By Cyndi Martinec
I have been attending the racial justice core group since this past August. I had attended a couple of other short classes at the UUCC on race issues so the racial justice class seemed like a next logical step. The first class I attended was Jay’s one-night class on white supremacy. This was the first time I had heard the idea of white supremacy as an ingrained, systemic issue that we are all a part of; that it was not just a belief system of hate groups. This class is also where I learned how the idea of “race” came to be. I learned that prior to the 1600’s race was used to describe where someone was from, differentiating people from one area of Europe from another and wasn’t about the color of someone’s skin. I learned that “race” was manufactured here in America to promote the idea that Africans were inferior to “white” people to justify the practice of slavery. In the class we were each assigned a document important to the founding or direction of our country (I was assigned the Declaration of Independence; others include the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott Case). Although I remember learning about these and other important documents in school, they were not covered in a way that showed how they affected non-white people. I’m embarrassed now to say that I was not aware of these ideas. The racial justice core group has taken me deep into the history of race, racism, white supremacy and white privilege and how these practices are written into the very founding of our country.
As I went through these classes I reflected back on my own experience with race and privilege. Like a lot of the people that I attended racial justice classes with I had very little interaction with people of color growing up. My father was in the Air Force and someone’s rank in the military was what determined the level of respect given. We even had to answer the telephone “Colonel Daniel’s home” in case someone important called. I never heard my parents make a negative or insulting remark about people of color; which is surprising considering that my mother was from Atlanta and my father from Louisville. Only when visiting older relatives in Atlanta did I hear disparaging terms. I put this down to them being old fashioned and out of touch. In my high school in rural Indiana there was only one African American girl and she was in a different grade so I was never in class or groups with her. All of this is to say that the issues facing black Americans were completely off my radar.
I have always considered myself to be compassionate person (I even pick up worms off the street after a rain and put them in the grass) but I now realize I was not looking at the injustice all around me. With all of the things going on the past few weeks I realize that without the racial justice core group I would not fully understand everything that is going on and what people of color are asking from us. Looking back at my notes from the original session of our group I found that Jay gave us some thoughts on transformation. My own phrase is that I have had my mind “blown wide open”. I will never be able to look at the world the same way.
I’m planning to attend another justice core group at the UUCC in the coming year and I hope to see you there.