Rev. Diane Rollert
28 February 2021
Years ago, I was trained to be a facilitator for a program called Who Are Our Neighbours?, a series of workshops that take a developmental approach to intercultural sensitivity. A number of UU ministers across the continent were trained in this methodology. Our job was to train other ministers, which I did across Canada.
One of the things I liked about the Who Are Our Neighbours? program was the collection of interactive activities that helped us teach the program’s concepts. One of these activities was called Hand-Slap, a dramatization of the experience of microaggressions. We were encouraged to adapt the script to fit our own local situation.
Here’s how it worked. I would ask several participants in my workshops to act out the roles in a simple story. A person of colour comes to visit a UU church and experiences a series of microaggressions. Each experience is like a tiny slap on the hand. No big deal, right? Except by the end of the day, the visitor’s hand and psyche are in terrible pain because of the accumulative damage. Death of a soul by a thousand slaps.
In my script, a visitor (who I named Shakina Mustafa) comes into the church and is immediately welcomed by a greeter who insists that she was here the week before. “No,” says Shakina, “this is my first time.” But the greeter continues to insist she was here last week. In coffee hour, Shakina is asked repeatedly where she’s from. “From the neighbourhood,” she says. “But where are you really from?” “I was born in Ottawa,” she says. “Well, where are your parents from?” “Toronto,” she answers. “Really?”
Later, someone asks her out of the blue to carry a tray of glasses into the kitchen. And so it continues. By the end of the day, when the minister asks Shakina how she enjoyed her visit, she responds angrily that this is the most unconsciously racist place she’s ever been and she’s never coming back. I’d written the script eight years ago, based on actual incidents I’d witnessed in this congregation. The character of Shakina represented an amalgam of several Black, Indigenous and People of Colour who had come to visit over the years. The sad thing is that I never shared the script with you here, even though other congregations have used it.
For each incident I had witnessed or been told about, I had an excuse. The person who had been rude couldn’t help it. I knew their backstory. They were awkward, they were dealing with an illness, they came from a different generation or country and hadn’t learned the new vocabulary, they had good intentions.
But in the end, the impact was the same. A person of colour could walk into our building on any given day and experience a microaggression heaped on top of a lifetime of microaggressions. One more slap added to a thousand tiny slaps that becomes a giant wound — all this in our sanctuary, a place that’s supposed to be a safe spiritual oasis.
I didn’t share my script because I didn’t want to shame, embarrass or hurt members of this community. My compassion — our compassion — for “our” people is the very thing that creates an environment where microaggressions are never addressed. And then we wonder why our communities aren’t more diverse.
Fast-forward to this year, to an incident that happened during the Beloved Conversations program. As I’ve explained already, there were about 1200 people in the program, split into two identity groups, one for white people and one for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. In addition to self-directed study and gatherings in small learning pods, we participated in larger gatherings called Meaning Making session, which brought everyone together for worship and presentations. On Zoom, of course. During the first Meaning Making session for white laypeople, two participants wrote some rude comments into the public chat. I wasn’t there, but I guess it was something like “This is a waste of time.” No big deal, right? We get complaints from people all the time. So what? But the BIPOC designers of the Beloved Conversations program said to the white designers, “We can’t just let this go. This is a teaching moment.”
The response was a video conversation made by the white designers for the white participants. They invited us to consider the damage that’s done when we don’t respond as a community to these kinds of hurts. They asked us to consider the culture of white supremacy that encourages us to approach our experiences as consumers rather than as beloved members of a learning community. A member of my learning pod was especially bothered by the program leaders’ response. He gave me permission to share this story. He felt the whole thing was an overreaction. He felt that a little more compassion was in order.
His comments really churned me up. The way I saw it, the response was exactly what we needed to hear: that this was the kind of thing that our BIPOC members and visitors experience in our mostly white congregations all the time. Whether intentional or not, racist things are said or done in our communities and we remain silent.
Here’s what I wrote back in December:
My friend asks, “Haven’t we set the bar too high? What’s the big deal if two gruff voices complain in a sea of more than a thousand. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they’re struggling with their mental health.” His questioning hangs in the air around me for days. I can’t seem to brush it away. We come back to it again, because we’re talking about race, because we’re talking about the water we’re swimming in that we never see. “What’s wrong with this water? I’ve been drinking it for years,” I joke. “Who knew it was toxic?” But we’re talking about the mirror that’s being held up for us to see our own faces, our own actions, our explicit and implicit tolerance of what is fundamentally wrong. What does it matter, if a single person— who we know and love— is just maladroit, says something, does something, that hurts? What does it matter if our people demand that we perform, that we deliver the goods on Sunday morning, to keep us all entertained? It matters. It matters to me. What if we imagine another way of being? Beloved community that says, I am curious about you, that says, I am willing to follow your lead, that says, I am willing to speak up before the wounds are inflicted, that says, the bar has been set too low. Let’s raise it.
I’m still working on how to publicly respond to what I witness. How do I model accountability and loving kindness? What I’m learning is that ignoring elephants in the room, or sweeping too many things under the carpet, only creates a dangerous obstacle course. Dismantling racism begins by removing one obstacle at a time, beginning with our own internal baggage — and yes, I did mean to mix all those metaphors.
These days there’s a toxic accusation that any progressive move toward racial justice is “cancel culture.” I’m not talking about self-righteously pointing out each other’s mistakes and looking for scapegoats to throw out of the community. Recognizing the effects of microaggression is not about cancelling others, it’s about lifting up everyone’s humanity.
We have stuff to work through. Our responsibility is to make a commitment to work through it together, to start within our own identity groups, to be each other’s sounding board. I’m asking you to help me raise the bar. To quote African American poet Dr. Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”