Lia Rivamonte, Beloved Community Communications Team

Long ago, I was part of a small acting troupe from a local theater that toured rural areas in the upper Midwest. Typically, we performed in a school gym or an auditorium and it was the school principal who served as emcee, introducing us by name to the students and faculty. The challenge to pronounce our names was exasperating for them; funny and ironic, to us. Waiting to go on stage, we never knew what might emanate from the mouth of the person who introduced us. The show was about growing up Asian American, an attempt at humanizing us by interweaving music with humorous and moving stories about Asian American history, culture, family life, and the immigrant experience. 

The botched intros seemed to illustrate, at that time, how necessary it was to dispel the notion of Asian exoticism and inscrutability, that has long permeated Asian-ness in the country; notions that exploited difference in order to justify unequal treatment. While our names sounded strange and we may not have looked like the majority of the students or their families in their community, the narratives we shared were probably similar to their own predominantly European immigrant histories. That touring show took place 30 years ago. 

The pandemic revitalized that sense of foreignness of Asian Americans; some blaming us directly for Covid. And while there have been no recent reports of violence toward Asian Americans, renewed skepticism and opposition towards all immigrants is a hallmark of the incoming administration. We have yet to see how “successful” this anti-immigrant campaign will be not only in terms of government policy and economic feasibility, but also in regard to an unabashed retreat from that to which we had once aspired: a democracy where all are treated with equal respect, where all feel that we belong. 

The cultivation of a sense of belonging and genuine human connection has taken on a new urgency. For many of us, present-day hyper-connectivity through social media has served to heighten our awareness of disconnectedness. Our social media posts often portray our accomplishments, our close happy times with family and friends, career successes, vacations, smooth life transitions, etc. In the Unity All Our Fullness (AOF) initiative, we want to go deeper with you to cultivate authentic inclusion and connection. 

As Rev. KP Hong, Unity’s Minister of Faith Formation says, “At the heart of a faith community is creating belonging where there has been exclusion, border, social fragmentation, and segregation.” The current Unity Church fourth Ends Statement may be aspirational, “to know each other in all our fullness and create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people,” but as KP says, “A religious vision of belonging is always revolutionary, prophetic, imagining a way beyond othering.” This is the belonging that we call Beloved Community.

Did our theater presentation make a difference? Did we persuade the mainly white, Euro-American students to see Asian Americans as having the same desires and needs, despite seemingly unpronounceable names or other perceived differences? Maybe, for a minute. What I do know is the kid in the audience who was a Korean adoptee or whose family owned the local Chinese restaurant was always the first to greet us backstage; often in tears, grateful to hear their own story elevated and told as something about which to be proud. It felt to them as if they belonged — if not in that gym, in the larger world they hoped would be waiting for them one day.

We, too, are waiting. It is easy to isolate and never stretch ourselves, but I think we are all a bit tired of living among strangers. As curious Unitarian Universalists, who believe in the interconnectedness of our universe, how about starting with ourselves? 

With this in mind, we warmly invite you to All Our Fullness, to share your personal story in response to one of the following prompts: 

• When did you become aware of your own cultural identity?
• Share a story about a time you encountered difference; and what difference did it make.
• What stirs your yearning for multicultural community?

We welcome videos (two minutes or less), art, photographs, and/or your written response (300 words or so). Submit via the All Our Fullness online form.

Thank you! We are grateful in advance for your participation. Responses will be shared with the congregation on Unity’s website and/or in commUNITY in the coming months. Please note that your contribution may be edited for length and clarity.

Feel free to direct any questions about AOF to [email protected].

Our faith community holds the idea of belonging at its core. We value knowing one another in all our fullness to forge deeper, more meaningful connections with one another in order to create an ever-widening sense of belonging. Today, despite the trappings of social media, we too often find ourselves living in a world of false connections, exclusion, social fragmentation, and isolation.
 
All Our Fullness (AOF) is an initiative from the Beloved Community Staff and Communications Teams that aims to make authentic connections among us by sharing our stories with each other about identity, encountering difference, and dreaming big. It was conceived as a means to help us make progress, however slight, towards what we so often refer to as the Beloved Community, a place in which we all feel safe and accepted, and where we can all breathe in a true sense of belonging.
 
With this in mind, we warmly invite you to share your personal story in answer to one of the following questions and to which there is no right or wrong answer:
 
(1)   When did you become aware of your own cultural identity?
 
(2)   When was a time you encountered difference; what difference did it make?
 
(3)   What stirs your yearning for multicultural community?
 
We welcome videos (2 minutes or less, artwork, or your written response (300 words max.) via the online form.
 
We are grateful in advance for your participation. Responses will be shared with the congregation on Unity’s website and/or commUNITY in the coming weeks. Please note that your contribution may be edited for length, clarity, or typos.
 
Feel free to direct any questions about AOF to: [email protected]

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team
[Transcript of a talk presented as part of a larger report on ministries at the 153rd Annual Meeting of the Congregation on Saturday, December 7, 2024. Some details have been edited for readability.]

​The journalist and author on technology, Nicholas Carr, made an intriguing observation recently: “The aspect ratio of our lives has changed.” In September of 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held one of their most consequential meetings to standardize the aspect ratio of the movie screen, the proportion of width and height of an image or video frame for motion pictures. That standard would not only influence the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking but shape the viewing experience of audiences for decades to come. 

The attendees at the meeting were offered various aspect ratios to consider, but a horizontal screen was taken as a given. The reasoning? Because traditional landscape and narrative paintings were almost always horizontal in orientation, a more natural orientation for the telling of stories. Furthermore, human vision is itself horizontal. With the lateral placement of our eyes, our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias also makes evolutionary sense, with more opportunities and threats presented by the land than the vertical sky. A species like ours benefits from a broad landscape view, and a horizontally composed image feels truer to our human point of view, something closer to the reality of the broad and encompassing world we actually inhabit.

So imagine being forced to wear blinders and seeing the world in a narrow portrait view. Not only would the portrait view feel cramped and claustrophobic, it might even pose a danger in constraining our wider perception of reality. Consider the smartphone, our handheld devices designed to be held vertically, in portrait mode. According to studies, we look at our phone in portrait mode more than 90% of the time, even when viewing horizontally composed photos and videos. When the phones were first introduced, people routinely complained about feeling constricted and unnatural. But as the phone became our primary screen, we all got used to the narrowing field of view, cropping reality and its wider complexity to fit the size of our solitary screens.

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. It has narrowed, not just on our smartphones but on many fronts, from the polarization of our political life to individualization as a defining feature of contemporary life to the epidemic of loneliness and the search for deep belonging. The aspect ratio of our lives has narrowed, as complex, multifaceted social narratives get cropped and manipulated to fit into one narrow established perspective or another. But in his magisterial work, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), rather than narrowing the aspect ratio to racism alone, W.E.B. Du Bois expanded its frame to the conflict between capitalism and labor, to a class struggle and how racism is time and time again manufactured by the oligarchs and capitalists to keep the masses divided. In the evolution of his racial justice work, Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in Memphis supporting a labor strike, his aspect ratio expanding to capture the deep connections between capitalist exploitation and racial oppression and both tied to the militarism of the United States.

As the Beloved Community Staff Team attended to the many fronts of Unity’s antiracist multicultural work this past year, what became increasingly clear was the work of enlarging the aspect ratio of our prophetic imagination, the importance of complicating the narrative and reviving complexity amid false simplicities manipulated to fit one narrow established perspective or another. Foremost among complexities is the fact that racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism. We forget that George Floyd was unemployed and allegedly using counterfeit money, that Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes to earn a living, that Walter Scott was under warrant for delinquent child support payments, that Breonna Taylor lived in gentrifying zones where police sweeps regularly cleared the neighborhood for real estate valuation. Countless fatal police encounters result from minor infractions like broken taillights or unpaid tickets which are symptoms of economic hardship more than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resort to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of policing today. 

Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power produced by capitalist class society, relentless in securing conditions for compounded growth. A singular focus on race only serves the interests of neoliberal capitalism by reducing the question of obscene economic inequality to skin color and a distorted politics of identity, while obstructing discussions about healthcare, homeownership, unionization, progressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, childcare, education, and more. 

What are the stories about money and wealth that frame our relationship with money? Our values, policies, and economic imagination about debt,

spending, saving, investing, scarcity, abundance, enoughness? We have been living in the imagination of rich white capitalists for most of our history. What are other imaginaries that tell a different story? And how can we tell a better story of money? These are some of the questions guiding the work of the revitalized Development Ministry Team.

But just as a focus on racism alone frames an inadequate aspect ratio, neither does a singular focus on class address the multiple forms of racism that have historically and specifically harmed communities of color. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out to the Bernie Sanders campaign when making his case for reparations, that “Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty.” Such a view misses the way in which centuries of racism have hammered inequality so deep into American society that general solutions will not suffice. A rising tide will not lift all boats, not the boats that have been chained and tied down and wedged among the rocks. Without special repairs for descendants of chattel slavery, enacted alongside general efforts, the rising tide cannot help those boats.

What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class — especially as our nation’s racial composition complexifies — but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously. What is needed is a much larger aspect ratio, a larger focus and truer framing that imagines a cross-racial solidarity and movement that can match the complexities of our world today. These are the generative edges as we step toward the Ends Renewal process and the prophetic horizon of our shared ministry.