by Lee Stranahan
After Attorney General Eric Holder’s ‘nation of cowards’ speech a few weeks ago, President Obama has some disagreements about tone but not really with the overall point Holder was making.
“We’ve made enormous progress and we shouldn’t lose sight of that,” Obama told The New York Times in an interview posted on the newspaper’s Web site Saturday.
The president said he understood Holder to be saying the country often is uncomfortable talking about race until there’s a racial flare-up or conflict and that the nation probably could be more constructive in facing up to slavery and discrimination.
I’d already been thinking specifically about some of these issues while working on a documentary about race after the election of President Obama and after reading about Rev. David Eaton, the first black minister of a major Unitarian-Universalist congregation in 1970s. So here’s some words for a Sunday about Eaton’s experience;
Although black and white members worked well together in carrying out the business of the church, in less formal activities the two races tended to stay apart. The congregation struggled to move “beyond race,” trying to develop a church community in which interpersonal relationships were based on individual qualities rather than on differences of race. This proved an extremely difficult goal, and was only partially achieved. Eaton worked hard to promote understanding of those of differing races and culture, but he recognized early that he and the congregation must inevitably fall short. “We know what life is and what life ought to be,” he said. “Many of us are dislocated between the Is and the Ought because we are products of a dislocated period in history. . . . The spiritual challenge is no longer mute, it speaks: ‘locate yourself or learn to thrive in dislocation.’ I think we need to learn both. . . . May we continue to care.”
