3rd Sacred Conversation on Race and Diversity

August 24, 2008

 

On May 18th, 2008 Seekers Church, Covenant Christian Community, the Divinity Center for Better Living and the National Spirituality and Science Center who all call the building at 276 Carroll Street NW their faith home  joined together and formed a community of communities and began a sacred conversation about race and diversity.  The 2nd conversation took place on July 27th during the sermon time of Covenant Christian Community.  Today Seekers extended its worship time to embrace the 3rd conversation as the sermon time.  Each conversation has centered around the telling of stories, personal stories of how the experience of coming to terms with issues of race has brought each storyteller to the place in their faith journey in which they find themselves at the telling.

 

This is Jacqie Wallen’s offering:

 

I graduated from Munich American High School. It was a military dependents’ school.  Children of civilians attended the school but most students came from military families.  In the military, rank is the primary classification system and rank affects all aspects of your life.  Except the schools, I thought.  I loved my high school and believed it was completely egalitarian, unaffected by issues such as rank.  I could belong to any group, participate in any activity, that I wanted to.  I had a smart friend named Ralph and he and I edited the literary magazine together our senior year.  His father was an enlisted man, not an officer.  I later learned from him that we had gone to two completely different high schools.  In his Munich American high school, a kid’s father’s rank shaped the entire opportunity structure.  Children of officers and children of enlisted men were not friends with one another.  Children of enlisted men did not feel comfortable or welcome participating in extracurricular activities.  Editing the literary magazine with me was the first and only extracurricular activity he had been involved in during his high school years.  Whose high school was the real high school?  Both of our stories were true.  There were two different Munich American High Schools, based on a person’s rank.  I came from a civilian family and could move freely through the rank structure.  He came from an enlisted man’s family and was constrained by rank.  I soon came to learn in my college sociology classes that the rank structure is always more visible to those in the lower ranks than it is to those in the higher ranks.

Public  schools were segregated.  Bathrooms, drinking fountains, and public recreation facilities, including swimming pools, were segregated and, of course, so were most private facilities. 

So, at the tender age of 5 I had learned the important lessons about race:

Our little white feminist group decided to walk across Woodlawn, an almost entirely Black neighborhood, to the jail where she was being held to visit her and show solidarity.  We were a motley little group but handfuls of people stood on the street here and there to watch our procession. The Black Panthers were quite the gentlemen and didn’t act annoyed or condescending but I felt that we were mainly a big pain in the neck to them and wondered whether they were embarrassed as they escorted our group of hairy-legged white women across a virtually all Black neighborhood to show support for a woman who probably didn’t even know we existed. 

To understand the complexities involved in cross-racial or cross-ethnic communication

To recognize our own biases and the underlying dynamics of these biases

To understand feelings and behavior in any situation that involves a consistent differential in power

To enhance our ability to perceive ourselves and the other accurately

What your your racial/ethnic background?

In what locality did you grow up and what other racial/ethnic groups resided in that community?

How did your family see itself as like or different from other racial/ethnic groups?

What were your earliest experiences of racial or ethnic differences?

What are your feelings about your racial/ethnic identity? How are they influenced by the power relationships between your racial/ethnic group and others?