March 18, 2005
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Damascus Road Anti-Racism Process marks 10 years of anti-racism work
by Marla Pierson Lester
ATLANTA — Through stories of challenge and urgings to continue the journey, participants in the March 11-13 conference, “Damascus and Beyond: seeking clearer sight, bolder spirit,” shared their experiences and dreams for anti-racism work in congregations and church institutions.
A decade after a conference in Chicago that led to the beginning of the Damascus Road Anti-Racism Process, some 125 people came together to reflect on their work.
“This is a celebration. (It’s) a celebration for me of many, many years of seeing anti-racism work take root in the church,” said John Powell, whose work with the former Minority Ministries Council of the Mennonite Church three decades ago helped set the stage for the later work of Damascus Road.
Damascus Road uses trainings about systemic racism to organize teams to work on dismantling racism in their own institutions or congregations. More than 1,500 people throughout the United States have participated in anti-racism trainings through Damascus Road. Some 50 anti-racism teams have been formed.
Today, Damascus Road is looking ahead by developing a system of chaplains and organizers in order to better nurture teams and link them together.
Participants and speakers at the conference stressed the task of dismantling racism remains enormous.
The first night of the conference, Powell, now director for Missional Church Development at Mennonite Mission Network, and Lynford Hershey, who was part of the former Minority Ministries Council, recalled their struggles to bring the discussion of racism into Anabaptist churches.
“There was a lot to do. And guess what folks?” Powell told the crowd. “There still is a lot to do.”
Speakers said that the systems of racism remain dominant in society today and that white people continue to benefit from long-standing inequities supported by institutional structures.
How to overcome that system is a more complicated question. Participants in the conference noted not just the strategies that teams within the Damascus Road network have used to organize against racism — but also the challenges to Damascus Road and the difficulties inherent in dismantling structural racism.
Also strong in this gathering was a sense of community among partners in this work.
“I think Damascus Road is one of the few places I have heard white people say that racism is a white person’s problem and that white people need to deal with it,” said Tracy Baton, an African-American woman who is a leader and member of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church. It is also one of the few places she’s heard white people call racism a sin.
As chair of missions and service for the congregation, she is a member of the church’s Damascus Road team. However, she stressed she hopes her white brothers and sisters in the church will take up the challenge of this work. “I am looking to them to take ownership of the problem and its solutions.”
For Rick Derksen, of East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pa., Damascus Road offered a new identity outside the power and privilege that, as a white male, he’d long realized that he held. “That was hopeful to me. For me, it was also an experience of grace,” he said. “It helps me reclaim a God-given identity instead of an identity forced upon us by society.”
After education about how white privilege and white power shape the identities of white people as well as people of color, Damascus Road leaders intend that participants will become active members of teams working on the issue within church institutions or congregations.
“One of the things we say in trainings is that you can’t educate racism away. Because racism is a structural reality, dismantling racism takes structural change, not just change of mindset,” said Phil Brubaker, training coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) U.S. Anti-Racism Program. “Education is key to that organizing but insufficient in itself.”
In working to name the racism present in today’s systems, each of those present becomes part of the resistance, said Calenthia Dowdy of Washington, D.C., a Damascus Road trainer who is on the faculty of Eastern University in St. David’s, Pa.
As part of the first conference session, participants stepped forward to pin squares of fabric they had brought with them into a patchwork quilt, which will be pieced and sewn together as a symbol of this gathering and of shared work against racism.
“We’re putting something together, each one of us bringing something of ourselves and lifting up and letting God use us to resist oppression,” Dowdy said.
For more information on the conference, click on www.mcc.org/damascusandbeyond. For more on the Damascus Road Anti-Racism Process, an Anabaptist anti-racism training and skill development program, click on www.mcc.org/damascusroad.
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Marla Pierson Lester is a writer/editor for MCC Communications.
MCC photos available
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Photo 1: John Powell, of Buffalo, N.Y., pins a square of cloth onto a piece of fabric as part of the first night of the “Damascus & Beyond: seeking clearer sight, bolder spirit” conference in Atlanta. (Photo by Matthew Lester)
Photo 2: Sharon Williams (far left) sings, Leo Hartshorn (left) plays the guitar and Conrad Moore (right) plays the keyboard during the opening session of the conference. (Photo by Matthew Lester)
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