Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

For three Sundays at 9 a.m. (our Heart and Soul class ) this fall, Pam Oliver is leading a discussion about race.

The following documents were handed out in last week’s Heart and Soul class at 9 a.m.

Why is it so hard to talk about race?

Orchard Ridge UCC members respond to survey on race

Handout on Models of Action

Hand out on Inter Group Conflicts

These handouts include list of bullet points about why it is hard to talk about race. Two are handouts used last week to think about the problems of race.  There is also a summary of survey results from within the congregation.

Pam writes, “The most important thing I would call to people’s attention in the survey is the diversity of opinions even within what seems like a pretty homogeneous place like ORUCC. The top topics to discuss were why is it hard to talk about race, and what’s going on locally.

In the first workshop, what I tried to stress is that our attitudes are a product of the social system we live in, so if we live in a system structured by race, it is virtually impossible to avoid having attitudes that reflect that hierarchy… Just as we cannot avoid the law of gravity, we cannot avoid the consequences of the founding of this nation in genocide of the Native Americans and African slavery and the decades of discrimination that followed, such as federal housing programs that actively promoted racial segregation through the 1960s. As an analogy, I said: “If your ancestors cut down all the trees, you don’t live in a forest. It’s not your fault, but you still don’t live in a forest.”

I also argued that although it is virtually impossible for one person to change society, social systems can and do get changed by the collective action of lots of people, and that changes in the social system tend to lead to changes in the attitudes. The point of this is that beating up on ourselves or others for attitudes of bias, or prejudice, or hostility is missing the point that these are products of the society we live in. I talked a bit about the idea of “aversive racism,” the well-identified phenomenon in which people avoid people of other groups for fear of unpleasant interactions. I stressed that it is hard to talk about race because it hurts, because it makes us feel bad, because we often don’t want to hear what others want to tell us or are uncomfortable realizing that others disagree with us.

On November 2nd, I’m going to ask people to raise upsetting experiences and issues in Madison/Dane County and see if we can talk about them realistically and eyes open but in a way that gets beyond a discourse that blames all the problems on minorities.

This could include problems on Hammersley Road; it could school troubles and difficult interactions. These are examples of Black people acting in ways that are upsetting to White people, including children.  We will try to talk through how we can be honest about what we see and our reactions to it, at the same time hearing what some other perspectives are on the situations… We are not going to cure racism or even racial tensions in Dane County in 40 minutes. My own view is that we cannot move forward if we are not willing to sit with and own the pain of the social structures we have inherited.

Pray for me and for all us!”