Author: Rev. Adam Lawrence Dyer

Lead Minister at First Parish in Cambridge Unitarian Universalist, author, educator, LGBT Activist. Unitarian Universalist Chaplain at Harvard. A believer in bodies and liberated religion.

Blackness…

.Reading time 4 minutes.
“Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across The Decades: 1790—2010 – U.S. Census Bureau.” Accessed May 2, 2023. https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html.

I preached a sermon on February 16th titled “Blackness” that feels like a turning point for me professionally.  While I’ve preached on race before, I feel as if my studies being combined with the incredibly generous community I’ve been working with for the past few months has allowed me to tap into language and intention that I think may be useful for a wider audience than just Unitarian Universalists.  My goal is to be able to speak to people across the spectrum who want to engage seriously in understanding the race question that keeps rearing its head, complicating justice and messing with people, even when they don’t realize it.

After returning home, I was scrolling through my various feeds and came across this brilliant piece by Garrison Hayes.  He takes this conversation about race, and language to a whole new level and gets much more specific about the way the language around DEI is being weaponized as a modern substitute for the more traditional slurs.  I am INCREDIBLY grateful to his perspective this is a MUST watch.

Below is an original poem that I close the sermon with.  I’m including a link to audio of the full piece as well as the text below.  Once the video is live, I will link it as well.

My biggest gratitude is to the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley for encouraging me, loving me and letting me speak freely from this pulpit.  Not every black, gay preacher gets that freedom.  I’m a lucky guy.  Amen.

In the message, I share two slides.  The first slide is an overview of the US Census race categories since the Census began.  The second slide is just the categories for “blackness” compared with the categories for “whiteness” from that same list.  That slide is the cover image for this blog post:

How Does Your Whiteness Work?

How does your whiteness work?
Does it fill you with pride
Does it make you ashamed
Does whiteness call you to action
Or does it allow you to hide?
Does whiteness give you a pass
Is it just a pain in the ass
How does your whiteness work?

How does my blackness work?
My blackness is a portal
It gives me a place from which to see the world
My world
Your world
It gives me perspective
It would have to.
My blackness stands upon innumerable bodies sacrificed
To the nonconsensual concept of race
Applied, and reapplied
And applied again
Like layers of makeup on Baby Jane Hudson.

My blackness swims in the blood of too many ancestors
Never repaid for their gifts
And dives daily into the pool from an impossible height
Not the sparkling Esther Williams spectacle
As she plunges into the blue water dotted with identical white faces
But the thick, dark crimson of effort an unknowability
That comes from a history erased.
My blackness is knowledge
I hold it carefully
And share it sparingly
Because too much would bring the end of the world.
That’s how my blackness works.

How does your whiteness work?
Are you willing to find out?
Do you even want to know?
If not…why is that so.

–ALD

 

Full Text: “Blackness”

Full Recording:

Turn off the Gas

.Reading time 8 minutes.

Ideology, Indoctrinate, Binarism…

Donald Trump has only ever been surrounded by whiteness and wealth.  His education lacked a moral compass and he was emboldened by an era (the 1980s) that celebrated everything big, regardless of its actual quality, logic or sustainability. While I do know the era, I do not know the man.  I cannot speak to what wakes him up in the morning (or in the middle of the night).  However, as he is the primary agent of political policies that are aimed at making my world a hostile and uninhabitable place he will be mentioned in what follows…

I’ve placed the words above and through this article with their definitions because what the individual man, Trump is attempting through his newly minted office of chaos is for Presidential Executive Orders to take on power that he, nor any government actually has: the ability to control, shape and speak on behalf of belief.  In the latest garbage (linked below), the administration is attacking a variety of “ideologies”.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/

But there are two problems.  First, the Trump administration is bundling together what they see as “radical-left” or “woke” into a single package and framing it as “indoctrination”.

The second problem is that those of us who are in the crosshairs of this and other policies are taking the bait.  We have let the true ideologues convince us that we are under attack.  Our response as a result is classic crabs in a bucket which will get us nowhere.  This is a big mistake.

The beauty of true equity work is that it is NOT based on ideology.  It is NOT built on a singular or narrow idea of what is right or wrong.  It is a philosophy of accommodation.  That is, it looks at individual unique needs and seeks unique solutions.  It empowers and fortifies individual agency. Equity is built on uniqueness, adaptability and flexibility, while what the administration is presenting as “making America great again” is doing the opposite.  In fact, looking at the definition of ideology and indoctrination, that is exactly what the Executive Orders are, just as was promised in Project 2025.

In addition to indoctrination, the administration is intentionally trying to confuse people into exhaustion; they are trying to convince people that they aren’t seeing, hearing, feeling what they are feeling.  Gaslighting.  What is being done is that the administration is trying to accuse the “radical left” of doing exactly what they themselves are doing.

Turn off the gas

To fight this insanity, it must be first remembered that while we may all want to play like we are “unified patriots” with “universal goals”, that is actually not helpful framing.  If diversity is what we truly believe in, and if it is really our strength, then that is what we need to muster.  The response to this shouldn’t be as simple as “give me back my rights” or worse some kind of self-hating apology for being “extreme”; the response needs to be “I don’t want your tired, narrow and inadequate rights” and “I will not be limited in my wholeness to make you feel safe.”  The hatred coming from Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty God-awful loud, but robust, authentic diversity can be MUCH louder.  Human diversity is literally endless and infinite and that’s what has the true ideologues shaking in their Cybertrucks. Diversity is the superpower.  What’s more, it is built in, so we just need to figure out how to harness it. The response cannot give in to the impulse to hold tight to single issues as diversity.  What needs to be embraced and pushed by leaders on the left is a better grasp of diversity as a powerfully organic capacity for humans to be different whether or not someone writes a poorly worded (and frankly petty) document.

Last week, I posted to my blog about how Unitarian Universalists are hamstrung by whether they first need to be free or human (Free or Human?).  What I’m trying to do in this new post is address the same challenge to a wider audience.  Being human is only limited by the limitless capacities of the human body.  Our embodied selves are vastly more expansive in body and mind (as any medical professional will tell you) than even in our advanced society is capable of understanding.

There is no “radical left”.  That is an invention of deeply troubled, narrowly educated and scared, ideologues.  What they are scared of is all the people who are able to look in the vast reaches of the human self and recognize infinity.  They don’t want that.  They want the safety of on-off, black-white, boy-girl, good-bad.  They’ve been taught that spaciousness is to be feared.  And yes, true innovation is terrifying, but the human body innovates every time it overcomes disease, or adapts to an environment, or gives birth. Innovation and the capacity for creative problem solving and the generation of ideas is what we do. The limited, uncreative, unenlightened mind builds a rocket and tries to get to a single destination (for example Mars) to create an empire.  The creative mind, builds a rocket to explore space and learn from all of existence.

Do I have an exact strategy for applying what I’ve written above?  Not yet.  But part of me looks to some of the most creative people I’ve known for help getting to the answers.  People who hear music that is first in their heads and then they are able to translate that music for the rest of us to hear; people who see themselves differently in the mirror than the rest of the world sees them and are brave and honest enough to live that truth; people who explore the reaches of human understanding and reveal better ways for us to be with each other; people who save lives, people who accompany those coming to the end of life.

Somewhere in the endlessness of our ability to be human is a way to drown out the annoying and harmful tune of one-note ideology, indoctrination and binarism.

–ALD