Editorial Reflections

Multi-racial ties invite unity in action

Having lived six months in a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-gender, multi-lingual, multi-age, multi-political, multi-struggle, multi-Christian community, I carry the impact of those conversations and challenges in my everyday life. We lived together at the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Institute in a Swiss chateau near Geneva. Then we dispersed after sharing meals, worship, Bible studies, studies, discussions, dialogue, informal interactions together as a community.

We acknowledged and respected our different experiences of oppression, hate, abuse, exclusion—sharing the trauma and impact, not quantifying whose experience was worse but validating each other despite our differences. We need to be cautious when statistics are used as a means of excluding, alienating, invalidating suffering to divide people.

Together and in solidarity, we emerged opposing racism, oppression, nationalism and hate.

When I listen to people of different races and cultures in the U.S. multicultural society struggling for power and using histories of colonialism, oppression or racism to quantify whose experience was worse, I'm sad when we do not hear the common impact of those experiences across the differences. When I heard about the Supreme Court's ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act that we won in the Civil Rights movement, I was sad but motivated to work with the NAACP and others restore what has been lost.

The NAACP brings interracial power to overcome struggles that divide us—people working together beyond the tone of their skin. As the NAACP said, "The Supreme Court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy." I might add that it betrays not only all workers but all in the middle class. Whose rights will be next?

We need to be in solidarity with all those who experience hate, oppression and exclusion. Part of dismantling racism is to unite, as we did in the Civil Rights movement, across all our multiple differences. Gutting voting rights for Blacks guts democracy and any chance of economic equality and justice.

When the NAACP says they are fighting an assault on their freedoms, it affects everyone. As German theologian Martin Niemoller said they first came for the Jews, the Roma, the disabled and then political dissidents.

As we remain divided and diverted by political theater, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. Though we may differ, your pain is my pain. We must not allow ourselves to be put down as "weak" as we embody traits of faith that empower us to unite—empathy, mercy, humility, love, truth telling and truth listening.

I learned living day-to-day in that diverse setting that people can and do understand and empathize, so we can stand in solidarity against evil, oppression and lies. We need step out of our silos to risk trusting each other.

We are all part of the family of God—across all our faiths, spiritualities and value systems. We cannot let our different understandings of and experiences of any form of discrimination divide us.

We must unite to restore voting rights to enfranchise all people. The fight for racial, social and economic justice and the fight for democracy are connected.

Mary Stamp - Editor