Voting Better
Each summer our services are led by members and groups from First Parish, while our staff are on vacation. For the service following the two party conventions, Chris DiMeo asked me, Woody Kay, and Lois Fine to weigh in with our thoughts on how our UU faith influences our view of politics. We were asked not to be explicitly partisan and a disclaimer was added to our Welcome & Announcements explaining that while we welcome many voices to our pulpit, the views expressed are those of the speaker, not the congregation as a whole. That's actually going to be repeated each week until November, because the separation of church and state is important to us and there are often opportunities for people to speak whatever is in their hearts. It was an interesting exercise, figuring out how my UU values and my political values intersect. If you'd rather listen than read, or want to hear what the other speakers had to say, here is a link to the recording. This is what I ended up saying:
When I first started coming to First Parish, back in 2010, I attended the New UU class taught by Andrea Winslow and Cindy Kiburz. They taught me a lot-about Unitarian Universalism, about First Parish, about how the seven principles of the UUA can be the foundation of a faith. One of those principles is that we affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.
At some point, we talked about the process that First Parish had gone through in order to become a Welcoming Congregation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals. I asked if the process had been controversial and she said no, but that it had been a great opportunity for learning within this community. What did you learn, I asked. Cindy said that all her life, LGBT people have been part of every organization she’s been a part of, and she always thought that was fine. What I learned, she told me, is that it’s not fine, it’s better.
I thought a lot about that and it went together in my head with research showing that companies whose boards include women and minorities make objectively better decisions. Having more, different voices at the table isn’t fine, it isn’t just nice for them…it’s better.
Starting before I even came to First Parish, I’ve been working on examining my own privileges and raising my awareness of the racism and other forms of bigotry that are built into our society. As a white woman and a descendant of slave-owners, I know that I have personally benefitted from the labor of black workers while having advantages that their descendants have never enjoyed. I’ve never been turned down for a job, or had my honesty suspected, or feared the law, or had any trouble making my voice heard, simply because of the color of my skin.
Since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, in particular, the Black Lives Matter movement has made me aware of the need to follow--for white would-be allies to give precedence to the voices and leadership of people of color as we try to join and support their activism around the issues that most severely impact their lives. Current events have brought the work and words of black and other minority voices into greater prominence in my life and while it’s rarely easy reading, it has given me at least the sense that I am paying attention and that is better.
I have read Ta-nehisi Coates’ writing about the idea of reparations, of finding ways to compensate black citizens of our country for the damage that our ancestors inflicted on theirs, for the inequity that we have benefitted from, and the injustice that we have failed to remedy. And I read an intriguing proposal by Theodore R. Johnson, that we give each black voter 5/3 of a vote. I loved this proposal’s echo of one of the most damning compromises in the US Constitution: the decision to count slaves as 3/5 of a person when calculating state population.
Now, I can’t actually imagine this proposal ever being enacted, although I do find it amusing to think of all the people who would suddenly rush to claim African ancestry. But I do like the idea of handing over some of the unequal power that we white people have accrued and continue, all too often, to hoard.
Throughout the primary season, I have been reading posts by a Mexican-American writer named Gabriel Valdez. As state after state voted, Gabriel kept my eyes on how the candidates and their supporters treated black and Hispanic voters: who was actively courting their votes and including their priorities in campaign speeches and policy statements, who was encouraging voter turnout in communities of color, who was supporting the movements started and led by people from those communities-and who was not. These were issues that I had paid only scant attention to in previous election cycles.
And I began to think: maybe I could give them my vote. Now, like any good UU, as soon as I thought that, I began to question it. Wouldn’t that be patronizing? I wouldn’t actually be willing to vote for someone that I couldn’t support for my own reasons, right? And it’s not as if people of color all agree on a single candidate. And isn’t it also important for me to consider other issues-women’s reproductive freedom, for example-that may not align with the priorities of communities of color. And isn’t it awfully convenient that this occurs to me at a point when I think our interests do coincide.
But. But couldn’t it be a starting point for me, as a voter? Back in college I took a course called “Race and Ethnicity in Comparative Politics” by Cynthia Enloe. The main thesis of her class was that whenever we consider a situation, any situation, unless we ask the question “what role do race and ethnicity play” we will not have a real, comprehensive understanding of the situation.
So that’s the commitment that I am making, as a person of faith in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being: to ask, in this election cycle and in all those to come, “what role do race and ethnicity play?” Is there a greater understanding that I can gain by considering how the candidates treat the issues of importance to people of color and how they treat the voters from those communities? What are people of color saying about the candidates and is there a way that I can use my vote to lift up their voices? Because I think that by not only accepting, but amplifying those voices, our whole country will be, not just fine, but better.
When I first started coming to First Parish, back in 2010, I attended the New UU class taught by Andrea Winslow and Cindy Kiburz. They taught me a lot-about Unitarian Universalism, about First Parish, about how the seven principles of the UUA can be the foundation of a faith. One of those principles is that we affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.
At some point, we talked about the process that First Parish had gone through in order to become a Welcoming Congregation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals. I asked if the process had been controversial and she said no, but that it had been a great opportunity for learning within this community. What did you learn, I asked. Cindy said that all her life, LGBT people have been part of every organization she’s been a part of, and she always thought that was fine. What I learned, she told me, is that it’s not fine, it’s better.
I thought a lot about that and it went together in my head with research showing that companies whose boards include women and minorities make objectively better decisions. Having more, different voices at the table isn’t fine, it isn’t just nice for them…it’s better.
Starting before I even came to First Parish, I’ve been working on examining my own privileges and raising my awareness of the racism and other forms of bigotry that are built into our society. As a white woman and a descendant of slave-owners, I know that I have personally benefitted from the labor of black workers while having advantages that their descendants have never enjoyed. I’ve never been turned down for a job, or had my honesty suspected, or feared the law, or had any trouble making my voice heard, simply because of the color of my skin.
Since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, in particular, the Black Lives Matter movement has made me aware of the need to follow--for white would-be allies to give precedence to the voices and leadership of people of color as we try to join and support their activism around the issues that most severely impact their lives. Current events have brought the work and words of black and other minority voices into greater prominence in my life and while it’s rarely easy reading, it has given me at least the sense that I am paying attention and that is better.
I have read Ta-nehisi Coates’ writing about the idea of reparations, of finding ways to compensate black citizens of our country for the damage that our ancestors inflicted on theirs, for the inequity that we have benefitted from, and the injustice that we have failed to remedy. And I read an intriguing proposal by Theodore R. Johnson, that we give each black voter 5/3 of a vote. I loved this proposal’s echo of one of the most damning compromises in the US Constitution: the decision to count slaves as 3/5 of a person when calculating state population.
Now, I can’t actually imagine this proposal ever being enacted, although I do find it amusing to think of all the people who would suddenly rush to claim African ancestry. But I do like the idea of handing over some of the unequal power that we white people have accrued and continue, all too often, to hoard.
Throughout the primary season, I have been reading posts by a Mexican-American writer named Gabriel Valdez. As state after state voted, Gabriel kept my eyes on how the candidates and their supporters treated black and Hispanic voters: who was actively courting their votes and including their priorities in campaign speeches and policy statements, who was encouraging voter turnout in communities of color, who was supporting the movements started and led by people from those communities-and who was not. These were issues that I had paid only scant attention to in previous election cycles.
And I began to think: maybe I could give them my vote. Now, like any good UU, as soon as I thought that, I began to question it. Wouldn’t that be patronizing? I wouldn’t actually be willing to vote for someone that I couldn’t support for my own reasons, right? And it’s not as if people of color all agree on a single candidate. And isn’t it also important for me to consider other issues-women’s reproductive freedom, for example-that may not align with the priorities of communities of color. And isn’t it awfully convenient that this occurs to me at a point when I think our interests do coincide.
But. But couldn’t it be a starting point for me, as a voter? Back in college I took a course called “Race and Ethnicity in Comparative Politics” by Cynthia Enloe. The main thesis of her class was that whenever we consider a situation, any situation, unless we ask the question “what role do race and ethnicity play” we will not have a real, comprehensive understanding of the situation.
So that’s the commitment that I am making, as a person of faith in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being: to ask, in this election cycle and in all those to come, “what role do race and ethnicity play?” Is there a greater understanding that I can gain by considering how the candidates treat the issues of importance to people of color and how they treat the voters from those communities? What are people of color saying about the candidates and is there a way that I can use my vote to lift up their voices? Because I think that by not only accepting, but amplifying those voices, our whole country will be, not just fine, but better.