June 2000

We Will Survive!

The keynote speaker for Forward in Faith was the Rev. Gwen Hall, pastor of Sojourner Truth Unity Fellowship in Seattle, one of eight United Fellowship churches in the country. The United Fellowship movement was started as a direct response to the impact of HIV and AIDS in the African-American community, though today it serves many other groups as well.

As I look around the room, this is not a large African-American gathering. And our founder would ask, Does everyone here want to see us survive? Does your heart say yes and your mind say no? And when I say, see us survive, in America, recall that there has been and is a tendency all of our lives to make us invisible.

Former NEAC president the Rev. Richard Younge (l) and current vice chair the Rev. Richard Brewer chat with keynote speaker the Rev. Gwen Hall.

Former NEAC president the Rev. Richard Younge (l) and current vice chair the Rev. Richard Brewer chat with keynote speaker the Rev. Gwen Hall.

The AIDS epidemic, pandemic, has been around now for 20 years. What is most startling, though, is that as the other numbers come down, for gay white men our numbers come up. Right now, in our community, the leading cause of death for African-Americans between the ages of 25 and 44, it’s the number one killer. To make that a little more tangible: it has replaced the bullet.

The valuing of our lives is what we’re talking about, not just us as African-Americans valuing our lives, but do other people value our lives?

The issues we deal with in HIV still come from the root cause of many of the problems in our society: Racism. The unspoken word that we are afraid to address. Until we address the things that keep us bound, we will not solve our problems. We won’t come close to solving our problems.

Perhaps one of the other things that you don’t know is that 67% of African-American men, regardless of what they say, how straight they say they are, are having sex with other men. The impact is that AIDS in our community continues to rise as it goes down in other places.

Let’s look at how the money is handled for HIV and AIDS. The people that handle the money, as well you know, don’t want to give up power. They don’t care if the face of AIDS changes. They don’t say it this blatantly, but they mean it: we’ve got the money, we’re not giving it up just because you’re here, because we still need it. We’ll start taking care of your people.

Well, if we look at the history of America, we know that nobody takes care of our people. No one wants to take care of our people. It’s not a good people to take care of.

So that is the question that I ask you: Do you want to see us survive? And that will tell us where we can go, whether or not we can form some kind of liaison. Do you see us as children of God, just like yourselves?

These are not just rhetorical questions. I want to know that when you look at me, you see the face of a child of God. And that is important. It is more important than anything else that you can do. It is a sin and shame for someone to say, when I look at you, I don’t see black. I want to know how in the world you could look at me, and not see black. Cause when I look out there, I see a sea of white. I see the same few grains of pepper in the salt shaker. And that is okay. But we need to acknowledge where we are.

As young black children, we grow up learning to hate white people. It is drummed into us. With young white children, it is drummed into them. It does not change just because we have entered the 21st century. It does not change and it will not change unless we agree to do more than talk. To really take a stand. If you don’t know all the statistics, that does not matter, because we are not dealing with statistics, we’re dealing with the lives of people. We’re dealing with women, we’re dealing with men, we’re dealing with children. We need to help remove the stigma of HIV and AIDS.

There is no shame in getting the disease. There is shame in treating those people as less than children of God. There is a shame in that, and that shame rests upon the church. Not just the African-American church, but the church. The church in its totality.

If we decide that we will want to move forward, then we have to decide what it is that we will do. I think the first step is really to begin to look at the racist nature that we all possess. Because if we don’t begin to deal with that, we will continue to walk in the same way.

Peter here would not be expected to speak for every European-American in America, would he? I, on the other hand, would be expected to speak for every African-American in America. It is an impossible task. I barely speak for some who are queer. I barely speak for some who are Christian. I barely speak for those in our own denomination. But that would be expected of me. That is an unfair expectation, is it not?

We have to really reach out to each other. We have to do that. You might have to come to my house and have collard greens. But I might to come to your house, too. We might have to sit down and talk with each other many times. We might have to talk about many things. We might have to discover that our childhoods, even though one might have been born in a Chicago ghetto and one had been born on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, were pretty much the same. We were children with issues, with fears.

We don’t do that.

I’m looking for new faces, I’m looking for new blood, I’m looking for new identities, a new willingness to take a stand. Taking a stand requires courage. It requires the kind of courage that not many of us possess. The woman that I think of who really took a stand was Ruth. I don’t know anyone here who would tell someone who had no visible means of support, no place to really go, no man to take care of them-because let’s make that clear, we’re talking about the patriarchal community, “Where you go, I go.” That’s what we need.

If you want to move forward from here, then we need to develop a collaborative vision, a collaborative vision where you pick someone that you don’t know, someone who is diverse from you, someone who may scare the bejesus out of you on the first beginning, and make a commitment to develop a relationship with them.

When I ask you, do you want to see me survive, I want you to feel it down in your core, I want you to leave with the feeling that the next time you see a person who looks like me, or who looks different from you, that you feel down at your very core that this is a person of God, a person who bears saving, a person who bears loving. You have to see them with new eyes.

If people tell you that it is not possible for us to eradicate racism, you have to tell them, yes, it is. It is more than possible, and it will happen when we each take a stand toward doing it. It is not an intellectual exercise, it is an emotive exercise. We have to get rid of those people who doubt.

The next thing that we must do continuously is pray. We must pray.

Perseverance: We like to get lazy because it suits us. But our battle is not nearly over. It’s just beginning in earnest. It begins in earnest when we can pull the cover of some of the secrets that we have and we can sit and be truthful with each other about how we feel.

Like minds: We have more in common if we just share the love of the Lord than most people have. If we could just focus on loving the Lord and doing what we say the Lord would want, we can build on that.

Flexibility: In spite of all that I’ve said before, we have to be flexible as we approach each other, because we have such a history of mistrust, doubt, fear-and it is well-warranted on both sides.

We have to advertise that we are no longer racists. We have to put that up and make it be known that we are new people. That we are trying something different. Because if we don’t advertise, how will people know? They’ll think it’s business as usual, and they will continue in the manner in which they have continued and expect us just to go along. We have to be very vocal about it.

We have to trust God. It is not enough just to pray, plan, and persevere. We have to trust that even when the people to our right and to our left appear to let us down, that God is still in control. When I’m ready to give up on you, I need to know that God is in control, and even if I’ve given up on you, God has not.

Finally, when you feel like quitting, and when you’re tired, you need to go just one step beyond. We all feel like quitting. We all get tired. And we all need to go just one step beyond.