by the Rev. Dr. Rick Schlosser, Executive Director

“Being white means never having to think about it.”   — James Baldwin

The uprisings in Baltimore, Ferguson, and across the country remind us in a powerful way that racism is America’s original sin.  From the genocide of indigenous nations, to the immorality of the slave trade, to northern wealth built on cheap slave labor in the south, to the criminalization of God’s beloved children under our current immigration system, we know that privilege, power, and wealth is built on systemic, institutionalized racism.

Let those with eyes to see and ears to hear acknowledge this sin without excuse or defensiveness and commit ourselves to changing our culture until every child of God is treated with respect and dignity, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, class, sexual orientation, age, ability, or any of the other “isms” we are so good at using to divide and discriminate.

We spend a lot of time talking about the injustice of racism, #blacklivesmatter, the New Jim Crow, and other issues that every person of faith should be actively working to dismantle.  For those in the dominant culture, one primary focus needs to be on the issue of privilege, primarily because so many do not recognize its extent and are, therefore, powerless to change it.  Until we recognize our privilege and are willing to actively work to give it up, very little will actually change.  Let me say this very clearly: Racism is a white problem.  It will not change until a critical mass of members of the dominant culture recognize their privilege and actively work to give up their privilege and challenge it in every way possible.

White privilege is a set of advantages and/or immunities that white people benefit from on a daily basis.  White privilege can exist without white people’s conscious knowledge of its presence (one of the biggest obstacles to change) and it helps to maintain the racial hierarchy in this county.

This is a difficult subject for many well-meaning white people to talk about.  But it is, nonetheless, absolutely essential that we facilitate conversations about this everywhere we can if we ever expect anything to change. 

Sunday mornings are still the most segregated hour of the week in this country.  I would love to recruit 100 congregations throughout California (to start) who would be willing to commit to actively engaging in study, self-reflection, respectful conversations, and direct action to challenge white privilege and racism.  We have justice-seeking churches in every corner of the state.  Churches are in a unique and powerful position to lead the way in this effort from a place of trust and respect in their communities.  Any movement for justice requires the participation of the faith community to succeed.

It is not helpful to talk about it in such a way that folk go right to guilt or despair.  One of the least threatening and accessible articles I have used for many years is by Wellesley professor Peggy McIntosh.  If you are looking for a way to consider this issue yourself or start a discussion of it in your community of faith, I recommend it to you: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack by Peggy McIntosh.

I also recommend to you a pastoral letter from the United Church of Christ: A Pastoral Letter On Racism: A New Awakening. 
You can download a PDF of the entire resource here.

The biggest problem with white privilege is the invisibility it maintains to those who benefit from it most.  The inability to recognize that many of the advantages whites hold are a direct result of the disadvantages of other people, contributes to the unwillingness of white people, even those who are not overtly racist, to recognize their part in maintaining and benefiting from white supremacy.

White privilege is having the freedom and luxury to fight racism one day and ignore it the next.  White privilege exists on an individual, cultural, and institutional level.

Racism is America’s original sin. Racism signifies power relations associated with skin color.  Racism is more than personal prejudice.  In the classic definition, it is prejudice plus power.  To dismantle racism, a power analysis is necessary to identify its various institutional forms.

Are you interested and ready to help make a difference?  Following is a listing of a very few articles and books to help you get started.  There are so many more wonderful resources available and I will include a short list of resources in Justice Seekers on a regular basis. 

What are you doing to end white privilege?  How are you living out the gospel truth that #blacklivesmatter?  What is your community of faith doing in your community?  Is your congregation willing to join us in a statewide effort to dismantle white privilege and racism? I would love to include your suggested resources, your success stories and challenges, and anything else you are willing to share with others with others throughout California, so please send any and all feedback, resources, stories, suggestions, questions, and challenges to me at rick@calchurches.org.

Resources
Here is a very short list of articles and books to help your congregation discuss white privilege and racism.  Please send your suggestions to rick@calchurches.org so they can be included in future issues of Justice Seekers.

Articles

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack by Peggy McIntosh
https://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversity/resources/white-privilege.pdf

See further: White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies by Peggy McIntosh
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/white-privilege-and-male-privilege.pdf

The Undergirding Factor is POWER: Toward an Understanding of Prejudice and Racism by Caleb Rosado, Department of Urban Studies, Eastern University, Philadelphia
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/caleb/racism.html

Reflections on My White Privilege and Understanding It: Thoughts from a Teacher Educator by Todd S. Cherner, Coastal Carolina University
http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=catalyst

Young White Men: Scared, Entitled, and Cynical-A Deadly Combination by Paul Kivel
http://www.paulkivel.com/component/jdownloads/finish/1/4/0?Itemid=31

Books
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book.  Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as “brave and bold,” this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness.  With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”  By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control-relegating millions to a permanent second-class status-even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.  In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a “call to action.”

Called “stunning” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, “invaluable” by the Daily Kos, “explosive” by Kirkus, and “profoundly necessary” by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree
by James H Cone

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.” Acts 10:39    

The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols

in the history of the African American community.  In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk. Both the cross and the lynching tree represent the worst in human beings and at the same time a thirst for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning. While the lynching tree symbolized white power and black death, the cross symbolizes divine power and black life, God overcoming the power of sin and death. For African Americans, the image of Jesus, hung on a tree to die, powerfully grounded their faith that God was with them, even in the suffering of the lynching era.

In a work that spans social history, theology, and cultural studies, Cone explores the message of the spirituals and the power of the blues; the passion and the engaged vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he invokes the spirits of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells, and the witness of black artists, writers, preachers, and fighters for justice. And he remembers the victims, especially the 5,000 who perished during the lynching period. Through their witness he contemplates the greatest challenge of any Christian theology to explain how life can be made meaningful in the face of death and injustice.

Understanding White Privilege:
Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race
by Frances E. Kendall
London: Routledge, 2006.

Knowingly and unknowingly we all grapple with race every day. Understanding White Privilege delves into the complex interplay between race, power, and privilege in both organizations and private life. It offers an unflinching look at how ignorance can perpetuate privilege, and offers practical and thoughtful insights into how people of all races can work to break this cycle. Based on thirty years of work in diversity and colleges, universities, and corporations, Frances Kendall candidly invites readers to think personally about how race - theirs and others' - frames experiences and relationships, focusing squarely on white privilege and its implications for building authentic relationships across race. 

This much-anticipated revised edition includes two full new chapters, one on white women and another extending the discussion on race. It continues the important work of the first, deepening our knowledge of the recurring history on which cross-race relationships issues exist. Kendall's book provides readers with a more meaningful understanding of white privilege and equips them with strategies for making personal and organizational changes.

Pre-Post-Racial America: Spiritual Stories from the Front Lines
by Sandhya Rani Jha

Those people. Their issues. The day's news and the ways we treat each other, overtly or subliminally, prove we are not yet living in post-racial America. It's hard to talk about race in America without everyone very quickly becoming defensive and shutting down.

What makes talking race even harder is that so few of us actually know each other in the fullness of our stories. A recent Reuters poll found 40% of White people have no friends of other races, and 25% of people of color only have friends of the same race.

Sandhya Jha addresses the hot topic in a way that is grounded in real people's stories and that offers solid biblical grounding for thinking about race relations in America, reminding us that God calls us to build Beloved Community.

Discussion questions at the end of each chapter provide starting points for reading groups.

Hardcover edition available through smile.amazon.com (be sure to designate the California Council of Churches!).  Electronic versions are available from chalicepress.com

Sandhya Rani Jha is the director of the Oakland Peace Center, the East Bay Housing Organization, a former member of the California Council of Churches Board of Directors, and so much more!

A Call to Police Reform and Healing of Communities

WASHINGTON: In their cry, “No justice, no peace,” protesters in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and in other cities across the country are expressing the same sentiments of disappointment and frustration as the prophet Habakkuk when he proclaimed,

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
      and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!” 
      and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
      and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
      strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
     and justice never prevails.”
Habakkuk 1:2-4a NRSV

The root of justice and peace is a moral belief in the intrinsic worth of all human life. The advancement of technology and use of social media have brought to light evidence of a disturbing truth – the lives of African Americans, particularly those in impoverished communities, are not valued as much as those of the wealthy and affluent.  The misdirected “War on Drugs” and “get tough on crime” policies of the past decades have given birth to militarized police forces that do not best serve the people and communities they are mandated to keep safe.

The high-profile deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hand of police in Ferguson, Staten Island, North Charleston, and most recently Baltimore are not isolated incidents. The incidents of police brutality resulting in major injuries and death are taking place so often we can barely keep up with the reports. This is a national problem that calls for a federal, state and local response.

According to the website Mapping Police Violence (http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/), approximately 304 African Americans were killed by police in 2014.  This documentation is a collaborative project of private researchers and activists because no public or federal database is kept of this information.  

In times like these people can be heard asking, “Where is the faith community,” or, “Is the Church relevant?” The answers can be found where the faith community is in the middle of the pain and the healing.  Persons affiliated with the NCC through our member communions serve as prison and police chaplains; they are police and persons serving time, returning citizens and family members, victims and perpetrators, pastors and community leaders.  In the midst of civil unrest breaking out in cities across the country, our faith leaders have been at the forefront of peaceful protest actions and providing pastoral care for the community. 

We commend and support law enforcement agencies that model good community policing, and in the tradition of advocating for justice and peace and inspired by the prophet Isaiah to serve as “repairers of the breach” we call for an overhaul of the justice system that brings about reconciliation and restoration.  To this end we recommend the following steps towards police reform: 

• Incorporate conflict transformation training as part of police training and a standard alternative or additional option for addressing offenses and criminal infractions.
• Reward police departments and officers for effective community policing strategies rather than arrest and ticketing quotas.
• Make training mandatory and continue to update for all law enforcement on issues of cultural sensitivity, interaction with the mentally ill, and responding to sexual assaults.
• Implement nationwide mandatory use of body cameras and provide federal funding for communities that cannot afford them.  We reject attempts by municipalities to hide behind FOIA laws and other restrictions.
• Discipline police officers who do not wear their badges or provide business card with name and badge number when requested.
• Address the militarization of the police department and the abusive manner in which military surplus equipment has been used. 
• Address the underlying problem of overcriminalization and the indiscriminate application of laws implemented by local police departments and the impact it has on communities and families

Issued by the National Council of Churches’ Governing Board upon the occasion of the Christian Unity Gathering, May 7-9, 2015.
http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/news/2015-5_CUG_Policing.php

++++++++++++++

Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for shared ecumenical witness among Christians in the United States. The NCC's 37 member communions -- from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches -- include 45 million persons in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the nation.

NCC News contact: Steven D. Martin: 202-544-2350 ext 231 (o), 202-412-4323 (c) steven.martin@nationalcouncilofchurches.us

by Elizabeth “Libby” Sholes, Director of Public Policy

California Council of Churches’ work on economic justice has taken a new path.  We still fight for the safety net, for better education, and all the traditional issues such as lifting the minimum wage and increasing taxes on obscenely large corporate profits.  However, we have come to the conclusion that it is not enough. 

If we are to make serious inroads into economic inequality, we have to find a means to change not just what decisions are made about jobs, pay, and opportunities but also who is making those critical decisions.  We are supporting the creation of worker owned cooperatives, both with unions and without, as a redirection in economic justice.  The true ‘makers’ are those who create the wealth.  Only from ownership of the businesses where they toil will workers realize the full benefits of their labors.

The key to success lies in unleashing the creativity and knowledge that employees bring to their jobs.  Three stories illustrate the enormous void we’ve created in this nation on not just the outrages of income inequality but on the profound loss of skill, of solidarity among citizens, and on our democratic processes — all in the quest for corporate riches and domination.  These stories illustrate what is the art of the possible in worker ownership and why it is the right strategy for our time.

In 1976 Bethlehem Steel, second largest producer in America, hired its first ever outsider from Price Waterhouse Accounting to be its CEO.  Although the company was making a small but steady profit, highly respectable in the annals of industrial capitalism, the lure of double digits proved the company’s undoing.  The company’s Lackawanna plant had a rail rolling facility that was old but productive.  It also had an amazing boss roller, Don Landsittel, whose 40 years of experience allowed him to judge the heat of rails by sight and to understand the art of how you bend rails to cool properly.  The rest of his rail mill team were equally skilled, equally devoted to their craft.  1976 was also the year Conrail decided to rebuild the entire NE corridor track lines from Chicago east.  With this amazing market and incredibly skilled labor force, Lackawanna was poised for huge rail orders when the new CEO decided to shutdown the entire rail operation and take the federal accelerated depreciation that got them huge amounts of cash to sweeten the bottom line.  The mill never produced another dime in profits ever again, and when in 1983 the whole plant was closed, almost 22,000 people of skill were permanently out of work.

In 1984 Buffalo Brass that produces brass and copper rolled products and was then owned by ARCO petroleum, was slated to be closed because again, it was profitable but not obscenely so.  Shutdown would mean the loss of hundreds of skilled jobs.  However, five local capitalists bought the plant then met with the supervisors and union, USW Local 593, and said that they had NO idea how to run Buffalo Brass so the workers should do it.  The union was the lead, and within weeks they had changed the production process, the receipt and shipping of alloy raw materials, obtained new business, and started up old abandoned product lines.  There were almost no supervisors — workers were self directed on how they did their jobs — and no managers.  At the end of one year they moved the plant from marginal profitability to million-dollar boom.  However, workers did not own the facility so five years later when the investors decided to sell, the people who created all that wealth had no say in its sale.  Buffalo Brass never ran so well again.

Deindustrialization, plant closings, offshoring of jobs to Asia all have decimated not just the numbers of jobs but the foundation of our middle class.  We have also lost critical skills as highly trained workers retire, move away, or die just as we turn to imported capital goods for infrastructure that turn out to be inferior quality.  The saga of the new Bay Bridge that is deteriorating as it was being built lies partly in our loss of skilled steel workers and metallurgists who successfully provided the materials for every earlier bridge made in America and erected by local ironworkers.  One of them, Alfred Zampa, helped construct every earlier Bay Area bridge prior to the one now bearing his name that spans the Carquinez Straits.  We lost such amazing people when we rushed to save money and discard local production, local jobs.

This is incredibly helpful in other ways, too.  One of our projects, a Food Hub in Livermore, will house a variety of vendors including a union coop, the United Food and Commercial Workers may contribute some of their pension funds as either capital or collateral.  Unite Here is working on bringing the union coop model to their own members in their training centers, calling this a training and transition model.  Where expertise is needed — skill development, apprentice programs, licenses, certificates, permits — the unions often have them ready to go.  Having prepared workers inside at the start can allow the necessary lead time for others to gain those skills and certifications and not forcing the business to wait.  In one of our premier union coops in Cincinnati, UFWC released one of their members and subsidized her to help create “Our Harvest” farm and food distribution.  Because of her skills and knowledge of the business, Our Harvest now does $700,000 worth of business and was created as a viable worker coop within its first year, and she along with others are viable worker owners as well as union members.

In Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Clean and Green laundry, a United Steelworkers worker coop, has secured amazing head start via the union members’ previous experience working in a now defunct industrial laundry the union had also represented in more traditional ways.  Down the road, they are exploring the possibility of manufacturing commercial laundry equipment.

New Era Doors and Windows company has a most famous story — in 2008 workers held a sitdown occupation of the company against Bank of America’s lockout of workers and rip off of their pay.  Their dedication eventually moved into ownership with the help of United Electrical Workers, the electricians union.  While some of their professional advocates were negotiating the buyout of New Era, workers were STILL locked out of financial negotiations and UE helped them picket for a seat at the table.  They won the right to be part of their own finance agreements and in the structuring of their own cooperative. 

Throughout the Northeast — the proverbial Rust Belt of shuttered factories and mills — the union coop model is being adopted in many communities.  Reading, PA, surely one of this nation’s most battered cities from deindustrialization, has adopted the union coop effort as a citywide strategy.  In Cincinnati OH, even the very Red city leadership — John Boehner territory — has adopted union coops as a key ingredient in their economic revitalization.  Work is going on across the nation in Denver, Seattle, and here in CA where we have several projects gearing up.  We have just made alliance with the UAW that, while not a big presence any longer in CA, will be a force to offset plant closings in the Midwest. 

Service unions also are involved.  In the Bronx, NY, Cooperative Home Health Care is a SEIU — Service Employees International Union — cooperative of over 2000 home healthcare aides.  About half are now fully vested owners, and everyone earns far above the standard wage for this work.

Is it imperative for unions to be involved in every worker coop?  Of course not.  We have more non-union related success stories than union ones.  Our allies in Lompoc working with the Valley of the Flowers United Church of Christ created the “Green Broom Brigade” housecleaning service.  Immigrant women now have risen from low wage work to middle class status by owning this business.  They have the developed the critical county-wide network of coops now assisting one another through the spin off of the Lompoc Community Development Project that is helping to expand the idea of worker ownership throughout Santa Barbara County.

However, union affiliation offers a huge hand up in technical assistance, organizing, conversion projects, and even financing.  From conversion to start up, the partnership of unions with worker owners has been and will be a powerful new strategy. 

The face of Mondragon USA is now called 1worker 1vote, Inc. and can be found online at 1worker1vote.org.  California Council of Churches holds the only MOU with them for CA where we, as with others around the nation, are coop catalysts to help communities come together to do this work locally.

In CA we offer background information on how worker coops operate, conversion information and strategies, financial data and resources, organizational help, and alliances with labor.  We are working with communities of color, immigrant rights groups, low wage workers, ex-felons, dislocated former foster kids, along with our own congregations, and where possible, unions, all united in this strategy.  And we do this for free. 

Our strongest role is creating local communities of practice — groups arising from their own situation and creating projects appropriate to their own local needs — so that what is created belongs authentically to the people and is not something imposed upon them from above.  This vastly improves the likelihood of success since community buy-in as well as worker ownership strengthen the outcomes and through the authenticity of support.  Where communities such as Lompoc make major commitments to this work, the entire community benefits from it.  Stable businesses with stable jobs — ones that cannot easily be sold or shut down — helps the communities also to be stable.  

Anyone interested in gaining our help, having our study guide and tool kit may contact me at sholes@calchurches.org.  We welcome all new energies and all new voices in this work.  This is the new way for find and make manifest economic justice for all.

Book Launch:  My Trip to the Land of Gandhi: A Mexican-American’s Journey to the Legacy of Nonviolent Resistance

Watch Book Video Trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXEAJL9v-X8

SAN DIEGO – As we approach the end of the public school year and college graduations that leave students with thousands of dollars in student loan debt, it is important to remember where we stand as a country on the human right to education.  On Sunday, May 17, 2015, the 61st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the book My Trip to the Land of Gandhi: A Mexican-American’s Journey to the Legacy of Nonviolent Resistance will be launched as an eBook on www.smashwords.com and as a print-on-demand book on www.thebookpatch.com.  The book is a memoir about a Mexican mother’s son growing up in poverty in America and his pursuit of the human right to education through the legacy of Gandhian nonviolence.  In 1959, after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King wrote an important article in Ebony magazine about his journey to India to study the work and life of Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle and how to apply those lessons back home to redeem America’s democracy.  The article was entitled “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi.”  In the article, King states, “I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

This book is about this young son’s metaphoric “Trip to the Land of Gandhi” and how this journey helped him confront the great issues of today with this great legacy of nonviolence resistance.  The first item on the agenda was the $90,000 in student loan debt that was handed to him along with his law school degree.  Erik Olson Fernández’s journey and his strategic insights are a call to action to finish the “unfinished business” of the 1960s with a nonviolent struggle for the human right to quality free public education in the Americas.

Sadly, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board, public school students are still plagued by stark racial and economic segregation and misguided education reform efforts led by some of the wealthiest people on the planet.  In California, for example, it’s once proud, mostly white, public school system was the envy of the globe in the 1950s and 60s but it is now one of the worst in the country and criminally underfunded.  In 2004, PBS made a film documentary on California’s public schools appropriately entitled “From First to Worst.” (http://learningmatters.tv/blog/documentaries/watch-first-to-worst/651/)  Education Week’s Quality Counts 2014 report ranked California 49 out of 51 in its state rankings on per-pupil spending – below all the Southern states, including Mississippi.  Black and Latino students today make up at least 59% of the student population in California.  According to a February 4, 2015 article from Capital & Main entitled “The California Chasm” by Manuel Pastor and Dan Braun, California […] is the home to more super rich than anywhere else in the country — and it also exhibits the highest poverty rate in the nation, when cost of living is taken into account.  Income disparities in the state of California are among the highest in the nation, outpacing such places as Georgia and Mississippi in terms of Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality.”  After much legislation, many public referendums, and high profile lawsuits, California’s students are still denied their state constitutional right to a quality, free public education.  The time has come to give life to lifeless laws with the great legacy of nonviolent resistance. 

All proceeds from the book will go to fight for the human right to education through Nuevo SNCC.  Visit www.nuevosncc.net for more details.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Erik Olson Fernández
(619) 309-7111 cell
contact@nuevosncc.net
http://nuevosncc.net/book.html

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erik Olson Fernández has many years of experience organizing for nonviolent social change as a Community Organizer and in the labor movement as an Organizer, Labor Representative, and Field Director with public education and health care unions.  Motivated by the experiences of growing up with a single mother from Mexico, he has a long commitment to economic and social justice through nonviolent resistance.  Like Gandhi, Erik has a law degree but has instead focused and devoted his life to organizing workers and community residents for justice.  He is currently working to create Nuevo SNCC, the modern equivalent of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a project that seeks to revive SNCC’s nonviolent legacy in the 1960s to challenge today’s human rights violations around the right to education.  Erik holds a Bachelor of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning from Miami University and a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law.  Erik is president of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity and a member of the California Council of Churches IMPACT Board of Directors.