Discovering the Story of Race

Dallas 2019

I am sitting in the sanctuary of First Unitarian Church of Dallas on a weeknight evening, along with more than a hundred other folks, most of whom are white. We are here for a talk on the history of race by Rev. Dr. Thandeka, a Black Unitarian Universalist theologian and activist.

Thandeka begins her slide presentation in the Virginia colony in the 1600s, where two groups toil side-by-side under the lash of rich plantation owners. The first group are “bedraggled and penniless English laborers” who have been carried to the New World as “indentured servants.”1 The second group are Africans who have been stolen from their homelands and carried across the ocean in the filthy hulls of slave ships. Both groups, says Thandeka, “were called slaves.”2