Week 4 - Race and Religion - Reframing the Conversation - Sunday June 21, 2020


Welcome to the Restarted Race and Religion Workshop.  Our Lenten Series on Implicit Bias was designed using a curriculum from United Methodist Committee on Race and Religion.  Our intent was to spend three weeks with a guided self-examination - using scriptural references that highlighted the biases of the time of the apostles and Jesus' response to what he observed. These conversations were coupled with videos from Ted Talk about identifying, examining, and working to change white privilege in ourselves.  The workshops were to follow our traditional pattern: gathering Sundays after worship, with brunch. We got through our first Sunday of Lent, saw an inspiring TedTalk by neuroscientist Jerry Kang, had a good conversation, and then everything changed.   As you know, the church was forced to close and halt face to face meetings in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

An unsuccessful effort to move the workshops to asynchronous on line content and online HW was, to be blunt, a dismal failure.  You can still access this content on this BLOG, but it never caught on.  What we wanted to do was to have face to face conversations.  A promise was made to revisit the topic once the academic semester was over - and to try to use the new Zoom technology to run synchronous conversations about this important topic. 

George Floyd Family Demands First-Degree Murder Charge Against Cop ...

Then, seven minutes and 45 sec on a Saturday evening or Memorial Day Weekend, May 25,  in Minneapolis, Minn changed everything.  During those minutes, the life of George Floyd, a 46 year old black man, was drained out of him while he was handcuffed and in police custody.  His brutal murder was captured on video and posted online, showing Floyd lying face down, begging for his life and repeatedly saying "I can't breathe".  Officers Chauvin, Kueng, Lane and Thao were arrested for murder the next day.  We add Floyd's name onto the list no one wants to be on - #SayTheirNames - the names of blacks who have died in confrontations with police - a list that is now branded into our consciences including Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor. and many many many more. 

The national protests that have taken place since then - and our own commitment to bring our identities as people of faith to protest this injustice - catalyzed our RESTART and reframing of this workshop. 

7:00 PM Gathering Time -  Gerry and Jim standing in for Pat and Rich as co-hosts.

7:15 PM Breakout Rooms to discuss these questions....
1. When did you first observe the consequences of or recognize that you yourself were the beneficiary of white privilege?
2. What about the murder of George Floyd made this time different for you than the other times we've read reports of police killings of blacks.

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