Equipping White Folks for Anti-Racist Practice

What does it take to move from talking about anti-racism to building communities where equity, belonging, and meaningful change can happen? Dr. Paul Hoard, PhD, LMHC, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology, and Dr. Ron Ruthruff, DMin, Professor of Theology & Culture, explore what it takes for churches, schools, agencies, and other organizations to move beyond statements of solidarity and toward anti-racist practices that are tangible, accountable, and rooted in the experiences of their communities.

Drawing from both psychology and theology, Drs. Hoard and Ruthruff will examine some of the dynamics that can keep organizations from confronting uncomfortable realities and creating meaningful change. They consider how policies, relationships, and everyday practices can either reinforce inequity or help cultivate greater belonging and inclusion. This conversation grows out of three years of grappling with these questions within a theological institution. Rather than offering easy, palatable answers, this webinar invites us to ask better questions about what credible anti-racist practice looks like—and what it takes to sustain that work over time.

 

Transcript

Lauren Peiser: Hello, everyone! Welcome! We are gonna wait just a minute for other people to log in, and while you’re logging in, go ahead and, if you’d like, put where you’re logging in from in the chat. We’d love to hear where you’re calling in from today.

I am calling in from Albuquerque, New Mexico – and Ron and Paul are in Seattle. So, excited to see people from all over. Alaska, California, North Carolina, Los Angeles, that’s great, awesome. Thanks for introducing yourselves. Okay, so we’ll go ahead and get started. Today, our faculty webinar is From Aspiration to Action: Equipping White Folks for Anti-Racist Practice with Dr. Ron Ruth Ruthruff and Dr. Paul Hoard. And this is our fifth webinar in our faculty webinar series, so if you’ve missed the first four, you can find those on our featured media page, which I will put in the chat. And we are doing these webinars as a way for everyone to hear from our faculty. So, these webinars are designed for anyone to integrate with theology and psychology.

And, my name is Lauren Peiser, I’m the Director of Partnerships here at The Seattle School, and we offer graduate degrees and certificates studying the intersections and integration of theology, psychology, and culture. And we’ve developed this faculty webinar series to speak to our times through an interdisciplinary lens. So, we are looking for God moving and at work beyond our certainty and stability. These short conversations are aimed to hint at new possibilities to tend to the pains of our world in a space that honors formation without fixing, curiosity over control, and being with rather than solving uncertainty. So, what you’ll expect from these webinars is a short conversation – we won’t be able to dive into everything today, but you’ll have a chance to hear from our faculty, and connect with them, and then we will have a Q&A time.

And this is designed to invite new perspectives and have a chance to posture ourselves differently as we tend to the problems that we’re facing. And this is designed for scholarship for all. So, in my work, I get to talk to people who are working in all different disciplines, and there’s a desire to have theology and psychology speak to all different disciplines, so this is designed to be scholarship for all.

And so today, you can use the chat to respond to faculty prompts and to interact with other people on the call. We’ll also have a Q&A time at the end, so if you have a question that you would like answered, use the Q&A feature, and we will have time at the end to answer those questions. And if the chat feels overwhelming to you, feel free to close that at any time. I know there can be a lot of chats going on, so whatever feels most comfortable for you.

And now, I am excited to introduce Dr. Ron Ruthruff and Dr. Paul Hoard. So, Paul Hoard is Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School, and is a licensed counselor who holds a doctoral degree in counseling education and supervision from Regent University. He has provided mental health counseling and clinical supervision in the United States, Ukraine, and Türkiye. His research and scholarly work draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis and focus on the intersection of perpetration trauma, sexuality, white body supremacy, and adolescent mental health. An interdisciplinary thinker, he works at the convergence of psychoanalysis, theology, and cultural formation.

And Dr. Ron Ruthruff has served homeless and street-involved youth and their families for the past 30 years. He has provided case management services, designed programs, and educated the community on the issues that impact this vulnerable population. Ron’s career goal is to empower persons to live lives of significance, to equip the church to love and serve their neighbors, and to engage communities in cross-cultural and global conversations. Ron’s education is an eclectic blend of social work, counseling, and theological studies. Ron holds a BA from Western Washington University, an MS from Pepperdine University, and a Doctorate of Ministry in Complex Urban Settings from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And he is our Professor of Theology and Culture at The Seattle School. So I’m gonna turn it over to you guys. Thank you so much for being here, and like I said, feel free to use the chat to respond to faculty prompts and to engage with other members. And then use the Q&A feature, to ask any questions you have. Okay, I’ll hand it over to you guys.

Dr. Ron Ruthruff: Great. I think I’m, I’m gonna get this rodeo started. I use the term rodeo because I saw somebody in the chat is from Mount Vernon, Washington. And I’m, I was born in Arlington, Washington, at what we refer to as Casket Valley Hospital. It’s actually called Cascade Valley, but, enough people die there, I think Casket Valley is an appropriate term. But it’s great to see people from my, my neck of the woods. We’re gonna start our conversation with, doing a little definition.

One of the things that I think becomes really complicated in this talk is if we don’t define racism from the very beginning, it becomes really difficult in how to attack it. Because if you talk to 30 people on the street, all of them would define racism in a different way. So, I’m gonna, I’m actually gonna define a few terms. The one term I’m not gonna define that I think Dr. Hoard defines much more articulated than me is the term “belonging”, and kind of how that sort of belonging works itself out, and I know he’ll speak to that later. But I’m gonna try to, just begin by defining anti-racism, defining what a credible community practice is, and then we’ll begin with a few of the goals that we have for this, 45 minutes of us talking at you. And then hopefully another 45 minutes or so of us talking with you.

It’s challenging to do this in a vacuum. I wish you could see my entire outfit, because I do have a chain on my wallet, which gives me all the authority in the world to be the professor of theology and culture. I’m also really excited because I’m wearing my favorite pair of jeans. I am wearing pants. I guess that’s, that’s the bottom line of this. And I’m wearing my favorite pair of jeans.
What did you say, Paul?

Dr. Paul Hoard: Not always a given for you, Dr. Ron

Dr. Ron Ruthruff: Not always a given, but today I am wearing pants during my lecture, and I’m really, really, I’m sad that you can’t see them, because they’re my favorite pair of jeans. Let’s get right into defining race. And I’m not going to be the one that defines this. I’m gonna read you a couple of quotes from a couple of books. And I apologize, I would normally throw these quotes in the chat, but I have a certain amount of carpal tunnel or bursitis or something going on with my hand, and I can’t maneuver my computer right now, so it’s just my mouth and me for today, which, If you knew me, many people would say that that’s probably all I need is my mouth and me.

Let’s define a couple of terms. This is from a book by Miguel A. De La Torre called Reading the Bible From the Margins. He says this:

“Race is not a scientific notion. It is a socio-historical concept. Race is not a biological factor differentiating human beings. Rather, it is a social construction whose function is oppression of one group of people for the benefit of another. When we’re talking about ethnicity, we’re talking about countries of origin and places we come from. When we’re talking about race, we’re talking around a sociological construct.”

And from another great book, called A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki, a great historian who passed away a few years back. He says: “Race we will see has been a social construction that has historically set apart racial minorities from European immigrant groups.”

He talks about that in relationship to racism and the construction of race for the purpose of building America. And then my favorite quote that begins to define insiders and outsiders as far as race is from a book titled Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, where she says: “We have no patterns of relating across difference as equals.” She goes on in that quote, page 115 of her book, Sister Outsider, strongly recommend you reading her book. She’s a beautiful writer and a very thoughtful social critic. She goes on to say, “So those… those areas of difference become misnamed and used for the purposes of oppression.”

For the purpose of this conversation. We are not going to talk about bigotry. I would argue that anybody can be bigoted. All of us have bias. All of us have preconceived ideas about other people. It’s the way we form not only our own identity. But it’s a survival mechanism that actually, in some ways, has the illusion of keeping us safe. For the purpose of this conversation, my definition would be that race plus power equals racism. So, racism is, is… is, a larger category that has far more complexity than just bigotry. Race plus power equals racism. And because of that definition, I would say my definition of anti-racism, which I’ve played with this the last couple of years, this is what I say is anti-racism. It’s breaking down a bit, the barriers to belonging. Which, like I said, Dr. Hoard will refer to later.

It is the intentional effort at all levels of human relating – and I would argue there’s 4 levels of human relating: systemic, organizational, interpersonal, and interpsychic. Breaking down the barrier, an effort at all levels of human relating to be attentive to and to undo racist beliefs, behaviors, and bias through intentional actions that recognize diversity, strive for equity, and encourage inclusion. Building the capacity of individuals and communities to be fascinated by difference, rather than frustrated by it. And my last definition, before we go on to the objectives of this workshop, is what is a credible community practice? And this is what I would argue. Credible community practice is not striving for competency as the goal to be achieved. But rather, credibility in credible… excuse me, in a credible community practice, credibility is the relational pursuit in community. It is a collective endeavor, not an individual pursuit. It’s a practice in which we embody a way of being rather than an intellectual concept to be learned.

We like to use the word credible rather than competency, because competency speaks to a goal that can be achieved, and credibility speaks to a relational dynamic that is ongoing. So today, what we hope to accomplish in the next 45 minutes or so, is to build a curiosity around 3 things. A curiosity around what we would say are the psychological and theological barriers to anti-racist action. Begin to identify and become familiar or comfortable with the practice of building tools that foster equity and inclusion. And we really hope that at the end of the day, this begins the journey to equip you as participants to take action in your institutions.

We… I… want to create a few troublemakers. And those troublemakers are just people that are willing to ask questions of institutions, and of individuals, and of communities that those institutions, communities, and individuals haven’t been able to, or haven’t considered asking before. So, as we start, I’ll just turn it over to Paul, and Paul’s gonna take a few minutes to talk about kind of the psychological barriers to this work we call anti-racism, and to unwrap this idea of racism in our culture and in our communities. Paul? Take it away, please.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Thanks so much, Ron, and I was able to snag those quotes from our shared notes and throw them on the chat for you, so our participants, yeah, just as a heads up. Yeah, I appreciate the setup there. A couple things to note, while we’re doing this. One, as you may pick up, is that Ron is the theologian. I’m the therapist, and so it’s my job to bring in a little bit of the psychological framing. Ron’s gonna bring some theological framing, particularly around the barriers to anti-racist action. Because what’s the… I would say the nugget that Ron and I continue to kind of wrestle with is why is there such a gap in my lived experience, I would say particularly in myself, in my own efforts, in the communities I’m a part of, in the school that we’re at, between beautiful aspirations, wonderful aspirations for belonging, for community, for anti-racist action. And then what actually happens, and the lived experience of both folks of color as well as white folks in these institutions. Why does that gap continue to exist, even if the intention of the individuals is somewhat good, positive, pure, whatever?

And so, it’s this sort of, like, failure of good intentions, that we wanted to be able to, you know, get beyond the aphorism of, like, hey, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and actually try to explore this, both from a theological lens and a psychological lens. And we’re not here going to argue as to which one is more important. Instead, we kind of want to offer both. And give you an opportunity to sort of see how they interact with one another. And I would just invite you to notice what might be, perhaps, new. or more, unsettling for yourself as you’re listening, and maybe just listen to that discomfort. Not because it means it’s right, but because it may mean there’s something more to think about for you. And obviously, we’re doing kind of a quick webinar here today, so this is a project Ron and I have been working on for several years, and we have developed a lot of the things we’re going to talk about here briefly. We’re going to summarize some things. But we actually have been working on them in far more depth in several other places. So if there’s interest in that, happy to share more of our resources and ideas with anybody.

So, the other thing to note is that Ron and I are also approaching this as two white men. And I think that’s really important to note, because one of the things we want to highlight is that that’s not neutral, that’s a part of how we’ve entered this conversation. We’re coming at this from our own location, and we’re trying to speak to this construct of whiteness, and this desire for anti-racism from the location of of white… of white men, of what it has meant… what has meant for us to try to understand oppression, understand power dynamics, understand how racism works from our lived experiences. And so we are building quite a bit off of the reading we’ve done from others, but it’s important to note that we’re talking from almost as insiders within whiteness, is part of the framing we’ve tried to take in this.

So I’d just like to kind of acknowledge and sort of highlight that in there, to say this is one framing, and that’s the position we’re coming from. So my role here, for the next couple minutes is I’m just going to talk about some of these psychological barriers, and there’s a few frameworks I want to give to everybody. Because there’s, there’s this quote from Zizek, and I’m gonna paraphrase it, Zizek is a philosopher, and he talks about how the moment we think we have somehow transcended ideology, the moment we think we’ve somehow seen through it and are beyond it and are past it, is actually the moment we’re most deeply caught within it. And I would say this has been my lived experience of trying to, trying to become more anti-racist, to become a person who is more involved in justice, action, and work like that, is that the times when I somehow think I get it, the times when I somehow think, I’ve figured this out, or somehow, aha, I don’t have those problems, are exactly the moments when I’m actually often most insulated from reality. And that’s a term I’m gonna come back to a little bit, is, kind of the impact of power on here, and I’m gonna… Ron, if I start going down too many rabbit holes, weave me back, because I’m not great at sticking to our time limits. So, here we go. Also, I have a tendency to speak really fast, because I get really excited, so tell me to slow down, Ron, because you’re the only one I can see right now, if we need to. Okay, so this idea that…

Ron Ruthruff: I think your pace is perfect, and I think you are perfect. So go ahead and do whatever you want, and I’ll walk out of the room when you’ve gone too long.

Dr. Paul Hoard: When I’ve gone too long. Alright, that sounds good. Ron and I have been doing this for a couple years. We have a good back and forth here. So, okay. So the first thing I want to talk about is this idea of what I’m going to call image protection. And one of the things, and we don’t have time to get into all the details of the difference between the self versus the subject versus the ego, versus the conscious and unconscious self, but one of the concepts in there that I really want to highlight is that, who we feel like we are, who we think that we are, is only ever one part of the story. There’s this great TED talk, where the speaker asks her audience, hey, what is it, what’s it, what’s it feel like to be wrong? And you get some quick responses, oh, it’s embarrassing, it’s shameful, it’s unnerving, it’s uncomfortable, kind of this kind of… and her response is brilliant. She says, I appreciate all that, but what you just described is what it feels like to find out you’re wrong. What it feels like to be wrong is that it feels like you’re right. All of those shame, embarrassment, kind of feelings of, like, oh my goodness, I can’t believe I did that, oh, that was wrong, those don’t show up because you are wrong. Those show up because you become aware that you’re wrong. And this is kind of that first clue that’s been really helpful for me in my own life, to recognize, oh, a lot of my own defenses, a lot of my own awareness. I’m sorry, my own defenses and my own feelings, when I trust those, that’s a really important thing to do, but those are much more geared towards my awareness. And so, I have, at times, done all sorts of horrific things outside of my own awareness. And because I didn’t notice it. I didn’t feel the impact that I was doing.

And so this is why I want to come back to that concept of insulation. One of the things that having more, and we’ll… Ron used the word power, so I want to… having more power, and that’s obviously a complex term that we could define more if we need to, but for now, we’re going to use it a little bit more simplistically. Having more power in a relationship means that the one who holds the power is actually more insulated from the impact of that power. So an example I like to give of this is there was one day, during COVID, I was working from home. And I finished my day, and I walked out of my office, and my daughter was sitting on the couch reading a book, and I… the story I’m telling myself in my head, is I’m gonna be a good, engaged dad. So I said, hey, come on, let’s go play a game downstairs. And I walked down the stairs. And started looking at my… I’m kind of a board game nerd, looking at my cabinet of board games to pick what I should play. Thinking, look, I’m inviting my daughter into my world, I’m engaging with her. She comes down kind of pouty, and I was like, what’s wrong? What’s going on? And it was in that moment, I realized what I thought was just an invitation. She heard as an interruption and a demand from her parent. From the one who could ground her, could discipline her if she doesn’t listen. And so, I wasn’t paying attention to the power differential between a parent and a child in that moment. And what I thought, and my intentions were good, I was reaching out to her, by being blinded to the power differential, I didn’t realize the impact that was having on her.

And I’m so grateful for her willingness to tell me that that’s not what she wanted to do, and that she didn’t feel like she had a choice in the matter, and that I was taking away her options and her agency, because then we were able to have a moment where I was able to start recognizing, oh, I need to tune into something that doesn’t automatically come naturally to my gut. There’s a way that I am insulated. from her experience. And this is one of these first ideas around whiteness that I want us to highlight, is that there is an insulation that comes from being in the location of having more power. You don’t always feel it. On the sort of… some of the extreme side, this is why, like, employers having romantic relationships with employees is really fraught, if not problematic in big ways, because, again, the idea of consent and understanding isn’t there, because not all the parties are on the same level.

And this same sort of thing happens when we think about power. when it’s related to, a social structure and some of the systems that Ron just identified in terms of how racism operates. So, one of the big issues that happens for white folks who want to enter this is that there’s this constant tension of, oh, I want to be good, and yet I end up continually doing things because I’m not tuned in to the impact that I’m having. I’m insulated from recognizing, and learning to resensitize oneself. So the impact you’re having is not easy and is never finished. And it’s something that we need to constantly re-navigate. And this way, I’ve actually framed it, and this is some of the things that, when we get to the practical applications, we’ll develop this a little bit more. But I’ve actually framed this through a little bit more about… in being, like, living in recovery, if you’ve ever kind of taken an addiction model, that there’s a sense in which, when you are in recovery, you don’t ever transcend that. If you’ve ever spent time in the 12-step system, it’s something that you continually work in. And so, it’s a movement towards actually continually dedicating yourself to being open to it.

The other question I like to start when I teach classes on this at the school is say, if no one’s ever told you that you have been offensive or rude, is that because you’ve never been offensive or rude, or is that because you’re not the kind of person who can hear that? You’re not a safe enough person to be told that. You haven’t built the credibility with others where they can tell you, hey, that was really offensive, that hurt me. And that, I think, is such an important thing to go back to that idea of awareness. It’s often that we insulate ourselves from being aware of our racism, of our bigotry of the way that we hurt people, and I say we, I’m sorry, identifying as white folks in particular, or those with more societal power in that moment. We insulate ourselves from the awareness of what we’re doing. But that’s fundamentally different from actually making changes, from actually being kind. Finding out, being told you’re nice, is actually really different than being nice. Developing a system of feedback that says you’re good. doesn’t always mean you are being good. And it’s that gap that’s really uncomfortable, and it’s really difficult to find ways to work through. But that’s a big part of, psychologically, what we need to start being able to tune ourselves into.

When Lauren read my bio, one of the things it noted is that one of my areas of interest is in a topic called perpetration trauma. And I’m not gonna get too far into the weeds and what we mean here, but I have found the lens of trauma to be a helpful way to talk about what’s going on here. Now, trauma is a word that I often have a lot of trouble and frustration with the way I see it used online, or the way I see it used in social media, or kind of bantered around. It’s become a very popular term, it’s being used in a lot of different ways, and so I’m going to give you what I mean when I say a trauma lens, and then, looking at my time, I’m going to be handing it over to Ron real soon, but I want to give this just as a framing to say a little bit of, like. how this idea of a resistance to awareness plays out, because trauma is actually, when we break down, like, a PTSD diagnosis, what we’re talking about is a combination of three things.

So trauma involves some form of an event, there’s some thing that’s happened. There are intrusions of that event, of the past continuing to intrude into the now. And then there’s an avoidance of triggers, of reminders of that event. So something happens, it continues to haunt us, and we then take steps to avoid those hauntings. Now… those are pretty basic. That process does not equal a PTSD diagnosis, but what it speaks to is when we say that there’s a trauma… that something is trauma-like, or there’s a traumatic impact on somebody, that’s actually what we’re talking about, that there’s something, there’s an event that’s overwhelming, there is an intrusion of that event. And so we are taking steps to avoid it.

When it comes to whiteness, and I’ll locate my own story within here, there’s an event, there’s a reality of what my identity, my understanding of myself, costs the world, costs others, of what me imagining myself and being experienced as white costs people of color, has cost what it means for my family to be where we are, for the privilege that I experience, and for all these other social issues. That’s a reality. And that breaks into my world sometimes. Sometimes I’m forced to notice my privilege. I’m forced to notice the ways that I’ve done something. I’m forced to recognize my insulation. And that’s where we actually end up having a choice. We can choose to listen to that. Or we can lean on our avoidance, withdrawal, hiding, and that’s where we get a lot of this kind of, what at least I did in my life, sticking my head in the sand, avoidance, or shooting the messenger, denial of what’s happening. Because there’s this reaction to, no, that can’t be the case. I’m a good person. Look, I do kind things. I was raised in Sunday school, and I was taught to love people, and I love people, and I’m really nice. And yet, so when messages that I had done something offensive, that I had not been open to, the experiences of others, that I had missed the way that my privilege had insulated me from how I was harming others, when those would come in, my reaction was a quick, no, those are wrong. Shut those down. that avoidance.

Now, the reason I say this is not because that idea of trauma then thereby says, see, Paul, that’s why you did it, and so it’s not your fault. Actually, I’m totally setting the side of responsibility aside, but to say, now I can better understand the process of what’s going on. I’m reacting to an intrusion instead of being able to see the person in front of me. And being able to make that shift is not something that happens overnight. But it’s something that takes working in community, working with others, and developing what Ron called credibility to be able to ongoing have those conversations, to face the discomfort that says, no, Paul, you aren’t who you think you are, you aren’t who you wish you were, but we can continue to work towards it. I think I’ve gone a little bit farther than I was supposed to, Ron, so I’m gonna turn it over to you, and let you take it from here. Can you begin to talk about that?

Ron Ruthruff: Thank you. You know, it’s funny, every time Paul and I begin to do one of these things, I begin to connect the dots. So my encouragement to you, as a participant, is Please don’t forget what Paul just said about those psychological ideas, because I think that idea of wanting to be good, that idea of resisting, sort of, the information that you aren’t as good, or… Even the sort of recognition that you were wrong all fit into these sort of theological barriers that I’m going to begin to talk about. So, first of all, try to connect the dots between what Paul just said psychologically and how that could, how that could… how that could be sheared up or sort of propped up by some theological lenses that are problematic.

And the second thing I just want to say is that, in a book by Richard Bek called Unclean, he has this great quote that we use as really an entrance question, into discussions with potential students, where he talks about, sort of, the balancing of psychological, sort of frames, and sort of theological construction, how they do play into each other. So be attentive to that, too. How… how all of us, our theology comes from the psychological frames that we’ve built up to protect ourselves, or to defend ourselves, or to understand ourselves. And vice versa, that actual psychology is informed by, sort of, the theological lenses that we look through. The other thing I want to say before I start this is, what I’m bringing you in this next, like, 5 to 7 minutes isn’t Ron’s ideas about theology. I’ve been informed by some, I believe, very good research. I read a book called Jesus and John Wayne a few years ago, and it set me on this sort of… trail of curiosity to try to figure out how evangelicalism and how Christianity in general might not just be complicit to racism, but might actually be culpable in some of its construction. And so that book was really, really important to me. And then I read a very, very good book I would argue that’s very, I think… Very helpful for people that lean more towards evangelical faith. A book by a guy by the name of Whitehead called American Ideology that I thought was great. Excuse me, American Idolatry. Gorski’s and Perry’s The Flag and the Cross, also a very good book.

And what started Paul and I kind of was a catalyst for our research was I, at the very beginning of a fellowship that we got to be a part of through Wabash Presbyterian that invited white professors, specifically white professors, to talk about racism and anti-racism, was, I began to just think and wrote an article for Christ in Cascadia around making application of Willie Jennings after whiteness, where he critiques The Academy, specifically in relationship to racism, wrote a little article, and Paul and I, through this, this Wabash Fellowship, that’s where these ideas began to germinate for us.

And finally, the last book that I’ll just suggest to you is a book called When Affirmative Action Was White, a book by A. Cazaltan that was actually suggested to me by Cornel West. And that book talks about, sort of, some of the institutional mechanisms that’s created that systemic reality of how we relate to each other to be embedded in our culture. So all that to say, as way of introduction, that I’m not, I’m not flying by the seat of my pants here. I’m not just in conversation with Paul. We have, through the actual research that we did. We’re in conversation with some really, really incredible thought leaders that helped guide us in this conversation.

And I just want to pick on The Reformation for just a second. And Calvin, you know… I’m sure John Calvin was a really nice guy, but I just want to start there, not because that is the beginning of racism in our culture. We have ideas around Poppel Bulls and the doctrine of discovery. its cousin, Manifest Destiny, that shows up on the scene about 100 years later, are both participants in the way our society, as an American culture, has handled this idea of race and difference. But Calvin had a very interesting doctrine, and it’s the doctrine of election. And let me just read this for you, if you don’t understand, Yes, Unclean by Richard Bek is an amazing book. One of the best books I ever read. In fact, I sat two days in the summer and read it all in two days, because I loved it so much.

Back to Calvin. Calvin’s theology is one of unconditional election. And it’s considered an aspect of his ideas around predestination, in which God chooses certain individuals to be saved. And certain individuals to face judgment without condition. Now, Calvin used this as a form of grace, or the understanding of grace, that it’s not by any works that we should produce or manifest salvation on our own. Calvin was very clear that this was implemented by God. But to a group of Puritans. Trying to create a new life. In a new country. in which they just moved from Europe, where actual natural resources, even the amount of wood that was there to construct homes, was on the decrease. They not only moved to America because of religious freedom. But they moved to religion… America because of resources, and the lack of resources in Europe that could sustain them. And this idea of total depravity and God electing only a certain group of people. And only God knowing who that elected group of people are and are not. I would argue caused a certain amount of what we would call existential angst. Or in the words of my, my friend on the psychology side of the house, how do I know that I’m good enough? Is there any evidence that could prove to me that I’m actually in the elect?

And what’s strange about this idea is this gift of God causing existential angst in a group of Puritans wasn’t just, wasn’t just sort of a thought experiment among a group of people, that they literally… Calvin actually heard. that there was this deep, deep, deep concern over, how do I know that I’m good enough? Or how do I see evidence of my own image of goodness being communicated? And Calvinist Institutes wrote this. He says… and he uses the idea that we call… that he calls divine benevolence. While you don’t know who’s elected or not, he did say, we do not, however, forbid the Christian from undergirding their faith, over their elected status, by signs of divine benevolence towards him or her. Calvin began to create a frame that said, the actual accumulation of wealth or divinely, bestowed blessing was the one piece of evidence that you could actually begin to understand or undergird the security that you had over your own salvation status.

You can begin to see, in a country where you owned no land. and you had actually no labor force that could accumulate wealth for you, how these things become connected to divine benevolence, connects to manifest destiny, connects to doctrines of discovery, and all point to this… odd assurance of your salvation, that the accumulation of property and the accumulation of wealth now actually are evidence of God’s favor, or God’s benevolence. Now, I want to make it very clear, this isn’t communal benevolence. There’s definitely some dynamics among Native American communities that argued that communal benevolence, or the idea of wealth was manifested by a leader of a community’s ability to give his possessions away. That’s not the trajectory of divine benevolence. Divine benevolence becomes very hyper-individual and hyper, vertical in the way that the dynamic works.

So divine benevolence becomes part of this idea of doctrine of discovery and manifest Destiny, and unlike what Leslie Newbigin would say. About this doctrine of election. Newbigin’s read on Calvin’s theology was that God always uses the particular for the sake of the universal, that election is a category of blessing to be shared with others. The Puritans actually didn’t adopt that idea. Rather than election being the particular for the sake of the universal, my argument is, in the forming of this country, and the forming of this sort of evangelical mind from the Reformation, as you read what, Du Mez writes in Jesus And John Wayne, when you read the flag on the cross, when you read American Idolatry. What you become very aware of is rather than Newbigen’s idea of the particular for the sake of the universal, this theological frame became what I call an individualized eternal security blanket. This is how I know that I’m good. This is how then I know that I’m saved.

And this is the implications that I think are really important, and this is why I’m really excited that I put my laptop somewhere where I could stand today, because what happens with that. is that if I know, or if I believe, that my assurance of my salvation is dependent on this idea of divine benevolence, or wealth and land accumulation, then I have an unwillingness to accept being wrong. I have an unwillingness to accept any historical narratives that do not continue to endorse that divine election. So I view this divine idea of… I view this narrative of divine chosenness, and I become skeptical, or might I say critical, of any historical narratives that do not endorse this idea of divine election. I over-identify with this… with what Willie Jennings calls in his book, After Whiteness, and actually he says this more clearly in the Christian imagination, I become far more identified with a Jewish idea of election, or chosenness, rather than a gentile identification as sojourner or pilgrim. And I’m using that word “pilgrim” in a way that we would use it in the biblical context and not necessarily appropriate it to the American context.

So, two things are happening here. One, divine election, proven to me through wealth accumulation and divine benevolence, a real resistance to any historical narratives that don’t endorse that election, and then… a justification of violence, or I would say, by any means necessary to reclaim, or shore up, that elected status. In fact, I would argue this is where, theologically, we’ve really misread apocalyptic literature as a justification of overcoming any historical narratives that challenge our divine election by overthrow ourselves. And I would, I know this is being recorded, I’ve been called the Accidental Academic, and once in a while, I’ve been called the irreverent reverend, so I’ll just say this, I think January 6th, and what happened in January 6th was… was born in part because of a misunderstanding of apocalyptic literature that literally gave a group of people the unfounded belief and the endorsement of a violent narrative to reclaim an elected status that many historical narratives had begun to challenge in them, and they couldn’t accept it.

And I would argue, at the very end of the day this justification of violence through the misunderstanding of apocalyptic literature actually manifests itself in many of the ways that we even handle the idea of race. We have a very difficult time not thinking that we’re exceptional. In fact, I would argue that divine benevolence and election gets conflated with American exceptionalism. We have a very difficult time understanding any historical narratives that would challenge that. that we begin to sort of build a narrative around, we are God’s chosen people, and by the will of God or the chosenness of our status is evidenced by how we’ve accumulated things, and this is why I would just… I’ll just finish with this, because we gotta move on.

This is the danger of performative allyship in faith communities. This is the idea of an abstraction that interferes with a real embodied way to do anti-racist work. Is the misunderstanding of election, the inability to look at historical narratives that challenge that, and then the justification of reclaiming that election by any means necessary, I would argue, in many of our faith communities, is the actual narrative trajectory that has put us in this position. And the more I listen to Paul. the more I begin to see how those are completely embedded in some of those psychological frames. So Paul’s going to talk a little bit about shifting from image management to authentic engagement.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Love it. Ron, I could let you talk forever. Oh, I love it when you do, so thank you for… for bringing that. What I wanna highlight here is that what Ron just gave us, in terms of tying this to Calvin, to theological streams, is that I think that’s a really important part of the puzzle, and there’s not a sense of, like, that’s one part, and that’s just ideas, and then separate we have our bodies and our lived experience, but actually, hear how these are commingled. The idea of what Ron’s calling this existential insecurity. This idea of, what is my place, it actually begins to touch on ideas of “Who am I?”–of identity. And these become deeply psychologically embedded in how we see ourselves in the mirror, how we hold ourselves. And those are connected to physiological responses, those are part of how we carry ourselves in the world.

And so, these ideas, I want to first encourage you, those who are listening, just to pause and maybe take a breath. And notice how those ideas aren’t just abstract ideas. How they do or do not, or to what extent they do, live in your body and affect your pulse, your heart rate at the moment, your capacity to stay grounded, to keep listening, because this is where I think the psychological part of this conversation becomes so important. Because it’s not just, oh, let’s read better theologians. Good, read good theologians, I think that’s really good. But also, slow down and notice that ideas aren’t just ideas. They actually also are a part of how we see ourselves. And that there’s a lot happening within our bodies as we consider, or reject, or react to, or get excited about different concepts.

And so. First, slow down and notice, because actually that reintegration from the abstract ideas that Ron’s talking about to your lived experience listening to us talk right now, that integration is part of the work.

But it’s also only part because so much of that conversation ends up individualized. Ends up with you just in your own self. And some of it is recognizing, “okay, I am having this reaction.” And now is the second step of what does it take to now be able to be in a community of other people, where these kinds of energies and reactions and responses are happening in lots of bodies, in different ways, to perhaps the same situation. And how do we learn to come together? How do we learn to connect with each other instead of having a reaction and either, I would argue, like, kind of going into fawn, where, “oh my goodness, you’re right, absolutely everything I thought was wrong, and everything you say is right,” or it’s alternative of, like, “everything you say is bad, this is all wrong,” I’m having a reaction. But how do we actually now bring our physiological, our body, bodily response into the conversation to notice what’s happening so that we can actually use that to connect.

Ron teed me up earlier with this word “belonging,” and so I want to come back to that right now, because there’s a lot of ways that I think the concept of belonging has been misused. And I’ll take this back to that idea of, like, feeling wrong versus being wrong, and I would say feeling like you belong versus actually creating a community of belonging, are deeply different things. Now, anyone who’s studied Girard would be able to tell you that one of the quickest ways to create a feeling of belonging is to find somebody who belongs less, and kick them out the door. If I am concerned about my belonging, I just need to find somebody who’s weirder than me, and then make sure we all decide that they’re glad I’m not them, then my connection to that in-group has… is connected. And so one of the biggest dangers of wanting to create a feeling of belonging is that the easiest, the candy way of doing that, the way that quickly hits your appetite, is by saying, “oh, at least I’m not like those people.” Whoever those people, whoever the other is, whoever we’ve scapegoated, we push them out. And so when we create, the goal is, I want to feel like I belong, we inadvertently set ourselves up to create outsiders, to create others.

Now, in the power structures of today’s world, that often plays itself down racial lines, down class lines, and lots of the other ways that oppression plays itself, or down gender lines. But what actual belonging involves, and this is where I love that you brought in Richard Beck, because in my own work, I love working… building off of Beck’s work and around disgust and the importance of recognizing how contamination works, is actually true belonging, I would argue, is disturbing and uncomfortable. I think in the last webinar that I did in this series, my sister gave the example of something that my dad would regularly say from the front of the church that we used to attend in Turkey, where he would say, if you feel like this church is just perfect for you, please let us know so we can change it.

Because for you to feel perfectly content and happy, it means it’s an extra burden on somebody else. Community involves discomfort. Community is going to involve things that you’re not fully comfortable with. It’s gonna involve you having to deal with, “oh, I don’t particularly like that, and I need to wrestle with that.” Now, hear that carefully, because that type of word can, especially when it’s put into power structures, make certain people often people who look and sound a lot like me be telling other people that they should silence their discomfort and not listen to that. But what I’m trying to actually argue is that, particularly for those of us who have been imagined and themselves as white, who have been marked as white, that often this is going to involve us recognizing, oh, I need to be willing to recognize that at times, I’m gonna have to be called out in my racism, in my oppression, in my offensiveness. That if we’re gonna develop a community, it’s not a community of people who’ve now perfectly get it. It’s actually gonna be a community where we can begin to… move towards credibility and towards trust.

And that’s where I’ve mentioned before that I really appreciate the, the model, and again, not every group is perfect, and no model is perfect, and nothing’s going to capture everything, but the idea of recovery groups, like in the 12-step model of recovery, that it involves, hey, I need to constantly be aware that this is something I’m gonna struggle with, and we work together towards it.

Now, I’ve got a lot more ideas on that to add more nuance, especially for those of you who have had different experiences with 12-step models, and love to talk about that with you. But, the one thing I want to highlight here before handing it over to Ron to look at more organizational strategies is to say, in 12 steps, often, and I’m speaking as somebody who’s done quite a bit of addictions work with various individuals in my therapy practice, there’s a desire to go from, I have a problem, to let me help everybody else. Or in the 12-step language, to go from step 1 to 12.

That a lot… and one of the… that a lot of people want to jump straight from, oh my goodness. I have a problem, I need help, to, I’m gonna help other people. And while that is an admirable desire to help other people, it is an admirable desire to want to give back to communities, when we jump so quickly there, it also ends up insulating ourselves from the actual harm we’ve caused. And actually making change. We’re going straight to wanting to feel better, instead of doing the really messy work that the 12 steps in particular walk you through, of having to recognize what you’ve done, and begin to try to make, take ownership of it, to begin to work towards restoration, and beginning to actually build relationships.

And not to say that the 12-step steps are perfect, but that… but particularly for white folks listening, I’d encourage you to notice in yourself that desire, perhaps, to jump straight from, oh my goodness, racism is a problem, structural racism an issue, oh my goodness, I’ve been formed by whiteness, and white body supremacy is this terrible thing, to straight to, I’m gonna go tell everybody else about it. And instead of going… doing the really difficult work of actually recognizing what it’s cost you, and what’s cost the people in your life, and continually engaging that work of recovery, as opposed to that work of evangelizing.

So, I will pause there and say, so the first step, when we move towards credible practice, is actually engaging our own feelings of disturbance and disgust that’s going to be elicited in that, and recognize that sometimes, sometimes, that’s a gift.

Ron Ruthruff: And if we have been people who have been told that we are in any ways exceptional. Think about how difficult it is to make that journey. One of the things that I argue before I tell you a little case study on an organizational shift is one of the things I say often, my students probably get sick of hearing this, is my argument, plain and simple, is the only way to change our behavior, as far as white anti-racists, to move towards anti-racism. And I love… I love that term, because, I believe it’s Randy Woodley in his book around… decolonizing faith. He argues… He argues that, white people need to be anti-colonial. They can’t be decolonizing because they’re part of the perpetrators of the problem. They have to be actually against a system that they’re a part of before they can move forward.

So I actually prefer the term anti-racist because it tells me what I’m trying to deconstruct. The difficulty in that is my… and this is what my students get sick of, the difficulty in that is that takes two things. Proximity and posture. It takes proximity to difference, close enough to experience difference, and humble enough to recognize where you need to change.

This is counterintuitive to the exceptional mind. When you have been told you are the majority your whole life, majority ways of thinking don’t embrace being wrong, or being told they’re wrong. So my first caution and encouragement to you is to be in a place where you have proximity to difference will illuminate you to you.

It’s what happens when you have a big argument with your wife, and she’s two glasses of wine in, and she tells you something about you that you didn’t know. This is exactly what happens when we get close enough to difference, is we begin to see our own racism. And it’s very difficult, both psychologically and theologically, for us to accept that that’s who we are as people. I love that. And then my argument is. The posture to be able to say, in a community. You’re right, what can I do differently?
And I would tell you that as a white person doing this work, if I was not attached to a multicultural community that over the last 40 years has been deeply gracious to me, and had the courage to tell me you’re wrong. Or you did it again. And if I wasn’t able to build up the resilience and the strength to say, I am sorry, what can I do differently? I would not be able to be here having this conversation with you right now, because daily in my life, difference is close enough to me to illuminate my own racism.

Now, we’ll be very briefly with this case study. I was part of an organization, a white evangelical organization, that evolved in the 1970s, and like all good parachurch organizations that evolved in the world in the 1970s. We wanted to do good work with kids on the street. And it wasn’t until we began to hire a few very courageous souls… First of all, we were all white people. And we never asked, in the first 20 years of our organization, why were all our volunteers, why were all our staff, why was everybody white? Why did only white people care about this problem of kids on the street? Kids on the street came from every socioeconomic, every cultural background imaginable. But we were good white people doing this work.

And when we began to explore that issue as an organization, we did a few things. We began to examine and reform the policies that weren’t equitable or inclusive. And one of the things that we began to identify was that we were a white institution. That we’ve created a ministry to model, not a ministry with people… with model. That most of our recruiting was done in white churches. Most of our volunteers and our staff came from… came from places… we had a fundraising or a financial model, where at the beginning of our organization, you raised your own support. Think about the economic limitations of who gets invited in to be a participant in your organization. If you have… have to have 3 or 4 generations of wealth behind you to actually raise the kind of funds, or the network of relationships that can raise the kind of funds to do that work.

So, we began to examine some of those things, and we began to see how insidiously racist we were, how wrong we were, even in the scaffolding that we created for this missional organization.

The second thing we did, and I wrote this down as a bullet point, is we began as faith leaders in this community to try to take responsibility without centering ourselves. How do you do that? Well, my argument is, you gotta talk about racism somewhere, and you gotta find good leaders. And one of the good organizations that will help you, and one of the things that we did is we committed money in an organization that didn’t have much, to taking good, anti-racist training. Where we did our first training was with a group from New Orleans called the People’s Institute for Anti-Racism and Beyond, a great organization that began to talk to us about much of the scaffolding around organizations that was constructed from a white paradigm.

And we learned very quickly the danger of white allies. Because white allies want to do something good. And they come in with their strength. And that sort of, performative allyship that sort of manifests itself Is not the sort of place where people are able to articulate their weakness. But we went to this training as leaders, being willing to be told where our blind spots were, and where… and I’m a one-eyed professor, I know very clearly my blind spot. But, I learned that I had far more blind spots than I was even aware of, because… and this is something you’ll hear me say often in this work, is it’s actually my being willing to admit or confess, through a 12-step process, my weakness that actually creates room for other people’s capacity.

The other thing that we did as leaders to decenter ourselves is rather than recruited people to help us with our thing, we began to join other people’s thing to learn from it. So we began to join organizations and communities that we could understand more of a comprehensive, well, actually, to be quite candid, a more comprehensive understanding of why kids even ended up on the street.

So, the first thing we did was we examined and began to reform our policies around pay, around recruitment, around how decisions were made. Secondly, we tried to de-center ourselves by taking trainings and joining other people’s things. And thirdly, through examining those policies and joining other people’s things, we began to build the kind of relationships over time that challenged and transformed our institutional culture. We found wise guides. We began to recruit in different churches, we began to change our payroll, literally radically change how we paid people to hire people.

And I’ll be very candid, it wasn’t pretty. It was ugly. We went from an organization that was literally 24 white people to an organization that was 50% people of color in about 3 years. Those wonderful, gracious souls that worked with us along the way, that worked… that I… that worked with me, and for me, and led me. They could tell you all the mistakes that we made, but we were very intentional about doing three things. Examining our own policies. Trying to figure out a way to take responsibility, where we could learn and grow with others that were doing things bigger than us, they weren’t just joining our thing. And thirdly is that created and cultivated relationships that were able to tell us the truth about us.

And I’m gonna stop right there, because we’re at 10:35, even though we… Paul and I could… Paul and I are the only ones on the screen right now, and if we were pretending that we were back at my house last week doing a little day retreat on how to prepare for all the things we’re speaking for this, fall, we could talk about this forever. So, Lauren, I’m gonna toss it back to you and let you… Ask some questions of us, and then field some questions that we can… Yeah.

Lauren Peiser: Awesome. Great job on timing, that was perfect! And I could have listened for longer. Well, the first question, you’re already speaking to some of this, Ron, but I will ask it anyway. So, you’re two white guys doing this, and you’re speaking about race, you have a platform to speak about it, you have a webinar where you’re able to… to do this. So how do you, continue to do this work and speak about this without centering maleness or whiteness, and… Where do you see the limitations of this work, or where do you see particularities that you want to focus on?

Dr. Paul Hoard: You wanna take this first, Ron, no? Finish it?

Ron Ruthruff: Sure, I’ll be the white guy that centers myself to ask about how do you center whiteness and maleness in this conversation? Wise guides. My first comment would be, I don’t do this work for me. I’m not an author or an activist or a professor on my own. I continue to lean into a community of friends that love me enough to tell me the truth. And so, that phrase, I’m sorry, what could I do differently, is a phrase that I’ve become very familiar with and I say often. So, the first and foremost thing is, I’m only as good at this as the network of relationships that I have.

Two, I think Paul just spoke to this, really, in a very helpful way, and that is–I have to admit who I am. I am the Trinitarian form of privilege. I am white, cisgender, male. That comes with its own blind spot. So… understanding, one, the impact of that, and continuing to educate myself and embody what postures that, that understand that.

And thirdly, anybody watch the film Finding Nemo? I guess it’s not really a film, it’s more of a movie. Do you remember… this great AA group that the Sharks were having. Little Dory was swimming around, and she gets invited to this group because a group of very well-meaning, I think they were white sharks, very well-meaning sharks are trying to deprogram this idea that fish are food, that they’re our friends. Do you remember the scene?

Dr. Paul Hoard: Oh, yeah.

Ron Ruthruff: Dory goes with deep skepticism, but she shows up for fish, our friends. Somebody loves Finding Nemo. Who… how can you not?

And everything’s working out well. Everything’s working out really well, until Dory bonks her poor little nose. And the minute Dory bonks her nose, and the sharks smell blood. They go back to what’s intuitive to them. I, as a white man, need to recognize that it doesn’t matter how many AA-type interactions I have, I will instinctually always be in this water of whiteness, and I need a community that is telling me the truth, and I need to have the humility to go, oh. That was me. I did it again.

I was at a cocktail party in our neighborhood. A while back, a long while back now, but I tell the story because it’s important. And I’m having this really cool conversation with this young woman, she happened to be black, so of course, I’m really proud of myself that I’m interacting with somebody that’s 30 and a black woman. I hope people see me in this conversation, because I’m actually doing the work, and I’m pretty brilliant, and all of a sudden, I can connect with her, because maybe we like the same music, or maybe I know… anyway.

All those things are happening inside myself, interpsychically, right? And then she tells me that she’s here, because she’s in the medical profession. And we go on in the conversation, and she tells me that she’s an OBGYN. And I immediately feel all sorts of shame, and discomfort, and embarrassment. Of course, I don’t relay any of that to her. We continue our conversation for another 3 or 4 minutes. She drifts to go get another beer or something, I don’t know what happened, and I start walking home with my wife a couple hours later, and I said, Linda, I did it again. She’s like, you did what? And I’m like, I’m so proud of myself in this conversation, and I literally… I honestly think I did want people seeing me talking to her. Like, I know that’s in me. It’s embarrassing to say it even now, even though there’s 300 people on this phone call and I can’t… I don’t see any of them. But the most embarrassing part about it was… That when she said she was in the medical profession. I thought she must have been a traveling nurse. An x-ray technician. I’d never even had the imagination that she was an OBGYN.

My point is. Those are the kind of conversations that are deeply embarrassing, but deeply and profoundly illuminating. And unless, as a white man, I continue to engage in that kind of proximity, and the posture of sort of saying, I did it again. I’ll never begin to lose myself from those demons. Long answer, short question, sorry for that.

Dr. Paul Hoard: I… no, I love what you said there, Ron, and I think the long answer speaks to, like, it’s a good question, because it’s also… it’s an uncomfortable paradox of, like, what we’re doing here, that, like in many ways, we’re being centered. I mean, we are. Like, it’s Ron and me talking, and I think it’s important to… to recognize that, and I think it’s also really important to not be comfortable with it. I love… one of the things I appreciate what you do, Ron, is always point people to… the resources beyond you, that, like, that it’s not just a good academic thing to, like, cite your sources, but it’s like, hey, if you like what we’re saying here, actually, there’s people that we learned it from. We would encourage you to, like, go there, and hopefully we’ve helped highlight others. work whose you can… other people’s work that you can go engage with, and I think that’s really important.

The other side I will say is that I do think there is a space for us as, essentially, insiders within this structure to acknowledge what it is, and speak, and I mean, a lot of the work that I see myself doing is speaking to other white men, to help other white men understand our own, like, this is what’s happening, and it’s… I think we have a responsibility to be able to… to talk about what’s going on, and not simply say, oh, this is the role… this is the job of people of color to tell us, but actually us, as white people, to also take the responsibility to say, no, we need to educate ourselves on what we are doing, on how we are formed, and what’s happening, as well.

And that education is going to involve a lot of really everything you just described. Really uncomfortable conversations, really uncomfortable awarenesses, not… and I mean, even in that moment, Ron, instead of pushing it back on her, instead of, like, blaming other people for your shame, instead of saying, oh my goodness, I can’t believe that happened, or finding some excuse. Your willingness to say, no, that was me, I did that right then and there, and actually, me recognizing that is part of moving forward. Not asking her to make you feel better.

Ron Ruthruff: Yeah, I wanted to ask her if she… you’re not… you haven’t been an OBGYN very long, right? Like, that’s new. Oh, Ron Ruthruff. Anyway…

Lauren Peiser: I’m actually gonna jump to something I just saw in the chat, because I really like the question, I think it’s helpful. So… how do you balance… Ron, you’re speaking to proximity, as a white person being a way to work through that. And then also, this person is saying, as a white male, I’m hearing people say, we’re exhausted, this is your work to do, don’t use us, for this work. Do you have examples that respect this exhaustion, but also, don’t avoid proximity with difference?

Ron Ruthruff: Yeah, and I want Paul to answer this too, but I’m gonna answer it very briefly. I’m sitting in a little, office right now at my home. I just sat down because I’m super tired. But I’m sitting in an office, in what National Geographic argued in the 1990s was the most equally diverse neighborhood in the United States, 98118. Maybe some argument… maybe some argument from neighborhoods in New York.

Linda and I moved here not to do social justice work. We didn’t move here out of any sort of, sort of, courageous impulse. This was an affordable neighborhood to buy a home in the 1990s, when our sons were 0 and 3. So, our boys moved in here, we’ve lived in this house our entire life. It’s the 98118 zip code, and when we bought this house on this corner, I had dear friends that told me this was a stupid decision to buy a house in this neighborhood. And that I was risking my wife and my children’s safety by living on the street that we live on.

We didn’t have a lot of money because we were social workers, so we sent our kids to the local gospel mission for summer camp. We didn’t have a lot of money for private education, and really believed in public education. And, you know, as much as Christianity is a shitshow in America right now, public education is, you know, a shitshow to the 10th power, but… our kids went to local elementary school, junior high, high school, in this neighborhood.

We now, 40 years later, we cannot walk down to Lake Washington. I cannot walk around our neighborhood without being stopped by people that are 20, people that are 30, people that are 80, that just want to have a conversation with us. And so, my argument is, the way you do that. is you do that by joining a community. And you join… don’t join a community for what they can do for you, you don’t join a community because you’re trying to evangelize or change them. You… You join a community as a visitor, and you let the people there tell you, when you become a neighbor. And so for me, it was very, very simple. It’s like, I don’t… I don’t want to live anyplace else in the city, my wife doesn’t want to live any other place in the city, but… we spent 40 years here building the kind of network of friendships, and building the kind of trust and building the kind of honesty that you need to do this work.

And where I see this happening, and I don’t mean to pass judgment on anybody, my therapist and I are working on my own fear of judgment, I don’t want to transmit that to anybody else, but where I see this social justice thing changing dramatically is when people have school-age kids. When they begin to sort of make choices for their children. They say things like, well, I’m all for social justice, but I also want the best Montessori program for my child. As if social justice and the best thing for my program for my child are two mutually exclusive things.

And… And… and I’ll just… and I’ll end with this. My sons are beautiful men, who bear the scars of being in this neighborhood. And some of those scars are because I could not protect or defend or care for them in… in all the ways I wanted to. And… Yeah. So, there’s all that. Yeah, I’m… So that’s how I… that’s how I do… that’s how I did it, or I do it every day.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, I think… Lauren, what comes to my mind with… and I do appreciate the question, is, is that there’s a tendency to… I mean, I think it happens in a lot of different ways and for a lot of different… but there’s a tendency to reduce people to objects, to, like, oh, you’re my person to help me with this. And… what’s happening in that moment is then we’re actually, like, if I am a white… as a white person want to have proximity to people of color, I’ve actually reduced them from humans, and… complex subjects or friends, to an object, to someone to teach me. And that’s not what my friends have consented to me. As a therapist, I have not consented to be my friend’s therapist. I do not like it when my friends assume that I’m going to offer mental health advice unsolicited or that talking to me is going to be, talking to therapy. Why would I assume anybody else, for any other reason, would… would be that for me? I don’t assume my doctor friends are going to offer medical advice off the bat, and at the same time, sometimes I’ve developed friendships with people who have come and they have skills that have helped me, and I think… that word that Ron started with, that, like, credibility, what I really like about that word is it’s relational.

When you’re a credible individual, it’s not just that you have some badge that says, you are now credible, gold star, but credibility is constantly navigated, and is understood, and is this relational space. You are credible to somebody else for some particular thing. And I think that’s part of what we want to be developing. So, when we are seeking somebody out for any particular trait, be they that race, be that a particular competence, be that a particular gender. We are inherently in a process of objectifying them. And I think that’s what we want to be really careful of. It’s more that we… I’d encourage you to continue to take inventory of yourself, and ask the questions, which I think Ron is getting at, of like, oh, what are the ways that I’ve actually let comfort and my own comfort zone, structure my world so that I don’t even run into places where I would make friends, where I would have the opportunity to make friends, as opposed to, I’m gonna go make a friend who’s different than me.

And when we see people, like, again, I would say be a good friend, be the kind of person they would want to hang out with, as opposed to seeing what they do for you. It’s sort of like, I’ve spent, you know, I work with a wide variety of people, and there’s some aspects of society that view friendships purely from a networking perspective. What do my friends get for me? What access do they give me? What ways do they support me? What ways can I… And I think that’s such a gross way to view humanity, and I think this is one of those ways that that view of others as what do they do for me, seeps into this desire that, again, I’ll acknowledge, the intention to grow in our anti-racist capacities and to change ourselves and to be… develop proximity. I think there’s a beautiful intention there, but if we don’t examine the ways that wonderful intentions can get co-opted by the systems around us, we end up repeating the same problem we’re trying to solve. So I love that question, and hopefully you’re not hearing a simple, easy answer from me, because we’re talking about relationships with humans, and none of those are simple.

Lauren Peiser: Thank you. Okay, this… well, it could be for either of you, but maybe, Paul, a little bit more.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Oh, dear.

Lauren Peiser: What, what about shame? And I’m… I’m hearing… Something saying that maybe embracing shame, and that kind of goes against… prevalent Western psychology, and so how do you go through this balancing of recognizing our harm without shame spiraling? When is shame helpful? Can you speak more to… to shame?

Dr. Paul Hoard: Do we have time for another webinar, Lauren?

Lauren Peiser: I probably shouldn’t have done that in the last 5 minutes.

Dr. Paul Hoard: I will absolutely give a quick answer to this with the giant caveat that if you hear something from what I say that, like, sends you spiraling in a… in something, I would love to have a deeper conversation with anybody, because I’m going to say some things that hopefully aren’t just inflammatory, but also aren’t erasing anybody’s lived experience. So your experience is different from what I’ve said. Bless that. Just gonna invite some things. I will say that personally, in my own therapeutic practice, in my own research, and in my own, kind of my own work. I think there’s a very simplistic view of shame that’s been metabolized by the broader culture.

Now, anytime I talk about something like shame or depression or addiction, I always get really nervous because I’m not talking about any person here on the call’s individual experience with it. And absolutely, shame can be toxic, shame can be really problematic, and shame can cause a lot of harm. However, the monolithic view of all shame is bad, I think actually further supports whiteness. And white structures. Because what shame invites us to do is shame says… so, you know, there’s that classic thing, guilt says you did something bad, shame says you are something bad. And part of what the invitation of shame can be is that, actually, that very… the way you understand yourself to be, the world that you understand, that’s messed up. In fact, like, your understanding of yourself is a problem, and shame, in that sense, can be an invitation to say, oh the fact that I want to think of myself as a good person, and that I have to defend that view of myself as a good person, that’s actually part of the problem. And so shame can be an invitation into grief. Into grieving that I’m… the world is not what I thought it was. I’m not the hero I wish I was. I’m not this beautiful, wonderful savior that’s gonna transform the world. I’m going to step on toes. And actually, that grief is the invitation. So when shame is inviting us to grieve. I think that’s… I think it actually can be helpful.

Now, a lot of shame can be weaponized. Power structures love to use shame. Shame can be very motivational, and in that sense, it’s often really insidious and very, very harmful, so I’m not denying that shame causes harm. I am saying that sometimes shame is actually quite helpful when we begin to recognize the relational and communal nature of what it means to be a person. The problem with guilt… alone, or that classic move that was really popular, probably about 10 years ago, of saying, let’s transform your shame into guilt, is that guilt becomes individual. If I did something bad, then it’s about me, and then it moves into really behavioral work and some of that performative allyship that Ron was talking about. If I feel guilty because I did something bad, the solution is, oh, I just need to do something better. I’ll use better language, I’ll make more friends, I will put better things on my Instagram, I’ll follow more people, I will do the work. And not that any of those things are bad, but when we’re doing them, out of a sense of alleviating guilt, it’s all performative.

When actually, shame can be the invitation to say, that need to see yourself as exceptional, that need to see yourself as set apart, that need to see yourself as the good guy, as the savior, that’s actually part of the problem. And so, when we transform everything to guilt, we end up concretizing or reifying an individualistic framework. Now, that’s not to say guilt is therefore always bad, but the simplistic move from shame to guilt as the healthy move, I think that’s actually really problematic, that keeps a very individualistic framework alive.

Now, I have a lot more, like, psychoanalytic theory behind this, and I’d love to talk more about, like, the Jung’s work, and about how trauma plays into this, and about Lacanian symbolic structure, but I’ll pause it there to say I think shame actually has a role for us to play, because shame does connect us to a community. And we’re gonna have to find healthier ways as a community to engage shame without quickly ostracizing.

The last thing I’ll say, sorry, one more thing popped in my head, Lauren, and I know, I’ll pause. But, like, when something awful happens in a community, there’s often something you’ll see on the news. A leader in the community will come up, like, after some sort of act of violence, will come up and say, this isn’t who we are. This isn’t who we are. And the problem is, what that’s doing is actually trying to absolve the community of shame by scapegoating, by ostracizing, the person who did the horrible thing. Instead of saying, hey, we need to look at ourselves as a community, and what it means, that as a community, we’ve produced the kinds of people and the kinds of behaviors where this happens.

And that’s a… A lot more uncomfortable thing, because it means, actually, I’m somewhat implicated in my neighbor’s behavior, in my neighbor’s actions, and I have a responsibility on some level, and of course this is nuanced, and of course it can be taken to horrible lengths, and I’m not advocating for that, but I’m saying there’s an uncomfortable and complex conversation for us to have about what it means to be in a community. Because we’re not perfect. We’re all imperfect. And for our imperfect communities to try to maintain and to actually care for one another. Instead of, oh my goodness, Ron did the bad thing. Kill Ron. Get rid of Ron. Ron was never one of us. Then we all live in constant fear that we’re gonna accidentally or purposely do the bad thing, and our… our continued connection to the group is fully set on how much we look like we belong, and now we’re right back into image management. As opposed to authentic engagement. Okay, that was longer than I meant.

Ron Ruthruff: I loved it. Somebody in the chat, talked about objective… projective identification and splitting, and, so I’m gonna… I’m a 25-cent psychologist, so I’m gonna talk about splitting for just a second.

I think… I think much of our theological frame has caused some of that psychological splitting, because we need to be good people. I mean, Foucault’s big criticism of religion and the confessional booth of the Catholic Church, which every church has a confessional booth in one form or another. My own little Pentecostal church had an altar call on Sunday nights that was a confessional booth.

But that confessional booth Foucault criticized because he said it was a mechanism to tell you the most curious or interesting thing about you to God was the thing that was bad, or the thing you needed to get rid of. So I understand Foucault’s sort of critique of religion in that way, and what we often have done is we’ve often said, that’s not me. I’m not that. That’s the splitting that happens. I think our invitation here, and the reason why I think shame in a communal sense, can be a good, I agree with Paul, is… what if rather than saying, that’s not me, which is a form of psychological splitting and differentiating myself from that, either socially, like Gerard talks about in creating scapegoats that form communal identity, or in an individual sense, or in an inter-psychic sense, where we literally close ourselves off from other parts of ourselves because we think, you know, a good professor, you know, can’t like Motorhead, right?

Like, we do those things all the time. And my argument is, what if rather than say, that’s not me? What if we were growing in our identity formation at a place where we could say, that is me. But it’s not all of me. And it’s a part of me that I’m working I’m trying to work beyond, and I’m trying to work out of, and I’m trying to own such a way that I can treat it honestly, and gently, but courageously and truthfully.

My own son, when he was younger, was really mad at me one day. And he says now that it was just a thing to be mean, but I think it was one of the most profound things he ever said to me. He looked at me one day and he said, Dad, you are the biggest narcissist I’ve ever met in my life. How do you handle yourself? And I looked at him, and in deep love and appreciation for what he said, I said, you know, Clayton, that is me, but it’s not all of me.

And now, years later, he says, I was dealing with my own narcissism. I was trying to figure out, how do I deal with all of this stuff? And I think that attitude of, like. Embracing the shame and saying, that’s me, but it’s not all of me, is the invitation.

Lauren Peiser: That’s awesome. We have so many other questions that we did not get to. I feel like there could be a part two of this, something interactive.

Ron Ruthruff: Can I do a little advertisement and say that Paul and I are actually flying to Philadelphia to do this as a 3-hour workshop in a few weeks. We’re flying to Virginia to do this as a little hour and a half workshop. We continue to want to have this conversation for white people in mostly white spaces, I would say, as our target audience, but not exclusively. But we… we just… we want to continue to take our theoretical research, or whatever we would call that, and we want to create a real embodied conversation with people about how do we continue to do this work. So the invitation is, keep the conversation going with us if you want to.

Lauren Peiser: Yeah. Thank you. I have a couple, quick announcements, before we end. So, you will get a link to this recording, and we’ll try and add, some of those resources, too, in the follow-up email. And then we also have, our Center for Transforming Engagement, which is a part of The Seattle School, is hosting a free summit next week. Ron will be speaking at that. On confronting white Christian nationalism, and I’m putting the link in the chat right now.

And you can register for that for free now, and it is next week, September… 4th and 5th, I believe it is. It’s Thursday and Friday next week. 3rd and 4th. Thanks, Kelsey. And then we are also launching, some continuing education courses, which will have more interaction and a chance to see other faces, and be with participants and be able to talk more, which I’m… I’m hearing, feedback that you all would like that.

So if you, are… if you are on this webinar today, you will get updates about this. If you’re watching the recording later, please go to our website and sign up for our newsletter. It’s theseattlechool.edu, and we would love you to be a part of that as well.

So, thank you, Ron. Thank you, Paul, for being a part of this today. It was really great. Thank you for all of the questions that you all had in the chat. It was really interactive and helpful, and thank you so much, and we look forward to continuing the conversation soon. Thank you, have a good day.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Thanks, everybody.

Ron Ruthruff: Thank you, guys.