The Common Elements of Oppression

The Common Elements of Oppression

Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church

January 27 2013

Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

Two years ago, in 2011, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations Commission on Appraisal published a report called Belonging: The Meaning of Membership. In it, the authors addressed a real disparity between the ideal of pluralism vs. the reality of UU congregations.

Mark Harris, in his book A Faith for a Few, described the problem: “While our principles affirm that we would welcome someone who is very different from us, many members feel we should recruit among those who match the demographic characteristics of our current membership. New members should fit in or be like us in order for us to grow, and therefore there is little challenge to confront change”(Mark Harris, http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/hsr/A-Faith-For-A-Few.php ). So obviously Groucho never met a UU congregation!

Unitarians of the 1950s and 60s saw the need for diversity, and in theory their faith was open to all, a religion for one world, to quote Kenneth Patton. But Harris observes that “the one world they promoted looked very much like a replication of themselves, and what is most striking in our desire to be diverse today is that our multiracial and multicultural populations are usually the adopted children in our church schools, or the few adults among us who have the same education, income and values that everyone else does. Our yearning for diversity does not touch differences of class.”

Many of us UUs are familiar with the slightly paternalistic assumption that people of different classes, cultural groups and ethnic backgrounds would not be attracted by our rational, liberal faith. The consequence, Harris says, is that “our public expression of a democratic faith open to all, does not find practical application among us, and therefore ‘does not always match the Principles we espouse’.” (http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/hsr/A-Faith-For-A-Few.php )

Are we UUs deceiving ourselves when we say we want to appeal to a variety of people, not just the white professional demographic? More seriously, are we UUs responsible in part for the oppression of any number of marginal peoples in our world today, even as we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of each person?

Are we accountable to them because of our failings as people of faith? UU minister Wayne Arnason once addressed the UUA board on the issue of accountability, calling it a big theological issue. He spoke about a number of world faiths, including Christianity, that reject the idea of being accountable to anyone or anything but God – not secular authorities, only an authority which transcends this world.

He pointed out that Unitarian Universalism “does not require or covenant around a transcendent source of authority’…but “instead, as a covenantal religious community, we locate our accountability in this world, in our community of congregations, and in the values, principles, and traditions they represent.” (James Cone, “Theology’s Great Sin,” in Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, Nancy Palmer Jones, SoulWork, 16) And so when we acknowledge our failings, we do so by being accountable to each other.

Thus, Arnason recalls, “over and over throughout our history we have seen the struggles that have ensued when we called ourselves to account based on values we said that we held but denied in practice” (16). He is recalling our UU heritage of working for social justice in areas like emancipation and suffrage, while finding that our own faith movement was complicit in those forms of oppression.

Wayne Arnason took part in a landmark UU debate on racism, which was initiated by a 3-day conference in 2001 attended by scholars, educators, ministers, theologians, and activists. The book Soul Work came out of that conference, and its authors tried to explore why there had been such resistance to seeing racism as a profound problem for religion.

Now you may be ready to say, Hold on, I have not been complicit in oppressing people of a different class or ethnicity or gender or sexuality. I don’t need to be involved in this Welcoming Congregation program, because I have no issue with LGBT people coming to our church, or becoming members.

The continuum from hatred to hostility to tolerance to acceptance to love is a broad one, and the point of the Welcoming Congregation program, like the point of that anti-racism conference 11 years ago, is to say, tolerance is not enough; even acceptance is not enough. If we as Unitarian Universalists say that love is the doctrine of this church, then we have to continue to work until that is the reality.

Oppression in the United States is alive and well, and the author Suzanne Pharr has given us a picture of how oppression is systematic and organized so as to keep power in the hands of a dominant few (from Homophobia: a Weapon of Sexism, 1988). The ‘isms’ of oppression that she identifies – sexism, racism, classism, ageism, to name a few – originate in the ‘defined norm’ of our American society.

What is the image of the defined norm? Basically, male, Caucasian, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, youthful, wealthy and well-resourced. Pharr is not saying that this is a majority of Americans, only that this is the type of person in our society who has the ability to assert control over others.

Pharr says that the way the defined norms are kept in place is through: the power of institutions, economic power, and the threat of violence from either individuals or institutions.

Just two examples of institutional status quo are the government – the lack of representation from minorities such as women – and the penal system – the excess of representation of minorities in the prison population.

As far as economic power goes, Pharr refers us to the ‘myth of scarcity,’ which pits us against each other because we are scared of losing the few resources we have or have control over – for instance, the poor use too much of our already limited resources. Just think about the myth of scarcity as it operates in the immigration issue: immigrants take our jobs, lower the standards of our schools, destroy our neighborhoods and lower our property value.

And then think about how economic oppression keeps most of us from becoming involved in the democratic process – should we wish to run for office, the cost is prohibitive, except for wealthy citizens.

Pharr claims that, in order to maintain the status quo, the tools of oppression wielded by those in power include the following three tactics:

First, the threat of violence – historically a very effective tool! Remember the decimation of Native Americans in the westward expansion of this country?

Closer to our own contemporary experience of patriarchy and heterosexual dominance, two examples are domestic violence, which statistics show continues to occur to unacceptable levels; and the terrible epidemic of sexual assaults on female members of the US military. And the gay population has had its share of martyrs, from Harvey Milk to Matthew Shepard, whose threat to the dominant norms of sexuality was dealt with through tragic acts of murder.

The second tool of oppression is the use of labels of exclusion, like ‘the Other’ – those who in someway are lacking in comparison to the norm; those who are seen as abnormal, deviant, inferior, and those who are not seen or invisible. ‘A Day without a Mexican’ is a film I show to my class in Intercultural Communication – it was made in 2004 as a satire. What would happen to California if all the Mexicans – who do all the invisible work of building houses, picking crops, caring for children – were to vanish suddenly? The film ends with the collective confession by the Anglo population that they had indeed treated Mexicans as invisible.

And a third tool of oppression is tokenism…those minority members who are ‘on show’ as a refutation of discrimination, and who find themselves in a double bind, as in the 1950s, when blacks in authority positions in government and law enforcement had to face hostility and isolation from both their cultural community and the Caucasian majority in which they worked.

These and other tactics of oppression divide and conquer – they focus on individual achievement, and thus keep groups from effectively organizing.

And so, because we have joined together and exist as an organization within a structural status quo, we cannot help but be affected by our perceptions, assumptions, and expectations of the defined norm - remember that Mark Harris described our desire to be diverse, sitting awkwardly alongside our preference for people who will ‘fit in’ with our membership demographics.

How will we revitalize our commitment to diversity? We need to stop cooperating with the perpetuation of oppression and instead witness to a larger good. We are called by our covenant with each other to live up to the seven principles that we affirm and promote so as to make this a better and more just world. We are challenged to stand on the side of love.

We here at AUUC are on the journey to becoming a Welcoming Congregation. Just being aware of the pervasive nature of structural oppression is another step we can take on that journey. But once we are aware, what do we do? Theologian Rebecca Parker also took part in the anti-racism discussion described in the book SoulWork. She suggests that we express our feelings. Yes, that suggestion may send chills down the intellectualized UU – and we are legion!

But Parker points out that we may become anesthetized and numbed to our feelings about the various oppressions that we are immersed in. The status quo, the social structures in which we live, may cause us to suppress our feelings without really knowing it; Parker calls this the “social construction of heartlessness”. Feelings, Parker says, are as important as thinking about racism and its consequences, sexism and its consequences, classism, ageism and all the other isms.

That is why I close today by asking you to reflect on the two short quotations I’ve used in this service: the first, from the Letter of Paul to the Romans, is written at the top of the Order of Service. It echoes Rebecca Parker’s desire for us to feel: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.”

The second, the meditation from Rumi’s poem “Say Yes Quickly,” recalls the responsibility each of us has, through our bond of covenant, to be faithful to each other:

“If you are here unfaithfully with us,


you’re causing terrible damage.


If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,


you’re helping people you don’t know


and have never seen.”

May we be the ones who make it so, Blessed be, Amen.

Gaye W. Ortiz

January 2013