Token Day or Something Else?

The Sunday of the long weekend marking the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poses a special problem for Unitarian Universalist congregations.  One of our regular attenders asked me a few days ago whether this was going to be "token Black" Sunday or something else.  If it was the former, he thought he would stay home.  It was something else, but his concern left me wondering.

We are mostly white.  All white, in this congregation, except for one Black man who comes every now and then. And we are big supporters of nonviolence.  We were in the old days big supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.  On a national level, when Dr. King called for people of faith to come to Selma, we responded. That was fifty years ago, but we remember.  Indeed, we have made efforts and experienced both successes and failures since then to become a less white community, because we care.  And some of our congregations are no longer quite so white.  But in the little congregations I have had a chance to serve,  the Anglo whiteness persists.

On Martin Luther King Sunday, and in February, when schools recognize African American history, what do we do?

Yesterday, we heard about the Montana Innocence Project, a statewide program that works to exonerate people who have been wrongly imprisoned.  In Montana, it does not usually have a racial component.  Just prodding the justice system to do its job.

Justice seems to be where it's at.  And being open to the arrival of new people in our midst, regardless of race, religious background, or whatever.  And watching that openness for spots where it's not.  I'm for inviting people of color and African Americans in particular to speak to us, not particularly on Martin Luther King Sunday and not particularly during Black History Month.  Just do it.  In these parts, it's also important to lift up Native peoples' voices and to listen to Asians as well.  I need to remind myself to find readings not just from women (a longtime interest) but from other less well heard groups, to lift up the examples of lives lived with courage and compassion by people of Native, African, and Asian heritage.  The songs of many cultures that made it into our hymnbook in 1985 need to be updated, but that impulse was good.  This needs my work and attention, too.  Openness.  Can it be done?

If we build a welcome, we invite ourselves to a better place.  And maybe others, seeing that, will want to join us.  And maybe some of them will be people who don't look just like we do.