Message for All
Doubt of the Benefit- Jesse Greist
January 22, 2023
“Give them the benefit of the doubt”. “Assume good intentions.” These ideas have always been such an important part of my Unitarian Universalist education, as important as any of the principles. In many situations, these ideas have served me well. If someone says or does something hurtful, or something that takes away another’s pride or power, my spiritual orientation in UU theology leads me to approach it as “they must have made a mistake”, or “this must be a misunderstanding”. Often, this compassionate approach has helped me talk with the person who has caused the hurt in a comforting way, one that often helps them open up to seeing their mistake and working to right the wrong they’ve done.
But I have also come to understand in recent years that the person who has been harmed often needs a stronger kind of support. I as a white cisgendered heterosexual man have found myself empowered to provide that support in the form of justice. The truth is, that in some situations, when I have assumed good intentions and given the benefit of the doubt, I have actually wound up causing further harm.
Here’s one example: Years ago, my family was out for an early spring walk, and we stopped at the Walgreens at the corner of Whitney and Lincoln, street names I include without the slightest bit of intended irony. My sons started playing on the grass in front of the store, and my wife Sandra, who proudly refers to herself in ice cream lingo as the coffee to my vanilla peach, began taking pictures of them. I wandered off down the block. It took less than 2 minutes for a white customer inside to find a manager and express her worry that a “suspicious woman was photographing the store and the customers who were coming and going. It made her nervous, she said.”
When that manager, himself a Latino came outside, walked across the parking lot, over the grassy hill down to where Sandra was smilingly recording our grass stained kids, and shared the customer’s complaint, I did the wrong thing. Instead of seeing an opportunity to confront an injustice, I instinctively tried to soothe and avoid confrontation. “I’m sure they meant no harm. I can’t imagine their intention was to hurt you” were the words that flew out of my mouth. Now I don’t know if any of you have ever seen or recognized the exact moment when the trust of someone you love that you’ve spent years building, breaks, but I assure you, it’s something you can immediately read like a neon sign in their eyes. And you cannot unsee it. They don’t have to say anything.
That moment. Those words “I’m sure they meant no harm. Their intention wasn’t to hurt you” are words that I thought at that moment came from a place of love, a place of worth and dignity, a place of putting out a potential fire. But what I read in Sandra’s eyes at that moment was how my privilege, my never having been questioned for simply existing as I am, stopped me from seeing what was really happening. It is a story written across the lived experiences of oppressed people, particularly people of color, for as long as memory can stretch. It is the story of prejudice, of disempowerment, of feeling like a crime can somehow be committed by virtue of skin tone alone. And my UU instinct to not rock our Blue Boat Home failed her, failed us both, at that moment. In trying to avoid a fire, I threw water on the person I most loved in the world. I have a deeper understanding of that now. In today’s service, the 8th principle of Unitarian Universalism and the stories of people of color are shared and hopefully heard in the spirit of broadening the circle of our understanding of how there IS benefit in doubt. How love does not mean “no conflict” but rather wholehearted, full-throated
collaboration in working for justice. But, my friends, it is a goal that we must believe will grow closer the wider our minds and hearts open to humility, to self-examination, to tough lessons learned and to tough lessons still to be learned.