Our denomination has been called to comment on and engage in a "Holy Conversation on Race" during these weeks following Pentecost. Our Florida UCC Conference Minister, Kent Siladi, has posted on his blog (click on the Progressive Revelation link to visit and read it) an excerpt from an article on Race and White Privilege.
During our cluster's clergy fellowship meeting this week, we discussed how it seems that in some of our congregations it's easier to address and resolve issues concerning ONA and LGBT than issues of race. We also reminded each other that race, fundamentalism, and even denominationalism are quite modern constructs which didn't exist as we know them more than a couple hundred years ago. They, as are so many other sociological concepts, products of our post-enlightment culture.
Several members of our congregation have connected with one or another of the projects seeking to map matrilineal, or mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) which is that part of the genetic code of every living person which lives in the nuclei of the cells of our bodies and which we get only from our mothers. mDNA is passed mother to child, and can be passed generationally only from mother to daughter. This means that women who had no children or who had only sons who survived to puberty to reproduce did not pass on their mDNA. This also means that women who abort their female fetuses or kill their female infants fail to pass on their mDNA.
In the larger picture, this means that every person now living is descended from a single female ancestor, dubbed "mitochondrial/matrilineal Eve." mEve lived in east Africa between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago and all of us trace our ancestry to her through six (or seven) of her daughters whose children migrated out of east Africa and eventually populated the planet, replacing other inhabitants with whom they were genetically incompatible.
As these migrants moved and settled in various places, they developed secondary characteristics which we now see in variations principally in skin color/texture, hair, stature, and facial and other bone structure characteristics. However, we have to realize that, as scientific studies have shown, interbreeding has been so extensive that "racial purity" has always been nothing more than a myth. War and conquest with their consequent rape, enslavement, and seduction, not to mention commerce and trade and intermarriage between peoples have served to thoroughly blend the genetic heritage of Earth's population.
The genetic code we receive from our parents helps shape our physical appearance and provides the large part of our personal predispositions to behavior, health, and taste. And our environment provides the rest, shaping our rhythms, associations, language, ethnicity, and familial norms. Who and what we believe ourselves to be is a greater factor in how we live and behave than some set of arbitrary categorizations based on those secondary physical characteristics.
Lots of people eat "grits and greens." Lots of folks enjoy "rap and rhythm" or the classics. Others order their lives according to sexual identity. And how this gets done may have little to do with skin color, facial characteristics, or our "family of origin" or the neighborhood we grew up in.
So one of the first decisions we need to make as we take up a conversation on race, is what do we really mean in the first place by using and defining the term, and whether or not it provides a useful frame of reference in categorizing and identifying people in our day and time. Is "race" a useful classifier or is it yet another tired and hackneyed term best left for dead?
1 comment:
How ironic that white people enslaved the race from which we all descended. I am just about to finish reading James Michener's Caribbean. I was aware that slavery started long before the civil war, but I had no idea of the scope of it. It was terrible to read about.
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