Talking Racial Reconciliation in the Episcopal Church

A CONVERSATION WITH SHANEEQUA BROKENLEG: TALKING RACIAL RECONCILIATION AND THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

Jul 29 - Written By Chris Corbin

Editor’s Note: This interview was edited slightly for clarity and style. 

Chris Corbin: Is there anything about your background that brought you to racial reconciliation work?

Shaneequa Brokenleg: As a person of Color, it's always been something that we do from a very young age. I think you learn about race and hear it talked about early on. Also, in the church context, I didn't realize that The Episcopal Church had white people in it until I went to a convention with my grandpa either in Pierre or Sioux Falls. I actually thought, in my infinite wisdom, that The Episcopal Church was run by the Indian Health Service because everything in the church said IHS—I didn't realize until later that “IHS” was the monogram for Christ. I used to think, “Oh, they care about our physical health, but they also care about our spiritual health.”

C: You talk about not realizing there were white people in The Episcopal Church and being a person of color. What is your background?

S: I'm American Indian, specifically I'm Sicangu Lakota from the Rosebud Reservation. Most of my understanding of The Episcopal Church came from my grandpa who was an Episcopal priest and my uncle who was an Episcopal (and then Orthodox) priest. It was later when I actually lived with my grandparents that I saw, and they talked to me about, racism in the Church. There would be things that would come up, or something would happen, and my grandpa would be angry and my grandma would be angry or hurt. I think as a child I saw disparities around me in my community and then as an adult, in my work as an epidemiologist, I saw systemic health disparities. Research that I did was treated differently than data that came from the state. For example, people might not believe my data even though you know, my data had a sample size of 350 and theirs had a sample size of 15. There was the sense that they just don't think you know what you're doing.

C: Would you say public health work impacted your approach to doing racial reconciliation work in the church?

S: Yeah, I think if you come from a Western culture you think things can fit into neat little boxes, but from a Lakota perspective it's really hard to do that. Everything to me is like one gigantic Venn diagram with circles everywhere and they’re all overlapping and they all connect with each other. So, you can't look at physical health without understanding spiritual health or you can't understand the health disparities without looking at the past and the historical trauma that helped create them. In public health one of the things that’s really depressing is that if you know someone’s zip code, you know their life expectancy. COVID is harming people of color disproportionately; that's a symptom of the structural violence and structural racism that exists in our society.

C: What are some of the struggles, as well as gifts, for the work you do of being Native and thus not fitting into the standard white/Black dichotomy for race in this country?

S: That's a good question. I think Native people often look for something different in the conversation about race and reconciliation. I think a lot of people of color want equal rights or to be treated equally, but I think because of our specific histories and the fact that we are the first peoples of this land, we often want the rights that we were guaranteed in the treaties, and these are often separate and different from other people’s rights. A lot of that comes into play when you think about land use issues like resource extraction and hunting and fishing rights. In terms of race, some people have the ability to pass or have what we would call “skin privilege.” Then there is the history of some American Indians in the South historically being treated more like white people, creating this conflict between Black and Native folks in that area. It’s played out differently where Natives weren’t treated as white people. Getting back to what gift being Native has brought to this work, I often think about it in terms of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, “we are all related.” Everyone is my relative and not just people but also all of creation, so we have a responsibility to be a good relative, which I think is the overarching message of the Gospel. I also think about racial reconciliation with the idea or concept of wólakȟota, or “being in right relationship with everything”: right relationship with the Creator, right relationship with ourselves, right relationship with creation, and right relationship with each other. And so, if you're not treating each other as a relative or as a good relative then then you're not in right relationship and not working toward reconciliation.

As an aside, I should explain the difference between equality and equity because we often talk about desiring equality when we really should be talking about equitable treatment. Equality is when everybody is the same, like if we said we're going to buy everybody a pair of shoes and they're all going to get Nikes® with no regard for size. Equity is when you get a pair of shoes that fit and meet the needs that you have. It’s not just giving out steel-toed Timberland®’s if people need work shoes. Not everybody's a construction worker. That's not going to work for everybody. If you're a nurse you're going to need those fancy big soled nurse’s shoes. If you work in an office, you’ll probably need dress shoes.

C: Have you found that being Native, and being specifically Lakota, has certain challenges in entering into discourse about racial reconciliation in The Episcopal Church?

S: Yeah—I think our Church has too often thought of race as basically a Black and white thing. I think the other thing is American Indians make up such a small portion of the entire population as a whole that often our voice gets silenced. Here’s a concrete example: the police officer who murdered George Floyd also murdered an Indigenous person years before and it didn't get the same hearing I think that George Floyd is getting. It’s obviously not a competition of who's oppressed more or anything, but had they taken that death seriously at the time and had then-Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar actually prosecuted the officer, George Floyd might not have ever been killed in the first place. I also think sometimes the rural nature of Indian Country can also silence the voices a little bit more. There's this whole wealth of information and knowledge and learning and theology from a Native perspective, rooted in our way of life that The Episcopal Church hasn't really tapped into but could really learn and benefit from.

C: What led you from the public health world into ordained ministry, and do you see some path from public health to racial reconciliation?

S: I actually started the discernment process in Minnesota, but I just wasn't done by the time I finished college, so the bishop said I could go to seminary, but if I didn’t get through discernment, I would have just wasted my time. And so, I was like “Okay, well, I'll do something else.” I actually missed the deadline to apply for the social work program and that's how I ended up in public health. Then when I was in Wisconsin doing public health and being an epidemiologist, that call started to come back up again. And then I recognized the disparity all around me and saw that there were almost no clergy of color. How was it that our churches don’t reflect the communities they're in? I was at a church right next to a reservation and I was the only person of color in that congregation. It's not that they don't want to do it, it’s more that these communities are like, “We really would love to work with the Indigenous people, but we just don't know how to do that and we don't know what to do.” They need somebody to shepherd that process. Part of where I see my connection to a lot of ministry and work is my role as a wíŋtke, which is a third gender in Lakota culture. Traditionally we walked between the masculine and feminine and the natural and supernatural and were kind of healers. I see public health being like physical healing while my role as a priest in the Church as the spiritual healing. I think you need to heal the person as a whole in both those areas if you actually want to create change. My Lakota name is the same as my grandfather: Tȟokȟála Eháke—Last Warrior, or, more accurately, last member of the kitfox warrior society. This is the person in battle who stays behind so that others can get away. I think of who’s being left behind and how I can inspire and empower them, and ultimately how we can transform things so that no one’s left behind.

C: I want to own that in this piece a white person is interviewing a person of color about educating me and other white people on these issues, and I know that this can easily become an unhelpful and damaging dynamic. How can white people enter fruitfully into these kinds of dialogues in a way that is respectful and non-exploitative?

S: That's a really good question. I think in any culture in any community, there are people that will act as liaisons. Look in different communities to find those folks first because they're the ones who will be able to usher you through. It’s similar to how if you wanted to become a Christian there will be catechists who would help you rather than just finding any generic person in church who may feel like they barely know how to be a Christian themself. But I think in terms of communities of color there's going to be folks who sort of act as go-betweens for the communities and other cultures. As you're building relationships with people of other ethnicities and cultures, figure out what it is that you have in common and what are things that you can do together. Do you see someone who’s different from you going fishing every time you’re fishing? Maybe you ask them about how they cook their fish, if they like to cook or even invite them over for a fish fry. Then it’s not putting the onus in the relationship on race, which will still probably come up naturally. Also, I think as you’re building relationships don't expect them to fit into what your mold for a relationship looks like, because that's often a mistake that we make

Again, think about where your goal is for building a relationship. If your goal for building a relationship is that you’re white and they’re a person of color, that's probably not going to work the best. But if your goal is they’re in your neighborhood and you both care about your neighborhood, or, maybe, you both like gardening, or you want to invite them to something that you’re doing, that's going to provide a much better foundation. These two points, building authentic relationships, and not having preconceived expectations about that relationship, came together for me in Watertown (SD). They asked me to work with the drug court, and I went there expecting something like, “Now, I'm going to be doing a 12-step Eucharist, and I'm going to be doing spiritual direction,” but when I shared my ideas with them, they didn't like any of the ones that I had expected. Instead, they needed what was at the very bottom of my list: help with financial literacy and help with healthy relationships.

C: When we’re dealing with racial reconciliation in The Episcopal Church, which is about 90% white, we’re often talking about reconciling with people who are not part of the body or have been marginalized in our communities. Do you have any suggestions for well-meaning white people who are just not accustomed to thinking about race or primarily want to think about racial reconciliation as being “color blind?”

S: Let me first mention something for racial reconciliation that The Episcopal Church does have, namely Building Beloved Community. In it there are four steps: Proclaiming the Dream, Telling the Truth, Repairing the Breach, and Practicing the Way of Love. I think all of those things again come down to relationships. Let me tell you some stories. As a wíŋkte I have this walking between the worlds thing, but that also comes from being half white and half Native. I remember with my white Grandma one of her favorite things was to say, “I just don't see color; I don't even know that my Black friend, Janice, is Black.” To this I was always like “Well, Grandma, she wouldn't be your Black friend Janice if you didn't know she was Black.” I think many well-meaning folks are aware that racism exists and they think the solution is to pretend there's no such thing as race or to ignore it, but that fails to see one’s full humanity or fails to see the person as a whole. So, it’s not that we don't want to see colors—it’s that we need to see all colors and we need to see them all as beautiful. I sometimes talk about people as flowers and each petal of their flower is like a part of their identity. And so, one of the petals might be race, another one might be ethnicity. Another one might be socioeconomic status or gender or class, and I think we need to see people as a whole flower and not just as one of their petals. Similarly, what we've done as a church and as a society is said that some flowers are more beautiful than others and we're only going to care about those flowers and those pedals, which is also profoundly unhelpful.

C: It sounds like in part what you're saying is that to talk about and recognize race is not to make someone just their race.

S: Right, and that we can't pretend that it's not there because it is, and we have to talk about it. If you think about things like domestic violence or sexual abuse or addiction, the reason why they can fester is because there’s this unwritten rule that we don't talk about it. We need to bring it out in the open and talk about racism. One of the things I wish we did better as a society, but especially as a church, is really work on how to talk to people who think differently from us—where else could you possibly talk about something controversial or difficult if not in the church? Church should be the place where you could talk about whatever and be able to be heard and listened to while also hearing and listening to others. That dialogue helps you build relationships and transformation take place because you stop seeing somebody as an object, as a Black man, and begin to see them as George Floyd, a father, somebody who was active in their church: You can change that through that dialogue, through that engaging with each other.

C: As we’re talking about the often-unacknowledged reality of race and ethnicity, this may be a place to speak a little more about the concepts of race and ethnicity. I’ve been told, and have seen, that Lakota culture tends to see what we may call race and ethnicity much more fluidly than Western cultures do, and I wonder if that could be a helpful place to jump into the conversation?

S: I think in terms of how we culturally think about who is and who is not Lakota, that's very true. It's much more fluid. It's not based on skin tone or biology (if there even is such a thing as biological race, which I don't think there is). In our culture, you are Lakota if you live your life as a Lakota person and are a member of the community. Do you exemplify the values of the community? Are you engaging in community life as a member? This is especially exemplified with the huŋká relative where we adopt certain people to become relatives. You may even think of formation as a Lakota person as similar to how you were formed as a Christian. That is how we tend to think of it. Blood-quantum was an imposition by outsiders as a way actually of trying to make Native Americans cease to exist.

C: What is Blood Quantum?

S: It's a very unfortunate thing. It’s basically the idea that in order to be considered Native you had to have a certain amount of “Native blood” or ancestry. In order to be enrolled in the tribe, they usually think you have to be “so much” Indian. The law says that you can only be enrolled in one tribe so here would be an example. My grandma is Dakota. My grandpa is Lakota. So technically I'm 25% Dakota 25% Lakota, but I'm enrolled as half because the two tribes are similar so they accept each other's blood Quantum. But, for example, if I was half Navajo and half Lakota, we can only be enrolled in one tribe. So, in that instance, I'd be listed as part Native even though technically I'm a hundred percent American Indian. And for American Indians there’s a fear sometimes of not being Indian enough. This can create this tension where we sort of pick at each other. This is what we might call lateral violence or lateral oppression, and it only serves to help the oppressor. Some of it has to do with how we internalize who we are while some has to do with how we then externalize that onto others. One example of this lateral violence would be when people claim that someone’s not Black enough or they're not Indian enough. The whole idea of crabs in the bucket pulling each other down is lateral violence. It's unfortunate and it's not helpful. Relatedly, there’s this idea of whose oppression is worse or more which is also unhelpful.

Getting back to the question about race or race and ethnicity, these are socially constructed things. We may think of them as fixed, especially race, but if we look at history, Greeks and Italians were put in the nonwhite category and the people of color category and somewhere along the line they got moved into the white category. As an aside, it may be worth asking how quickly did that transform how they interacted with other communities of color when this happened. Ethnicity I would think of as the cultural piece of who one is so, in my case, Lakota that would be an ethnicity versus Native American, Indian, or Indigenous, which would be the race. You can also think about Afro-Caribbean versus African American versus African as three different ethnic groups with unique cultural identities (and even within Africa, of course, there's like you got a host of different ethnic groups), but Black would be the racial identity.

C: You talk about race as a social construct, which is what a lot of critical race theory would put forward, but my sense is most people “on the ground” think of race as something essential or biological. Can you talk a little bit about how those two concepts relate to each other? Also, does saying something is a social construct make it less real?

S: Well, first of all politics are a social construct and they're very much real. I can't test somebody's blood and say, “Oh, you're a Republican or a Democrat.” At the same time, you can see how faulty biological assertions about race are. There's more variance within any one racial group than there is between the groups. And I think the things that people like to think about biologically are almost always proven to be untrue or there's something else interacting with it. For instance, some people talk about Black women having shorter gestational time for pregnancy or more stillbirths, that has much more to do with the stress that they're under. You can look to the rates of cortisol in their blood and compare that to nonblack women under similar stress and the differences disappear. What we might think of as a biological trait is actually a result of how they’re treated and so a lot more about the racism that they’re facing than anything else.

C: Getting to how our churches can concretely enter into this work, are there things that a predominantly white church that wants to enter into work for racial reconciliation within the church can do, including communities that feel afraid of doing inappropriate or culturally appropriative things?

S: I've heard a lot of my white friends on Facebook posting about that issue. One of them said something along the lines of, “I'm really confused. This is my neighborhood. There’s all this stuff going on and I want my children to do the right thing. I don’t know what to do. I want people to be able to voice their anger and concern about what happened with George Floyd and I'm angry about it too, but also want to protect my family and I just want to be a good human. I don’t know how to be a good human right now.” And I think that anxiety is really real for people so I just want to acknowledge that. It may not always be so present as it was for her, but I think it’s present for everyone, and again I think that's why sometimes it's easier for people to ignore it because they don't have to deal with that cognitive dissonance that they feel. But the reality is as white people in society you have privileges that you receive that are unearned and I think you have to think about what your responsibility with that privilege is as a Christian and as a human being. Concretely it doesn't help anyone to be silent—silence only ever hurts the people who are oppressed. It doesn't hurt the oppressor. As a church, you can do a curriculum called “Sacred Ground,” which is a free resource, it consists of a series of 10 meetings. There’s usually some sort of learning piece like a video you watch or an article to read and then you talk about it as a group. It’s a free curriculum for Episcopal congregations. While it was designed originally for white folks to talk about race in the church, anyone is welcome to participate. Katrina Browne and other folks are working on a revamped version more for multicultural or people of color to enter the conversation. Another thing is for clergy to preach and talk about race in church. We sometimes just wring our hands like “I don't know what to do,” but don't do nothing—preach about it. We’ve also developed some resources around Learn, Pray, Act. We're trying to keep it really short—like five or six things in each category. A really simple but overlooked thing is to ask how you are interacting with your neighborhood. Do they know who you are? Do you know the other agencies and businesses and people in your neighborhood? Another thing you could do is invite different people to come together and just have a dialogue and ask them a question like “What pressures are on your family right now?” If you have little groups of six or eight you’ll start to hear stuff come out and it's often through those gatherings that churches can find things to focus on to help transform their community. A good example of that would be some of the stuff that happened in South Dakota around predatory lending. They listened to people and heard them say, “I don't know how to make ends meet and I do these loans and then I end up losing my car.” These conversations helped them put energy into working against predatory lending practices and helped to get legislation passed that pushed these businesses out of the state.

C: It's wild how difficult we try to seem to make this when, at the end of the day, it sounds like one of the most helpful things is to go and build relationships with people who are in your community who are different from you.

S: Yes, it's wild that that's got to be something we have to talk about and remind people to do.

C: Is it right that some of that fear about saying or doing the wrong thing is mitigated by the relationships because once you actually have a relationship, there’s more grace?

S: Yes, absolutely, and part of growing and learning is making mistakes. I mean, ideally, they are mistakes that don’t permanently hurt someone, but through building those relationships, you’ll make small mistakes at the beginning, learn from them, and then you won’t ever make a mistake in a big way. It’s akin to learning to dance: You're going to step on people’s feet every once in a while. But then when you're really good at dancing, they'll be no more feet stepping. It’s the same thing when it comes to learning how to be in relationship with others. One of the things that I think is helpful is talking to the organizations and businesses in your community. Do the elementary schools know that you're there? We have a lot of elders in our churches who feel like this relationship building is not possible because of age or mobility. But offer to go read to folks. When you get to know people around you and build relationships it's a lot harder to hold on to fear of them as the other. When I lived in Seattle, I worked with homeless and at-risk kids. We did outreach on the streets of Seattle in the red-light district. People would ask, “Aren’t you afraid they're gonna hurt you?” But no—you're building relationships. You're just engaging in conversation. We always have stuff to give them like condoms or bleach kits or socks, too, but what was interesting was the longer I lived there the more I saw those kids grow up and intersect in other parts of my life. Some ended up as bouncers at the clubs I would go to or would be working at the grocery store.

C: There was an interesting tweet I saw earlier basically saying basically if you look around at the conditions for people of color in America, you’re left with either thinking there is something wrong with people of color, which is the racist option, or there is something wrong with America. It seems that in building these relationships it becomes a lot harder to go with the racist option.

S: Right and I think part of that is what’s called in the social sciences the Just World Phenomenon. We think that the world is just so if something bad happens to someone, it must be because they did something to cause it. We see that even all the way back in the Bible. We know the story where people ask, “Why is this person blind?” and it’s just assumed that it's because of something the person or their parents did. But Jesus corrects this saying that everything is not about what the individual or their family did.

C: Speaking from the reality of responses I’ve seen from white folks before, especially around claims to white privilege or feelings of undue responsibility for engaging in dismantling systemic racism, are there any ways that we can enter into this conversation in a way that can disarm some of those challenges or questions?

S: To begin with, it probably helps to frame the conversation around how much of the burden of the results of racism is already being borne by people of color. It’s not just emotional or mental discomfort—it's often life or death, real constant suffering and trauma. That said though, if someone challenges the idea of white privilege or the idea of their personal responsibility for dismantling these systems, I always try and seek first to understand, to see where they’re coming from. Are they truly feeling overburdened in their own life or are they just coming to church to be comfortable? If you're just coming to church to be comfortable, don't go to church, go to a country club. As the church, we’re called to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world and that means working and sometimes that even means, you know, sacrificing your life. Think of cases like Bonhoeffer’s. And today, the work that we need to do as Christians has a lot more to do with how we're really showing love to others, which means stepping out of your comfort zone and means doing things that might be simple but not easy and it means checking your privilege. I think one of the benefits of white privilege is you can avoid even talking about it or knowing about it if you want, but that also means you can’t expect people to completely change immediately and suddenly. It’s not dissimilar to how you expect people to become practicing Christians. You're not going to expect somebody whose brand new to Christianity to understand the Daily Office. You have to start really basic: Here's the story of Jesus. I think the same is true when we’re talking about race. We can't just go and expect somebody to be “woke.” You should try to learn and when you make a mistake (and you will) apologize and move on. I think again people know if you're trying to be in relationship with them and that is key. When you're trying to learn a language, you're going to make so many mistakes speaking the language but people usually, in my experience at least, are so happy that you’re even trying to learn the language they’ll help you through that.

One of the difficult things about race and racism that people think is that it’s a binary: If you’re a racist you're bad and if you're not racist you’re good. But it exists on a spectrum that's part of a larger social structure. So, if you're a part of that structure, you are racist in the fact that you're part of that structure and that you have privilege from it. We have to stop thinking of it as someone is a racist or is not a racist and instead think about whether we’re able to move on the spectrum toward being less racist and helping to dismantle racist structures. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we think of it primarily as a question of morality, of being personally good or bad. I would think of it more as like are you moving in the right direction? I don't care if you're crawling and stumbling in that direction or if you're running. I just think everybody should be moving in that direction. And I think we as people have different things in our life. And so, it's up to us to figure out what that looks like for ourselves rather than judging others for not doing enough. At the same time, I think we can help by educating and by holding up a mirror to folks and saying, “Hey, this is what I'm seeing. What do you see?”

C: Well thank you so much for sitting down to do this interview with me.

S: It’s my pleasure.

from an article originally in Earth & Altar