The following is a guest post by Leanna Powell, the Assistant Director of Annual Giving at UMBC.
Previously, Powell was the Assistant Director for Partnerships at Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake. She has spent her career working with nonprofits in program development, partnership management and fundraising. She holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and Composition from UMBC. Inspired by her experiences in the Unitarian-Universalist youth movement, Leanna’s volunteer work includes supporting the Station North Tool Library and advocating for equity in bicycle access.
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Thanksgiving 2016 was America’s first family holiday that required nationwide support groups. Between the election and the dash to the airport, Facebook groups and workshops popped up to help people learn how to talk to and cope with their newly estranged families. Resources available to me on the liberal side of our national chasm included sessions on how to discuss race with your “not racist but…” extended family, cheat sheets on de-escalation and debate, and self-care exercises and meditations to help keep your cool over dessert. I am not sure what the conservatives did to prepare, since we aren’t speaking right now.
Spending the last 12 months trying to pin down the challenges in interreligious dialogue with 25 other progressive activists, while our country slowly reaches for its sidearms, has led me to believe that religious difference is maybe not our biggest problem anymore. But healing new rifts might require old techniques.
It used to be that polite people didn’t discuss money, politics, or religion at the dinner table. Now it’s just politics, but we still can’t help ourselves. In a nation where 23% of us aren’t affiliated with any faith but we increasingly wear our politics on our sleeves (and hats), exit polling tells a new story.
While a majority of Catholics overall voted Republican for the first time this millennium, Hispanic Catholics abandoned their white counterparts to vote Democratic by a margin of more than 40 points. In fact, the only other religious groups that broke heavily for Trump were other traditionally white Christian sects: Mormons and white Evangelicals.
Jews, the religiously unaffiliated, and “other” (presumably including black Evangelicals and Muslims) all joined the Hispanic Catholics on Team Hillary. In the 2016 election, and in our national debate, clear and widening factions are forming based not on personal morality or even faith-- as appeared to be the case in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns dominated by the “religious right”-- but between white and brown, wealthy and unemployed, PhDs and good ol’ boys.
Listen to any call-in radio show today (even NPR, I’m telling you) and you’ll hear people profess not facts per se, or even perspective, so much as a fundamentally different understanding of the reality we live in.
On a recent episode of On Point, back-to-back callers asserted that first Trump and then also Obama are fascists. Obviously given the immense ideological differences we’re looking at, they can’t both be correct, but both seemed so gut-wrenchingly earnest, so unassailably convinced, that it was like they were dialing in from parallel dimensions.
Growing up, I had a lot of frustrating conversations with other precocious kids in my diverse public school. When gay rights came up, for example, I could reliably whittle down the debate with Christian-born classmates to “the Bible says so”. Even as we got to the age where actual scripture and contextual understanding came into play, there was always this opaque barrier between us: at the end of the day, they held a different bottom line about the fundamental truths of life.
There wasn’t, and still isn’t, any sense in using rhetoric or classical logic to win that debate. In my (limited but persistent) experience, belief is not the kind of thing you can talk someone out of. Even invoking a person’s own religious teachings, at a certain point, is just more words; the power of faith-- in a higher power domestic or divine-- is a complex mix of highly personal lived experience and knowledge that The Truth is actually larger than any one person.
I am one of those white people who calls most movies “problematic” and wants to talk to my girlfriends (at the bar) without saying “YAASSS” all the time. Trying to be aware of racism is a big part of my social, personal, and professional life. My parents weren’t American Studies professors or activists, though they were working-class people without college degrees who raised me out of economic necessity half on my great-grandfather’s tobacco farm in southern Maryland and half in the blackest suburbs of Chocolate City.
At about 14 years old, I was extraordinarily lucky to have privilege explained to me and my frustrated white tears dried by organizers from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. They told me a totally different story of my life and who I was than I thought I knew. I came home from that training to the beginnings of a lifelong cognitive dissonance created by the pleasant brainwashing of growing up white in America.
I’ve never been Christian, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, but if those teenage tears were a baptism then the subsequent decade-- and the advent of the internet and its glut of research and writing-- was like being born again in slow motion. Viewing the world through a new oppression analysis lens was closer to taking the red pill than any men’s rights activist will ever know.
Slowly, I realized that it wasn’t a coincidence that all makeup at CVS at least sort of matches my skin tone. I started trying to figure out how affirmative action actually works. I dedicated more and more of my brain and heart to examining my daily choices and words. I surrounded myself with other white people who will call me in when I need it. Slowly-- very slowly-- anti-oppression is becoming my religion.
I’m an imperfect disciple. Ignorance and privilege are like a warm bed that’s hard to get out of in the morning and tempting to return to as quickly as possible. Being a white person becoming aware of institutionalized racism in a white world that didn’t acknowledge it made me feel slightly fractured, like I was living two different realities. Today, in the age of police shootings on Facebook Live and a well-organized and publicized Black Lives Matter movement, the case against is building, but the cognitive dissonance is still there.
Ultimately, I think that’s what makes white people call in to talk radio and call Obama a fascist. It takes real faith to engage in the calculus of personal privilege, and it’s scary to face that dual reality without it. You have to believe in a person’s experience with the world being drastically different from your own, while at the same time everyone in charge tells you that we are a nation of equal opportunity. You can’t talk someone into having that faith any more than door-to-door missionaries can convert you on your front porch.
So, this is for my fellow nice white folks: if we want our people to feel the spirit of the movement, to stop shouting past each other and covering their ears, we have to acknowledge the leap of faith we took in the early hours of trying to get woke. We have to make that experience as joyful and welcoming as possible. It’s our job to say “it’s ok, come on in” to our high school acquaintances and great-uncles and former bosses (and mean it).
And this is for my fellow religious white folks: when it’s easiest to feel frustrated and angry and dismissive, remember the often-painful difference between belief and fact. Take a page from the white evangelicals that voted for Trump and remember that you are not a crusader but a liberator.
The city of Baltimore is part of a national conversation around questions of justice, race and community. At this pivotal moment in our city’s history, indeed our nation’s history, the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies highlights the continued importance of bringing diverse religious perspectives to address civic and social challenges. In the initiative Imagining Justice in Baltimore the ICJS will contribute the perspectives of local Jews, Christians and Muslims to the public conversation about justice, and injustice, in Baltimore. Each contributor represents her or his own opinion. We welcome this diversity of perspective and are not seeking a single definition of justice between traditions, nor denying the multivocal nature of justice within traditions. The long-term goal of the Imagining Justice in Baltimore initiative is to create a model of interreligious learning and dialogue around differences that demonstrates how a robust commitment to religious pluralism can shape public life.