UU and Me
A personal case study on cancel culture from an old white straight guy
I’ve been resisting writing this for years. My encounter with notoriety happened in stages in 2017, and I wrote about it in pieces then, refusing the agony of pulling it together into one essay. Enough time has passed, so I’m ready to write this for anyone interested in a personal story about how this era’s fragmentation, polarization, intersectionality, and quickness to judge can devastate an ordinary guy with no power or celebrity and very little influence.
This is also a story of a religion that, under the influence of a radical element, ejected its core values, as seen through the eyes of one former active member. If you follow From the Pure Land for its spiritual content and want to avoid controversial topics, please feel free to stop reading now. This is part of the Sermons From a Former UU series, occasional more extended essays on varied subjects.
To help you understand what it meant to be labeled a racist, or at the very least an old white guy who doesn’t understand racism, I’ll need to start at the beginning with a few early biographical details.
I was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and grew up in a rowhouse in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Four years earlier, the Nazis had hunted down and shot to death my Uncle Leibel, his wife, Sheina, and their children in the room where they were hiding in a shtetl called Shereshov in what’s now Belarus. The following year, my Aunt Chaske, her husband, Reuben, and their children were rounded up in Shereshov, crammed into boxcars, and transported to Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the gas works and crematoriums had been expanded and readied for them.
My father had left Leibel and Chaske, his brother and sister, behind when he immigrated to the United States in 1922 and joined three siblings already here. My mother’s parents had immigrated earlier from the same shtetl. So, all of my father’s and my maternal grandparents’ antecedents can be traced to the same village, whose Jewish population was wiped out in the holocaust.
Both ancestry.com and 23andme say my DNA roots are more than 99.9% Ashkenazi Jewish. Before the turn of the 20th century, I didn’t have a single antecedent in the Western Hemisphere.
I grew up with a basic understanding of the holocaust and what it meant to my family and my neighbors. I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 when my parents took me to visit the couple of concentration camp survivors they had sponsored for entry to the U.S. I don’t know if that was the first time I saw the tattooed serial numbers on the arms of survivors, but they were a common sight in my neighborhood. I knew what they meant.
My father had been Yankel Yussof Pinsky in the “old country” and became Jack Pine after immigrating in his 20s. Having lived through pogroms and periods of starvation and having seen his father chained to a plow to grow vegetables for German soldiers during the First World War, he settled in New York City, delivering newspapers, then opening a newspaper stand, and then a gas station. After he married my mother, they had a child in 1929, who died a year later. In 1931 and 1935, they had a son and daughter who lived.
Before my birth in 1946, the family moved to Philadelphia to be closer to my grandmother, my bubbe. There, my father had a business with a small warehouse on Philadelphia’s Skid Row, a truck, and a couple of employees. He bought reconditioned bushels, baskets, and burlap sacks and sold them to farmers. The truck was for delivery.
After I was born, Bubbe—who spoke only Yiddish—lived with us and remained part of the household for a decade. I learned later that her childhood in the “Old Country” had been spent in indentured servitude to another family because hers couldn’t afford to feed her.
Jack Pine wasn’t very religious and probably knew nothing about Buddhism, but he had upekkhā, the Pali and Sanskrit word for equanimity. At least, that’s how I remember him from my childhood. He died when I was 11 and had been sick for a few years, so my childhood memories will have to do. He treated everyone with the same basic decency, and I never heard him say anything nasty about a person or group, including Germans. He didn’t easily get flustered.
I am most grateful to him for something else he didn’t do—shield me from the uglier sides of the world. He took me to make deliveries to farms where the field hands were near-naked in rags. I asked him why the “colored people” always seemed to be poor. I don’t remember exactly how he answered, but I came away with the sense that it was no fault of theirs—that there was something unfair about it.
After Dad’s “colored” truck driver—also named Jack—was arrested, he took me to visit him in the holding area of a police station. Not long after that, Jack died in prison, and my father took me to pay our respects to his family in a tenement more chaotic and noisy than any other residence I have ever entered.
Suppose I gave you that background without the words and places suggesting Judaism, and you didn’t know my skin tone. In that case, you’d probably think of me as part of a group that’s now called “marginalized,” especially after you learned about the years following my father’s death in 1958. That was before the sort of medical insurance we now have, so his illness and death left my mother and me in poverty.
She had never learned to drive and didn’t feel temperamentally able to learn. So, without a driver’s license and “job skills,” regular employment was out of the question. She did some babysitting for 50 cents an hour and could pay our expenses through my high school years primarily because she received Social Security benefits of less than $160 a month as an unremarried widow with a son younger than 18.
Although my immediate neighborhood and my K-through-8 elementary school were all “white,” my high school reflected Philadelphia’s racial demographics and was about 30% “black.” (As explained here, I use quotation marks around “white” and “black.”) It wasn’t until I graduated from high school and started attending Temple University in 1964 that I developed close relationships with African-Americans.
But I was nine years old when Emmett Till was killed and disfigured, and his mother insisted on an open coffin, and when later that year the Montgomery Bus Boycott started. I was 11 when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to force the angry crowds and the governor of Arkansas to let nine “black” students into Central High School. I was 13 when U.S. marshals had to accompany Ruby Bridges into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.
We watched the news on television at home, and my parents didn’t shield me from it. Even the Daily Forward,1 the Yiddish newspaper delivered to our house daily for Bubbe, covered the events, and she showed me the articles.
I can’t speak for my father and my grandmother, who had lived through pogroms, but I can share the disgust I felt in the air.
When I was 17 or 18, I met Alice Johnson (later Alice Johnson McDonnell), a “black” woman who had worked for the U.S. Foreign Service in Japan and Africa and decided to return to Philadelphia to participate in the growing civil rights movement. She had always wanted a little brother, and that became me for reasons I have never understood.
Alice was my first mentor. Having been born long after my sister and brother, I knew I was a mistake and felt the need to justify my existence. Alice, the first person who gave me the sense that I mattered and could make a difference, was my friend and adviser as I became a student activist.
I founded the first Vietnam antiwar group (which later became a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society) at Temple University, co-led a march from Temple’s campus to Independence Hall in support of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights, and worked in community organization in the North Philadelphia ghetto. On a fundraising tour for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Julian Bond used my bed in an apartment in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village. Later, I’d joke that if he ever became President, I could say:
Julian Bond slept in my bed.
During that period, I was turned down for a position because of my skin color. A Saul Alinsky organization was enrolling students in a program to train community organizers in Syracuse, New York, and I was recommended. I drove from Philadelphia to Syracuse for the interview, but the program leader laughed as soon as he saw me. They didn’t believe in “white” organizers for “black” territories and had no spot for me.
Two decades later, another organization founded on Alinsky’s methods put a young man named Barack Obama to work in Chicago. Who knows? Maybe if I had gotten that job in Syracuse, I would have become the first Jewish (or Buddhist) president.2
After that disappointment, I started a career in journalism in 1966 without completing my degree and moved to New York City in 1970 for a newspaper job there. My activism gave way to my career, but I remained close to Alice, who had married. She and her husband, Brian, were my best friends.
In December 1971, Alice spent a weekend with me in my Manhattan apartment. Rutgers University had granted her a professorship so she could run a for-credit college program in Trenton (New Jersey) State Prison. She was celebrating her new position and taking a weekend off before setting up her apartment in Trenton, and we had never been closer than we were during that stay. She left my apartment that Sunday afternoon for Pennsylvania Station and the train to Trenton.
I didn’t learn till the next day when I called Brian that she had never finished setting up her apartment and starting her new mission. She had been stabbed to death Sunday night by the guys hanging out on a street corner near the prison. Although her killers were of color, Alice was another martyr of the civil rights movement. I took the train to Philadelphia to be with Brian, who insisted that I stand by his side in the receiving line after Alice’s memorial service.
If you have read this far, you will understand what a shock it was 46 years later to have the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) declare that an honest discussion about racism was impossible with me in the mix. But before I move along to that, I owe a thank-you to one more “black” man whose name I don’t remember. He was the preacher in a holiness church with all “black” congregants (other than me) who told me, after a discussion about my religious beliefs, that I sounded like a Buddhist. That lit a spark that maybe Buddhism could be more than something I read about in books.
Having rejected Judaism as a faith when I was 18, I went looking for a religion before I turned 40 and settled on Unitarian Universalism, which was creedless. One motto often used then:
Deeds, not creeds.
The idea was to support each other in our honest searches for truth and meaning in life. The first UU service I attended honored Vesak Day, the celebration of Buddha’s birthday. They had me right away. Here was a faith that found wisdom in Buddhism and other religions. I joined Community Church of New York partly because its membership was almost half “black” and had a proud history of supporting civil rights.
Fortunately—or perhaps by providence—shortly after I joined, Community Church hosted a talk by the venerable Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I bought his book The Miracle of Mindfulness, and my journey began. UUism supported my growth in Buddhism, and Buddhism informed my activity in UUism. Readers of From the Pure Land know about my Buddhist path. As a UU, I…
…served as president of one congregation and vice president of another.
…served as president and as director of an annual intentional community.
…served on the board of a district.
…founded a listserv for lay worship leaders to support each other.
…attended three annual General Assemblies, one as my congregation’s delegate.
…wrote and delivered scores of sermons.
…was granted status as a community minister.
…wrote a prayer called We Thank Them All that was accepted into the Worship Web library of materials to use during services and was included in several collections.
As a prelude to how things turned sour in 2017, step back with me to 1999 or 2000. As a member of the UUA’s Joseph Priestley District Board, I was required to attend one of the new anti-racism programs being proudly rolled out. I chose one in Philadelphia and drove up from where I now lived with my wife, Carol, and our two sons. Carol and I had met at a new member orientation at the UU Church in Reston (Virginia) in 1990, so UUism was a central part of our life.
This anti-racism was supposed to be new and improved over the old idea of equal rights. The training started with presentations about how “whites” have advantages over “blacks.” While I avoid gross generalizations, I accept that—on average and in many situations, all other things being equal—”whites” are likely to be treated better than “blacks.” But I drew the line when the trainers coaxed me to say four words:
I benefit from racism.
The class came to a standstill and wouldn’t proceed until I said those words, but my deep moral and spiritual beliefs wouldn’t let me say them. I’ll admit to having some relative advantages because of racism, but the word “relative” is the key. Racism brings us all down. It is not an issue owned exclusively by people of color; racism damages the entire culture. As Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
My classmates joined the teachers in trying to get me to say those four words. One was a “black” man living in a predominantly “white” middle-class neighborhood whose son sometimes got hassled by the police when he came for a visit. I tried to explain that I don’t benefit from the hassling of his son, but no one wanted to hear it, so I became the class dunce.
I began withdrawing from UU leadership roles, except as part of worship services.
Shortly after my older son died on June 1, 2015, I dived deeper into spiritual practice and began blogging regularly. My blog eventually became Melting-Pot Dharma, which was mainly about Buddhism but occasionally touched on UUism. On April 12, 2017, I wrote a post about a shakeup in the UUA’s leadership that had the markings of a coup. Here’s the critical part of that piece:
In a nutshell (pun not intended but appreciated now that I see it), a coup has disrupted the democratic process.
The demands of one UU faction have led to the resignation of the denomination’s democratically elected president (three months before the natural end of his eight years in office), the resignations of the chief operating officer and a department head, and the decision by a parish minister to decline the leadership role to which he had been appointed.
The denomination’s annual General Assembly, at which a new president will be elected, is scheduled for June 21-25, and the new president takes office immediately. But the faction now in control is determined to get what it wants before then, so the Board of Trustees has appointed three interim co-presidents and charged them to give the faction what it wants before the new president is elected at the regularly scheduled General Assembly.
I knew that some people would object to my post because of race. The issue that led to the resignations was the pace at which people of color were getting leadership jobs. Even though Peter Morales, the president who resigned, had a Spanish immigrant father and a mother of Mexican heritage, he was considered an obstacle.
I wasn’t afraid of the criticism I expected to come, but—like so many others who have been canceled in various situations since—I had no idea how vicious and personal the response would be. Even the use of the term “cancel culture” was minimal until 2020.
Something else I didn’t understand was that, while my gripe was with the mostly “white” denominational figures who I believed had engineered the coup, the minority groups (the faction) that had been protesting what they saw as the president’s too-slow approach felt my post was aimed at them.
Less than 24 hours after my post appeared, a woman named Leslie Mac, one of the founders of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, did a live 18-minute-long video feed on Facebook attacking me. I included a link here on August 10, 2024, when I first posted this, but on August 21, after the post was widely distributed, the link could no longer access the Facebook video.
Some quotations from the video about the blog post and me:
…white fragility and white centering…pissy language about being a Buddhist…fuckshit behavior…Your experience as a white man in the faith is what everyone is catering to…racist dog-whistle…white supremacist rhetoric…You have no morals…You’re not going to be safe anymore…
Before this video, I had never heard of Leslie Mac, and I’m sure she had never heard of me before my blog post the previous day. Unitarian Universalism was hardly aware of my Melting-Pot Dharma blog, which was better known in the Buddhist community. But Mac did some research on the county in which I live and mentioned three reported incidents of racist acts, declaring that I’m “cool” with them and see them as “the norm.”
She even found what she called my “poem” posted on the Worship Web and read it:
We Thank Them All
Some came here looking for solace.
Some came here and gave it to them.
Some came here seeking music.
Some came here and gave it, joyfully.
Some came here seeking laughter.
Some came here and created it.
Some came here seeking learning, growth.
Some came here and provided it.
Some came here looking for a sense of security, a safe haven.
Some came here and provided that.
Some came here seeking an escape from hectic lives.
Some came here and enabled them to have it.
Some came here seeking the joy of community.
Some came here and created that.
Some came here wanting to serve.
Some came here and made it possible for them.
We thank them allMac concluded the video by saying:
The words sound great, but it’s a lie.
She decided that I meant those words only for “white” people and that I don’t want “black” people in my church. She inserted “white people” into the last line:
We thank all the white people. You don’t mean we thank them all—at all.
The last part of the video stung me the most. Being represented with a prayer on the Worship Web was an honor, especially for a layperson, but now she had thrown mud on it. As for the rest of what she said, I was sure anyone watching it would realize that her video was an unwarranted ad hominem attack. My blog post was about the lack of a democratic process without mentioning or expressing an opinion on Peter Morales's presidency.
Boy, was I wrong!
Until then, it would be rare for one of my posts to get more than 35 views on a given day. After the Mac video, views of the post she responded to quickly climbed into the thousands. The negative responses started coming in—from friends, ministers, and UUA staff members—some very angry, some offering advice on how I should apologize. I remember especially one email from a UU minister who practices Buddhism. He couldn’t understand how I, calling myself a Buddhist, could have so blatantly broken my covenant with Leslie Mac.
Another minister wrote a blog post saying that the colonization of the native American peoples was because of people like me. A couple of trolls started following me on social media and disputing anything I posted. I was threatened on Facebook and Twitter. One Twitter post about me:
These white people won’t understand until we turn the tables on them.
I wrote an apology for any harm my words had done, and I tried to explain my intent, but nothing helped. I hadn’t understood until then how the “anti-racism” movement had grown to dominate the dialogue about race, at least among the middle-class, educated, progressive, mostly “white” people who considered themselves UUs. One UUA leader wrote a memo to all UUs declaring that we swim in a sea of white supremacy.
While all that was a devastating shock to the values I had grown up with, I could live with it and still consider myself a UU until…
A month or two later, a friend texted me that she couldn’t find my We Thank Them All on the Worship Web. I checked, and she was right. The prayer had been removed from the library, and my name had been removed from the index. After writing to the UUA to ask about why, I received this reply:
May 16
Hi Mel,
Thanks for contacting us. Your email was forwarded to me, as I am the supervisor for Worship Web. Yes, you are correct, your pieces have been removed from the collection. We are always reviewing the Worship Web collection, and as I understand it your pieces had been there since before our current Worship Web Curator arrived.
Your submissions were removed because your recent public comments made it difficult for these pieces to be interpreted in the way they had been before. As our Association struggles with the nature of whiteness’ supremacy, we have to reexamine past assumptions, such as the assumption that a piece of writing can be interpreted independent of its source. Inclusion in the Worship Web collection as an author is, of course, always subject to the discretion of our editors. They felt (with my agreement) that these pieces and your voicing in them were not appropriate for Worship Web at this time, as we are committed to having hard and honest conversations about racial inequity in Unitarian Universalism.
The editorial decisions on these pieces are final, though you are still free to submit additional pieces for consideration if you choose to do so.
In faith,
-Carey
—
Carey McDonald | Outreach Director
My prayer had been removed not because of its content but because its association with me was a stumbling block to “hard and honest conversations about racial inequity in Unitarian Universalism.”
I eventually resigned from my UU church and have devoted increasing time and energy to Buddhism, so it worked out in a way—for me, anyway. As for UUism, that “coup” word proved to have been accurate:
Sofia Bentancourt—one of the three interims appointed in 2017—was “elected” UUA president last year as the only candidate on the ballot, even though the UUA bylaws call for at least two.
Carey McDonald, who wrote the explanatory email to me, is now executive vice president of the UUA.
Ashley Horan, the minister who wrote that people like me were responsible for the subjugation of Native Americans, is now vice president for programs and ministries.
Leslie Mac has served on the UUA Board of Trustees.
The UUA has removed the fellowship of at least two ministers for failing to fall in line with the new “gospel,” and others have left parish ministry voluntarily.
At this year’s General Assembly, Article 2 of the UUA bylaws, stating the principles of UUism, was replaced by a set of values that has become known by its mnemonic, JETPIG, which is spelled out in the “musical bonus” below.
A digital version, now in English and Yiddish, still exists.
Obama had his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University before taking the Chicago job and afterward attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1991, so it’s not a fair comparison, but I thought it was worth a laugh.
Thank you for writing this, although I'm sure it was painful to relive, since it shines a much needed light on the hatefulness of so called Anti-Racism. I've experienced shunning and sidelining in my personal and professional life (teacher) as a result of my refusal to conform, but nothing so publicly humiliating. Examples like yours work to silence dissent and maintain control. Their impulse to hurt and shame "heretics" is the root of all evil and it must be called out. Thank you again for all your work for justice and your eloquence in standing up to hate.
Thanks Mel for the unrestricted posting of this. MORE diaries like this are needed from those who were thrown out of UUism by racist black persons.