An event every week that begins at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, repeating until October 5, 2016
White Privilege: Let’s Talk—A Resource for Transformational Dialogue is an adult curriculum from the United Church of Christ. During Wednesdays Together in 2016 United Church of Chapel Hill will use part one of the four part curriculum.
PART ONE – The Spiritual Autobiography Told Through the Lens of Race
Five writers – Traci Blackmon, John Dorhauer, Da Vita McCallister, John Paddock and Stephen Ray – explore the impact of race on their own backgrounds and family history. Deeply personal and emotional, these autobiographies bring large social issues into focus in the lives of five people of faith with very different life histories.
“I am a white man.” Scales fell from my eyes, and for the first time I was able to see my life and being in a whole new light . . . through an entirely new lens, if you will. I, John Paddock, have race. By that I mean something far more than being conscious of my skin color when I’m with a group of blacks. In the same way that a tinted lens will color everything seen through it, seeing the world through the lens of race changed the way I see everything.”
—John Paddock, from Part 1, “The Spiritual Autobiography Told Through the Lens of Race”
“God’s whiteness was deduced from Sunday School books, and The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses, and the statues of Mary that adorned every Catholic home in my neighborhood. Then there were the stained glass windows. Stained glass was common in the church of my youth and either the glass depicted no image, or a cross, or a white Jesus. One popular reproduction was Jesus sitting on a rock surrounded by children, all white children, sitting with an Afro-Semitic Palestinian who is falsely portrayed as white. It’s easy to miss such an irony if one sees oneself included. Not out of any maliciousness, but simply, inclusion calms our fears.”
—Traci Blackmon, from Part 1, “The Spiritual Autobiography Told Through the Lens of Race”