One of my favorite parts of the weekend was attending the Diversity lunch on Thursday. Hosted by the Diversity Taskforce of APCE, we spent the lunch discussing what diversity and equity mean and how we can better promote and embrace diversity in APCE and the larger church. APCE, as a PC(USA) organization, has the same problem the rest of the denomination has: we are very white. The PC(USA) as a whole is approximately 90% white. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how to handle the fact that we have a history of racism. Presbyterians have not always been on the right side of history when it comes to race. For example, we ran Native American boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it wasn’t until 2018 that we formally renounced the Doctrine of Discovery and made a formal apology for our role in the oppression and genocide of First Nations peoples. One of the things that I do appreciate about my denomination is that in recent years we’ve been working to find ways to fix our problems of racism, even if our long committee processes make for very slow progress.
But on Thursday as I sat listening to the four women of color at my table speak about how they often feel tokenized in white spaces, as though their churches only want them in leadership so they can check off a box, I began to think that maybe the problem is rooted in how we talk about building diversity. Often, we say we’re “inviting people to the table” and “making space at the table.” But the problem is that what we’re really doing is inviting people into our space. We’re saying, this is my space (in this case, a white space) and you (a person of color) can only come in because we went to the trouble of opening it to you. It’s much like inviting someone to dinner. The guest is only there at the host’s invitation, and if they upset their host, the host has the power to remove them. Far too often minorities are only welcome at the table so long as they don’t rock the boat too much. I have seen way too many white people get offended because a person of color called them out for microaggressions or implicit biases. “How dare they call me a racist,” the white person thinks, “I’m the one who gave them a space at [my] table in the first place.”
I wonder if rather than making space at our table, we need to instead be building a new table together, one where all people who sit there have a hand in building it. Rather than inviting you to my table, we would sit together at our table, one in which we have equal stakes. Even as I write these words I wonder if it is even possible to do. But then I think, it’s not impossible, it would just take a lot more work. It’s easy to say to a person of color, come to our table. It’s a lot harder to say, let’s create a table where everyone feels safe and empowered to speak their truth. But wouldn’t it be worth the effort? After all, the table was never supposed to be ours to begin with. It was always God’s, and God’s table belongs to all.
The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program provides a daily lectionary of scriptures based on themes of peace and peacemaking. Over the course of 2019-20 I’ll be basing some of my blogs on one or more of the scriptures from each week’s lectionary. If you would like to follow along in the lectionary with me, here are next week’s scriptures:
Sunday – Genesis 1
Monday – Leviticus 26:1-13
Tuesday – Job 38
Wednesday – Psalm 19
Thursday – Matthew 6:25-34
Friday – Philippians 4:1-9
Saturday – Revelation 4:1-6