Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races [but as] a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land... Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less.
                                            — Martin Luther King, Jr., address at the conclusion of Selma to Montgomery march in 1965

In February 2021, Clyde Kerr III — a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and forty-three-year-old Black father — posted a series of videos delivering a searing critique of policing and our criminal justice system. He voiced deep sense of turmoil about his profession in the killings of Black people, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “I’ve had enough of all of this nonsense, serving a system that does not give a damn about me or people like me.” The videos served as an extended suicide note, at one point stating that his decision to take his life was an act of protest. Kerr took his life sitting in his patrol car outside the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office. 

Much earlier, in an 1960 essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” James Baldwin describes this collision at the heart of policing. He looks at the projects of Harlem and points to a deep inequality reflected in the geography of Fifth Avenue, the same street conjoining the opulent shopping corridors of midtown and the destitution of the Harlem ghetto uptown where police move “like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.” Baldwin draws particular attention to the damage this labor of occupation inflicts upon the police themselves who are tasked to manage the boundary dividing the different worlds along Fifth Avenue and throughout our country. The officer patrols the dividing line, and “he is not prepared for it [as] he is exposed as few white people are to the anguish of the black people around him.” How does he reconcile his purpose to serve and to protect with his daily work of ghetto containment? How does he manage the injustice of his occupation with the daily encounters of Black humanity that belie the underclass mythology of the inner-city poor as criminal, self-sabotaging, and unassimilable? How does the police officer live with himself? “He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction,” writes Baldwin, “into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.” And all the while, capitalist elites in midtown are less concerned with abolishing the conditions that policing has come to manage than with kneeling on the neck of protesters who threaten retail spaces, commercial real estate development, and capitalist interests of the market economy.

Policing and mass incarceration have always existed to serve and protect the dominant capitalist economy and class structures developed through slavery, and to control “surplus populations” of the unemployed and unemployable, those pressed to commit survival crimes to earn a living, those superfluous to capitalist accumulation and so racialized, exploited, and targeted for police control. For in the often-misleading race-class debate, the class character of policing remains largely overlooked by the power and expediency of the racial justice narrative. But 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, though not directly engaged in survival crimes, 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, more symptoms of economic hardship than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resorted to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of Americans who are overpoliced. The problem of structural unemployment and poverty are not exceptions to capitalist economy but outcomes of the exploitation at the heart of profit-making. 

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 late capitalism by reducing the question of obscene inequality to skin color and identity politics while obviating discussions about healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. If all we have to do is expunge the racism in the hearts of police officers, or just reduce the number of racist patrol officers, we can forestall the question about poverty or at least pretend that class conflict and racialized police violence are two separate issues. But Stuart Hall famously described race as “the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced.” What is needed is not the dismantling of police departments but the conditions that modern policing has come to manage. What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class, but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously. 

As we begin the new church year, we are reminded that Unity is rich in numerous opportunities to be together as a congregation in all the ways that matter — joy, pain, grief, celebration, worship, social justice — and in learning about ourselves and one another. The arrival of Rev. Oscar brings our congregation an especially charged atmosphere of promise and renewal. The Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) is already at work exploring opportunities for deeper connection for this new year.

What is the BCST?
The BCST was initiated in 2016 by senior co-ministers Rob and Janne Eller-Isaacs to coordinate and sustain efforts across the congregation that explore and deepen learning explicitly through the lens of antiracist multiculturalism. Aspiring to achieve the Beloved Community, prophetic practice — developing meaningful ways to integrate our values into our day-to-day lives to make qualitative changes in our souls—is a constant. The BCST serves to expand and strengthen our collective capacity for antiracist multicultural understanding, and ensures that this remains foundational across the congregation from how we operate to our programs and activities, embedding our antiracist multicultural Ends throughout congregational life. 

It was the BCST, for example, that:

• Implemented congregation-wide learning opportunities with Team Dynamics that sharpened our awareness and understanding of intersectionality and dominant culture.
• Created the Double Helix Model interlacing faith formation and spiritual practice with antiracist multiculturalism. 
• Worked closely with the Ministerial Search Team to engage the congregation in examining biases surrounding identity and expectations for a senior minister. 

Under Rev. KP’s steadfast, inspired leadership, the BCST is committed to 1) critical discernment — keeping in mind the larger historical implications of this work, 2) connection — sustaining our humanity and empathy towards one another, 3) tracking hypocrisy — aligning what we say with what we do and noticing when we have failed, and 4) hope — empowering our creativity to reimagine the future in building the Beloved Community. 

The Unity Ends Statements that ignite the BCST work are:

• Know each other in all our fullness.
• Create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people.
• Create brave space for racial healing and dismantling the dominant culture.

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” — bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Who is in the BCST?
The Executive Team (ET), staff members, and lay leaders make up the BCST. The ET: Rev. KP Hong, Minister of Faith Formation; Laura Park, Executive Director; and now senior minister Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair. Staff members are Rev. Lara Cowtan, Minister of Congregational Care; and Drew Danielson, Coordinator of Youth and Campus Ministries. Lay member Angela Wilcox serves as project manager and scribe.

To better inform the congregation about this work, former BCST members Erika Sanders and Pauline Eichten created the Beloved Community Communications Team (BCCT). The team has been at work for over seven years and is charged with the task of sharing stories of the struggles, questions, and collaborations coming out of the multicultural work at Unity and in the wider world of our faith and city. The current team includes Shelley Butler, Becky Gonzalez-Campoy, Marjorie Otto, Suki Sun, Ray Wiedmeyer, and me, team leader and BCST liaison. Guided by the work of the BCST, the BCCT is responsible for collecting and writing Beloved Community News articles and blog posts that focus on the issues, ideas, and challenges of the antiracist multiculturalism work, and for positing questions and engaging in reflection that offers deeper understanding and multiple perspectives.

Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity. —James Baldwin

Antiracist multiculturalism work is inherently complex. As much as we wish it were simple — “love is love,” “we are one,” and numerous other aphoristic phrases we employ that invite complacency, to build the Beloved Community is to embrace the many layers of identity and experience that each of us represents. To dig down into our own human existence and examine ways to “know one another in all our fullness” is often difficult and sometimes painful, revealing uncomfortable truths about ourselves and how we influence others to the good or ill, but ultimately redemptive. 

The BCCT would like to hear your story! What illuminates your commitment to creating an antiracist multicultural community? Share a story, image, and/or video in the All Our Fullness program, or just get in touch to let us know you are interested in working with us: [email protected].

In this new church year, may we be guided by our faith and connected in love as we aspire to build the Beloved Community. 

Ray Wiedmeyer, Beloved Community Communications Team

I’ve been thinking a lot about land ownership the past couple years. Just a bit into the pandemic, I attended the Sacred Sites Tour in the Twin Cities led by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Jim Bear spoke clearly about the broken promises, the broken treaties that would remove the vast majority of Indigenous Peoples from the land that is now the Twin Cities, and efforts in the 19th century to banish them completely from Minnesota. All that after having been told, in fact promised, that the white colonizers would share the land.

Indigenous Peoples understood that land could not be owned, that no one could claim ownership. If anything, they were of the mindset that the land owned them; that humans were no more important than the land on which they lived and that gave them sustenance. 

After Rev. Jim Bear’s presentation, I realized that I was now part of the story. I own land in St Paul. And I own land in Wisconsin a mile or two from the scattered bits of the St Croix Chippewa reservation where 3.8 square miles is all the tribe has left of original homelands that once covered thousands of square miles. I am not someone disconnected from the past; I am part of the historical timeline. 

To be perfectly honest, it totally changed how I see the land we own. Given the choice to see the land as a commodity or to see myself as the caretaker of that land was a choice I could make. I choose now to think of myself as caretaker. But I am caretaker of land that was taken from folks who lived here long before my white ancestors arrived. 

With that in mind, how do I live with the principles of Unitarian Universalism, the Unity Ends Statements that I was so excited about in 2018, and the ritualized land acknowledgment we espouse every Sunday? What was my next right action? What kind of discomfort, what kind of pain did I need to be willing to work through to see the change I wanted to see in the world?

I have been living with that discomfort for some time now. It was scary but I asked my partner if we could give the Wisconsin land we own back to the local St Croix Chippewa Tribe. It was scary because I feared she would say, “No.” You see, it is our happy place. The place we go to disconnect, and we love it dearly. She said, “Of course we should give it back.”

The next hurdle for me was fearing what our neighbors might think. Was there really a fear in me that the tribe would not be good neighbors? Surprisingly, I needed to move past those racist attitudes that bubbled up in me. I needed to give up on the idea that only I could be the perfect caretaker of that land.

Time passed. The inertia of white privilege can and will make one forget one’s best intentions. But eventually we contacted Jessica Intermill of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light. Jessica centers much of her legal work representing Native tribes and I am acquainted with her workshops on reparations. She let us talk through our questions and concerns about giving the land back. She introduced us to the concept of “rematriation,” or restoring the matriarchal relationship between Indigenous Peoples and ancestral land. 

Upon her recommendation, we contacted the St. Croix Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Chippewa Tribe of Wisconsin, who then consulted their lawyer, who then approached their tribal council, who considered our request, and told us they would love to have the land back.

We then needed to find a Wisconsin real estate lawyer, preferably native, who would do the necessary legal work. Months passed. It is so easy to just move along in one’s privilege and not to keep on task.

Needing to finish this story, literally, for this August newsletter was the additional push I needed. We met with Richard Lau, one of my recent associates on the Ministerial Search Team at Unity Church who practices real estate law in Wisconsin. We talked through various ways of giving the land back, and he has begun the work to transfer the land.

Recently I heard the phrase, “It is one thing to begin to be woke but eventually one needs to get out of bed.” We moved from a place of awareness to the place of discomfort, and finally found the price we are willing to pay to be in right relationship with the world we wish to see. It has been a long journey but worth every step taken.