“Give a church school part for the
children of a Negro or Mexican church school, without patronizing them...
substitute the name of whatever minority group in your community, racial or
national, is most clearly a victim of prejudice or neglect in the place of
‘Negro’ on this page. These might be: Portuguese, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese,
Mexican, Italian or others.”
--Christian
Register (Unitarian) issue on “Race” (1943)--
As we Unitarian
Universalists expand our awareness of the increasing diversity in our
congregations and in our surrounding communities we struggle with the method by
which we incorporate this new understanding into our faith. It seems that the
code words for this new stage of our development are “Beloved Community” and
“Multiculturalism”. It is my belief that Beloved Community is the goal once we
embrace Multiculturalism. Ideally multiculturalism results in individual
cultures, not just co-existing, but interacting among the various cultures and
sub-cultures with the result of a harmonious new understanding. It is more than
tolerance or acceptance, but a commitment to understand and support each other.
However this ideal is not achieved without deliberate work and often through
many missteps.
When a
particular culture encounters another culture and they begin to interact, there
is usually a dominant culture in the pairing. This dominant culture, either
through a larger population or greater force of arms, often imposes its set of
values as being normative. In the earliest stages the dominant culture often
has very little understanding of the other culture and believes its mission is
to educate the other culture. In education terms, especially religious
education, this type of understanding is sometimes referred to as a “Null
Curriculum.” The dominant culture
is provided very little factual information about the other culture and gives
the message that understanding of the other culture is not important. To the
other culture the message is given that they must change and adopt the ways and
values of the dominant, “superior” culture. This message is often couched in
the most caring and supportive language; the dominant culture trying to save or
improve the other culture. For both cultures there is a lack of real
understanding and leads to erroneous conclusions by both cultures.
Thus the goal of
the dominant culture is Assimilation of
the other culture. Often this type cultural interaction may be declared an
anathema by the leadership of the other culture. There are attempts to change
the other culture either through lack of support, intimidation or legislation.
In the history of the United States there have been attempts to impose a common
language or to outlaw certain practices associated with other cultures. A
reaction by the other culture is sometimes to recover the history or language
that is unique to that culture. Ethnic pride can be expressed through parades,
cultural events and sharing of food.
When the
dominant culture first attempts to understand the other culture it can enter
into what educators call the “Implicit or Hidden Curriculum.” This stage can be
very unreliable as it is often characterized by citing the work of supposed
“experts” in the other culture who may or may not be part of the other culture.
Another pitfall is when individuals or institutions from the other culture are
presumed to represent the entire culture and thus their particular values and
ways is erroneously applied to the entire culture. A far more damaging aspect
is when the dominant culture presumes that there is an alliance of all other
cultures. Thus the values and ways of all other cultures are presumed to be the
same for all. This dichotomous view increases the misunderstanding of unique
cultural values and ways.
A
discussion of who we are as Unitarian Universalists, and who we want to be and
where we want to go requires that we recognize the forces that have influenced
public discourse, and the values that are embedded in the very fabric of the
United States of America from its very beginning. While many would argue that there is no universal American
culture there are values, attitudes and practices that are very much a part of
our society. It’s just that most of us don’t see them. Most of us have bought the idea that
public space is value free; that public discourse – that is objective, of course – is value free.
What
we need to recognize first is that public space is not value neutral; how we
have learned to talk about public policy and attitudes is not free of certain
values and attitudes. The question is:
whose values?
Now
we UUs like to think that we are free thinkers, critical of the norms of our
larger society, and we pride ourselves in our history of civil disobedience. We
are, and we should. However, we
are not as free as we think we are.
We UUs are as bound by the values, beliefs and behaviors imposed by the
founders from the very inception of the United States as members of the larger
society.
American
exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is
qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from
its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation," and
developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This
observation can be traced to Alexis de
Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as
"exceptional" in 1831 and 1840. Historian Gordon Wood has argued,
"Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being
of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that
we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world
toward liberty and democracy."
In the United
States, the belief in American Exceptionalism reinforces the notion and further
obfuscates the importance of other cultures. Essentially this reduces
understanding of cultural differences to a binary paradigm where there is the
dominant culture and everything that is not part of the dominant culture. It
reduces fact gathering and is often self-referential. As such it would be
sufficient to understand the culture of Native Americans by studying the
culture of Asian Americans or by noting the differences between the Native
American culture and the dominant culture.
When society is
able to grasp differences and freely permit the cultural differences to
co-exist and interact then the possibility of change enters into the cultures.
Understanding becomes explicit and results will confirm expectations. In an
explicit understanding of cultural differences there may not necessarily
knowledge of what are the differences, but there will be acknowledgement that
there are differences. In educational terms this is referred to as an “Explicit
or Overt Curriculum.” This is the most dynamic and fluid of interactions as change
is expected, documented and intentionally supported.
What follows is
a timeline of the dominant Unitarian Universalist culture and the growing
Latino/a population in the United States along with the cultural changes that
have resulted over time. The introductory quote in this chapter is taken from a
period when the association was obviously in the Implicit stage. Given recent
events and the availability of resource materials one might be tempted to think
that Unitarian Universalism has reached the Explicit stage in regards to
interaction with the Latino/a communities; but there is a danger that if only
one Latino/a community is being addressed and if the socio/economic status of
that community becomes the standard, then in reality Unitarian Universalism is
still in an Implicit stage.
Looking over the
data we can clearly see how in the earliest records there is very little
mention of interaction with the Latino/a communities. The Rev. Mark
Morrison-Reed in assisting research for this timeline noted the following:
l In both volumes
of Russell Miller's history of Universalism The Larger Hope there is
nothing in regard to Hispanic peoples. In Ernest Cassara's Universalism in
American: A Documentary History the “Mexican War” is mentioned on p. 190
but only in regard to people being concerned about opening that territory to
slavery. In George Hunston
William's American Universalism he writes on p.64 “During the Mexican
War of 1845-1848 which brought many anti-slavery people into the anti-war and
pacifist fold...” In fairness to Universalism it was largely concentrated in
small town and rural New England, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio
and Ontario exactly where there would have been no Hispanic population. And it
was already going into numeric decline following the U.S. Civil War.
l In the 1967 UUA
“Committee on Goals” Report in which 27% of those who responded said that being
a 'Negro' would hamper one's ministry this same question was not posed in
regard to Hispanic ministers. The same question was asked in the 1989 “Quality
of Religious Life in UU Congregations” survey done by the UUA Commission on
Appraisal and again Hispanic people were omitted.
l In 1976 the
First Unitarian Church of LA published a hymnal entitled How can we keep
from singing! It included two pieces related to Hispanic people: “De
Colores” (82) which it lists as the “Song of the United Farm Workers” and
“Comaňeros.” (150) It is in English but the lyrics are about Mexico and the
style Mexican Corrido. On page 116 there is also a reading form Federico Garica
Lorca. “De Colores” (305) also appears in Singing the Living Tradition
as does “Duenmete Nino Lindo” (230). There is a reading by Roberto Jaurroz.
(487)
l There seem to
be no Ware Lecturers with Hispanic background that I can identify.
l No one knows
who is Gonzalo Mollina, who sat on the UUA Commission on Race and Religion.
l In June 2011 Las
voces des camino has sold 852 since it was published in June 2009. In
comparison, Singing the Journey sold
43,347 in the same number of months.
l In The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History “American Unitarian
and Universalist Historical Scholarship, A Bibliography of items Published 1946
– 1995”, by Conrad Wright. There are 112 pages of references. Only one referred
to anything Hispanic. Charles J. Beirne, S.J., “The Theology of Theodore Parker
and the War with Mexico,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 104 (1968)”
130-138. There are many items on Abolition and abolitionist and some on civil
rights and only Black Pioneers on African American UUs. There is much
more on India and the Brahmo Samaj than about Latinos/as or African Americans.
It is the invisibility we have learned to expect.
This timeline is
not complete and is intended to stimulate conversation and to clarify the
contemporary interaction between the dominant UU culture and some of the
Latino/a UUs and the cultural values and understandings they bring from their
varied communities.
