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.

Haiti will break your heart. I’m not the first person to say so, but I’m reminded of what Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs used to say, that when a heart breaks open, it makes more room for love. 

Flying over the Caribbean Sea is a magnificent experience. From a distance islands like Hispaniola appear as small rocks that rise out of the vast water that surround them. It’s only when you get closer that you see the dividing line down the mountain — the Dominican Republic on the lush green side and Haiti on the denuded bare side. It’s an obvious first sign that something is not right in Haiti. As the plane comes down over Port au Prince, the vast neighborhood of makeshift homes that make up Cite Soleil (City of the Sun) appears; infamously known as the largest (and to me scariest) slum in the Western Hemisphere. 

I worked with a small nonprofit that partners with a community of nuns in Haiti for several years and have been there half a dozen times, for grant writing; to tour the education, farming, and elder care projects we support; and to lead immersion trips. When I’m asked what it is like there, I think of the deep pink-magenta bougainvillea blossoms in full bloom that won’t be denied as they wind around nasty looking razor wire atop most middle-class homes. Or the view from Kenscoff, where there is farming and trees in the mountains above Port au Prince, that belies the reality down there, where gullies throughout the city are filled with trash being picked through by a pig or goat or maybe even a child. Children who may live in a shack with no water or electricity come to school pressed, clean, and as happy and goofy as grade school kids anywhere. It’s a land of contrasts.

Haiti is a place where examining my own privilege and white superiority was inescapable; it smacks you in the face. Nothing in the United States or anywhere I’ve traveled in Europe compared to the sights, sounds, smells, and jarring car rides in Haiti. After a few trips, the stench outside the airport became familiar, but God help me if I ever get used to sights like a mother washing her baby in a puddle of water on the side of the road, an orange-haired child with the extended belly of starvation, or a toddler in an orphanage crib so devoid of hope he doesn’t cry for attention anymore. 

Though Haiti was born from revolutionary struggle against colonial oppression, the legacy of racial hierarchies endures in the form of colorism, with wealth and status disproportionately held by those with lighter complexions. Such classism remains deeply entrenched, exemplified by the system of restaveks which still exists. Yet beyond these inherited structures lies another form of racism that is largely of foreign import, brought in by the thousands of organizations and church mission programs full of white people with the best of intentions to help the poor. Many, if not most, find it nearly impossible not to compare “us” to “them,” especially when the differences can be so stark and devastating. The common reaction is, “What can we do to save them?” 
​
As you’d expect, antiracism doesn’t exist in Haiti as we largely know it here. There are no workshops on intersectionality and microaggressions. The “us” versus “them” savior complex may be the most obvious racist attitude, of which I was (and often still am) guilty. When I felt my heart breaking, I looked to our Haitians partners to direct me, to tell me what was needed, and let more love into my heart to walk beside the remarkable Haitian nuns who had let me in, despite belonging to Unitarian Universalism, a religious oddity in a country where Vodou is practiced alongside Christianity.