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bronze_ribbonsJawole Willa Jo Zollar, in Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair (which I'd happened upon at my library's New Book Shelf):
Three excerpts from the 25-page report by a UUA Special Review Commission (March 2006) about problematic incidents at General Assembly 2005:
Elizabeth Bear:
In doing these dance pieces, I've learned that every man, woman, and child has a hair story regardless of race. Hair is a big part of how we define ourselves and other people make assumptions about us based on our hair.
At our "Hair Parties," an outgrowth of the research process for "Hair Stories," I talked to men and women, but mostly women, about their hair issues. And what I learned was that when we brought people together to talk about hair, we always ended up talking about issues of race, class, and gender. But if I had brought a group of people together and said we're going to talk about race, class, and gender we would get, "Oh, God! Not that again." No one would want to come. But doing it within the framework of hair, it leads to identity.
Three excerpts from the 25-page report by a UUA Special Review Commission (March 2006) about problematic incidents at General Assembly 2005:
What we have learned is that none of these events happened in a vacuum and that the trajectory does not start at the LDC [Youth of Color Leadership Development Conference] and has not yet ended. Human beings have human needs, faults, and frailties. We act or react depending on our particular state of mind at the time, which is often compounded by other events. Additionally, we all act out of our own experiences and, given how diverse we are, our challenge is to affirm the life experiences that each of us brings. Everyone has their own interpretations and often those interpretations are contradictory. That does not mean that one is right and another wrong.* * *
Racism is pervasive. It lives within the juxtaposition of righteous indignation, political correctness, and over-sensitivity in our Unitarian Universalist communities. Most white UUs are liberals and committed to the struggle for human rights. They have fought good fights and continue to do so. Not wanting to admit to racism, they very often sidestep it. Persons of color, in turn, are tired of being teachers and translators to white liberals--serving a dominant culture once again, even as they brace themselves against the next indignity, the next wounding, the next dismissal of their presence. This treatment is so familiar that it turns us into mute witnesses. The emotions of silent witnesses run the gamut; we go from being almost unaware to explosive. Every incident has the potential to become volatile. So many questions then go unasked and unanswered....* * *
As we engaged in our task, it became evident that the goal given the SRC "to identify learnings about the structures of racism and ageism both within and outside our faith community" was both too large -- given our limits of time and expertise -- and in the larger picture, too small. The essence of what challenges us all is "other-ism," ingrained in ancient ancestors confronting limited resources in the drive to survive. We homo sapiens learned millennia ago to co- labor with our tribe and compete against others who are not us. "Isms" are categorical exclusions of broad swaths of people from a circle of privilege and belonging.
There are two faithful options in the face of such exclusion: to expand and increase our resources, so that more beings may survive, share, and thrive, and/or to expand and enlarge our embrace to include more life and lives and liveliness in our circle of belonging. In so doing, we embody the enduring vision of beloved community that we are called to create.
Elizabeth Bear:
...of course I'm not colorblind. I can't pretend to be. I don't wish to be. What I wish is that we could find a way to be equal, to share out cultural heritages while still encompassing them. Which is why I get tangled in the whole cultural appropriation issue; because there's so much richness out there, and I don't think it's wrong for me to want to touch and understand the culture of Ethiopia or Hawaii any more than it is to want to touch that of Ukraine. There is a difference between a melting pot (that old, suspect image) and a chorus.
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