need of dismantling. If the marginalized lead, then the role that privileged people play is a supportive one. However, when privileged people are invited to play a supportive role in justice and equity work, they often feel disoriented, marginalized and role-less. Since they’re not ‘leading’, they don’t know what to do. Since they don’t have a ‘leadership’ role, they don’t believe they have a valuable role to play . . . Because leadership and high social status often go hand-in-hand, we are socialized to see leadership roles as inherently more valuable than non-leadership roles. The effect is that — in addition to not knowing how to play supportive, non-leadership roles — privileged people have a difficult time recognizing the social value and theological importance of such roles.” When those of us who have privilege exercise humility and let go of that disorientation, we free ourselves to grow into new understanding of the spiritual and practical value of the supporting role.
 
No matter what our respective roles or how we place ourselves within our communities’ struggles, perhaps we may all embrace and echo Lena K. Gardner’s assessment of her work: “it’s a continual coming back to love, learning more deeply about what it is to love each other in this world.”