February’s Worship and Programming Theme is Living Love Through the Practice of Inclusion. To anchor ourselves in this practice, the worship team offers you this quote for reflection:
Inclusion isn’t about being invited to sit at someone else’s table, it’s about building a new table together, where each person’s voice and presence matter equally. –Russell Lehmann, Speaker and Poet on Autism, Mental Health, and Life
This year’s Superbowl Halftime show gives us ample opportunity for reflection on what this looks like in real life.
What I am seeing on the socials is a lot of white people complaining about the halftime show as if the Superbowl is their table to which they invited a black performer, and he didn’t entertain them in the ways they wanted. It’s as if white people are still expecting black people to serve them, to entertain them within the boundaries of whiteness, within the culture of respectability politics. But that is not inclusion. Inclusion is not just about the presence of darker skin, it is about actually listening to and learning from the message that is being communicated from folks with darker skin who have experienced a kind of racism, intersected with poverty, violence, and struggle we (white people) do not experience. And then it is about white people, those of us with power and privilege, to step up and work together to change our behavior, systems, and culture so that it is clear that the message was heard and more people feel included, in other words, so more people have the opportunity to not just survive, but thrive. Inclusion is not about black people being welcomed to the table so they can learn how to act more white. It’s about white people listening to the message so that we can upend systemic oppression and understand the roots of anti-blackness and weed that shit out. Building a better world together will be met with much less resistance when we do that, when we actually learn how to practice inclusion.
So, if you didn’t like the halftime show, that’s ok. You don’t have to like it. But it you are centered in love and faithful to your UU values, you probably aren’t sitting around complaining about it or getting defensive. Our UU values are calling us to curiosity–what should I be learning from this halftime show? Our UU values are calling us to humility–I don’t know what it’s like be a black man in America, so I should listen and respect other perspectives rather than pretend I have the answers.
How do you hear our UU values calling to us on this occasion?
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Context notes:
Kendrick Lamar has been nominated for 57 Grammy Awards and has won 22. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (lyrics on his album “DAMN”) in 2018.
From: https://slate.com/culture/2025/02/kendrick-lamar-halftime-super-bowl-halftime-drake-2025.html
“Lamar decided to do what he does best: use his stadium-sized platform to deliver a political message when America needs it most. During Black History Month, with Donald Trump of all people in the audience, Lamar called out the streak of anti-Blackness that pervades this country’s past and present.”