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Us and Them
Address to Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s Annual Session
August 4, 2009By David Zarembka, Coordinator
African Great Lakes Initiative of the Friends Peace Teams
Good evening, Friends.
I believe that the business of all of our lives is to put our faith into practice. This evening I will be speaking on one small aspect of this that we all can do. The title of this presentation is “Us and Them?”.
About five years ago I was at St Louis Friends Meeting (unprogrammed). Early in the Meeting, an elderly woman gave a message in which she indicated that “Whites” were “us” and “Blacks” were “them.” Uhgh! I couldn’t let this pass, but then Quaker Meeting is not a debating society and one needs to respect what people say, even when it shows racism. So after thinking deeply on the proper approach, I shared the message about the uselessness of racial classifications and the need to see everyone as a human being.
After the Meeting, a half European/half Asian member of the meeting thanked me for my comments as she felt that some response needed to be made. The really discouraging aspect of this interaction was that a young, White man was listening to us and he commented, “I didn’t hear any racial slurs”. So I had to explain to him that when you call “Whites” as “us” and “Blacks” as “them,” you are excluding Blacks as a separate, alien group.
Then, recently a few years ago, there was a Quaker conference in Washington, DC and one of the main Quaker leaders working with the African Great Lakes Initiative in Rwanda was going to be in the United States at that time. I arranged for him to be a presenter at the conference. About two months later, the invitation was withdrawn because the organizers of the conference said that this particular African was homophobic. Really—I didn’t know that! I complained but he was not put back on the agenda, although he was allowed to attend like anyone else. It then occurred to me that the organizers were confusing this Rwandan Quaker leader with a Kenyan Quaker leader who at that time was publicly quoted as opposing the elevation of the gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire. Are all Africans the same? Were they confusing two black men without investigating?
So I talked with the Rwandan and found that he was not homophobic. To really test this issue, I arranged for him stay with a lesbian couple in DC during the Quaker conference.
The organizers of the conference had seen themselves as “us” and Africans as “them.” One aspect of this labeling is that all of “them” are given stereotypes.
There are so many variations of this. White versus Black, rich/poor, male/female, educated/illiterate, pro-gay/homophobic, pro-choice/anti-abortion, blue states/red states, Friends General Conference (FGC)/Friends United Meeting (FUM). The list can be endless.
My understanding is that we all do this “us/them” dichotomy too frequently. When we do, it becomes a hindrance to understanding an issue and more importantly a block towards a resolution. As peacemakers fondly say all the time, “Conflict among humans is inevitable. It is how people deal with this conflict that is important”. My small bit of wisdom that I am adding to this is that when a conflict is defined between “us” and “them”, it becomes almost impossible to resolve. Think of the major, long-standing conflicts in the world—Israel/Palestine, Hindu/Muslim in India and Pakistan, the Christian/Muslim conflict now called the “War on Terror”. All are based on an “us-them” mindset. An important attribute of these dichotomies is that no one is allowed to be in the middle. People are not allowed to be “half and half”, to be mediators, to be neutral, to stand outside the fray. This is why us-them conflicts are so hard to resolve.
Friends have for decades realized ways to address this issue. I knew a Quaker woman in the Pittsburgh Meeting named Marian Hahn who traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1950’s to establish person to person contact between Americans and Russians. Others have done this with Cuba and most recently Mary Ellen McNish of the AFSC and Joe Volk of FCNL went with other religious leaders to establish dialogue with Iranians.
I learned my lesson early. When I was about ten years old, my Mom was driving me and some of my friends home from an activity. I was sitting in the back seat and I asked my friend, Lewis Levy, “Are you Jewish”? When we dropped off my friends and reached home, my Mom was irate. She said, “You never ask anyone that again”. Of course when you are ten you are just learning what is proper and improper in the world so I took this as a lesson. But what was the lesson? That you don’t ask people if they are Jewish? That you don’t ask people their religion? Their ethnicity? Any grouping whatsoever? I decided at that time that you were not supposed to judge people on group stereotypes, but look at each person as an individual and make any judgments on that person’s individual characteristics. As I have learned over life, this is a much harder, more involved rule to follow than just assigning stereotypes to people.
When my then future wife, Gladys Kamonya, came to the US in May 1995 she was taking care of children, one of whom attended Sidwell Friends School in Bethesda. Gladys’s grandmother was one of the first thousand or so Kenyans to convert to Quakerism around 1920. So on Sunday morning she got up bright and early, dressed in her Kenyan best, and went to Bethesda Meeting at 7:00 AM as they do in Kenya. She sat for two hours and no one showed up. She put $5 into an envelope and slipped it under the door as an offering, another Kenyan Quaker custom.
