Common Witness: Where to From Here?
November, 2004

These are just a few of the questions that brought people together on October 15th at First UMC in Chicago (aka Chicago Temple). There, participants in the Common Witness gathered to take next steps in living out the commitments we made prior to and during General Conference.

Representatives from several organizations reaffirmed our commitment to work on issues of justice in a way that connects us rather than pitting us against one another. Groups represented included:

While each of our organizations has priority issues, sometimes similar, often divergent from one another, all of us recognize the need to make the ongoing work of fighting racism, in ourselves, in institutions of which we are a part, and in society a top priority.

To this end we spent half of the day with Rev. Melanie Morrison, an anti-oppression educator who both lectured and led us through a series of exercises to raise our awareness and identify ways to move forward in fighting racism.
Printed here is an excerpt of the address she gave. Click here to view the entire address.

“The End of Safety”
By Melanie Lorrison

To organize against white skin privilege means, first of all, a willingness to have the world as we have known it altered. As James Baldwin put it: “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it...the end of safety.” For white people to wake up to how we have unconsciously benefited from racism is painful work. It requires that we develop an elasticity of spirit so that when we suddenly see what we had not seen before, we do not retreat into a defensive posture or feel undone by shame and embarrassment, but find the grace to say: “I see now why that remark or that behavior or that program was racist. I see now...and seeing, I want to do it differently.”

I don’t know about you, but admitting I’m wrong and feeling exposed are two things I don’t do very gracefully! However, I am learning that the world does not end when I am challenged by people of color or other white people to confront my acts of racist commission or omission; when I am called to account for thoughtless gestures or the presumption that I can speak for everyone. I am also learning more about my own humanity and the grace of forgiving myself and others when we make mistakes and fail.

Many of the social justice organizations I have been affiliated with are predominantly white and most have a stated desire to become multiracial and multi-cultural. Unfortunately, that desire usually gets arrested at the stage of asking: “why aren’t there more people of color in our organization? What can we do to reach out to people of color?” Or the efforts at becoming multiracial/multicultural get stuck at the level of recruiting a couple board members of color or hiring a staff person of color to “represent” their constituencies. It is not often that I have known a predominantly white organization to have, as part of its core mission and purpose, the dismantling of white racism. Too rarely have I experienced predominantly white organizations asking themselves: what would this organization look like if the needs, concerns, insights, and gifts of people of color were central rather than marginal? Too rarely have I known predominantly white organizations to engage in the regular practice of sending representatives to the meetings or conferences of people of color organizations so that they might learn about the issues and concerns and agendas of those communities.

None of our organizations can become truly inclusive organizations without a long-term, (actually never-ending) commitment to acknowledging, analyzing, and confronting white racism. If the needs, concerns, insights, and gifts of people of color are to move from the margins to the center of our organizational life, those of us who are white may need to get out of the way, step back, relinquish control, learn how to share power, listen more, and talk less. It will mean shifting the questions from: Where are they? Why aren’t they here? to: Where are we? Why aren’t we there? Why aren’t we actively making connections with communities of color and finding out what the political, social, theological, and economic priorities are in those communities? It will mean working collaboratively with organizations that are led by and for people of color. And that kind of collaborative work is hard. It has to be learned through trial and error. Many of us are novices at working collaboratively with anyone, much less with people of other cultures, ethnicities, and races where there are centuries of mistrust and misunderstanding between us.