What’s Stopping Us?

Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

January 17, 2021 (Martin Luther King Sunday)

 

It’s still a scene that I love to watch, and that still can bring tears to my eyes: the scene in Grant Park in Chicago, on November 5, 2008, when Barack Obama gave his victory speech.  And the words that still bring the most emotion is when he proclaimed that “tonight…change has come to America.”

 

But of course, today, we are questioning those lofty words. Our confidence in progress, in the continual bending of the moral arc of the universe toward justice, is shaken. Change seemed to come to America, but has it lasted?

 

It’s been almost 53 years since the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke the words that Rev. Susan and I read a few minutes ago.  And of course we ask ourselves, as we do every year when we commemorate his birthday, what he would see here in 2021. What sense would he make of our halting progress toward equality; of our never-ending journey toward living into the words our Founders wrote with their quill pens: that all are created equal.

 

Today we question. The arc of the moral universe looks more like a roller coaster, with its loops and plunges, twists and turns.

 

Since the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, I have been asking myself the same question over and over: why can’t we sustain the progress we seem to make?  Why the roller coaster, instead of the arc, despite the genuine will of so many to create change in how we think of each other, how we treat each other?

 

This past summer it seemed as though there might be movement toward change.  The outrage against police brutality inflicted on people of color sparked widespread protests in support of the Movement for Black Lives that continued, day after day. Suddenly people all across the country were commemorating Juneteenth – June 19, the day in 1865 when the last remaining slaves in the Confederacy learned of their emancipation. It seemed that change had come.  But before long, federal troops were being sent to Portland, Oregon, and to D.C., to crack down on the protests. And then just last week, we witnessed the tepid initial response of law enforcement against the mostly white people who swarmed and broke into the Capitol. For anyone with eyes to see, and memories, it was very clear that the response of law enforcement was very different depending on who was protesting. Over and over again, we heard the comment: “Imagine if a mob of Black people had stormed the Capitol.”  No one has tried to claim that the response would be the same.

 

The question, again, is why does this happen, over and over again?  What is stopping us, finally, from moving beyond the racist reactions this country has whenever people of color demand to be treated like white people?

 

Racism, certainly, is deeply ingrained in our culture. Thanks to cell phones, we now see how often entitled people use the excuse of fear and call the police when they see black people engaging in normal activities: jogging, or barbequing in a public park, for example. In the most well-known story from this past summer, a white woman called the police on a black birdwatcher in Central Park because he asked her to leash her dog.  She said she felt threatened. In reality, she felt completely entitled to try to punish him for interfering with her.

 

Over the years, since 1968, we see these same stories, and the reactions of white people are usually attributed to fear; fear of violence, fear that they are going to be robbed.  The police use fear as an explanation for their brutality. And of course it is a racist reaction to feel fear at the sight of a person of color.  But because we make so little progress in coming to accept one another, there must be a different explanation as well. In fact, the reaction we see is based on a deeply ingrained sense that “you don’t belong here.”

 

There is a force deeper than racism at work.  By now, many of us understand that race is not based in science, but rather is a social construct based on skin color.  But there is a force that goes deeper and is harder to eradicate, and that is caste.

 

Yes, caste.  We associate caste completely with the Indian culture, which has had a caste system for centuries.  As we heard in our reading, it never occurs to Americans that we have our own caste system. We do, though.  It is hidden in plain sight.  In an important new book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson sheds light on what we, like Martin Luther King, have never been able to see.

 

First, let’s define what we mean by caste.  Isabel Wilkerson offers this definition: “Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy…it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal.  It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”  (Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, p. 69)

 

The hierarchy. The natural order of things.  So when you see a black man with binoculars in Central Park, you think he is out of place.  When you see a black man sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office, you think he is out of place. Caste is nothing more than the effort of a society to keep everyone in their assigned place.  And for that reason, the dominant caste, as Isabel Wilkerson labels white people, pushes back hard at the sight of people of color in unexpected places and circumstances.  This is so rigid, so deeply ingrained, that it is the force that keeps pulling our country backwards every time we begin to make some progress toward equality and justice.

 

Our caste system is older than the country. It emerged out of the need, in the colonial slave economy, to create division between poor white people and enslaved black people.  Together, they outnumbered the wealthy planting class, who saw them as a threat.  And so, the owning class set out to privilege the poor whites, to keep them on their side, by offering them more privileges than the black people had.  Ever since, whites have had to maintain that distinction in order to feel secure in this artificial hierarchy that was created.

 

The rigidity of this system has remained in place ever since.  It was so well known that in 1930’s Germany, the Nazis used our Jim Crow laws as models when they set out to create their laws for how the Jews were to be treated.  Let’s sit with that for a moment. 

 

Today our need to keep everyone in their assigned place keeps us from moving into our aspirations, keeps us from truly becoming the society we claim to be.  It keeps us from making progress in educating all our children.  It keeps us from embracing equal health care for all. Think of how this holds our society back; how it hurts all of us.

On this Martin Luther King Day, let us remember that for hundreds of years, we have been taught that the way we succeed is by keeping other people down.  Let us acknowledge that shame, and vow to help end that way of thinking.  For only then will the change we need truly come to America.

 

May it be so, Amen.