Dismantling the disgrace of racism

DisGrace conference challenges PC(USA) to confront privilege, injustice

by Gail Strange and Gregg Brekke | Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE – More than 400 individuals from throughout the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) gathered for the DisGrace conference at the Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina to address the issues of embedded and structural racism in the church and culture with the hopes of moving from disgrace toward solidarity.

The diverse group of conference attendees included PC(USA) Co-Moderator the Rev. Denise Anderson, former Moderators Heath Rada and the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, executive presbyters, pastors, national church staff and church members. Attendees took a deep dive into conversations to examine the causes of divisions between people and communities, unaddressed discomforts and hidden histories of racism.

The keynote speaker for the event was Melissa Harris-Perry, the newly named editor-at-large for ELLE.com and the Maya Angelou Chair at Wake Forest University. Harris is the executive director of the Pro Humanitate Institute and founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center on gender, race, and politics in the South.

To begin the difficult conversation of race and racism, the conference opened with two sessions, one for whites and one for people of color. A session titled “White Fragility” was led by J. C. Austin, vice president for Christian leadership formation at Auburn Theological Seminary, addressed church leaders’ and congregations’ struggle of how to engage the systemic issues of racial injustice and the strong resistance of many whites to the notion that they are the benefactors of and participants in racially unjust social systems. He asserted this resistance has become so prevalent across this country that it has acquired the name white fragility.

The second session, “Not my People: Exploring the ways internalized racism makes solidarity difficult,” was led by Jessica Vazquez Torres, an anti-racism, anti-oppression and cultural competency workshop leader. This session, exclusively for people of color, not only offered individuals the opportunity to explore the unique and distinctive ways of internalizing racism, “but also the ways in which overcoming our collective internalization can help us build solidarity across people of color groups; a solidarity that is restorative for people of color and challenges white supremacy.”

“I was impressed with all of the speakers as well as the panelists,” said Vince Patton, Manager of Diversity and Reconciliation for the Presbyterian Mission Agency. “After hearing Melissa Harris Perry’s presentation and Bruce Reyes-Chow, Jessica Vazquez Torres and Denise Anderson in a panel discussion, it occurred to me how radically different we may need to be church.”

Patton continued, saying, “After Melissa Harris Perry’s presentation, Richard DuBose asked her how the PC(USA) should attempt to try to become more racial ethnically diverse given the fact that the PC(USA) was 91 percent white. She turned and asked, ‘Where do you [the PC(USA)] want to go?’ DuBose said, ‘Presbyterians are quiet and white.’ After a couple of minutes, she replied, ‘The whole denomination can join a collective effort that could attract people of color. The PC(USA) could be about more than just the PC(USA). The church can join other spaces.’ She implored us to do more by ultimately asking, ‘What do you stand for?’”

Patton led a workshop titled “Living Out the Belhar Confession and Becoming a Fully Inclusive Church” as a part of the conference.

When asked about the ways white privilege was addressed at the conference, Chip Hardwick, Director of Theology, Worship and Formation, for the PMA said, “White privilege was a central theme throughout the conference. One particularly powerful moment came when Dr. Anthea Butler said that she was weary of having to explain to white people why our actions often hurt people of color. Not only does society give lots of advantages to white people that people of color do not receive, we whites often then expect people of color to relive the pain the lack of advantages cause them by explaining to us where we have gone wrong. While my colleagues at the PMA have explained this to me before, it hit me over the head like a lightning bolt this time around.”

Hardwick said a challenge posed by Butler was asking white attendees why they would continue to attend a church that hasn’t mentioned the Black Lives Matters movement over the past two years. The importance of addressing structural racism, she said, lies with whites choosing to engage the movement rather than ignore it because they feel it doesn’t affect them.

“The call of the Gospel, however, is to open our eyes to the destructive power of structural racism and to work against it,” Hardwick said. “I spoke with one white man of retirement age who had never thought this through before attending the conference; he spent most of our conversation processing what he could do to make progress against this type of racism, where everyone is nice and is a good person, and yet the structures of society devalue people of color.”

What will it take for the church to change this trend? Hardwick believes it rests in a majority of the church addressing the disgrace of racism to hear how it can be more inclusive and learn new ways of being.

“The call to action that is important to me is for me to do the hard work of understanding white privilege better, and then using the opportunities I have to help explain the advantages we receive, simply from being white, that other people of color do not receive,” he said. “Rather than expecting people of color to carry this freight for me, and thereby burdening them again, I want to learn how to be the best ally I can be.”

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