Dictionary.com’s 2021 Word of the Year ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 16, 2022
In case there are any of you who haven’t looked up the 2021 Word of the Year yet, we’ll get to that in just a minute. Maybe your curiosity got the better of you and you already know!
Tomorrow, as you have heard, is Martin Luther King Day. And for the sixth year in a row, the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation is holding a symposium to commemorate Dr. King’s life and work, and to foster the ongoing conversation we must have in the country about justice and racial equality.
The GMF event tomorrow promises to be meaningful and informative, as every GMF event is. It will take a look at race relations right here in Gloucester, and will share the results of a survey taken of community members. And the main speaker tomorrow will be Brian Saltsman, director of Student Diversity and Inclusion at Alfred University. Mr. Saltsman’s work involves finding ways to connect dominant and marginalized groups of people, helping to bridge the gaps between them. He is working to create allies, to form relationships in a process that is being called ‘allyship’.
Did you hear the word?
The 2021 word of the year is ‘allyship.’
Allyship. It’s different than simply being an ally. My own working definition would be that allyship is the process of becoming a good ally. And it takes work to do that. It’s not enough to take note of the oppression and the marginalization of so many people, from right here in Gloucester to other places in the United States, to around the world. The work of allyship involves learning a lot, and also unlearning. It means unlearning much of what we have been taught throughout our lives; unlearning things we thought we knew about other people, and also unlearning the way we should speak and respond to them. It means unlearning habitual ways of acting. It means questioning our motives, and our thinking, and the ways in which we show up – the role we play in groups of people, for example. And it means taking the time to listen to others, to read their writing, to give others a chance to have their voices heard. Allyship means standing with others, or behind them, but trying never to step forward and claim the space that they need to express themselves. It means honoring their lived experience, and never assuming you know better, or even know anything at all.
I first learned this concept in a very different context. As some of you may know, after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, I participated in or led 10 service trips to the region to try to help people rebuild their homes and their lives. We had a motto, that we taught to every group of workers who joined us during those years. We repeated this simple question until everyone learned it: “What does help look like to you?” Now, we fairly affluent white Northerners, most of us homeowners, certainly had opinions about what our priorities should be when we showed up at someone’s wrecked house. But those homeowners might have had other ideas. Often, in early spring, they felt it was most important to get their yard cleaned up so that they could get their garden planted. Perhaps the house needed a ton of work, but getting the garden in wouldn’t wait. So we would prepare their gardens for them. That’s what help looked like to them, in that moment, on that day. Our opinions weren’t important.
That, to me, is allyship. Centering other voices, keeping quiet, and letting others, the people who are living in a particular reality, take the lead. Making sure we are welcome, not assuming that we are, and respect that there is history behind the work being done that you don’t know. In other words, (and I love this quote in an article that I found) ‘don’t think that the party started when you arrived.’ It can be hard, if we’re not asked to actively fix a problem. We have to unlearn that feeling that in order to be helpful, we have to fix the situation. We need to learn that others understand a problem better, and they can fix it, but what they will need is our support, our presence.
To do the work of allyship, we need to be able to develop cultural humility; to understand that we are not the experts, that our role is secondary.
I learned that one day working on a man’s house. He was in a low-lying area, prone to flooding, and he shared hair-raising stories of their scramble to get in a boat and get away just as the flood waters caused by Katrina rushed into the home. It was easy to judge, to think to myself – shouldn’t you just move away? And then he pointed across the road to a grove of trees where his grandparents’ old shotgun house stood. He then pointed out another window to a cluster of houses that all belonged to members of his family. And I understood: who were we to tell him he should leave? There were such deep roots in that place.
When we are able to do that work, to develop that humility, we can hope that others will call us ‘allies’. We don’t get to label ourselves that, though.
Sheree Atcheson, an author and a corporate executive for diversity, equity, and inclusion, wrote, “allyship is a “lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” It’s not, she said, “self-defined — work and efforts must be recognized by those you are seeking to ally with.”
Allyship should be an “opportunity to grow and learn about ourselves, whilst building confidence in others,” Atcheson added. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/12/06/dictionary-com-allyship-2021-word/6408641001/)
Do you hear the mutuality of her words? In allyship, we grow ourselves, at the same time we support and foster the growth of others. I know I draw on the lessons I learned in the Gulf Coast over and over again.
I have outlined briefly a number of ways to engage in allyship, and there are many more. If you are interested, please let me know and I can send you a link to a valuable article. And tomorrow at the MLK Day symposium we will hear much more from Brian Saltsman. But the more I thought about this, the more I realized that there is one thing we can be doing, one issue that needs all of us to get engaged and add all of our voices and our resources to help.
That issue is the protection and expansion of voting rights. It is critically important that we stand together and refuse to allow this country to slide backward into the Jim Crow era, as parts of it seem determined to do. Here, on this weekend when we honor Dr. King, so much of his life’s work is hanging in the balance. We must not stay silent and watch as that happens.
The effort to protect voting rights is usually framed these days as saving our democracy, and that is certainly true. We need better protection, for no matter what state we live in, we all have a lot to lose. But the reality is that we know who the new laws limiting easy access to voting will impact the most: our communities of color. These new laws being passed are racist on their face; despite all the protestations about the issue being merely protecting the integrity of our elections.
We heard in our readings what voting means to people of color. “A religious act.” “A spiritual experience,” remembered Desmond Tutu. “You are transfigured.” “It’s really about the dignity of everybody’s humanity and our ability to build a future that embraces all of us,” said Raphael Warnock.
Transfigured. Spiritual. Humanity and dignity. What stronger words could be used to describe the meaning of the right to vote?
Desmond Tutu’s words remind us that the work of insisting on equal rights for everyone is not just political – it is religious work. It is particularly so for we Unitarian Universalists, because of our first principle. Say it with me: “we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Every person. And that ‘we’ is all of us.
It might be easy for us, here in Massachusetts, to believe that we are on the sidelines of this fight for voting rights. Think of the unquestioned access to polling places we enjoy, that we take completely for granted. Voting here is seen as a common good. But we need to understand that this is our fight, too. In reality, if we believe that all people are connected in their common humanity, what diminishes others diminishes us as well. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne, hundreds of years ago. When some of us lose rights and privileges, we all lose.
James Baldwin said it this way: “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own; in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.” (In “Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy” by James Cone, in Soul Work, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones, eds., p. 3.)
We must demonstrate our allyship with our siblings of color in these next months and years. We must offer our support, lend our voices, look for ways to help to bend the arc of justice. This effort can take many forms. We can support progressive candidates. We can contact our elected officials. We can reach out to organizations in regions threatened by these racist attempts to roll back voting rights, and find out how we can support them asking, of course, what does help look like to you?
But we cannot stay silent. Our religious work in this moment is to recognize the ways in which we must dismantle white supremacy, through our understanding that what diminishes one person’s humanity diminishes us all. European Americans and their churches have been silent and complacent for too long.
I’ll close with these words of Dr. King’s: “We will have to repent…not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.” (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963.)
Go forth, my friends. Learn allyship. Find ways to help. But let us not remain silent in the face of this injustice.
Amen.
