"Senghor"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 16^th of January 2000

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to remember that we are always connected
to all creatures and all things:
the farthest star, the closest person,
the highest mountain, the deepest truth.
With love as our end and our means,
we welcome this day, this hour, this very moment,
blending head and heart, question and answer
silence and singing into the very wellsprings of peace.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from the "Q" document, the ancient reconstructed collection of the sayings of Jesus that underlie the present first 3 gospels. It is usually dated to about the year 50 of our era.

It is not what goes into your mouth that makes you pure or impure.
It is what comes out of your mouth that makes you pure or impure.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer's latest book, written just last year, "Living In Hope and History."

Léopold Sédar Senghor's life almost spans the twentieth century, but he is a man of the century in a way more important than longevity. He embodies the entire black experience, for slavery was still a living memory of old Africa when he was born, and by the time of his 90th birthday, the freedom cry from South Africa mayibuye -"Come back, Africa, return from colonization to possess your African self" - had been realized.

Africa has many heroes to name, but surely none has quite the relevance to the present that Senghor has. He made himself a great poet and a powerful political leader. Senghor became a distinguished scholar, an African Socialist in the movement of liberation for his country from French rule. He is a Catholic and brilliantly eloquent (about) traditional African beliefs and philosophies.He has made of these apparent irreconcilables a new African. He proves that it is possible to keep your own culture and identity intact while fully appropriating another, opening yourself to other thought-systems, ideas and mores. As he himself wrote, "unity is rediscovered, the idea linked to the act, the ear to the heart, the sign to the sense."

Sermon: "Senghor"[Next] [back to top]

When I lived in Oakland, my loft was within walking distance of two very famous barbecue places. The New York Times food editor---no slouch--- had ranked these two places as among the ten best in the United States. Even vegetarians went to these places because their beans were second to none, the sauce sweet and glossy and deep. But of course, the main attractions, ribs and brisket, were served daily and by the ton.

One day I went to one of these places, Flint's, to order a gallon of beans for a potluck at church. Now you need to know that Flint's was not just famous for its barbecue, it was infamous for its s - l - o - w service and long lines. If you waited less than 30 minutes for an order you counted yourself lucky.

However, even though people expected to wait, they did not wait with grace. They wanted to get going, and fidgeted the whole time they were in line. So when my order was finally called, another man went up to grab it and run off with it, since he had ordered the same thing...ten minutes after I had. The woman behind the counter glared at him over her glasses, and said, "This is not yours, man, this order belongs to the man over there in the green shirt," nodding toward me. After all, I was the only one in the store wearing a green shirt.

I was also the only one in the store with a "white" skin.

All of the 25 other people waiting for their orders at Flint's were "black."

The words of the counter-woman echoed in my head the rest of the day. To her, I was not "that white guy over there," but "a man in a green shirt." Since that day I have never thought of the linked and loaded concepts "white and black" the same ever again.

White and black. Not a subject that is free from tension, eh? Not a subject that calms people's nerves, or lets them relax a bit on a Sunday Morning during worship.

Look, I know that. I even expect that I will say things that will cause at least some folks sitting here to be annoyed. Some will think what I am saying is too difficult to understand. Believe me, I know it is difficult. But I ask you to hear me this morning with a fresh and open heart, nonetheless, and to struggle fairly with what I am saying.

Black and white. Clearly, I am using those words black and white in their political meaning only. Any one who has an honest eye knows that I am not the same color as a sheet of letter paper, a cirrus cloud, a handful of cotton. Anyone with an honest eye knows that the other men and women waiting in line at Flint's were not the color of coal or the dilated pupil of an eye. They were mahogany and chocolate and sweet potato and coffee and Earl Grey tea.

So here's my take on this. I think we are all born with honest eyes. We see brown and beige and mahogany and Earl Grey tea, even if we don't have those precise words for naming those colors in our baby vocabulary.

Then, year by year, day by day, gesture by gesture, word by word, we are schooled by the families, cultures and realities that shaped us into growing a different set of eyes.

It happens unconsciously, certainly, for the most part, but still, with our new eyes we are no longer able to see what we see with our birth eyes...honest and beautiful colors.

We learn to see only inaccurate categories like black and white.

You see, I am convinced that no one would ever think they were white unless they learned they were. No one would ever think they were black unless they learned they were black. After all, black is clearly not the color brown. And white is, quite obviously, not beige or birch.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, the man whose name gives the title to this sermon, is a good example of someone who had to learn he was black.

Now I know many of you may not have heard of him before, so before I tell you how Senghor learned he was black, let me give you some brief biographical images of his whole life.

As Nadine Gordimer describes him, Senghor was one of the great personalities our twentieth century. She counts him as more influential than Nelson Mandela in her summary on twentieth-century history. Yet, though his life spanned most of the decades of this century, he is little known in the States.

And this, though his meditations on the whole idea of "white and black" influenced the major thinkers on race issues here in this country. I say there is no complete understanding of the words of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Cone or other African American philosophers without confronting the great African philosopher Senghor.

Senghor is first and foremost remembered as a statesman, I suppose. He was elected as president of the nation of Senegal, a former French colony on the West Coast of Africa, for many terms over 20 years. But beyond that, he was by all descriptions a man of remarkable, shall we say, "contradiction." He was both an articulate Marxist Socialist and a Catholic with a deep devotional life. He was both a scholar with a degree from the Sorbonne and a self-studied expert on African native wisdom traditions like the Yoruba religion, now gaining great popularity here in this country. He was a poet twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for his French poetry, and yet a man well at home in the admittedly unpoetic world of hardball politics in Sub Saharan Africa. He was a patriotic warrior, eventually a prisoner of war held captive by the Nazis, and yet he was publicly touted all of his life for his gentleness and even sweetness of character.

Now, as I said, Léopold Sédar Senghor did not know he was black from birth...had to learn that he was. He always thought he was a French speaking citizen of colonial Senegal, a human being with brown skin, until, that is, he moved to France. There, he discovered that people did not react to him as a human being from Senegal with a chocolate complexion. They told him, by gesture, word and innuendo, that he was part of a category called "black," and that this was his chief defining characteristic.

Not his maleness, his education, his height and weight. Not his French pronunciation, his life story, his loves, losses or the depth of his heart.

No, his "blackness" defined who he was.

Even in the prisoner of war camp many of the soldiers from France abused him as much as his Nazi captors. Not because he was from the colonies instead of France. But because he was "black."

Senghor was in his twenties when he first learned that he was "black."

And this is when he found out that his tormentors were not Frenchmen or Germans, but rather something called "white people."

This realization genuinely perplexed him.

He started to use his observation and engagement with the world to try and understand this strange thing.

And thus he began to observe in France what you and I can observe here each and every day.

Senghor noted that no person of Euro-American ancestry says, "I went out to dinner with my white friend John," or "...my white friend Karen last night." But they will usually indeed say, "I caught a movie with my black friend John," or "my black friend Karen."

"White" you see, is assumed to be the ordinary, back-ground color of the human race. Blackness is seen as something contrary and thus worth mentioning.

You may hear a "white" person say, "that Chinese man over there," but never will you hear him or her say, "that Senegalese man over there," for a Senegalese man is black before he is Senegalese." A Sicilian woman and a Senegalese woman may both have the exact same shade and luxuriousness of black hair, but only the Senegalese woman will be identified as being black.

Senghor noted all this in France, and believe me, in France there is nowhere near as much madness about race as there is in this country.

And this new knowledge that he was black proved to be a rude and painful awakening for Senghor.

So Senghor, along with his poet friend Aimé Césaire, decided to go with the blow instead of resisting it, in sort of a philosophical Ju Jitsu. Instead of trying to get people to stop using the false categories "blackness" or "whiteness" they decided to claim their own "category" and love it. They did this by coining the word "négritude" in French, or "the character of blackness." They said that all black men and women and children, no matter where they live: in Africa or America or Canada or Holland; and no matter what language they speak: Ibo, or Arabic, or English or Swahili; or no matter what religion they are: Yoruba or Muslim or Catholic; share some essential approaches that white folks simply do not ordinarily share.

For making this amazing assertion, some of their critics both "black" and "white" called Senghor and Césaire "separatists" and even "racists." "Are you saying," they said, "that blacks see the world one way, and whites entirely another way?"

And they responded, "Actually," they said, "we're saying that black men and women don't so much see the world as feel the world...they tend to come at the world with their ears and feelings, whereas European-rooted white folks tend to see the world with their eyes and intellects. Blacks tend to learn by communing, and "dancing with the Other," (Senghor's phrase) and becoming engaged; whites tend to learn by distancing, dissecting and categorizing."

When their enemies protested that this division of the population seemed "separatist," Senghor pointed out wearily that he still spoke and thought in French, loved French literature, and was totally integrated into the whole multi-colored world. So cool and white a philosopher as Jean Paul Sartre even wrote an introduction to one of his books.

Other critics accused Senghor of demeaning black people by saying they "learned first by their emotions," but Senghor responded that this accusation proved his point instead. To think that "feeling" the world is less valid than using rational thinking shows a white and hierarchical bias, he said. To say that learning by engagement or emotion is less wise than being analytical and argumentative is ample evidence of white colonialism in the black mind.

Of course, Senghor was not a "separatist," nor did he have lack of respect for analytical thinking. You do not graduate from the Sorbonne, after all, by being intuitive. He was a great French writer, and a rational, structured speaker.

What he was trying to do, in a wonderfully irritating way, was to get white people to claim their whiteness as partial and particular instead of assuming it blithely to be the human norm, and to get black people to claim their blackness not as category set against whiteness, but as its own partial and particular power and way of being in the world, elegant, strong, intelligent and bold.

And, he added, the world without black and white working together all the time, learning from each other, would be a wreck. Only when there is unity of heart and mind, of all ways of being in the world, will the world be whole. To quote Gordimer again, Senghor "proves that it is possible to keep your own culture and identity intact while fully appropriating another." She goes on to say "He is perhaps the most successful example of cultural wholeness achieved in Africa in a single individual."

Now Senghor well understood about blended cultures and mixed "racial" ancestry. He knew that more and more people were white and black, European and African. He understood very well that just as France had colonized Africa, bringing French literature and music to that continent, so had African culture itself reached the so-called New World, with jazz and even rock and roll and the blues clearly tracing their roots to Africa.

But Senghor did not think for one minute that such blendings would one day be universal, and that we would all be "the color of coffee and cream one day," with the citizenry of Paris and the citizenry of Lagos, Nigeria being absolutely identical. Jean Paul Sartre wrote as much in the introduction to one of Senghor's books, and Senghor was furious about it. This "one day there will not be a 'race problem' because one day there will be no 'races'" is a romantic idea held by some Americans, too, I know. But I for one, don't believe that it will happen, or that it is even desirable that such a thing be universally true. It reminds me of Karl Marx's famous "solution" to what he called "the problem" of the Jews in Europe. He knew about anti-Semitism, and how it permeated European culture at every level, so Marx suggested Jews should just give up being Jews and become Gentiles, like his parents had done, and that way, he suggested, there wouldn't be "any Jewish problem." If you are as horrified hearing that as I was when I first heard it (and I pray you are!), then you may well understand why the "coffee with cream" solution to "the problem" of race doesn't impress me very much.

No, Senghor kept the tension alive...be faithful to your own culture and its way of approaching the world, but learn other ways as well and very well. "Be multi-cultural," is the way we might say it today. Be intellectual and feeling, analytical and poetic, historical and mythical. If you white, learn from black cultures. If you are black, learn from white cultures. Why ever, he might ask, would you think that one way is better than the other?

Although Martin Luther King once defined racism more theologically as "a form of idolatry," it is common today to define racism in America as "power wed to privilege." Economic language and class statistics remain central in most modern discussions of the topic. I have no doubt that Senghor, Marxist that he was, would agree that economic analysis and responses to privilege are both critical and powerful, and that without using them, you are walking on a treadmill of futility.

But while I hear and agree that we must pursue economic solutions to oppressive realities in America, I have to note that I find the word "racist" to be used in so broad a manner that I fear that I, like many other people, have become a bit confused as to who or what the "anti" in "antiracist" is set to work against.

You see, I hear the word "racist" applied to the skin-head Aryan in an Idaho bunker with a swastika tattooed on his shoulders and a police record of murder; and I hear it applied to a white suburban teacher who works at Martin Luther King, Jr. School and has become convinced that she must be a racist simply because she is white. I hear it applied by white people to black people, as in "She is a black racist." Over the Christmas holiday, my father (who was always the only white man who was invited to, and who went to, the Detroit Edison black employees picnic) kept on referring furiously to that "racist mayor," by which he meant the late and undeniably black mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young. I hear the word "racist" applied to folks who question the immigration policy at the border of Mexico, and to statements like this made half-seriously: "Black folks simply can dance better than white folks because they have a sense of rhythm built into them." The word seems to have a lot of meanings and emotionally laden nuances. It's such a large word I am often afraid that people can hide behind it and escape doing the work they are called on to do. By announcing just who and what is racist, (including yourself), you can often just be claiming that you yourself are no longer a racist, either because you are not "them" (Aryan Supremicists) or because, if you admit that you are, you have done all the work. And look, if I apply it to myself as an educated, street-smart urban white person, and also to an illiterate 21- year- old White Supremacist killer in Idaho, I have to admit I am making a very reckless equivalence that can't but help to confuse things all the more and delay work on this issue instead of spur it on. When I hear an educated, thoughtful white woman tell me that she is not a racist, I do not hear her saying "I have no further work to do in this area, I am a veritable saint." No, I hear her distancing herself from an angry guy with a shaved head, the spittle of hatred and ignorance in his mouth and a repeating rifle in his hand.

Was ColemanYoung "a racist" even though he was black, because he had power and privilege? Or, is it true that the word "racist" can only be used of white men and women? Are the terms "white" and "racist" then completely identical? From birth? The question, you see, becomes maddening after a while. And to me, this sort of game reveals why so much modern "race talk" strikes me as wheels spinning without going anywhere, at least here in America. I am often struck by the sheer philosophical self-congratulation of so much of it, no matter how well-meaning people indeed are.

It was wrestling with this confusion with both my head and my heart which turned me toward the clarity of a great African philosopher like Senghor. And to a very different point of view lifted out of the miasma of American talk. And I want to underscore the kind of commentary on black and white Senghor made by quoting Jesus' dictum on the Kosher rules from the Q document.

It is not what you put in your mouth that makes you pure or impure.

It's what comes out of your mouth that makes you pure or impure.

As a man constantly dealing with poverty and the economic collapse of his land due to the undeniable power and privilege of his Graeco-Roman overlords, the Jewish teacher Jesus would have had little trouble, I think, seeing the class underpinnings of so much oppression on earth.

He even made this bold statement directly opposed to the universal application of the kosher rules as a way of saying exactly that...it's fine to be strong in your Jewish identity by keeping the purity rules around food, but it's even more important to keep yourself alive as a human being. And if you are a hungry peasant without work and have to eat something that is not ritually pure, a pork stew or something, then by God, don't starve to protect your identity, eat. It's not what goes into you that makes you impure, it's what comes out of you, that is, how you respond to the world, which really shows us who you are.

I think the same thing might be true of race issues in America. There are many people who will tell you that their program, their way of interpretation, their set of words, theories and analysis is the truly pure and correct theory. They may sway toward Martin Luther King's earlier or late theories, or Malcolm X's earlier or later theories of race. They may quote you statistics from George Will on the right or statistics from Cornell West on the left, and tell you that you cannot be safe or pure or correct in your own skin, whether it's beige or chocolate or mahogony or Earl Grey tea--unless you accept their universal theory that explains everything.

Who knows? One of these theories may indeed be close to being right and universal. But my own theory is that I myself don't know enough, have not lived enough, and have not become conscious enough to know that for sure.

And I don't know about you, but I don't take a heck of a lot "on faith alone" anymore.

A lot of stuff about race comes into me all the time...images of violence like Rodney King, images of reconciliation, history, song, rap, conversation, reading, James Cone's theology, spirituals and the voices of Leontyne Price, Ella Fitzgerald and even D'Angelo.

But since, despite all this nourishment, I know so very little, I would like to try to pay more attention to what comes out of me for a while than what goes in me.

I would like to remember how I felt when I was identified as "the man with the green shirt" instead of "that white man over there." And based on that experience, and some suggestions from Unitarian Universalist minister and professor Thandeka, I would like to conduct an experiment or two with what comes out of my mouth, so that I might begin to more attentively engage this issue.

The first experiment is this: for a month, I will not use the words black or white when applied to people. I will only describe them by other qualities...the woman over there with the black hair," "the man over there with the white shirt."

I wonder what I might learn in my gut by what comes out of my mouth during that month.

Then, experiment # 2, I will try to take Senghor very seriously and spend some time doing the exact opposite thing the first exercise asked of me: I will always notice and name whiteness if I am going to notice and name blackness. I will say "my white friend" or "my black friend, "whichever applies, "my black colleague Thandeka" or "my white colleague Rob Eller Isaacs."

I will never just say, "my friend" or "my colleague" without a modifier, either black or white, never even African American or Euro-American if they are citizens of the United States. I will say "my white godson Adam," and my "white goddaughter Andrea," and "my white neighbor Ray," and "my black friend Patrick." I am sure I will raise many eyebrows and feel strange, and that the experiment won't last long. But I wonder what my gut shall learn by what comes out of my mouth.

My feeling is that I will learn that Senghor all the way over in Africa has a lot to teach me here in the States.

And I will learn what I believe I need to learn in a way honored by the word négritude, that is, not by white analysis, but by black feeling. I will learn things in my shivering body for a change as the eyes of my peers look at me with fear and disgust whenever I refer to my "white" friends just as easy as I would refer to my black friends.

I will learn undoubtedly that I have a long way to go, but that I should not be embarrassed by that. Did anyone promise me that the race I am running would be over with in a short time? Why should I be ashamed to keep running toward the finish line if I knew from the beginning---and I did, and you did too--- that this was a long-distance race?

I will work on economic issues because, like both Senghor and Jesus, I think these are central. But I will do so without thinking that I have already solved the non-economic issues of color, difference, identity, and category. I will not assume anyone...black, white or mixed, or any other color, is exactly like me in any case. Differences are real even between whites and whites, and black and blacks. We are all human, sure, but we are unique, and formed in the matrices of very different and sovereign cultures with value and worth and wisdom. And I want to learn as much as I can without losing who I am in the process. I think Senghor, the great man of Africa, can teach me a lot in this regard.

As I said earlier, talking about these issues is never comforting. There is always a lot of "yes, but what about..." afterward, and a lot of "Why does anyone have to bring any of this up anyway?"

But there is no peace without the unrest of deep struggle and real meaning. There is no restful silence not preceded by deep conversation without slogans, and no satisfying answers without the risk of very searching questions.

There is no wisdom without study, and as King reminds us, no study that is worthwhile which does not lead to practice.

Join me in my two experiments if you wish. Or don't.

But in any case, be secure in this: know that all men and women on this earth are your brothers and sisters, and feel that truth deeply in your bones, for the sake of the common legacy of sanity we must at all costs leave for our children.

Prayer (based on the writings of M L King)  [back to top]

Oh Love Deeper than My Longing,
help me to turn from violence of body,
violence of word, violence of innuendo
and violence of assumption.

Keep me open to all that truly limits me,
so that I will know the course of real freedom,
claiming that as my destiny
and refusing the powerlessness called fate.

May I treat no one as a means to an end.
May I never confuse social duty or conformity
with the moral life.

Oh Love, maladjust me to the world of injustice,
and remind me that bravery is not a luxury,
nor courage only the quality of the violent.

Give me the faith to meet disappointment graciously,
and face the strains of life with equilibrium.
Keep me from bending the knee to any one
trying to claim my mind, my untested reverence
or my unquestioning faith.

Love, sound for me and for all here gathered the trumpet that announces the sober and transforming truth that we can, and indeed shall, overcome. Amen.

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