A SPECTRUM OF HATRED

Doug Muder

“The Weekly Sift” is a little bit like my own blog, in that each post is a short essay trying to make sense of something — in this "Sift" blog most often political subjects.  He describes it as “the political blog for people who don’t have time for political blogs”.  “The Weekly Sift is written by Doug Muder, a 50-something ex-mathematician who lives in Nashua, NH.”  He has another blog that considers religious issues.  He’s a contributing editor and columnist for UU World.  I try not to hold that against him — with mixed success.  At least he’s on the humanist side.

He once worked for “The Mitre Corporation, an American not-for-profit organization based in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia. It manages Federally Funded Research and Development Centers supporting several U.S. government agencies.”  (Wikipedia)  His wife still works there.  I expect there are a lot of nervous people around MITRE at present. but it doesn’t seem to show up in Muder’s writing. 

Muder’s first post for 4/17 (he sometimes does more than one) is at https://weeklysift.com/2017/04/17/racism-hot-and-cold/  It contains as Exhibit A the vid clip of Sean Spicer “being racist” with a black female reporter named April Ryan.  Muder’s premise is that conservatives simply don’t have any words or concepts for what liberals call “implicit racism”, that is, the unconscious but probably paleobiologically developed assumption about what a person “is,” based on contact, interaction and observation.  He suggests that Spicer was not consciously thinking, “I’d better put this mammy in her place,” but rather shading over into a dangerously slanted attitude because of what he — below thinking — feels is her true nature as a round, dark, mother-aged person.  The same as the impulse that causes small town business owners to watch me closely because I'm old and dress shabbily and therefore might shoplift.

I suspect that Spicer is not around black people very much and that the black women he knows “act white,” are thin, pale, accent-less, and — what the heck do I call black faces with features like the whites we consider “beautiful,” meaning not fat or wide or hooked or slanted?  What’s the implicit term?  Our minds work like Central Casting and many of the faces we know who are not our inner circle are likely to be types from movies.  

They are “stereo” types.  Dictionary.com defines “stereo- as a combining form borrowed from Greek, where it meant “solid”, used with reference to hardness, solidity, three-dimensionality in the formation of compound words: stereochemistry; stereogram; stereoscope.“

Muder suggests that “implicit racism” is not the same as outright hatred that fuels murder (which certainly exists) but rather there is a spectrum of hatreds that could be considered from simple unwarranted assumptions  (“white men can’t jump”) to KKK lynchings.  Liberals want to push it to the diluted side so they can talk about it.  Extreme Militant ignorants on the subject of racism want to go to justification of murder or at least deportation.  This “temperature” idea smacks of Home Security danger levels being color-coded or  Smoky Bear signage levels of fire danger.

Where I am, the racist problem is not black/white but rather red/white.  It’s more complicated in part because historical virtue is on the indigenous side -- to liberals -- and in part because there are few television series except maybe Longmire or a Hillerman mystery that portray real people.  We are in direct competition for resources like water.  There is always an invisible legal boundary between red and white about governance, entitlement, and missionary assumptions plus raw land ownership.

“Hot” here is direct bar fights (with Latinos complicating issues; there are almost no blacks or Asians.)  Whites seem to insist that drugs are characteristic of dark people.  The code is “gangs.”  If one starts to talk about local drugs, the terms immediately go to “rez gangs.”  (This is a psych phenom known as “deflecting” or displacing.)  The assumption is that there are no gangs off the rez, therefore no drugs.

People here from all sides interact with “Other” people daily with every degree of racism, from vague distrust to dueling knives.  The context, personality, and other factors that distribute their convictions are not media images but reality, rooted in the way they are treated by the “Other.”

Educated and freedom-defending people here will say denigrating things about whites if they are Indian or Indians if they're white.  When I’m stupid or troublesome enough to object, I get the defensive reaction, “But that’s the way they really ARE !!”  Often it can’t be argued down because it is based on experience.  And quite truly, there are a lot of Native American people who show up drunk and quarrelsome, or push some ersatz Earth Spirituality, or attack whites for their “implicit racism” by reinforcing the stereotype the whites already had, for the pure pleasure of the “militant ignorance,” and excuse to tangle, because what do they have to lose?

And there are a lot of white people who come with their big bellies and expensive clothes, sneering, into issues that they try to resolve with domination and their control of money, ownership, government roles.  What do they have to lose?

Currently, the UUA is plagued with some minority people who have gotten the idea that they are not just equal but should morally  claim entitlement to offices that — like Trump — they really can’t manage.  (The older Blackfeet would say they had gotten the “Big Head.”  Inflated.)  One of those women on the rez, who had assumed she would know how to do her rather complex job because she had earned certificates and been on committees, confided to me in an unguarded moment,  “This job is just too hard.  I can’t figure it out.”  She hadn’t known that, didn’t even know whom to ask for help and did not want to face the contempt that would come from racism.  Glacier County finances are a shambles because of this kind of thing happening, and the problem is framed in terms of race.  But it’s really a failure of the education system, which can wave tribal people on by because they are “only Indians.”

This is far beyond needing terms for implicit prejudice, esp when racism itself is so stigmatized among liberals, so much seen as evil and deliberate.  What has to happen is exposure to each other that creates a new image.  In fact, some books and movies do that.  Sidney Poitier made tolerance real, but then — of course — Cosby undid it all.  Because underneath racism is always SEX of the most powerful and brute kind — also implicit.  Jimmy Carter explained but we just made fun of him.

In the end we come to the same place that I almost always end up when I try to interact with white liberals (even though I am one), which is that they are so often naive and inexperienced.  Maybe that’s the only kind of people who can stay tolerant and upbeat because they are protected and oblivious.  I’m no longer tolerant and upbeat.  A few years teaching seventh grade taught me reality.  No one has more cutting implicit stereotypes nor more willingness to throw them in one’s face than seventh graders who think they are of a different race.  They’re hot.  In a lot of different ways.

SNAGGING MINISTERS

Forrester Church, who divorced his wife in order to marry a parishioner

To have my next example of Dunning-Kruger come from the Unitarian Universalist Ministerial Association is not just unsurprising but hilarious.  Here you go:  https://uuma.site-ym.com/mpage/BSE2016  It may have been taken down by now.  Free speech be damned.

I’m not going to name this year’s Berry Street Essay author because she will need the anonymity more than the notoriety.  (Probably not her choice.) This feminist minister had been raped in the past (before becoming a minister), says she suffers from PTSD, and has been active in confessional women’s groups.  She talks “health” and testimony.  Somehow, evidently through a friendship contact, she was asked to deliver the Berry Street Essay at General Assembly, which is historical, prestigious, and independently commissioned.  Normally the topic is broadly “religious” but this woman launched a reform movement against what she considered sexually predatory ministers.  She names one minister specifically in a targeting takedown.  She speaks with the fervour of a pedophile hunter.  Or maybe one of those Nazi war criminal hunters.

First Unitarian Church in Portland, OR

I’ve known this man since 1975, right after the single episode of ill-advised choice for which he paid a high price.  Soon after he interned in Portland he married the woman to whom he is still married with no scandal.  They are a highly respected couple and he has continued his life with what I would consider a secular ministry, working with conciliation arbitrators, classes, addiction counselling.  Though this Berry Street woman was educated for the ministry at Harvard, the whole lecture is very much like the kind of accusation that broke open Starr King Theological School over racist issues: in that case someone incensed that her friend was passed over for president by someone she thought was a less-qualified black woman.

When the Catholics were agonizing over pedophilia, I used to quip:  “UU ministers don’t fool around with kids.  They go for rich women.”  And I would provide examples.  But not in print.  It appears that the Emerson Avenger is gaining converts.  The Emerson Avenger runs a website that attacks ministers he thinks are immoral.  No one I know of ever fingers lay people.  Except privately.

One of my Montana fellowships was powered by what I called “the demi-mondaine.”  Smart, employed, divorced, middle-aged women who seduced ministers — or anyone else with a little shine on them — and who explained candidly that the reason they became UU’s was because there were no sexual taboos.  (Usually meaning divorced, which most of them were.)  These were my first ministries, though I was over forty, and I was taken aback when one woman informed me — as a helpful service — which men in the four congregations would sleep with me.  One man asked me frankly to go to bed with him because he wanted “to see what I had.”  He was a school superintendent.  I don’t think this is a denominational problem — I think it’s a cultural problem.

These women were often vengeful, esp. when they found out I wouldn’t do what they told me to do.  They were like drunks who wanted everyone to get drunk with them.  In every church I’ve served or joined, they have been present, sometimes in small numbers and covert.  

Mary Scriver, 1998

In Canada I twice ran into laymen who propositioned me, though I am the very epitome of a tubby English teacher with spectacles.  I am NOT a sexy woman.  I told them,  “You know, I charge a lot more to be the Temple Whore.”  They were undeterred.  They were after POWER.  They thought ministers had power.  No minister ever came on to me.

In my experience UU ministers (and other denominations as well) were vulnerable to supportive intimacy from either men or women because they felt POWERLESS.  The pastor knows a lot, is held responsible for everything, and must beg a committee for any change.  Being in a pulpit is having one’s hands tied behind one’s back, even for the big traditional men.  Probably less so among the gay men because people don’t know the rules.  Lesbian women ministers are a mystery to me because normally I run like hell.  (My bad.)  As soon as the UUA accepted gay/lesbian ministers, they were possibly accepting polyamorous people who did not conform to traditional marriage assumptions, attracted because the whole schtick of the denomination is accepting people according to their own personal ethics. (UU’s purport not to believe in fencing the communion.)

Of course, courting minorities who are looking for respectability means a certain level of prudery in order to guard that reputation, esp. in a time when right-wing religious people are so rigidly predatory.  It seems that the UUA, in order to grow, is discarding some of their free-wheeling past, growing more cautious and guarded.  The phrase “neo-Puritan” comes up.  There’s a callousness to it.

My home district as a parishioner (1975-78) was the Pacific Northwest, which at that time was international, including BC, Alberta, and Alaska.  The ministers were charismatic, high-achieving, and broad-minded.  A few were deplorable, including a gay hustler of young men and a “counselor” whose idea was to “demonstrate” true love to troubled women in their own marital beds.  When he was found out, he cost that church a LOT of money for recompense and re-counselling.  Luckily, they had malpractice insurance.

A saintly senior minister had a lover who later joined my faraway congregation where she clung to the notion that since she considered herself that very respected minister’s consort-for-life, she therefore controlled me.  Another guy was an active member of the Venusian church whose members disrobed and were stroked with feathers by chanting women.  I don’t suppose this righteous female minister ever imagined such things.  She strikes me as willfully but unknowingly unconscious, as Dunning-Kruger would predict.  Therefore I have a hard time with my feelings about such a person being in a ministry that has always claimed to serve every human being.  

I will say, mildly, that this person is old-fashioned and naive.  It appears to me that her gripe is really about ignoring marital vows, esp. in terms of multiple repeat marriages.  She says that people who are repeatedly married to parishioners should be asked to leave the ministry.  She is conservative mainstream American and probably ought to return to a Christian denomination.  The sexual revolution has only offended her, not enlightened her.  What I don’t understand is how this rant got into the UU World, where it was linked by an endorsing editor.  Has she been having coffee with the Emerson Avenger?  How could the Berry Street Essay committee choose such a vengeful person?

But her worst offense was not simply failing to understand that there are many standards of sexual relationship that are far beyond her experience.  She didn’t pick out the more egregious and offensive examples she knew, but rather the admired and politically potent.  To those of us whose ministries included knowing what went on privately, she comes off as childish and ridiculous.

I’m even more baffled that the editor who signed off on this story — I assume it’s Elaine McArdle, a UU World editor — but there are only the initials E.M. — is living in Portland where David has been well-known and respected since 1975 — a third of a century.  Why attack him now?  The facts of this essay have not been checked — they are evidently gossip from therapeutic groups in Nashville about events decades earlier than this minister’s tenure. 

William Schulz

Bill Schulz, a major UU figure, added a note saying that what she reported him saying to her was untrue, that he had never met her at the point she claims.  David Maynard says that the “facts” she told about him are also untrue.  I’m told that this woman checked with the head of the UUA (now voted out) and a UU lawyer.  I think she would have done better to consult someone outside the UU circle.  It looks like they going to have to scramble to avoid being named as co-defendants in a lawsuit as sensational as the one starring Forrester Church whom she also accuses.  Luckily for this twisted sister, he’s dead since his connections were far larger than the UU context.  I hope she has malpractice insurance.

Retired from ministry, living in a village in Montana, a free-lance writer on “religious” issues (U of Chicago Div School MA and Meadville/Lombard MDiv) of anthropological sorts rather than doctrinal allegiance, I see the world in broad brush terms.  My sexual orientation is the most shocking of all:  celibate.  From where I am, the UUA, as represented by this incompletely healed wounded woman, looks to have abandoned its inclusiveness in order to imply virtue.  Stumped as to where to go with theology, some have resorted to prudery.  I thought we were better than that.  Or at least more grown-up.

Sweet revenge?