GYC 2009: unASHAMED

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

David Williams:  The Racial Divides

David Williams

The Racial Divides, Part 1

So we should get started since we want to be punctual.

I want to welcome you for coming out to this session this morning And I want to give you an overview of what we will be doing since at GYC in Baltimore, I had 3 hours and now I have 6 hours.

And unfortunately, my schedule is so busy, I didn't get back to the organizers in terms of the topics so they just say parts 1 through 6 but if you want to have a sense of what they'll be covering let me talk a little bit about that now.

I've built just a tiny bit of repetition into it not much They're really different topics.

So the first 2 hours will cover the topic, hidden bias.

Why do so many well-meaning Christians discriminate against others every day?

And you may not think that's true of you, but if you hang on, I will be sharing with you insights from the Bible, the spirit of prophecy, and from science that suggest this is actually very true.

All of us do this if we belong to the human family.

But we are unaware of it and may not know.

It certainly has implications about race, but this is really not about race.

It's about how we process information and what God is trying to do through each of us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

For the next sessions 3 and 4, my topic is Laodicea 101, Race, Separate Conferences, and the Gospel.

That is largely a historical presentation, although we will certainly reflect on what does it mean spiritually for us today, that we look at a history of both wonderful successes and wonderful points of leadership within the history of Adventism and the question of race, but also very dark, tragic moments of failure.

I speak not as 1 who has achieved, as 1 who has feet of clay, and I go through the history, not to criticize, but for us to learn from our history.

We have nothing to fear for the future unless we forget the way the Lord has led us in the past and his teaching of prior history.

But I think the history is really very important for moving forward.

There are many people who make proposals of how to move forward and clearly what they are saying reflects an absolutely misunderstanding of the history.

And I think just understanding the history really is crucial for us to think of what we can do in terms of moving forward.

And then the final 2 sessions, and that is tomorrow morning, is divided we fall, why we have failed to move the world.

Will really be largely a study of John 17 and the spirit of prophecy of what it says about unity and how central unity is in our mission.

How can we really achieve the unity for which Jesus prayed?

What are the barriers to unity within our church?

We certainly will talk about race, but this is much more than race.

There are multiple other dimensions in which we don't have the unity that we should have.

Let me say a word or 2 about this session.

Points along the way I may start preaching, but this is not really a preaching session, it's a seminar context And I expect engagement, I expect questions, I expect you to be free to raise your hand.

My students tell me that sometimes I speak fast, and they tell me that sometimes I speak with an accent.

I have never met anyone who didn't speak with an accent.

Now, what they mean to say is I have a different accent.

You, that someone drop you in the middle of some place and they will instantly tell that you have an accent, you have an American accent.

So I think what you mean to say is I have a different accent, not an accent, we all have accents.

So my point is if I am speaking too fast or you didn't understand something, please stop me.

If there's a question, if there's an issue, please raise your hand so that we can make sure that we are together on this topic.

What else do I want to say before I begin?

Because I recognize that not all of you will attend all of the sessions, I will hand out, and my second daughter is here with me, so I'll have her put her to work to help handing out these.

This is, and maybe I should tell you a little of the history of this article.

It's a piece I wrote for the Adventist Review that was published in 1997 and maybe it's a very good introduction.

I wasn't planning to do this but actually it's useful for me to talk about this article.

When I wrote it, it was entitled, Weighed in the Balances, a Biblical Critique of Racial Division in the Adventist Church.

I sent it to the review and requested that they consider it to be published as an opinion piece.

Not because I think anything in here is unbiblical or out of harmony with the spirit of prophecy, but because I am sufficiently politically aware that I understand how controversial this is within the church.

And I'd written several pieces for the review before, some on health, my major area of work is on health, and I'd written several pieces on abuse, on domestic violence within the church, I'd written for the Review on, and why pastors take advantage of women, I'd written a piece in the review on.

But most of the papers I'd written for the review were things the review had asked me to write, as opposed to I thought of this and decided to write about it.

And I want to tell you why I wrote about it because it's good context for this whole 6 hours of sessions I will do here.

President Clinton was the President of the United States then.

He had announced a special initiative on race in the United States And the White House Office of Science and Technology had pulled together about 25 to 30 leading scholars doing work on race in America, and I was part of that group.

And so here I sat with a group of scientists, researchers from universities across the US, who studied race and were trying to grapple with the mandate that the president had given to, we wrote a piece for the National Academy of Sciences on race and trying to grapple with how could the country move forward on the area of race.

And so I would go from these meetings during the week where scholars, most of them atheists and agnostic, would throw their hands up that this problem of race is intractable in American society and I'd go to church on Sabbath and listen to messages about the power of Jesus that was able to help us overcome everything, and yet on the problem of race, we as a church seem to act as if the cross never happened, As if this problem was too difficult for God to solve.

And then I read a couple pieces in the review that really got me going.

There was an article by then an associate editor of the review, I'm not mentioning any names, that was entitled, The Major Successes in the Church in the Last 50 Years and 1 of them was the success of regional conferences.

And there was a review article on that point.

You can go back in the mid-1990s and find it.

And there was a book published around the time, The History of the Black Work, that had a chapter entitled, Separate Conferences, The Road to Progress.

Not, I mean, if we have a problem, it's 1 thing.

It's a different stage when we have backslidden so far from where God is calling us to be that we accept our backsliding as normative and as success.

You know, it's as if sometimes when new believers come in, they have to backslide in order to be in good and regular standing.

So I was troubled and I knew the editor of the review he had taught me in the seminary and I knew he was a God-fearing man and he was in fact tackling the very topics I had written for the review before on domestic violence in the church and the problem of clergy abuse were certainly controversial issues that the Adventist Review had not historically covered.

And I felt, well, he would be willing to entertain a piece like this, but to protect the review staff, I said, I'm submitting it as an opinion piece.

An opinion piece allows a review to say, we have published this to stimulate debate and discussion.

I didn't hear from the review for 6 months.

For 5 months later, I got a letter from the editor of the review, said, Dear Brother Williams, he and the other editors have been reading this piece and have been struggling with what, if any, use to make of it.

He went on to say, we believe you are correct theologically, but we disagree with your implications for church polity.

In simple English, is you are correct, but we disagree with what your message has to say for church practice.

I read that and I was actually stunned because I thought that as last day Christians, What determines what we do is what is right, not what is politically appropriate.

And so, knowing the editor, myself, as a former student, and having an issue, I dealt with him in the seminary, he was certainly a godly man and 1 who was fair, I decided to write him a letter to respond.

I didn't think he would change his mind, that was not the purpose, but I said, I know the elder will not sleep well tonight.

So I wrote him a piece saying that I respect his right as editor, he certainly decides what he publishes, but I was troubled by his reasoning.

That if it is right theologically, how could it be problematic for church polity?

And in fact, isn't our church practice to be driven by our theology?

And to hit below the belt, the editor had a book that I had read that was a commentary in the book of Matthew entitled Religion and Overalls in which he made the point that the book of Matthew shows how religion has to come from the ivory tower into the practice of everyday life.

And I said, isn't that a point you made so eloquently in your book, Religion and Overalls?

But I went on further to say, or is it that we have strayed so far from God's ideal that his commands look like fanaticism?

Or are we afraid of the political backlash that we are unwilling to have the prophetic voice be raised within the church.

And I went on to share my own experience.

I come from the Caribbean originally, came into the United States in the mid-1970s during a time in which the big issue within the church then structurally was whether we needed 2 black unions, 2 black union conferences.

Up to that point in the history of the Adventist church there had never been a black person who was the president of a union conference in the North American division.

And the proposal was that given at the division level, blacks were then excluded, it would be nice, in fact it would be right, to take the 6 regional conferences at the time, there are more now, form them into 2 unions, you would now have 2 black ministers, presidents of a union conference, and they would now be represented at the division level.

And honestly, as a seminary student back in the 70s, I supported the proposal.

I thought it was not the right thing to do, but the appropriate thing to do given the options that were available.

There had been multiple occasions where blacks had been nominated for union president and it hadn't happened because at the time, including Elder Bradford, had been nominated as a union president, hadn't happened because a person said it was wrong for the image of the church at the time.

So we felt, if This is not an option, how do you get representation?

It's not ideal, it's a compromise, but it's an appropriate compromise.

And then there were developments in the British Union at the time that, I don't know if I want to go into that history, but it was all relevant.

The point was, I actually supported even deepening the division that existed in the church along the lines of race at 1 point in my life.

The Racial Divides, Part 2

For your benefit, the topic we're dealing with, and you're in the second half, so you missed the first half, I'll just touch on a couple key points that you missed, is why do so many well-meaning Christians discriminate against others every day, is our general topic.

There's some core principles that we spent time on at the beginning that are really important in terms of the whole series that I'm doing, the six-part series that I'm doing.

Importantly we are centrally focused on John 17 and Christ's call for unity.

I am emphasizing as we think about Christ's call for unity, the fact that Jesus himself said that when we are 1, even as he and the Father are 1, the world will believe and the world will know that he has been sent.

So that the unity is not just political correctness, it's not just a good idea, it's a command from God because it's 1 of the more effective ways in which we can witness.

In fact, the spirit of prophecy indicates that the single strongest witness that can be born that God has sent his son into the world, and she's elaborating on John 17, is the harmony and union existing among Christ followers.

It is essential to us accomplishing the tasks that God has given us to do.

And I also emphasize in each of my presentations that there's the promise of what can be accomplished when we humble ourselves before God, when we look at the challenges that we face, when we are kind and loving, the spirit of prophecy says if we would only do this, there would be 100 conversions to the truth where now there is 1.

So partly what I'm saying is that although we don't talk a lot about unity, unity is 1 of the most effective mechanisms, strategies of evangelism.

And in my last 2 seminars, that's tomorrow morning, we will centrally go into John 17 and centrally go into the spirit of prophecy to understand how can we get this unity, what are the steps we need to take, and what are the promises of God for dealing with us.

Okay, what you missed was my presentation on John chapter 4, where we looked at Jesus's encounter of the woman at the well, and that the Samaritan woman that Jesus encountered was someone of a different ethnic group, of a despised ethnic group, someone that the social rules said he should have nothing to do with, and Jesus, someone who was negatively stereotyped in many ways, and Jesus rose above them and those stereotypes and in fact ministered to this person.

I then tried to make this real by looking at an area where I have been doing research at a national level and health policy that has to do with disparities in medical care by health care providers in the United States.

And I gave several examples of them just to make the point that the average person and certainly the average Christian and the average Adventist would think, I would never stereotype people and treat them differently.

I would never discriminate against others and I'm just showing you, not research on us, but research on physicians.

Some of the most educated, respected health professionals in the country.

I'm going to repeat this 1 study, I showed several others, but let me repeat this 1 study for those of you who have just come in to give you context because we're going to move forward from this point.

This study, for those of you who just came in, is an example from a report that was done, that was requested by the United States Congress, that was completed by the Institute of Medicine, which is the highest medical authority in the country.

I happen to have served on the panel of 12 experts that they brought together for this.

This is just 1 of over 200 studies in different areas of medicine that showed the same pattern.

Todd was an emergency room physician at the UCLA Medical Center.

When a patient comes to the UCLA Medical Center with a broken bone in their arm or legs, the physicians call that a long bone fracture, is there a difference by ethnicity in whether the patient receives pain medication or not?

Todd went back through the medical records for an entire year at UCLA and found that of Hispanics who came to UCLA with a broken bone in the arm or legs, 56 percent, 55 percent of Hispanics did not receive any pain medication compared to 26% of non-Hispanic whites.

Striking pattern when he statistically adjusted for all the other potential explanations, the single strongest predictor of whether a patient received pain medication or not was Hispanic ethnicity.

He did a second study, and he looked to see how patients expressed pain, how providers could identify the way in which the pain patients were in, because 1 hypothesis was that maybe Hispanics manifest pain in a cultural way that providers are just not cluing in on.

And what he found was that physicians could equally tell the severity of pain in Hispanic patients versus other patients, but you could see systematically they prescribed less pain medication.

Todd moved from UCLA to Emory University in Atlanta, repeated the same study at the 3 largest emergency rooms in Atlanta, looking at black and white patients and found exactly the same thing.

A black patient with a broken bone in the arm or legs going to an emergency room in Atlanta is less likely to get pain medication than a white patient.

And so we were left with a question, and this is just 1 study of at a time the Institute of Medicine report was released in 2003 there were 200 studies that document this in the published scientific medical literature.

The question is how on earth do we make sense of it?

How is it possible that well-meaning, highly educated health professionals in the U.S., working in their usual circumstances, going to work every day, seeking to do their best, I honestly believe, for all of their patients, how is it possible that they could create a pattern of care that is so discriminatory?

Because remember, I just gave you the example of pain medication, but for those who have, here in the last hour I showed you this occurs in every area is probably best documented in the area of cardiovascular treatment but it's true in every area of medicine.

How why would race matter so much in terms of how patients are treated?

And what are the implications of that for us as Christians?

And could it be, could it be that we could treat people differently in the same way and not even be aware that we are doing it.

There are multiple explanations for the potential of these differences.

1 of the most compelling, 1 for which there was some evidence back in 2003, 1 for which there's a lot more evidence today, is a phenomenon called unconscious or unthinking discrimination based on negative stereotypes.

There is a large body of social scientific research.

So this is a robust finding, this is not about Americans, it's about people, It's not about racial stereotypes, it's about stereotypes.

What this research indicates is that when you hold systematic negative beliefs about a group of people And you meet someone from that group.

It's an automatic process and it's an unconscious process.

You will treat that person differently and honestly not know that you did it.

You've got to get this because it's a central point.

It's called unconscious or unthinking discrimination based on negative stereotypes very well empirically documented in the US and in other societies.

It is linked to the way the human mind processes information.

It's linked to what social psychologists call processes of group categorization.

All of us process the sensory input that we receive every day into groups.

It's 1 of the ways that we use in terms of perception to make sense of our world and to simplify all of the information we receive.

And what categories do you view negatively?

What the research shows, When you have some groups that you systematically look at negatively, you will treat a person, an individual from that group differently.

And importantly, you would not know that you have done it.

If you didn't get pain medication, you're in pain, whether it was conscious or unconscious.

But it's a process of how all of us handle information that all of us need to be aware of.

And so the question is, is there negative stereotypes of groups?

Can race provide a way to think about this?

And I want to show you quickly a few slides to document the persistence of race in American society and I'm just going to show slides.

And first we want to celebrate the good news.

I'm showing you slides, let me go back to this 1.

I'm showing you slides that illustrate the dramatic changes in American society and the question of race in the last 50 years.

Do you think Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job or do you think white people should have the first chance at any kind of job?

This question was first asked in 1944 and what I'm showing you is Other points over time where the identical question has been asked in national sample of whites in the United States.

And you can see the dramatic increase that the percent of people who said Negroes should have as good a chance as whites to get any job, in 1944 less than half of whites believed that.

And you could see over time, by the last time the question was asked in 1973, over 96% of whites said, yes, everybody should be equal.

So there's been a dramatic change in this country, and we should celebrate that, on the principle of equality.

This is the flip side of the question or white should have the first chance at any job.

Back in 1944 the first time the question was asked you can see that 54% of whites said oh white should have the first chance at any job, believed in affirmative action for whites.

The dramatic change over time by 1972, the last time the question was asked, you could see that less than 5% of whites said that.

So it's a dramatic change, we can celebrate the changes we have made on race as a nation.

However, what the research also shows, that although there is this universal commitment to the principle of equality, there is what researchers call a principle implementation gap.

There is more support for endorsing equality in principle than endorsing policies that would achieve it.

And I will give you 1 example just to illustrate the point.

So this is a question, some people feel that if black people are not getting fair treatment and jobs, the government in Washington ought to see to it that they do.

Others feel this is not the federal government's business.

Have you had enough interest in this question to favor 1 side or the other?

Should the government in Washington see to it that black people get fair treatment and jobs or is this not the federal government's business?

This has to do then with policies to implement it.

There's a lot of stuff going on here What I want to illustrate I show you the data on the principle We saw that before And I'm showing you the data on the implementation.

The Racial Divides, Part 3

Okay I think it's that time we're going to get started.

I've gotten my technology up and running.

I want to say welcome to those of you who after lunch have come out to this seminar.

This is a the second major seminar in a series.

This morning we looked at the nature of stereotypes in our society and how all of us as human beings process information, categorize them, and if we develop negative categories, which is pretty normal in our society, there's some groups that are positively viewed, some groups negatively viewed.

It has implications for how we relate to others automatically and unconsciously.

So we talked a lot about unconscious and unthinking discrimination and the scientific evidence showing that that happens and it happens to all of us and it's something we need to be aware of.

We looked at the example of Jesus and how at the individual level and multiple examples of how he related to people, he rose above the normal social stereotypes and categorization of his society to treat each individual as a child of God.

In our session this afternoon, we will be taking a more historical look, less at how we as individual Christians relate, and more at how as an institution we have operated.

I say that at the beginning because I think it's important to emphasize that as we will look at the history, there are moments of brilliance and moments of leadership and moments when the church and its institutions rose above the the normal demands, the normal routine of its culture and did well.

But there are actually great moments of tragedy when we terribly failed our Lord in terms of what we did.

I say that not because we want to be pointing fingers and looking backwards.

It's important to understand where we've come from.

If we don't understand our history, we are likely to repeat it.

So My presentation this afternoon on race, separate conference on the gospel is heavily historical, although I begin with many contemporary examples suggesting that what happened in the U.S.

And we have examples around the world where as a church we have faced and are facing similar crises.

But the burden on my heart is really to inspire us as young people, GYC, to...we need a new generation of young people.

We need a new vision of both what God wants us to be and a new courage to do that which is right because it is right.

And I hope that my presentation can play a role in inspiring you along those lines.

There's a handout I have for each of you.

It's an article that I wrote for the review.

I submitted it to them, published a decade ago, but I think it encapsulates some of the points I'm going to raise in this presentation and in the 1 tomorrow morning.

So tomorrow morning we look much more on in-depth view at John 17 and the challenge of unity in the church.

Because everything that we're doing today is really heavily based on the need for unity as God is calling us to be.

So why not bow your heads with me as we pray.

Father in heaven, this afternoon as we review some of where we have been, We pray that you would be with us, that your Holy Spirit would give us wisdom and enlightenment.

But most of all, Lord, I pray that your Holy Spirit would convict us, not so much about where we have been, but where you want us to go, and that you will give us the grace, the courage, and the strength so that we can be part of a movement that takes your word seriously, takes your challenges seriously, knowing that in your strength all things are possible.

Bless us to this and we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Let me emphasize that this is a seminar, so it can be interactive.

If you have questions of information, questions of clarification, Don't hesitate to stop me.

I get excited sometimes and I will keep going if you don't stop me with a question.

So raise your hand at any point at which you might have a question.

I begin all of my sessions with John 17, 21 and 23 because this is what this series is all about.

Series

David Williams: The Racial Divides

The Racial Divides, Part 5

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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