There is a prayer that preachers traditionally utter before they begin their sermons.  Today, it feels particularly fitting to begin this way: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight, O God.  For if I ever felt that I was stepping out onto the surface of the water, and had to trust that it was some other power that would keep me from sinking, it is today, as I step into this pulpit and try to address the subject of race and the persistence of racism in America. (Not to mention that I am preaching today in memory and honor of one of the greatest preachers of our time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  One feels just a little pressure…)

I feel I cannot add an iota of new insight to a conundrum that has been and continues to be endlessly debated in our society.  And the likelihood that I will say something terribly wrong or offensive, something to anger, is probably inevitable.  The public discourse about race and racism in America is so complicated and layered, so fraught with pain and frustration.

As a white person who’s social and geographic location allows me to choose whether I will think much about race or not, entering into this subject is like walking into a very large room crowded with people of all colors, and all those people are clustered into groups, and in each group of people are shouting at each other.  Some are weeping, some are enraged, some are lecturing, some are blaming, some are apologizing, some are pleading, some are stone-faced and frozen, some are chanting slogans.  One hears fragments of conversations and arguments, but the total effect is one of cacophony and the impossibility of resolving anything or of knowing what is true.   One can easily feel immobilized.

And so, to give myself some margin of emotional freedom as I entered upon my journey of discovery for today, I decided to start in a place that I had not originally intended to start.  I began with an investigation into what race is from a genetic basis.  I did this in order to ground myself in a most crucial, most fundamental fact:

From a genetic standpoint, there is no such thing as race.

This thing that imprisons us is a chimera, a construct invented and imposed by our pattern-seeking brains. The idea of “race” which we humans have imposed upon each other for millennia and which has wrought such violence and waste upon lives and societies and cultures—it is a no-thing—empty, as the Buddhists would say. 

This does not mean there is no such thing as racism, or that its effects are not real.  Our beliefs produce material consequences.  This also does not mean that there is no such thing as ethnicity, which gives a people of common ancestry their shared cultural identity, and which brings great richness to our world.

But let us just begin with this understanding about skin pigmentation, one of the most assumed indicators of race:  As Jack Hitt's article[1] tells us, “what we are seeing, the only thing that we are seeing when we see skin color, is a meandering chain of Vitamin D3 adaptations.”  And Barbara Katz Rothman, in her book, The Book Of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality and the Human Genome Project, explains that there is no gene that creates the combination of features that we would construe as a person's race.

Eye shape, hair texture, the pigment in one's skin, the shape of one's nose, or lips, or any other body part--each characteristic comes from tiny bits of genetic information that have come together uniquely in every human being. There is far too much variation amongst people within a particular population, and far to little variation between people of different populations, for race to make any sense as a way of genetically grouping people.

Rothman writes: 

When you sort people by skin color you get some people from India sorted with some people from Africa.  Sort by eye fold, and one group of Africans goes in the same race as the Asians, while the rest of Africans go with the Europeans.  Sort by fingerprint type, and most Europeans and most Africans go in one group...some central Europeans in another, and Mongolians and Australian Aboriginals in a third race.  Sort by sickle-cell trait, and Nelson Mandela's people, the Xhosas, get classified with the Swedes, while most African groups get classified with the Greeks.  Sort by lactose tolerance, and northern and central Europeans go with Arabians and West African Fulani, while most of the rest of the African groups go with East Asians, American Indians, and Southern Europeans.  Sort by ABO blood types, and Germans go with the New Guineans, while the Estonians go with the Japanese."

She goes on to ask:

“Do you think you’ve actually discovered some important characteristic of the Estonians now that you know that?  …Had that fact been known, [would Estonians have] been in camps with Japanese during WWII, and [would the Germans] have declared the New Guinians of Aryan Blood?”

Once the electron microscope exposes the genetic insubstantiality of race, the scandalous history of American racism and our ongoing entanglement in it appear all the more bizarre, absurd, unbelievable.  I am reminded of the little guy in the Wizard of OZ, who keeps yelling, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” while frantically working his levers and buttons to keep up the illusion of “The Great And Powerful Oz”.  Race is like the “Great and Powerful Oz.”  It is a cruel scam.

I find myself shaking my head in amazement and awe at the vast propaganda that has maintained white elitism and privilege, even as I recognize how it benefits me day in and day out.  I find myself sad and frustrated about having to use polarizing words like "black" and "white" to talk about my society and the people of my human family.

African American poet Audre Lorde wrote that "we cannot dismantle the master's house using the masters tools."  By this she warns that our very language, our words--the tools we use to understand, to think and discern, and with which we try to tell the truth--our very words are also the instruments of the great fabrication of racial inequality and the preference for whiteness.

Race is socially constructed.  We humans invented it for utilitarian reasons.  We invented it to keep resources within one group and inaccessible to another, or to deepen the sense of belonging to ones "tribe" and to accentuate the taboo of otherness.  We invented it to justify the subjugation of one people by another. 

But the fiction of racial superiority hardens through discriminatory practice until it manifests as very real cultural and class differences. Reality and perception cyclically feed into each other until we can no longer see that we have invented the whole situation. 

My first encounter with this premise of the social construction of race was in graduate school.  One of my professors assigned the book "How The Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev.  The vividness of this piece of our history, the process by which Irish immigrants coming to America had to fight their way into the category of "the white race" completely blew my socks off and opened my eyes.  I want to try to tell you this story because I think it illustrates something important.

In Ireland, throughout most of the 18th century, the Catholic Irish were oppressed under a set of codes that have come to be known as the Penal Laws.  Under these laws, Catholics were not allowed to vote, to serve in government, or to hold public office.  They were not allowed to live within the limits of incorporated towns.  They were forbidden to practice law, or hold a post in the military. They were forbidden to bear arms or to take part in the manufacture of them.  They could not teach, open a school, serve as tutors, attend university, or educate their sons abroad.  Their ability to train and work in trades, their access to land, their ability to inherit land or to profit from it were all severely curtailed. In terms of material deprivation, the situation of the Irish Catholic peasant was not far from the slave in America. 

This oppression was justified by English Protestant landowners as an instance of racial inferiority. Catholics were known as "Natives," the race of Celts or Gaels.  They even spoke of themselves as a race rather than as a nation.  As with all cases of systematic oppression, they were subjugated by every social mechanism--through laws, through pervasive prejudice, through economics, propaganda, and violence. 

When hundreds of thousands of destitute Irish came to America during the potato blight, they took up the worst jobs.  They were hired for a pittance in the most grinding and dangerous work where slave-owners would not risk using their enslaved human beings because, as property, slaves were worth more.

The Irish laborer was expendable. There was a quip of the day, a saying put in the mouth of the slave which said, “My master is a terrible tyrant.  He treats me like a common Irishman.” So harsh was the existence of the poor Irish laborer that the average life expectancy after arriving on these shores was 6 years.   

The Irish were often depicted in cartoons and pamphlets with gross, exaggerated features, as if they were stupid, hulking beasts.  In fact, they were portrayed in ways very similar to the way that that people of African descent were insultingly caricatured.  At times the two populations were so conflated in social perception that, in the slang of the day, blacks would be called "Smoked Irish" while the Irish were called "inside-out negroes."

People who may have had the palest of skin, red or sandy hair, freckles, or blue or green eyes were called "inside-out negroes"--or worse.  Why? Because to be black was not about having darkly pigmented skin.  To be "black" described one's social status in America.

Congress had passed a law in 1790 that only "white men" could be become American citizens.  But, according to Noel Ignatiev, it was by no means obvious that Irish men were included in that category or had access to that privilege. The Irish had to establish, very gradually, that they were "white" by separating themselves from "black."  Their transformation from "black" to "white" took place largely through labor, by transforming the ideas of "black mans work" and "white mans work."

As the Irish entered the work force in the Northern cities, they entered the occupations that had been dominated by free blacks and even slaves.  At first, by working along side African Americans, by doing black men's work they took on the "taint" of blackness.

But by flooding those occupations and trades, by being willing to work for almost nothing, the Irish essentially outbid the African Americans and took over, monopolized those occupations--whole swathes of labor and skilled craft and trade that had been held by blacks for generations. 

Then by embracing a rigid prejudice against dark skin, by refusing to work with blacks or people of mixed ancestry, by refusing to allow them to do such work at all, the Irish managed to redraw the lines around "black man's work" and "white mans work", with themselves established as whites.  Free blacks, many of whom were skilled in profitable trades which they could no longer practice, were forced into the poorest of jobs.  Over time, the link became fixed between being black and working in despised, hopeless occupations.

As an aside, there was a similar process that occurred with the Jews in European history.  At various times, laws were passed that prohibited Christians from lending money at interest, although they could take out loans.  At the same time, discriminatory laws were also passed that ghettoized Jewish populations and forced them into a very narrow range of economic options, one of which was money-lending.  After giving Jews little choice but to enter and monopolize this business, Christian propaganda then contemptuously stereotyped Jews as avaricious by nature! 

This is how racial categories and stereotypes are created and reinforced in a vicious cycle.

The tension between the Irish and Blacks has a long legacy in Boston.  You don't have to go to Southie to see it.  We live in it right here in West Roxbury, or as a friend of mine sheepishly called it "White Roxbury." 

So perhaps we can see how the idea of "White," the value of "white", the superiority of "white" was invented in order to keep resources and opportunities within certain populations.  It is an ancient, pervasive mechanism of self-preservation and self-interest, and even survival.  I believe there is a profound fear of losing the margin of privilege and access gained by whiteness, there is a profound fear amongst whites that desirable resources will become spread too thin if everyone has an equal chance at them. 

And so the mechanism is maintained in countless ways

Banks take in more money from neighborhoods occupied by people of color then they invest in them.  Banks use this money to invest in white developers, who in turn gentrify those neighborhoods.  The property values go up to the point where the people of color who lived there can no longer afford to.  The banks that have gladly taken their money then find them unsuitable for housing loans.  As the people of color are compelled to move out and whites move in, the neighborhood is perceived as increasingly desirable, and the property values continue to rise.  Gradually the former colorful neighborhoods become white, and the cycle of inclusion, exclusion, and racial separation goes on, and on, and on--in an apparently impersonal way, without anyone in particular being confronted with their responsibility.  

How do we dismantle this cycle so that all have access equally to opportunity--a value that we as Unitarian Universalists embrace?  What is abolition for our time?  What will set us all free from the prison that shackles our minds, that blinds us to individuality, and that mires our society in endless cycles of alienation and suffering? 

Abolition in Parker’s time was much easier to see, much easier fight for.  The fight was to abolish an obviously evil institution.  That evil was concrete and external.  But Parker and his cohorts could strive to abolish slavery without abolishing or even recognizing their interior sense of superiority as a white people, and without abolishing their access to the privileges that their whiteness gave them. 

Abolition in our time is so much more difficult.  What is the Abolition of our time?  It is the abolition of any sense of privilege on the basis of whiteness. 

We must strive toward a society in which all preference for whiteness has been abolished. We will know that this has happened when we can freely intermingle in all things without taboo, when skin color no longer holds any correlation with social status or access to opportunity.  But how do we get there? 

It is not for white people to tell any person of color that "race does not exist and therefore you should get over your sense of victimization.”  Our work, those of us who are melanin deprived, is an abolition from within.  Our work is to wake up and learn to see to how whiteness works, how it functions, how our lives are buoyed by the social preference for the whiteness.

We become sensitized by being in relationship, in solidarity, with those who are different from us:

Those who are affluent wake up to the meaning of class when we meet in solidarity those who are oppressed by our social caste system.

Those who are straight wake up to the effects of homophobia when we meet in solidarity those who are marginalized because of their sexual or gender orientation.

It is only through relationship that we really begin to understand what this is doing to all of us.  It is only through relationship and solidarity that we feel the imperative to create freedom for all.

One more little story:  Earlier in our service we heard, in the piece by Jack Hitts, about the German biologist Johann Blumenbach, whose weird, fallacious theories of race and racial superiority set the standard for the next 200 years. 

But later in his life, Blumenbach met in Switzerland, “eine zum Verlieben schönen Négresse” (a negro woman beautiful enough to fall in love with).  By further anatomical study he came to conclude that "individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans."  And even more, he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of humankind as he had once imagined (before he knew any Africans) "concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities."

In other words, this real, personal relationship shattered his whole erroneous construct of race, setting him free to love across a former constructed boundary. 

We all want to be free and to see others set free.  We all want to be whole and to see others whole.  We all want to be liberated from the shame of racism and race alienation that so wounds our society and our brothers and sisters. 

When we can finally, truly abolish the limiting constructs of black and white from the inside out...

When we can see the rainbow of human shades as equally beautiful from the deepest glossy dark to the palest pink...

When we can really see people in all their glorious and gifted diversity, and welcome each other into our lives and worlds, neighborhoods and churches and workplaces...

…then we will be free at last! Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we’ll be free at last!

May it be so.

The reading is drawn from the article "Mighty White of You:  Racial Preferences Color America’s Oldest Skulls and Bones” by journalist Jack Hitt.  It appeared in Harper’s Magazine in July 2005:

“The signal year was 1776, with the publication of a book called “On The Natural Varieties of Mankind” by German biologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

At the time, Blumenbach’s theory had a certain symmetry that made it the very model of good science.  These days his theories seem insane.  He argued that Native American Indians were the transitional race that eventually led to Asians (don’t try to work out the geography of this:  it will make your head explode).  And another group, which Blumenbach simply conjures from a far away people, the “Malayans,” evolved over time to become Africans (again if you’re puzzling out the geography, watch you head).

At the center of all this change was the White Race, which was constant.  Blumenbach believed darkness was a sign of change from the original.  All of mankind had fallen from perfection, but the darker you were, the further you had fallen.  As a result, the best way to locate the original Garden of Eden, according to Blumenbach, was to follow the trail of human...beauty.  The hotter the women, the hunkier the men, the closer you were to what was left of God's first Paradise. 

Here is Blumenbach explaining the etymology of the new word he hoped to coin:

 "I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produced the most beautiful race of men--I mean the Georgian. 

Blumenbach’s theory is totally forgotten today by everybody (except maybe Georgian men).  All that remains is a single relic, the word he coined for God’s most gorgeous creation:  Caucasian. 

The word itself is lovely.  Say it:  Caucasian.  The word flows off the tongue like a stream trickling out of Eden…You can almost see…the early white forbears walking away from Paradise to trek to Europe and begin the difficult task of creating Western Civilization.

Ever since Blumenbach launched this word two and a half centuries ago, the effort to pin down the exact and scientific meaning of race has never ceased.  Even today the US census is little more than an explosion of ethnic agony that arrives every 10 years like constitutional clockwork.  The number of races has expanded and contracted wildly between Blumenbach and now, depending on the mood of the culture.  The basic three have gone through scores of revisions growing as high as Ernst Hackels 34 different races in 1879, or Paul Topinard's 19 in 1885, or Stanley Garn's 9 in 1971.  Today, we nervously ask if you're White, African American, Native American, Asian, or of Hawaiian or Pacific Islander descent. 

But it wasn’t that long ago that the question would have turned upon races only our great grandfathers would recognize.  Let us mourn their passing:  The Armenoids, the Assyroids, the Veddoids, the Orientalids, the Australoids, the Dalo-Nordic, the Fälish, the Alpines, the Dinarics, the Feno-Nordics, the Osteuropids, the Lapponoids, the Osterdals, the Cappadocians, the Danubians, the Ladogans, the Trondelagens, and the Pile Dwellers.

In the meantime science has made its discoveries.  The mystery of race has been solved.  For the longest time, scientists were stymied by a contradiction.  Surely skin-tone had something to do with colder climates creating paler shades, but then why weren't Siberians as pale as Swedes, and why were Eskimos as dark as equatorial islanders?  The answer was announced in 2000, but it was so tedious hardly anyone noticed. 

Skin pigmentation changed long ago not only to protect skin from different levels of sun exposure--that's obvious--but also in order to regulate the amount of Vitamin D3 that is manufactured by the sun just under the skin...

When we look at the different races, what we're actually seeing is not "superiority", or "good people" or [even] "race."  All that we are seeing, the only thing we are seeing when we look at skin color, is a meandering trail of Vitamin D3 adaptation rates."

The reading for the service was drawn from the article “Mighty White of You:  Racial Preferences Color America’s Oldest Skulls and Bones” by journalist Jack Hitt.  The full text of the reading can be found at the end of this sermon on page 7.