“When Great Trees Fall”

“When Great Trees Fall”        May 27, 2018                 Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 “When Great Trees Fall”  by Maya Angelou 

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.

When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us.
Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed

by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.

Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”

 This is Professor Peter Gomes. He was the chaplain at Harvard University for forty years. He was a remarkable man who was full of paradoxes. Very short in stature with a high-pitched voice, that was lightly touched with a British accent that was entirely contrived; Peter was a Baptist minister, a black American, he was gay, and he was a Republican.

                      

He was my New Testament professor when I was a fellow at Harvard in 2004. I didn’t go to class this dressed up but you did get dressed formally when you were invited to Professor Gomes’ home for tea. An event that I never missed on Tuesdays at 4. 

Peter had a stroke in 2010 and though he hoped to return to the pulpit at the Memorial Church on Harvard’s Campus for Easter of 2011, he passed away in February of that year.

It has been 14 years since I heard him lecture. It has been seven years since he died. And yet, when I read his books, it is as if I can hear his voice in my head. In those moments, it is as if he were not really dead.

It is as if people die in stages. There is the death that comes when our hearts stop, and we cease breathing. But there is a second death that comes when those who knew you are no longer living to keep an organic memory of you alive. And then there is the death that comes when no one remembers you anymore. 

Authors try to extend the memory of their work through books, musicians through song, and politicians, largely through statues. I mentioned last week that during my recent lecture tour of England, I spent a day in Parliament and as we were escorted through the winding stairways and hallways of Parliament to the committee room where we were meeting, I secretly squeezed off pictures of busts and statues as we passed by.

There were a lot more but a heavily accented guard with his hand resting on his gun said, I’m pretty sure he said, “I said, ‘no pictures!’” 

It isn’t always easy to tell for sure. 

I’m pretty sure that I recognized a statue of Winston Churchill, which is not pictured here out of interests of leaving Parliament on my own power, but I couldn’t guess who any of those other guys were. I don’t know if they were conservative or liberal, I don’t know if they were slave owners or abolitionists. 

They were sons, probably husbands, possibly fathers, and grandfathers, who played some role in leading Great Britain through its thousand-year post-Norman history. But they are dead to me. Their handsome marble likenesses were, to me, just the backdrop of a five-hundred-year-old building. 

Even if a British historian had taken the time to walk leisurely through these halls, explaining something of the history of each, it would not do much to redeem them from the grave because I have no living memory of them.

Memorial Day, in the United States, was originally a day for Americans to decorate the graves of those who had died in the Civil War. Later it became the tradition to honor the graves of everyone who died in military service and now it has evolved into a day to decorate the graves of all of our departed friends and family.

In the history of the United States, there have been about 1,200,000 service members killed in war. That is a huge number of course but what is more mind -boggling is that half of those casualties were during the Civil War. That fact is compounded by the awareness that the country’s total population was less than 1/10 of what it is now. By the end of the Civil War, everyone had lost someone in the conflict. In a country of 30 million, 600,000 had died.

Pastorally, this is made all the more painful when you realize that other nations ended slavery peacefully, usually through reparations, but my stubborn country, we stubborn Americans, we had to fight a war that was as deadly as our 250 year history of war added together.  I am sure that none of us could imagine the national grief that first gave birth to Decoration Day which has become Memorial Day but we all have someone to think of this weekend. My mother died in 2003. My sister, Susan, died in 2006. My father died in 2010. Along the way I have lost professors who have had a huge impact on me: Herman Norton, Liston Mills, Peggy Way, David Buttrick, and Peter Gomes. 

And here, in our nearly 10 year old church, we have had to let go of the physical presence of many of our founders, people who literally launched this congregation through their financial generosity and their willingness to invest time and money in a very unlikely venture . . . starting a liberal church in Springfield, MO! Without Chuck and Ruth Snowden, we wouldn’t have lasted through our first three months. Rev. Nelson Parnell, Jim Price, and Nancy Pate brought their years of very public social justice advocacy to our little congregation, giving us the legitimacy we needed to get started. For fear of accidentally forgetting someone, I will not name everyone we have lost over the past decade but I can tell you that I never walk through this building without remembering them.

I remember seeing Robert Green rebuilding the studs that hold this building up, and Nancy Pate standing here patiently explaining to me why we didn’t need to replace this pink carpet in the chancel. 

This past winter we had to give up Ilse and Ed Meyer. Ilse died first and when she died a friend sent this Maya Angelou poem to Elizabeth and Judy. I had not heard it before, but its lines spoke to me as only great poetry can:

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
…
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.

Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”

The deaths of some people have robbed us of our ability to think, to live . . . some of us have been trapped, quite literally, in mental prisons of grief. So, yes, when great trees fall, even lions look for a place to hide and the rocks in the ground are shaken. The world has to slowly come back into focus when we can no longer pick up the phone and call to make dinner plans, or to ask to borrow a book.

Our minds sometimes play tricks on us. We will think that we saw them in a crowd, or hear them speak to us in a moment of distress.

You do not need for me to tell you that a great deal of what has driven people to religion over the centuries has been their fear of mortality and their hope that this world that we see is not all that there is. Jews, Muslims, and Christians have regaled one another with stories about heaven and hell and tried to bolster their whistling past the grave yard faith with declarations of certainty regarding the one thing that no one on earth can be certain about.

There is a parable from eastern tradition about a great samurai who went to see the greatest of the Buddhist masters. After his long journey he demands that the master tell him about the afterlife. The master only smiled and said, “I know nothing to tell you.” And the angry samurai replied, “But you are the greatest master in the land, how can you know nothing about it?” And the old monk replied, “Because I am a living master, perhaps you should ask one who is dead?”

I have no rational reason to believe that there is any conscious existence beyond our physical life. I don’t begrudge those who feel a need to believe otherwise and I would gladly consider any evidence they might have to present to me, but short of that, I believe that the best hope that our dearly departed have of a life after death, is in our loving memory. 

I know of nothing more profound to say of any of those who have shaped our lives and are with us no more than how Angelou concludes this great poem:  We can be. Be and be better. Because they existed. 

You do not have to live forever for life to be meaningful. It is not the length of a life that makes it important, it is the quality of how it is lived. As Mark Twain remarked:  "Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." 

We are not working towards a heavenly mansion, we are working to make a difference in the world in which we live so that our friends and our family will build a mansion for us in their hearts and the ripples from the stone we have thrown into history’s pond might continue for a while, even after we are gone from sight. 

“The Last Temptation of Evangelicals”

“The Last Temptation of Evangelicals”    May 20, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor     

click here to see the video

Michael Gerson writing in The Atlantic, April 2018   According to Jerry Falwell, Jr., Evangelicals have “found their dream president,” which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams.  

On the charmed life front, last Tuesday I was invited to attend a committee meeting in the British Parliament that featured a panel of speakers from Syria and Lebanon discussing peace efforts in the Middle East. After passing through airport style security and then being ushered through multiple halls, and winding staircases adorned with the statues and busts of old, dead, white guys of England’s past, we crowded into a committee room with large leaded windows looking out over the Thames, where we sat at old oak desks, still festooned with brass ink well holders, and tried to get comfortable in the stuffy, unairconditioned heat of the two day long English summer.

There were many engaging presentations during that afternoon but the one that captured my imagination was an elderly gentleman who had been a security director for the Christian militia during the civil war in Lebanon. He talked about how he had unwaveringly ordered the torture and execution of Muslim prisoners of war during the conflict and his gradual awakening to how horribly wrong he had been to fail to see his Muslim neighbors as being fellow humans, and, in fact, to realize the unimaginable hypocrisy of killing people in the name of patriotism or of faith. 

I asked him to describe his gradual conversion from being an enthusiastic militant to being an ardent prophet for peace. Predictably, such a change does not happen quickly. 

There are very few sudden conversions that have any substance to them, but it was, for him, a gradual journey, largely marked by unavoidable realizations that specific people that he had thought he hated, were actually very good people.

Most of us who are straight can remember when we were confidently anti-gay until we discovered that friends and family members whom we already loved were gay. Over the past 20 to 30 years we have seen a sea change in sexual prejudices and these witnesses for peace are now similarly trying to engage leaders in Syria to persuade them to see now, regarding their own civil war, what they discovered too late about their involvement in the civil war in Lebanon. 

There is a paradox here. One side of that paradox is that intelligent people with basically good hearts can be so blinded by prejudice that they can engage in torture and murder in the name of such virtues as patriotism and faith, which makes me so sad that it would quite literally be easy to just give up. But the other side of this paradox is the hope that people not only can change but they can change entirely, thoroughly, from a dark place of evil hypocrisy to a point of almost saintly enlightenment. 

Like a lot of you, I often feel so beaten down by the news . . . so heart broken by school shootings, violence in Palestine, the disassembling of environmental regulations, and the growing income disparity all over the world . . . it all feels so hopeless, so daunting, that escape to retirement, entertainment, avoidance, distraction, denial, seems like the only sane thing to do. 

A lifetime ago, I was married. Once, when and my wife and I were having dinner at our favorite restaurant, our private moment was interrupted, as it usually was, by a stranger who came up to the table to talk about one of my newspaper columns. In this case, it was a middle-aged woman who drew a laminated column out of her purse and she began by telling me that this particular column had changed her life and she carried it with every day and showed it to whoever would read it. Writers live for moments like that. As Mark Twain observed, it is difficult to know how to respond to a compliment because it always seems like there is so much more that they could have said. 

But as this ebullient fan walked away, my wife hissed at me: You are not important. No one really listens to your sermons; your articles never change anyone’s minds. You are just wasting your life. 

As mean as that may sound to you now, I know that she was mostly right. Most people don’t listen. People generally don’t change much, if at all. There are a few articles that people save but most of my stuff ends up on the bottom of bird cages without having ever been read. If you are an author and you think your work matters, let me invite you to go on Amazon.com and look for the used copies of your books that are for sale . . . sometimes for 17 cents . . . and they will add to that insult the descriptor, “autographed by the author.” And you might think that I would buy that book myself just to see who I autographed it for, but I assure you, I don’t want to know. 

But folks, look around this room . . . there is not a huge crowd here but everyone sitting around you is either lost or they are here because they are a progressive thinker with decidedly liberal views on almost every topic and it is entirely likely that not a one of us was brought up to be a socialist. 

My parents were Democrats, but they were Democrats of the George Wallace ilk and not the Bernie Sanders sort. So, how can you let yourselves believe that your right-wing neighbors, your fundamentalist family members, your conservative co-workers cannot ever change if you, yourself, have changed? 

So here is our own paradox: we want the world to change, we want the world to become more just, more fair, more liberal, but at the same time we do not want to suffer the unpleasantness of having to be informed about all of the horrible things that are going on in the world. Folks, isn’t it obvious that you can’t have it both ways? Ignorance doesn’t lead to change. Cynicism, escapism, isolation, and denial all play into the hands of people who are trying to turn our two-hundred-year-old democracy into a fascist dictatorship, and yes, I said fascist dictatorship, and yes, I meant it. 

Two weeks ago, jetlagged and trying desperately to make it successfully through my first day of lectures at St Albans, at the very end of the day, in the last moments of the last question and answer period, a woman who, inexplicably, didn’t seem to be tired at all, said, “Dr. Ray, you haven’t even mentioned Palestine. What should be done about Israel and Palestine?”

Now, mind you, my lectures were on panentheism, the historical Jesus, and the future of the church. I think that I can be forgiven for not offering my eight-point plan to end hostilities in Gaza, but I have spoken at St Albans before and I know this particular member who could turn a five year old child’s birthday party into an opportunity to talk about Palestine. 

No one budged. It was time to leave and no one was getting up and making motions towards the door. Trapped without an escape plan, I had no alternative but to tell them what I think. Besides, I have believed that the whole world has a right to my opinion.

I told them that I think that holocaust was one of the worst crimes of modern history, but it was a European crime that was resolved by stealing Middle Eastern land that had been predominantly Muslim territory almost from the time of Muhammad. A European sin should have been resolved with European land.

If you sell your home and move away, you have nothing to complain about. But if soldiers show up and force you to leave your home, perhaps a home where you and your ancestors have lived and farmed longer than anyone can remember, and they don’t even offer to buy it, you are just dispossessed . . . how long before that is OK with you? 

Countries have been invaded and occupied throughout history. White people have been pushing Native Americans off of their land in North America for centuries but, you know there is no small lack of acceptance of that fact still. How long should it take the dispossessed of Palestine to accept this theft? It has been seventy years and it still seems wrong. And part of why it seems wrong is because it is still going on. 

Let me share this historical sequence of maps with you: The decision to take a small portion of Palestinian land to make a Jewish homeland was a biblically romantic but really stupid decision. 

But backed by Great Britain and the United States, when Arab nations tried to reclaim the occupied land, they were repeatedly beaten back, and Israel kept claiming more and more territory. Not to make light of a serious topic but there is an old joke that says, “Israel wants peace . . . they want a piece of Jordan, a piece of Syria, a piece of Lebanon, and a piece of Egypt.”

I have a certain sympathy with Israel. I believe that given centuries of oppression, exile, and genocide, that the Jews deserve a homeland. Israel has a right to exist. I just don’t they that they have a right to exist where they are. And saying that is what makes me nervous about talking about this among strangers. Anyone who even slightly implies that this piece of real estate doesn’t belong to the Jewish state is immediately labeled as being anti-Semitic or worse. Even the Quaker church has been accused of supporting terrorists for being critical of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. 

And it is true that regardless of how wrong-headed the original land theft was, it has put the Jews in a place where they are surrounded by hostile neighbors who do not want them there, and, given nowhere else to go, I can understand that they have a need to be able to secure their homes and cities. There have been offenses on both sides and Palestinian opposition groups know how to grab sympathy through the media. Just like the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi knew that being seen on camera being brutally mistreated would be their best path to success in public opinion, the Palestinians are similarly sophisticated. 

But that being said, their reasons for protest are not at all rooted in public opinion polls. Gaza has literally become an open-air prison. With each regional war, Israel has expanded his territory but in much more subtle ways, they have engaged in land grabs through expanding settlements into Palestinian territories. 

Those who remain in these Palestinian enclaves are having their living conditions constantly eroded through Israeli government actions. Cutting off clean water supplies, limiting electrical power to 4 hours a day. Keeping unemployment at nearly 50% and even limiting food supplies. Resulting is this unimaginable statistic that half of all Palestinian children express no will to live. 

Think of every elementary school aged child you know or have known and try to imagine them having no will to live. And that, my friends, is why Palestinian protesters are willing to charge the borders even when they are being shot at by Israeli snipers.

And, yes, I said snipers. As the Trump delegation arrived in Jerusalem to dedicate the new American embassy, protesters gathered at the border of Gaza. That day, 58 men, women, and children were shot dead and more than 1300 were injured. Why didn’t they use tear gas? Because the protesters were too far away for gas canisters. Why didn’t they use rubber bullets? Because the protesters were too far away to use rubber bullets. Snipers, indiscriminately fired into huge crowds of unarmed civilians from hundreds of yards away. 

Yes, there are offenses on both sides, but it has become something akin to saying that there is not universal agreement among scientists about climate change. 98% of scientists agree and the 2% who don’t are usually being paid by the oil and coal industry, but there are people on both sides . . . it is just that one side is honest and informed and the other is dishonest an uninformed.

There are offenses on both sides and Israel has a right to defend their borders but the offense on the Israeli side of the equation makes it look like they have moved from being the victims of Nazis into acting like Nazis and we need to be clear about this. Our corporate media almost never tells the truth about Israeli offenses. If you ever want to understand the hatred that Islamic fundamentalists have for Americans, put at the top of your list, American support for the human rights violations of Israel against Palestine, because that is a fact. 

There was no reason to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem at this time other than the fact that it deeply pleased American fundamentalists and it was a payoff to Zionist political donors such as Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate. 

Last month, the former Evangelical, Michael Gerson writing in The Atlantic,  said,  According to Jerry Falwell, Jr., Evangelicals have “found their dream president,” which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams. As I observed a few weeks ago, evangelicals have given Trump a pass on a whole host of illegal and immoral failings, largely, due to the prospects of getting at least one more young, anti-abortion, jurist nominated to the Supreme Court. But right next to that anti-abortion cycloptic perspective is a love for the state of Israel that was born in far-right Christian Sunday School classes. 

The two American pastors the Trump administration sent to Israel to speak at the dedication of the embassy, Robert Jeffress and John Hagee were not there because they are friends to Jews. Jeffress said Jews can’t be saved and John Hagee said Hitler was doing God’s will. Their interest in Israel is motivated out of their belief that the re-establishment of the state of Israel, and the much-desired rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on Mt. Moriah, would bring about the apocalypse described in the book of Revelation, in which, all of the Jews, Muslims, and everyone but their narrowly defined clan of right wing Christians, will be killed.

Satisfying people who are locked into this irrational, magical, superstitious, though self-aggrandizing way of thinking is what started this whole mess with Israel in the 1940’s and yet, ignorant of history, foreign policy, world religions, or of other people, Trump stumbles into decisions that cost other people their lives.

He claims to be a great negotiator, but no one ever plays a trump card for no reason. He might have offered to move our embassy in exchange for Israel removing settlements from Palestinian land, other presidents before him have done exactly that. But to do it for nothing but to give a tip of the hat to crazy fundamentalists? That kind of immaturity and self-serving leadership then, quite predictably, lit the fuse of another conflict between a heavily armed Israeli army, and a rock throwing crowd of Palestinians. . . 58 Palestinians are dead, 1300 are wounded . . . the casualty count on the Israeli side is 0. 

Evangelicals now have the president that they have dreamed of and the whole world is being subjected to a nightmare of their creation. Now, I know that hope is not a plan. Hope is not a theology or a faith. However, I do find reason to hope in the stark light that is being shined on evangelical thinking in this era of Trump. 

Now that we have a President who is morally reprehensible and almost certainly guilty of economic crimes that will rise to the level of actual treason, sincere, thinking evangelicals are finally taking a look at themselves and their religious beliefs and, though it is hard to believe, many are now waking up from the stupor they have lived in for years. 

Evangelical Christianity has had a strangle hold on our government for most of its two centuries of history, especially since the Moral Majority put Regan in office in 1980, but now we are seeing thoughtful defections from that camp as many prominent journalists and politicians are distancing themselves from the unholy marriage of evangelical religion and Republican politics. 

We have a White House that has arrayed itself in a virtual war against civil rights, the poor, immigrants, even the environment, but like those thousands of Palestinians who stood their ground even as sniper bullets were hailed down on them, we cannot allow ourselves to just get bored, or angry, or tired of it all, and just give up. 

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. We have seen many of our most closely held values challenged seriously over the past two years but we never signed up for a Little League kind of faith. We came to play in the pros and we are here to win. In the fight for social justice, I will borrow the ancient Greek expression, I will not leave the battle field until the battle is won whether I leave carrying my shield or being carried on it. The strength of our commitment is not a simple matter of preference or of religion, it comes from knowing that we are on the side of justice. 

Starting with Ourselves: Recognizing and Healing from Internalized Oppression and Dominance

Starting with Ourselves: 

         Recognizing and Healing from Internalized Oppression and Dominance

click here to see the video

David Ketchum

May 13, 2018

CW:  Calling out disablist language

         Last week, I shared some reflections on disability justice, in light of the recent legislative attacks on the Americans with Disabilities Act. Whenever I encounter unjust situations like this, whether it is disablism, racism, misogyny, gender and sexuality phobias, and the like, the question that tends to linger in my mind is – why in the world do we go along with this stuff? Horrible things are happening, we witness or hear about them, and, almost inevitably, someone is there to insist that it’s not that bad, that we’ve just misunderstood the situation, or that it has been worse in the past. It is as if, although oppression may exist, apparently oppressors do not. Do any of these sound familiar? 

·      “That was a long time ago; can’t you just get over it?” 

·      “Be patient with him; he’s just set in his ways, but he’s not a bad guy.”

·      “You have to overlook some of what she says; she doesn’t mean it that way.”

·      “Honestly, it’s not because of race; we decided to go in a different direction.”

·      “Well, I don’t agree with how they treated you, but everyone has a right to their own opinion.”

 And, perhaps most famously – 

·      “Take it easy; it’s just a joke. 

Internalized Oppression and Dominance

         Systems don’t exist without our participation. In peace and conflict studies, we often talk about how different dimensions – personal, relational, structural, and cultural – all work together to create the circumstances of our lives, for good or ill. Oppressive systems require that the masses of people go along with them, tolerating and protecting them, even if the people involved don’t benefit from them, and even if the people involved are ultimately worse off. This is where the concept of internalized oppression and dominance can be a useful tool, because most of us do not mean to perpetuate oppression, but we still do it. We do it because the oppression and domination is programmed into the way we think and act, so that it becomes automatic and we don’t even recognize it much of the time.

         Internalized oppression refers to the ways that marginalized and oppressed people become accustomed to and even participate in oppressive ideas and practices. As a personal example, I was out as a bisexual and genderqueer person from my late teens, but only as a confession of sinfulness. My conservative religious and cultural upbringing had conditioned me to believe that those parts of my experience and identity were immoral. I could only speak about them if I was doing so as a testimony to how I was successfully resisting that part of my life, or if I was encouraging someone else to do the same. I internalized the messages from my community as self-loathing, and I acted on those messages by participating in punishing and oppressing myself and passing on those messages to others. I finally worked through enough of that to begin embracing my gender and sexuality and loving my self during my late 20s.

         Internalized domination is the opposite side of the same coin. That conservative religious upbringing that taught me to hate some parts of myself also taught me, for example, that identifying as a Christian made me superior to people of other religions. They didn’t use those words, of course, but it was pretty clear that this was the case, since we were the only true religion, and our denomination was even better than the other Christians. So they trained me, rather unsuccessfully, to convince other people that this was also the case. I internalized that domination in a way that made it seem natural to believe that Christianity was obviously truer and morally superior to any other belief system. It is an easy step from there to support cultural habits and public policies that are based on the idea that Christianity and Christians are entitled to special treatment.

         If you need another example, none may be more powerful than the growing body of research on the voting trends in the 2016 US elections, which brought Donald Trump to the White House. The most recent, published in April 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was titled, “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.” The research began with noting how these group status dynamics have become more and more prominent in the USA, especially in two areas. First, many white folk are not adjusting well to the idea that society is becoming more diverse. They referred to a 2013 study by Clara Wilkins and Cheryl Kaiser that discovered that white folk who thought the current system is legitimate had “lower levels of self-worth” when shown “evidence of racial progress.” They quite literally cheered themselves up by believing there was anti-white bias in the world, rather than by embracing the idea of equality and justice for all. Second, many Americans are worried about the perceived “increasing interdependence of the United States on other countries.” A decrease in US dominance on the world stage was interpreted as weakness, rather than opportunity for humanity to work together in increasingly cooperative ways. 

         The conclusion, as written by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania, was:

“Based on these results, it would be a mistake for people to understand the 2016 election as resulting from the frustration of those left behind economically. Instead, both experimental evidence and panel survey evidence document significant political consequences from a rising sense of status threat among dominant groups in the United States. … Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended—with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women—were most likely to support Trump. … 

“Most critically, these results speak to the importance of group status in the formation of political preferences. Political uprisings are often about downtrodden groups rising up to assert their right to better treatment and more equal life conditions relative to high-status groups. The 2016 election, in contrast, was an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance and by those in an already powerful and wealthy country to assure its continued dominance.” (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/04/18/1718155115) 

Language and Internalized Oppression and Dominance

         This is straight forward enough, but humans tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that we are vulnerable to this kind of social conditioning. I’ve said this before, in discussing racism, but I think it is worth repeating. Human brains are vulnerable to cognitive biases, and we make interpretations and decisions based on those biases. Most, if not all, people have some level of internalized oppression or domination. It can be embarrassing to admit, so we tend to insist that we are the exceptions. This is why we say things, like: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body;” “I can’t be transphobic, I’m gay!”; “I’m not sexist; I love women!” It’s tough to come face to face with the possibility that we are not the exceptions, and that we, too, are vulnerable to internalized oppression and domination. A kind of reactionary, emotional logic lurks beneath the surface of our thoughts:

         1) Racists/misogynists/disablists/homophobes/etc. are bad people.

         2) I am a good person.

         3) Therefore, I am not a racist/misogynist/disablist/homophobe/etc.

         Last week, I came pretty close to asking aloud how any decent person would be willing to support measures that took away rights from people with disabilities. While different people will have different clusters of motivations, I am convinced that internalized domination plays a big role. For example, I’m going to assume the best about us and say that all of us are enthusiastic about fighting disablism and working for accessibility. But I am enough of a realist that I would also be surprised if the everyday language of people in this room did not include disablist words and slurs, at least some of the time. Why? Because it’s nearly impossible for us to avoid internalizing disablism in this way, it takes consistent effort to change our habits, and most of us are surrounded by disablist language. But we need to stop and ask: what are we communicating to our selves and others when we call something lame or dumb, comparing physical impairments to things we do not like? And what are we communicating about neurodivergent people when we choose to use one of many insults based on mental health – psycho, nuts, crazy, stupid, loony, idiotic, and the like? None of these words should be used as we commonly use them. Many people with disabilities have asked for these words to be removed from our vocabularies, for many years. And yet, here we still are. This is not merely a lesson in being polite; this is a lesson in how the words we use reflect and reinforce our cultures and structures, and, in cases like this, injustice. 

         Language also offers an incredible glimpse into the way that we learn what our cultures consider real, important, and acceptable. In the case of the gender binary, we learn very quickly that our society as a whole only allows two, male and female. We have made some progress with acknowledging that transgender people exist, but we are often forced into that binary, whether we fit or not. So what about a person like me, who is nonbinary and genderqueer, not exclusively male or female? It’s a common human experience, documented throughout history and across cultures, but not in most western cultures, except as an aberration. So there is not even a vocabulary for our existence, not even pronouns, and the language is a constant reminder that the society at large has no place for us. Which is why, in my case, I use singular they as my pronoun, instead of he or she. It’s a small step, but the idea is that including nonbinary people in our everyday language not only communicates affirmation and respect, it also expresses a willingness to change society to include people that have been otherwise excluded. 

         We could work through language associated with other types of marginalization and oppression, with similar results. Through conversations, advertisements, entertainment, and education, we are giving ourselves instructions on what to expect, how to feel, and what to think about our lives. For most of us, we go around soaking it up, usually without realizing that we are being trained and training others. 

So if we want to build movements, made of human beings who are prone to internalized oppression and domination, we need to build in practices that help us deal with these dynamics in honest and thorough ways. We need to find ways to get beyond our knee-jerk reactions to our complicity, to give pause to automatic self-justifications, and be intentional about not only understanding the world, but changing it.

Changing the Measure

         

         Internalized oppression and dominance combines helpfully with another sociological concept, that of norm perceptions. Together, they help answer the question of why it is so easy for most humans to simply go along with injustice, and why it can be so difficult to denounce injustice and announce a different world. Simply put, human beings tend to feel, think, and act in ways that they believe are considered typical by those around them. We go along with our group and internalize those expectations. 

         As an example, think about all the social norms at work at an American football game. In other settings, adults physically tackling one another in an aggressive way would not only be inappropriate, it would be illegal. And cheering and encouraging that physical aggression would often be perceived as immoral, at the very least. But at the stadium, it is what is expected, and you are encouraged to get excited, celebrate, and enjoy a hot dog and beer. However, spectators are not allowed to participate, and those that do run onto the field will be expelled or even arrested. If you've grown up learning all those social expectations, it is likely you don't even notice them anymore - this is just the way things are. You don't have to think about them, you aren't surprised by them, and they feel natural. But if you are unfamiliar, attending an American football game is more likely to be confusing, bewildering, boring, or perhaps even exhilarating. 

         Throughout history, social norms have been powerful vehicles for perpetuating injustice. People from widely different cultures and time periods have all come to accept, tolerate, and even protect egregious oppression as normal - genocide, slavery, segregation, economic exploitation, sexual violence, war, and other oppressive systems. When oppression becomes built into social expectations, they are internalized, and people are not any more likely to notice those norms than the spectator at the football game - this is just the way things are. If you don't have to think about the norms, you aren't surprised by them, and they feel natural. The oppression becomes inevitable, and is reinforced both through unconscious and intentional behavior, structures, and cultures. 

         As discouraging as this may sound, social norms also provide an incredible opportunity. If injustice can be normalized and internalized, so can justice. The question becomes: how can we influence social norms so that what we come to expect from one another is equality, compassion, well-being, and solidarity? In a presentation on implicit bias in early childhood education, Dr. Walter Gilliam pointed out that human beings tend to - "value whatever we measure. … If we can change the measurements, … then sometimes we can effect human behavior without the humans even thinking about it.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaYnDrKZqX4)

         In other words, we tend to value, we tend to internalize, what we and our social groups pay attention to. If you want to uncover social norms and their justifications in a given society or group, look at how they measure their success or well-being. If you want to use social norms to promote change, find ways to shift those measurements, to shift the attention, to measures that align with justice. This is why, last week, we talked about normalizing accessibility and interdependence, making those the measures, and prioritizing them over other measures, such as profitability and productivity. Because, to quote Dr. Gilliam again, human beings tend to - "value whatever we measure. … If we can change the measurements, … then sometimes we can effect human behavior without the humans even thinking about it.” 

Starting With Ourselves

         As I worked through these reflections, I decided to take time to list my own aspirations and theories of change. Here are three of my personal commitments:

·      Assume you have internalized oppression and domination. In my experience, the default assumption is often that only “bad” people have internalized oppression and domination. So let’s change the measure: justice-minded folks actively work to recognize their implicit biases and are intentional about changing their habits of thinking, speaking, and acting to align with their values. 

·     Expect to learn, heal, and grow.Because I am more and more aware of how this works, it is more likely that I’ll take advantage of opportunities to change. And if someone, especially someone from a marginalized community, points out that I have done or said something oppressive, I will receive it as an opportunity for self-reflection. If I feel my reactivity bubbling up, I will pause. Instead of defending or justifying myself, I can say thank you for taking the time to speak up. I don’t have to agree or disagree, but I can resolve to use it as an opportunity to root out, as Audre Lourde put it, “that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us.” 

·     Commit to listening to and centering people from marginalized communities. I realize that I mention this in 2/3 of the sermons I preach, but if I have internalized the dominant, oppressive narrative about life, then a foundation for changing the measure has to be hearing and heeding voices that speak the language of liberation and justice and love. 

         We could go through relational, organizational, and cultural dimensions and distill similar experiences and principles, but I won’t try to squeeze that into this particular sermon. Holly will be reflecting a little on working to change the measures within your spheres of influence, especially with how she’s helping address implicit bias at her workplace and also how her children’s book can help readers internalize measures of justice, wisdom, equity, and love. But the main idea here is simple: we tend to value, we tend to internalize, what we and our social groups pay attention to. It can be, it probably will be, uncomfortable when we ask people in our circles to pay attention to what has been overlooked and ignored. But this is why we have to keep pointing out the injustices around us, no matter how many times someone tells us to be quiet. And this is why we have to keep insisting on changing the measure, making love and justice the standards by which we gauge success, well-being, and progress. 

         Because if injustice can be normalized and internalized, so can justice. And if colonizers, imperialists, misogynists, and racists can build a world where peace and justice seems outlandish, then we can build a world where exploitation, greed, and violence are equally outlandish. That’s the world I want to live in, the world I want to internalize, and the world that we have the opportunity to build together, if we’re willing to keep doing this work. 

May 13, 2018: Starting with Ourselves: Recognizing and Healing from Internalized Oppression and Dominance

Summary: 

We’ll look at the concept of internalized dominance and oppression: what it is, how it contributes to maintaining oppressive systems, and some examples of what we can be doing, individually and as a faith community, to make equity and kindness the norm. 

Prayer of Confession: 

Spending our lives in a nation that has 

            never honestly faced our long history 

            of violence and exploitation,

We realize it is unreasonable to think 

            that we are the exceptions

            and have escaped society’s influence.

But, very often, we still think that 

            we are the exceptions.

We ask for insight and courage, 

            wisdom and accountability,

To root out that piece of the oppressor 

            planted deep within us,

So that we can grow up, together, 

            in mutuality and love. Amen.

            

Wisdom Lesson: 

“The old definitions [of power] have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to … the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. / For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. / … the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us, and that knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. / Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals.” - Audre Lourde

“[Humans] just value whatever we measure. … If we can change the measurements, … then sometimes we can effect human behavior without the humans even thinking about it.” - Dr. Walter Gilliam