RAMBLINGS FROM CHURCH
City Heights is an older San Diego urban residential community from which most white citizens fled long ago. They left behind reminders that they once lived there, none more conspicuous than Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church. The Beautiful church sits proudly on the corner of Orange Avenue and 42nd Street. A very sweet mosaic mural covers the entire streetside back wall of the church. The mural depicts three very white children clinging to a very white Jesus. Few of the real people in yards and streets of the community match the images on the mural. The notice board outside the church announces three Sunday masses, one in Spanish, one in Vietnamese, and one in English.

As I participated in Easter services at First United Methodist Church, my thoughts wandered to television’s and radio’s loudest chatter this week, the chorus of talking heads repeating inappropriate remarks by Barack Obama’s pastor. At the center of the Reverend Mr. Wright's life, racism frustrates and hurts. From the center of my life, racism is mostly an intellectual aggravation, an embarrassment. He is a theological thinker who connects the will and actions of his personal god to whatever is going on in the world at any given time in history. That's what theologians who speak from pulpits and from their writings often do. Apart from difficulties I may have with Reverend Wright's theology, the fuss over his remarks served mainly to prove the good preacher’s thesis about racism to be indeed more right than wrong. Racism is alive and well in America. Remarks inappropriate because of where and how they are stated are often more true than false. A neighbor, for example, might truly be an S.O.B., but it’s rarely appropriate to tell him or other neighbors that he is so. It’s simply not good for the neighborhood to do it. But they know anyway.

Cognitively and intellectually competent and honest Americans know that their nation has a long way to go before it escapes completely its uncomfortable racist past, and it’s not unreasonable to predict that it may never escape it. Every person becomes acculturated by being brought up in a particular cultural setting. The things that make my tribe MY TRIBE are often subtle, nuanced practices that speak to members of the group in ways that are different from the way they speak to outsiders.

I am a member of a wonderful 80-voice choir in a church that is in theory and by declaration a fully inclusive community. As I was putting on my choir robe this Easter Sunday morning, I turned my stole from the black of the day of crucifixion and death to the white of the day of resurrection and life. With black stoles on Friday the choir sang about the agony of the cross. In white we sang on Sunday of the glory and triumph of victory over death. In our culture (Notice how easily, out of long habit, I presume the larger culture to be “mine.”) black and white are symbols full of meaning, taught and understood and accepted from early childhood. On this Easter Sunday for three consecutive services, eighty singers, all in gleaming white robes, marched to their places in the choir loft. The ministers who on Friday were all robed completely in dismal black were dressed at Easter in glorious white. The mostly white choir (one Asian) in all three services sang anthems for a predominantly white congregation. There might have been as many as a dozen African Americans among a couple of thousand people in three services. The few Asians and Latinos were not enough to interrupt the visual impression that this is a white church. The congregation is mostly white Sunday after Sunday. The choir once had an African American baritone and a Chinese soprano, but they were hired help. Now they are gone.

First United Methodist Church is a “cathedral” church. It is big. It is beautiful, It is a definite presence in San Diego’s Mission Valley. Mission Valley’s commercial district is most definitely fully integrated. Shops and restaurants in the valley are fully integrated. The church is not. I have little doubt that First United Methodist Church would like to be fully integrated to match its message; but it is, after all, a tribal enclave and the tribe is primarily white. Mr. Obama’s Reverend Wright is after all right indeed in some of his message. However much many of us, perhaps even the majority of us, might wish it to be otherwise, our America is still seen by the rest of the world as a white culture. The election of a brilliant, articulate black man to be our president might move the rest of the world to see us differently and might even cause us to see ourselves in a new light.