Racial Audit Team Reflection

Rev. Sean McRoberts, Racial Audit Team Co-Moderator

I was asked to reflect on my experience with the MFSA Organizational Racial Audit.  My reflection has something of a confessional nature.  I share this not as self-flagellation or with an expectation of affirmation or sympathy, but in hopes that it will be helpful to others in reflecting on the depth of the work we are engaged in.

I joined the MFSA Program Council around the same time the Board was committing to the Organizational Racial Audit.  When I was invited to serve on the audit team, I was told it would be a 10-12 month process.  The pandemic changed that , and it has now been two years since our initial training.  More unexpected and more difficult, though, than conducting the audit through this pandemic time, has been the personal engagement and reckoning with White Supremacy.

Before joining the audit team, I was aware of white supremacy in theory, and might have called myself an ally to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.  I had done little to engage white supremacy in an active, direct, or personal way.  In particular, I still thought of white supremacy as something “out there,” and shielded myself from introspection with my work for justice and my association with religious leaders who were Black or People of Color.

In the first year of the Organizational Racial Audit, we worked to establish a common language around white supremacy, create together a space to examine white supremacy culture in MFSA, and start collecting accounts and identify patterns of racism in MFSA’s history and present.  

Four months after the start of the audit, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis.  Floyd’s murder and the national uprisings that followed shifted the context in which I understood the audit, revealing more of the depth and urgency of active anti-racism work.  That fall and winter, I participated in a study of Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad with white members of the board and community at the Wesley Center in Iowa City.  This study began to bring home to me the ways that white privilege, white fragility, and other facets of white supremacy work in me, personally.  

In my own life, I can see that I have often remained silent rather than risking by naming microaggressions when I see them.  I have been “color-blind,” interacting with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color without acknowledging the important differences we have in culture and life experience.   And my actions and inactions have made spaces hostile to the participation of Black, Indegenous, and People of Color and allowed white supremacy to persist.

Now, two years into the audit, I still feel that I am only scratching the surface in my awareness and understanding of white supremacy.  The subtly with which it reinforces itself, insulates white people, and marginalizes Black, Indigenous, and People of Color is devastating.  I am grateful for the awareness that has come through this process, and feel the gravity of the work that is still ahead for me.  Now that I have seen, I cannot ignore the presence of white supremacy in me or my context, nor the ways that white supremacy undermines my own efforts at creating the spaces I need.  

I believe that what I am learning about my own life has resonance for MFSA as an organization.  I am convinced that any white justice organization that does not commit to anti-racism at a fundamental level will inevitably recreate the oppressions it seeks to oppose.  This fundamental commitment must be greater than our commitment to survival, or we will lack the resolve to become accountable for our work or to follow through on the generous guidance of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color leaders and communities we claim to be in solidarity with.