Unmasking Inequality

Author: Pastor Heidi Eickstadt (from Sermon on 3/7/2021)

The past couple Wednesday nights, I’ve been meeting with some fellow moms for a video study called: “Present over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living.” In the videos, the author Shauna Niequist talks about how her life is often frantic because she is so busy trying to be the perfect mother, the perfect friend, the perfect co-worker, the perfect Christian. She tries to be everything to everyone and to play the role of the dependable one, the one who has it all together, the role of the responsible one who never lets anyone down.

In this week’s discussion, we talked about the roles we all play, roles that have been nurtured in us since we were children, roles that we have felt pressured to play by society, roles that we think will help us feel worthy and fulfilled.

Our lives can easily become consumed by narratives and others’ expectations of who we are supposed to be. For example, some of us have felt like Shauna that we have to be the dependable and responsible one, the get-it-done person….Or perhaps instead you are always the cautious one, or the caregiver, or the pessimist. Maybe you’re the life of the party, the people pleaser, the peacemaker, the self-deprecating one or the one in the know.

Shauna says that, “the roles themselves are neither good nor bad. They just are---they are what they are. It’s when I look to my role for my value that I get myself in trouble. For so long, I’ve done just that, to the point that I wonder who I am apart from the role I play.”

We can get so immersed in our roles that we typecast ourselves, always playing the same character, believing that this role is all we can play and is all of who we are. It reminds me of that John Hughes movie from the 1980’s called “The Breakfast Club,” where five high school students serve detention one Saturday and each one has a very different identity. One’s the brain, one’s the athlete, one’s the strange girl, one’s the princess and one’s the criminal. But at the end of the movie, they leave a note for their principal saying that they are not these narrow definitions, each of one of them is a brain, and an athlete, a “basket case”, as well as a princess and a criminal. They realize they are not the masks they wear.

But too often, most of us become one with the masks we wear, the masks that deny the complexity of who we are, the masks that deny our full and authentic selves. But what if the mask we wear doesn’t just pigeonhole us into certain roles that constrain us but is a mask that can mean the difference between life and death? That is what Howard Thurman explores in the third chapter of his book “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman describes how those who live with their backs against the wall have to live lives of deception in order to survive.

In 1949, when Thurman published this book, segregation and Jim Crow were alive and well. Even in the North, where there wasn’t such codified structures of racism, there were still the dangers of the Klu Klux Klan as well as unwritten rules that de facto separated blacks and whites from one another and resulted in unequal treatment. As a black person, you had to live in a society where you were less worthy than a white person. You had to participate in a reality where your life is disposable, no matter your profession, wealth, or even your military service.

Thurman witnessed this unjust treatment first hand on many occasions, including the death of his friend Juliette Derricotte, who died after a traffic accident because she was refused admission at a nearby whites-only hospital and had to wait hours for an ambulance to take her to a black hospital thirty miles away. It was more important to uphold segregation than to save the life of the 34 year old Derricotte, even though she was nationally and internationally known and the dean of women students at Fisk University. In white society, the most important thing was the color of her skin; that determined her worth.

And this is the reality that Thurman and black people had to live with, the unjust and unequal rules by which they had to conduct themselves, no matter how much of a lie it was. They faced a choice: stay quiet and play by the rules of the system or speak the truth and confront the evils of racism. Many felt they had no choice but to accept the mask and play the role of being subordinate in order to survive. They had to hide their anger, their fear, their indignation at the injustices they experienced so as not to offend a white person, for white people could attack, assault and even murder a black person with little to no consequences.

It was a degrading life that forced one to deceive others in order to survive, to live the lie that your people and you yourself were less valuable, less trustworthy and less capable just because of the color of your skin. It’s a soul-killing existence to have to live such a lie.

Historian Peter Eisenstadt relates one such experience in Thurman’s life, when he was back home from college for summer vacation. He had gone into a store to buy something when he was insulted by the white female clerk and, instead of responding, he stayed silent. The clerk told her manager Thurman had insulted her so Thurman left. Later on the front porch at home, he saw a crowd of people down the street and despaired that it was a mob coming for him in retaliation for supposedly insulting the white store clerk. He put his head in his hands as his mind raced with fear and worry. Thankfully, it wasn’t a white mob but a group of neighbors coming to congratulate him. But it is an example of the fear and panic that black people lived with every day as they were forced to live the façade of complacency and compliance with white supremacy.

I have been speaking in the past tense as I relate Thurman’s experiences but really, have these dynamics changed that much since 1949, when this book was published? Yes, codified segregation has ended and blatantly discriminatory laws have been outlawed, but our country and society still regard whiteness as normative.

Power in government and business is still mostly in white hands. Wealth is still largely in white bank accounts. Black Americans are still often receiving substandard healthcare, often raising their children in under-resourced schools, and often living in substandard housing.

And the fact still remains, that 72 years later, not being killed is still the center of the lives of black people in this country. They must still tread carefully in order to avoid suspicion in a world where they are seen as a threat and their lives are taken much more often, by death or by the unjust practices of mass incarceration.

Imagine if that was our reality as white people? Imagine if the masks we wear and the roles we play were not only denying our full and authentic selves but also forcing us to live the lie that our lives are not as worthy? What if we had to live this deceit to survive?

What if Jesus was Philando Castile or George Floyd? What if Jesus was Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Aubery? Jesus tells us in Matthew that ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ Jesus tells us that we are to see His face in the face of others, especially those who are suffering.

We are to treat them with dignity, respect and honor, not in a paternalistic way in which we pity the oppressed and act like we are doing them a favor. Instead, we reject the roles of superior and inferior and step into God’s reality where we are all equally beloved children of God.

As Howard Thurman says, Jesus teaches us that “man’s relation to man and man’s relation to God are one relation.” That is the truth. Our identity and our worth is not in the roles we play and the masks we wear. It is in God’s love for us, our true and authentic selves. May we look into the mirror and see our inherent dignity. May we look at our neighbor’s face and see theirs too.

Amen.