That time that Martin Marty didn’t tell the truth
Let me begin by being clear: I am not saying that Marty Martin lied. My point is simply that he refrained from telling the truth.
The power of naming things is well-entwined in the stories of human history. After all, in the beginning was the Word. Naming harm that has been done is an especially important part of healing and reconciliation. So, how does Marty observe Unitarian Universalism and our recent conflicts and recoilings for five paragraphs and never once mention racism or white supremacy?
This article names the problem with clarity.
Those are the concerns and their precise names. Was Marty uncertain that’s what UUs of color were talking about? Marty tells the liberal religious world, “that “the joke’s on us” if we don’t learn[,]” which as a beginning is all right, but not very seriously held if Marty can’t name what we’re learning about.
In fact, inattentive white liberalism thrives precisely in not naming the harm that it does or the damage it carries. And there is another layer of how this learned lack of specificity creates a problem. It is a function of colonization to deconstruct the lived experience of colonized peoples such that it cannot even be named.
Walter Mignolo puts it this way,
“ Aesthesis is a Greek word, as we know, it refers to senses, sensibility. There is a common sensibility among many people around the globe. The sensibility that comes from the experience of coloniality, that is, of being considered less or deficient human beings. Who consider them/as such? The One who control discourse and has the authority to define the human.”
A nod to the unmentionable problems that Unitarian Universalists are having with, “those people” is not enough. I don’t in any way speak for a plurality of people of color, but I will not be defined by colonial distaste that borders on gaslighting, an intentional retelling of the truth to make one doubt one’s own account. Marty does take a moment to mention, “racial policies,” which doesn’t seem to relate to the actual problem. The actual problem with racism and white supremacy is that having white skin has become a default requirement for hiring, at times, in the Association and is a quality that seems to substitute for other measurable and harder-to-measure qualifications in applicants.
Just because some white people feel distraught and insecure in dealing with this doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Insofar as not naming a problem is erasing it, conscientious naming is the beginning of the journey toward reconciliation.
I imagine that there will be many other instances in which Marty will have opportunities to tell the truth, even if he missed this one. We Unitarian Universalists are learning what it means to root out and heal unexamined preferences for whiteness; we do indeed invite the world to join us.
