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. 
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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.

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.