What I learned from UU young adults of color is: we do not want to be made to feel different from the rest of the community.
I also hear a painful contradiction: we do not want to be made to feel White.
One way of saying this is, we do not want to be different, but we do want to be whole.
I learned that this paradox is a need that we must address if we are to be able to integrate our friends of color as true members of our spiritual community.
What I see is that the spiritual journeys of ethnic experience, which are profound in every human life story, but acute for those in minority groups, are not yet being addressed in our mainstream UU culture. So the same people who are angry at being made to feel different are also angry that our spiritual experience is not being addressed.
What I know it that it is possible to make ethnicity an experience that includes all of us.
I believe that being White is not the same as just being European-American. I believe that cultural Whiteness is not a skin color, but a psychic condition, a condition that children are not born with, and that can be reversed.
I experience the energy of Whiteness as an annoying psychic hum that can fill a room-- eeeeeeeeee-- made up of some combination of denial, ancestral pain, conformity and fear. The same energy that makes it hard for people to dance, or to perceive alternate realities. It's a drag.
And it scares not only people of color, but also young people and most new people away from the church like some kind of electronic insect repellent: eeeeeeeeee.
But it doesn't have to be there.
At an UUYAN conference we designed recently in PCD, we chose not to mention racism or anti-racism. Instead we made certain questions part of the experience of the whole community: Who are your ancestors? Who are your people? How do you intend to serve your people in this lifetime? In a spiritual context, these questions were deepening for all. And though we never mentioned or drew attention to race, the young adults of color got to see our spiritual struggles shared in common with our European-American friends. How do I relate to the ancestors in this modern world? How do I relate to that special group that is my people?
It was comforting to know that European-American young adults feel just as ignorant and awkward and ambivalent and eager as the young adults of color do. And while we were talking about it, the Whiteness level dropped through the floor. The weird hum stopped, and the human spirit came in.