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Friends United Meeting |
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January 1998
Clinton's Challenge
by Johan Maurer
Believe it or not, it is possible to eat in the White House without being a major campaign contributor. With 110 other members of the U.S. religious community, I attended an ecumenical breakfast on racial concerns with President Clinton and Vice President Gore one morning last November.
If I had breakfasts like this one every day, I would not get much other work done! We started at 8:30 and didn't finish until lunchtime. The food was nice. I've never had a three-course breakfast before, unless you count repeated trips to the buffet at Shoney's. But the main content of the morning was President Clinton's challenge to Americans to hold a deeper national conversation on racial diversity, and his request that churches play an important role in this conversation.
Clinton opened by making two points. For one thing, major social changes are underway. "Today, Hawaii is the only state in which no racial group is in a majority. But within a few years, [in] our largest state, California...Americans of European descent will not be in the majority there. Within probably 50 years, but perhaps sooner, there will be no single racial group in a majority in the entire United States."
The other point was spiritual: "If you look back over the entire history of America, we started with a Constitution that we couldn't live up to-just like none of us live up perfectly to the holy scriptures that we profess to believe in. And our whole life as a nation has been an effort punctuated by crisis after crisis after crisis to move our collective life closer to what we said we believed in over 200 years ago. And that kind of change always requires spiritual depth, spiritual resources, spiritual conviction."
Friends can add to those resources. However, we American Friends tend to vacillate between flagellating ourselves over our low level of diversity and congratulating ourselves over our progressive history. We need to make some new, more creative contributions to the discussion-and if some of our meetings are already doing so, the rest of us need to hear about it.
The issue is close to my heart because of my own history. Racism indirectly killed my sister Ellen, who began running away from home into increasingly dangerous situations because my parents couldn't abide her having a black friend. After I became a Christian and joined Friends in the mid-seventies, I spent a summer with Voice of Calvary's ministries in Mendenhall, Mississippi. One of their leaders confronted me with this blunt question: "After the Civil War, you could have had lots of us black people in your church. Why didn't it happen?"
Good question. Part of Friends' response to Clinton's challenge will involve healing the racism within Friends and becoming more accessible across all social lines-class lines as well as race.
We also need to beware of talking to each other as if we were entirely uniform racially, marginalizing those Friends who are not of the majority background. And few members of a minority group appreciate being asked to be constant experts on racial concerns or convenient spokespersons for their whole group.
On the larger scene, my experiences in Mississippi gave me my first experience of the most important resource we Friends have in contributing to a healthier racial climate: the unity of believers in Christ. That summer of prayer, Bible study, daily hard work together, blunt confrontations, tears of frustration and joy, all lifted racial dilemmas from theory to life, and gave me a taste of the potential universality of the household of faith. I'm hungry for more-within our meetings, within our ecumenical communities, in our towns, and (sadly, too late for my sister) in our own families.
We are eager to know what Friends are doing to meet Clinton's challenge.
Please write!
Johan Maurer is editor of Quaker Life and general secretary of Friends United Meeting.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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