Unitarian Society of New Haven
May 13, 2018
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Reading: “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman” by Sonia Sanchez
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146231/haiku-and-tanka-for-harriet-tubman)
Sermon:
“None of us alone can save the world. Together—that is another possibility, waiting.”[i]
The words of the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker.
Serena Williams is considered one of the greatest tennis players that ever lived. She is married to the founder of the internet platform Reddit. Let’s just say: they do not want for much.
Just after Williams gave birth in September of last year, she began to feel short of breath.
She had experienced a blood clot in her lung previously, so she knew what it felt like. “I need a CT scan and heparin,” she told the nurse, who told her that the pain medication she was taking
after her C-section must be confusing her.
Eventually, doctors began an ultrasound on her legs, while Williams continued to ask for a CT. When a CT was finally done, it reveled multiple pulmonary embolisms and she was given…the blood thinner, heparin.
Her complications continued, requiring emergency surgery and then bed rest for the first six weeks of her baby’s life.[ii]
Serena Williams, in the days after giving birth, became one of a large number of women who face complications after birth, many of them life-threatening. She also joined a cohort of women, many of them black, who feel dismissed and disregarded by health care professionals. The New York Times reports that: “About 700 women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Complications affect more than 50,000 women annually.”[iii] And here’s the kicker: “the risk of pregnancy-related death is three to four times as high for black women
as it is for white women, the C.D.C. says.”[iv]
You heard that right. Black women have a three to four times higher risk of dying as a result of childbirth than white women.
Moreover, “Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants —
11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery…” “That year, the reported black infant-mortality rate was 340 per 1,000; the white rate was 217 per 1,000.” Today, “in one year, [the] racial gap adds up to more than 4,000 lost black babies. Education and income offer little protection. In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.”[v]
These are hard statistics to hear, I know. And, friends, I know it’s been a hard news week. But as I was preparing for Mother’s Day this year, these reports kept surfacing in my mind and in my heart.
Because Mother’s Day was originally about justice and peace and public health, not cards and flowers. There is Julia Ward Howe’s proclamation[vi] which we heard this morning and years later, when Anna Jarvis, a peace activist, worked to make Mother’s Day a national holiday, she established Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address public health issues.[vii]
So, while, for many of us, today is a now loaded day, full of feelings, many of them mixed: gratitude and grief, regret and relief, love and perhaps even loathing, let’s take time on this day, especially, to raise the curtain on the painful truth that black and brown mothers are dying from, in large part, preventable complications in one of the richest countries in the world. Black and brown babies are dying at twice the rate of white babies. I don’t think we can engage Mother’s Day another year without lifting this up.
Researchers do not know precisely why this is. A new theory is gaining favor however,
one that might be even harder for some of us to take in. I invite and encourage you to track your own reactions to what I am about to say, to really take note of where you feel it in your body,
to examine your immediate reaction and the thoughts that surface.
Linda Villarosa writes in the New York Times Magazine that there has been growing acceptance of the idea that: “For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.”[viii]
So, two things here: first, racism combined with sexism creates in black women a “toxic physiological stress” that negatively affects their bodies and their babies bodies. As one African-American woman responding to Villarosa’s article put it: “the psychological weight of three generations of black women lives in my womb.”[ix]
And second, systemic racism results in dismissal of black women’s concerns and symptoms by nurses and doctors in ways that things are missed and people die. As another woman said of her birth experience: “You would have thought I was a mute from Mars.”[x]
“So, what, Rev. Megan, do you want us to do about this?” you might be asking.
For starters, I want us to be aware. Maybe you read these NY Times articles, maybe you heard the NPR stories[xi], but I want us to think about these facts this morning on a different level, an out-of-our-head, into-our-heart level. I want us to really feel the implications of these disparities and what it means for a nation to truly grapple with racism on an individual, group and societal level. I want us to remember that none of us are exempt from this work: no matter the color of our skin, the money in our bank account, the privilege we might enjoy.
We have been reminded in the past few days and weeks, in a Yale dorm[xii] and on the House floor, [xiii] outside an Airbnb in California[xiv] and inside a Starbucks in Philadelphia,[xv] on college tours, and in Labor and Delivery units all around the country, that to be black or brown in this nation is to live with the ever-present reality of racism.
And healthcare professionals have proven what people of color know all too well: This impacts people’s bodies. I want white people to take some of that impact into our bodies as well.
Because creating something new—a new reality, new justice, a new system, has to be embodied. We have to move out of the theoretical, academic forms of knowing into a heart-knowing, a body-knowing. We have to get in touch with the parts of ourselves that know that the work of creating justice is like the work of giving birth: it requires breath and time and determination and concentration and support. Some women give birth alone. Many more have companions along the journey: partners and friends, communities of women and men, doulas and midwives, doctors and nurses, folks providing guidance and hands to hold, pressure when it is needed, massage and encouraging words. Creating new life and bringing it into the world is often a collective, creative process.
We can no longer leave the work of undoing racism to our siblings of color, the work of undoing sexism to women, the work of undoing economic disparities to the poor. We must work together and we must get creative.
The truth is: “None of us alone can save the world. Together—that is another possibility….”
If we are going to be workers for Harriet Tubman’s freedom quilt,[xvi] the one that extends into the twenty first century, then we have to know how deeply interconnected we are as human beings.
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.”
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said.
We have forgotten this. We—yes liberals, too—have bought into narratives of division, of merit and worth, narratives of them and us, and more than and less than and deserving and undeserving.
We have forgotten that the network is inescapable, the garment un-rendable. They exist, the network of mutuality and the garment of destiny, even when we can’t see them, even when the possibility of them is obscured by our current reality.
Our work is to imagine the possibility of a different future, a future in which all people hear Mother Tubman’s cry:
You have within you the strength,
the patience, and the passion
to reach for the stars,
to change the world …
And together, I truly believe we can create justice like we have never seen before.
On the night after the election in 2016, Valerie Kaur spoke these words:
The future is dark. But my faith dares me to ask: What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all the mothers who came before us, who survived genocide and occupation, slavery and Jim Crow, racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, political oppression and sexual assault, are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear: You are brave? What if this is our Great Contraction before we birth a new future?
Remember the wisdom of the midwife, Kaur said: “Breathe,” she says. Then: “Push.” …Soon it will be time to push; she said, soon it will be time to fight — for those we love — Muslim father, Sikh son, trans daughter, indigenous brother, immigrant sister, white worker, the poor and forgotten, and the ones who cast their vote out of resentment and fear.[xvii]
Friends, it is time.
Tomorrow, I will travel to the Capitol in Hartford to join tens of thousands of people all around the country to kick off a new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. (https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org) We will gather in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. who, at the end of his life, had begun organizing a Poor People’s Campaign, drawing connections between militarism, racism and economic injustice, bringing people together across lines of race and class. Today’s Campaign seeks to “challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and [our] nation’s distorted morality.” I invite you to join me, if you are able, tomorrow at the Capitol at 2pm.
Even if you can’t join us in body tomorrow, you are a part of the community of support as we labor together to birth the America that is still waiting to be born. Imagine all those mothers, the ancestors, whispering: You are brave.
We are brave when we examine our own hearts for the biases and prejudices that separate us from others, especially those different from us.
We are brave when we look together at the patterns that show up in our institutions and organizations, including this congregation, that perpetuate systems of oppression.
We are brave when we seek to understand how those systems are pervasive in our culture,
one which was built on a foundation of white supremacy and a world view that sees people as
“self-interested individuals, unconnected and unconcerned with one another.”[xviii]
We are brave when we strive for a new way of being, a way born of creative love.
A way that says that we are connected; a way in which we are called to care for one another
and work together toward a world transformed.
We are brave when we choose to act in ways large and small that prioritize love, connection, justice and equity, when we choose community, when we remain in and restore relationship,
when we listen deeply to another’s experience and act in solidarity.
We are brave when we choose to bless the world rather than curse it.
In closing, I offer you these words by Rebecca Parker, words that offer hope and an invitation:
Your gifts—whatever you discover them to be—
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind’s power,
the strength of the hands,
the reaches of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door,
hoard bread,
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice
or withhold love.
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will,
a moving forward into the world
with the intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition,
a confession of surprise,
a grateful acknowledgment
that in the midst of a broken world
unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.
There is an embrace of kindness
that encompasses all life, even yours.
And while there is injustice, anesthetization, or evil
there moves a holy disturbance,
a benevolent rage,
a revolutionary love,
protesting, urging, insisting
that which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life
as a gesture of thanks
for this beauty
and this rage.
The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude
to search for the sources
of power and grace;
native wisdom, healing, and liberation.
More, the choice will draw you into community,
the endeavor shared,
the heritage passed on,
the companionship of struggle,
the importance of keeping faith,
the life of ritual and praise,
the comfort of human friendship,
the company of earth
the chorus of life welcoming you.
None of us alone can save the world.
Together—that is another possibility, waiting.[xix]
[i] Rebecca Ann Parker, Rob Hardies, Ed. “Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now,” 2006.
[ii] Rob Haskell, “Serena Williams on Motherhood, Marriage, and Making Her Comeback,” VOGUE, January 10, 2018. https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-vogue-cover-interview-february-2018
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/sports/tennis/serena-williams-baby-vogue.html
[v] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html
[vi] https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/199339.shtml
[vii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Jarvis
[viii] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html
[ix] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/magazine/black-mothers-respond-to-our-cover-story-on-maternal-mortality.html
[x] Ibid.
[xi] https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dying-after-giving-birth-shalon-irvings-story-explains-why
[xii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/05/10/a-black-yale-student-fell-asleep-in-her-dorms-common-room-a-white-student-called-police/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.41f282cf7493
[xiii] http://hiphopwired.com/752190/notonesecond-auntie-maxine-waters-slams-gop-congressman-in-epic-fashion/
[xiv] http://abc7ny.com/friends-stopped-by-pd-leaving-airbnb-demand-accountability-/3455889/
[xv] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-black-men-arrested-philadelphia-starbucks-meet-ceo-n866291
[xvi] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146231/haiku-and-tanka-for-harriet-tubman
[xvii] http://valariekaur.com/2016/11/a-sikh-prayer-for-america-on-november-9th-2016/
[xviii] Rebecca Ann Parker, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now.
[xix] Ibid.