I am not personally offended when someone says being white in America makes me a white racist. That is true. I am offended, however, if someone says that is all I am. That is not true. I am both a racist and an antiracist, and, as an antiracist, strongly committed to the elimination of racism. - Robert Terry

When I was a child growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, on many Christmases my family would take the food our church had collected to the Jane Hull House in downtown Chicago. These were in the days before the Eisenhower Expressway was complete, the massive interstate that connects Chicago and the western suburbs. Our only alternatives were the three or four streets that ran through my village and ended at Lake Michigan - Division Street is the way we usually went.

I remember the first time we made the Hull House trip. About 20 minutes into Chicago, the neighborhoods began to change. The people on the streets and in their cars didn't look like the people in Oak Park - Puerto Ricans and African-Americans mostly. We were all very quiet - my brother, mother, father and I, we just starred out the windows. Then my dad broke the silence: "Did everyone remember to lock their doors?" He didn't need to say anymore. He never named names, he said nothing derogatory, he made no generalizations - and we didn't ask for clarification because his tone of voice said it all. And the message was quite clear - I just had to look out the window to understand, or least understand as best as an eight year-old might understand. Of course he wanted us to be safe. I'm sure he had our best interests in mind. And it was just one of the first of many racist messages I grew up with, stepping stones affirming prejudice and privilege.

It was the 1960's. Oak Park was a white enclave surrounded by communities where redlining, panic-peddling and civil rights disturbances had already erupted and shaken the status quo. Oak Parkers lived in a delirious and unfounded fear of race riots - something so far from reality that even then I had a hard time making sense of it. What my family didn't want to talk about on car trips or around the dinner table was read in the paper, seen on the television, talked about at school. It was all happening right before us - in the hometown of Frank Lloyd Wright, the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway who had described it as a village of "wide lawns and narrow minds" - I can now see that the times were a'changing though not without a hard fight from those who felt their power and privilege being threatened.

25 years later, I was driving my family to Howard University where they were going to drop me off at a meeting so they could use our one car. As I turned off route 50 onto Florida and then over to Georgia Avenue, I hit the power locks button. "Who did that?" my daughter asked me. I did, I told her. "Why did you lock the doors? Is something going to happen?" she wanted to know. I was just concerned for their safety, I told myself. And what was the message I was sending to them? I quickly changed the subject not really sure what to say. Evidently the silent and demonstrated lessons of my childhood weren't easily forgotten, but burned deep into my psyche and emerging without much thought. My racism will only be excorsized with a lot of struggle.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying: there are still many neighborhoods where I lock my car doors. As I said, my father had our best interests at heart, I had my family's safety in mind. But it was the silence that was damaging. Children hear the words, look around, and draw their own conclusions, conclusions that can last a lifetime.

My children grew up in a very different environment than I did. Both of them attended Georgetown East, Annapolis Middle School and Annapolis Senior High, public schools with a lot of diversity, where the majority of their classmates were children and youth of color, settings that I never knew until I was 22, in New York City. When they went off to college in Ohio, they both complained about the monotony of color in the student body - "It's really boring" were their exact words, said 4 years apart. In spite of some of the things I've said in their company, I like to think that there's still hope for them. And there's still hope for me. I may be white, but I can also an anti-racist.

These are just a few of the memories and thoughts that surfaced last August during a four day workshop that I attended with 30 other Unitarian Universalists, including from our congregation Fran Ateto, Sue Taylor and Evelyn Spurgin. We all had memories and actions we had to claim. We all wrestled with associations, history, experiences and words that we weren't always comfortable with. In fact, I think I can speak for us all saying that we there were moments when we were among the comfortable who were being afflicted!

One of the revelations I left that long weekend with was something I'd read before but never fully understood. Race is an arbitrary and false social construct and distinction. Freely we talk about "the races" - we read about it, we hear others speak about it. But there is only one race - the human race. Within the human race there are people of different color, different genders and sexual orientations, people from different nations, but its all the human race. The very idea of there being races was invented during the time of European expansion, colonization and domination - I mean, how much easier to oppress a people when it's believed that they are of a different race, that they are not the same as you.

Racism, then, is the result of this deceptive and error-filled means of categorization. Racism is color prejudice and the misuse of institutional power. Let me unpack this. We all have prejudice, we all prejudge, it's a part of living. I'm prejudice toward warm, sunny, Sundays, blue skies and soft breezes; I'm prejudice toward Unitarian Universalists, from Maryland, and from Annapolis. Some do their prejudging of people based on the color of skin, facial characteristics and accent. In and of itself, this may not be all that bad. But racism is more than color prejudice, its prejudice enforced by power, by institutional power, as in the institutions which make the rules that determine whose in charge.

This racism is expressed at three levels. First individually, and perhaps its individual racism that is the least effective in a wide-ranging way, individual racism often has very little impact on society as a whole. As I've said, my own color or ethnic prejudices don't carry much weight all by themselves. But, when coupled with the second level, institutional racism, then it's felt much more. Racism at this level is power over, its when the rules and privileges are set in our institutions and closed to people of color, which is to say that institutional racism makes a big difference. But not the difference that cultural racism can make: cultural racism is when people's lives are shaped by color prejudice, the very way they think about themselves has been determined by distortions, discountings, and discredits as seen in our language and expressions, images and stories, history and heroes.

When I first heard this definition of racism and all of the pieces and levels, I've got to admit that I could agree that I have lots of prejudices, I prejudge all the time and often I prejudge by the use of skin color. But power? Me having power, authority and control? Yea, right! I don't have any power, I've told myself. So I have to admit to you that I now understand that I have quite a bit of power and a great deal of it is simply in the fact that I am white: our society has been created by white people for white people and whether I want it or not I am a beneficiary of all those years of white control and power. This is a privilege I don't even think about - it just is. This is the privilege Donna Shaper speaks about when she suggests we decolorize our language by substituting the word "privilege" for "white." Let me share some examples of what she means:

• As a white person (a person with privilege), I can find positive role models on TV, in the paper, and celebrated as heroes in most of our national holidays.
• I can attend college or seminary and find most professors look like me and talk like me, and most of the curriculum reflects my European and American culture, history and background.
• As a privileged person, I can shop in stores and never think about being followed by a security guard on suspicion that I might be shoplifting.
• I can shop for a house without having to worry that the Realtor might not show me all available houses in my price range and I don't have to wonder if my home loan will be determined by my skin color.
• As a white person, no one thinks I got my job because of quotas or affirmative action.
• As a privileged person, I don't have to think about color being an issue.
• As a person with privilege, I can choose whether or not to make racism an issue without fear of recriminations.

These are just some of the assumptions I can make, assumptions of white privilege, assumptions I take for granted and never think about, assumptions that many, if not most, people of color cannot take for granted. This then, is part of the racist legacy I inherit as a white person, an inheritance I use everyday. All of these and more are in the backpack of white privilege that I carry wherever I go choosing when and where to use its contents. A lot of what I have and assume has been built on the back of racism, of prejudice and power, in ways that I'm still learning about. And it helps, as I recently did, to take my backpack off and unpack it, looking at and naming the contents, examining each piece of prejudice, privilege and power that have shaped my life.

As I've done this work, there have been feelings of guilt and shame, an almost overwhelming desire for forgiveness and redemption. These are real and important. And, it seems to me, that if the path I choose to follow is the one of individual reformation and change, one of personal atonement and introspection, then the likelihood is I will journey down a road from which many have never returned because the path of private reconciliation around issues of white privilege and racism is one full of detours and distractions, and I am not convinced that this is the way toward institutional and cultural change. As a Unitarian Universalist, I could share with you many, many stories about the roads not taken, decisions made and directions followed by our Association, congregations and ministers that led no where. Each time, over decades and decades of promises and plans, the results has been the same - Unitarian Universalists congratulate themselves and pat each other on the back for their analysis which leads to paralysis and the result is that privilege and racism flourish untouched and without further examination. As far as I can tell, this is the way it has been for two centuries of liberal religion.

Jonathon Kozol, author of numerous books about social issues, addressed an audience with words that just as easily could have been delivered at any UU General Assembly in the last 30 years:

What I want is for this congregation to stand on the bridge of anti-racism, now and here. It begins with acknowledging the prejudice and privilege that almost all of us carry in our packbacks and then choosing to be silent no more. We can begin here, in this church; we can begin in discussion with each other (literally in discussion starting this afternoon at 12:30 and then again on Tuesday at 7:30 - we're even giving you a free book as a reference and to help shape the discussions!). We can begin to look at the assumptions we make, and then slowly and steadfastly we might be able transform this institution and its culture. I'm not talking about becoming "more colorful," that's not our purpose. I'm talking about challenging and transforming the structures, attitudes and power of this institution into one that is clearly, intentional and demonstrably anti-racist.

Why us? Why now? As Bell Hooks suggests (in the reading from her book Killing Rage: Ending Racism), its all about a vision. The faith community called the church has always had a vision. The Unitarian Universalist vision is one of life in community as it could be, a community built on our seven Principles. Hooks refers to the "Beloved Community," which is a phrased used in many congregations, in many UU congregations. In Christian circles, you've probably heard people refer to the Kingdom of God or the Reign of God, which is that time, usually after life as we know it, when there will be equality, wholeness and meaning for all people. In Unitarian Universalism, it's not that we don't believe in an afterlife, but our focus has always been on this life. The Beloved Community is what life could be like, right now, right here - not in some hereafter.

When we stand on the bridge of anti-racism and intentionally name the demon of racism, we are acknowledging that we will be committed to making the Beloved Community a reality and that it will only happen because we are committed and are willing to do the hard work that anti-racism demands.

This was the vision that took me into the ministry, into the Unitarian Universalist Church. I have heard your stories and visions too. I know it is something that we share, it is a promise that inspires us all. The Beloved Community - it is our journey toward wholeness. Let us walk the path together.