Bishop Walker of Long Island: Seeing Beyond the Melting Pot to the Salad Bowl
Episcopal News Service. May 14, 1993 [93097]
Jay Cormier, Director of Communications for the Diocese of Massachusetts and editor of the Episcopal Times.
For generations, the melting pot was the great American metaphor: different ethnic and linguistic communities "melting" into the single, great American nation. However, many observers of American culture suggest that the United States is really a "salad bowl" of different cultures that, while forming a single nation, still retain their distinct gifts.
"America may have been a melting pot for some who have had privilege and have had access to power," said Bishop Orris J. Walker of Long Island, "but while we were able to move into the so-called upper classes with education and money, that wasn't always true for certain ethnic groups. We're really looking more like a salad bowl, where each ingredient is distinct in its taste and flavor and its offering is unique and together makes for the salad."
The challenges and issues facing the America of many cultures were the focus of a recent series of sermons and addresses given by Walker in the Diocese of Massachusetts as the 1993 Coburn Chair of Theology speaker. Walker approached the issue of multiculturalism from an historical perspective.
"The founding fathers and mothers came to this continent with an image of establishing a new Israel. It was a monolithic model, which meant that they could come into the promised land, carve out of the virgin wilderness space which they saw as theirs, move the inhabitants out, and then create the 'in' crowd and the 'out' crowd. With the coming of the African slaves, instead of having a multicultural society, America continued to be a monocultural society," Walker said. "If Native Americans or blacks wished to enter, then somehow they had to deny their origins, which we begin to talk about in terms of the melting pot."
And, Walker believes, we are beginning to realize all that we have missed in upholding the "melting pot" myth. "What would have happened if there had been a closer dialogue with Native Americans about their relationship with the land?" he asked. "How would that, for instance, have shaped our thinking during the Industrial Revolution, with the wholesale slaughter of animals and the abuse of rivers and wetlands -- all the things that we're sensitive to now?"
In Bishop Walker's own Diocese of Long Island, a large Caribbean population, a continuing influx of people from the Pacific Rim, along with large Hispanic, Chinese, Korean and Indian communities, make for an "incredible" multicultural, multiracial diocese of 155 parishes in Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau and Suffolk counties. "There are very few congregations in the Diocese of Long Island now that would be considered all-white," said Walker, one of only two black diocesan bishops in the Episcopal Church.
Congregations are finding their own difficulties in the melting pot/salad bowl conundrum of change and mistrust of the "newcomer." Like most "old" city neighborhoods, those parishes only begin to welcome newcomers when they assimilate and accept the dominant culture that is present in the parish. Walker advises his parishes not to fear different cultures within congregations but seek to learn from them and incorporate those lessons into their congregational life, from liturgy to education. "I think, for instance, from Asian cultures there's much that we can learn in terms of courtesy and spirituality," he said.
Racism is the result of society's failure to cope with multiculturalism, Walker asserted. As one of the nation's most prominent African American church leaders, Walker knows racism in both society and the church. "The part of racism that concerns me is the power that is involved -- in other words, institutions preventing individuals from so-called minority races from advancing or not taking the cultural experience of so-called minority people seriously," he added. "Our church has a tendency to make minority people invisible. If I come for a visitation and they know the bishop's coming, then I get one kind of greeting. If I arrived at that same church in a sport shirt, dressed very casually, and just look like someone wandering in off the street, I get another reaction. And I think therein lies the problem."
There is, Walker feels, a great chasm between the policies that the church articulates and the living of those policies on the congregational level. "I told a caucus once that it was easier for me to be elected bishop of Long Island than to be elected rector of most of the parishes of the Episcopal Church," Walker said. "And that's a reality. I would like to see a church where a vestry would look at the mission of that particular congregation, allow the input of the bishop and others outside the congregation who have a broader view to participate in shaping it, and once they come together with a meaningful profile of that congregation, go after the person who can move that congregation to the place it should be regardless of color or gender. I may not live long enough to see that, but it's something I dream. I think there's a possibility," he said.
"I don't think people, unless they see sheets and burning crosses, think of themselves as racists," Walker said. "But anyone who has lived in American society has inherited the tradition, and racism is woven into the fabric of this nation. And until people identify it and say, I'm a part of it, I have benefited from it, and I don't want it to continue, then it will continue."
Walker said that another destructive aspect of racism is "the willingness to focus the blame on particular racial groups." He cited the example of blaming all Arabs and Muslims for the bombing of the World Trade Center, when, in fact, individuals are responsible, not an entire race or ethnic group. The real issues that should concern us, Walker said, have nothing to do with language, race or creed.
"I remember traveling on an airplane with a union official from Detroit who had just come back from a trip to Russia, and I asked her about her experience. She was just overwhelmed because the concerns that she heard from her friends in Detroit were the same concerns expressed in Russia: education of the children, housing, health care. I think people are always surprised when they move into another culture or they engage someone in a significant conversation who comes from a very different background, they realize that these are universal issues," Walker said.
Walker shares the sentiment of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who says, "I'm a prisoner of hope."
"Something has to happen or the Episcopal Church will continue to shrink and really disappear as a vital force in the life of the nation," Walker said. "At least in my diocese, with the influx of people from all around the world, it's going to be a very different diocese, but I think it will be a healthier diocese, with people taking one another seriously and being very much aware of gender issues and issues of race. As I said, I'm a prisoner of hope."