The year 2007 may be remembered as the year that the noose made a comeback as a symbol of racial prejudice and hatred. Not that the noose has ever not been with us. But since the Sept. 20 rally in Jena, La., where tens of thousands protested what they saw as racism in the prosecution of six black youths known as the “Jena 6,” this country saw a rash of noose incidents. Nooses were found hanging at high school and college campuses, at army depots and police departments, work sites and postal centers. In the last three and a half months of 2007, there were as many as 60 documented cases of nooses displayed in public. Compare that to the past decade when only about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups. “Jena style nooses” were even offered for sale for $10 on white supremacist Hal Turner’s internet radio website.

Some commentators have tried to minimize this rise, dismissing some of the incidents as the result of copycats seeking media attention or as pranks perpetrated by people ignorant of the significance of a noose. Even if that is the case, the rise is still discouraging. A noose is not a neutral symbol. It is a symbol from the shameful past in American history when lynching was used as a means of social control of blacks. Lynching did not just involve hanging. It often included humiliation, torture, burning, dismemberment and castration. Victims were beaten and whipped, many times in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities. Pieces of the corpse were sometimes taken by onlookers as souvenirs of the event. By conservative estimates, in the five decades between 1880 and 1930, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, by a hate-driven white mob. And one needn’t have committed any crime to become the victim of a lynching—just looking at a white person the wrong way could get you killed, especially if you were a black man and the person you looked at was a white woman. It is not possible to know something of this history of the noose as a symbol of racial intimidation and not feel disturbed at its rise.

However, as disturbing as the rise in noose incidents is, that is not nearly as upsetting as the case of Meghan Williams, the young black woman who was held and tortured for over a week by six white men and women in rural West Virginia last September. Indeed her story awakens echoes of lynchings past. Williams, who is developmentally disabled, and who knew her attackers, was lured to a remote trailer with promises of a party. Once there she was viciously assaulted and held captive. Her captors choked and beat her, stabbed her, sexually assaulted and sodomized her with a wooden rod, scalded her with hot water, made her drink from a toilet and eat human feces, all the while spouting racial epithets, telling her they were doing this to her because she is black. At one point they took her to a nearby lake and told her that was the place they were going to cut her throat. If it had not been for an anonymous tip which led sheriff’s deputies to investigate, it seems likely that Meghan Williams would have been killed. Meghan’s mother, Carmen Williams, interviewed in her daughter’s hospital room, said, "I don't understand a human being doing another human being the way they did my daughter. I didn't know there were people like that out there."

“I don’t understand a human being doing another human being the way they did my daughter. . .” Sometimes, the news just makes me want to weep. Sometimes I find it hard to retain faith in human nature. Aren’t we better than this? Haven’t we made more progress than this? And I find myself wondering if racial hatred and violence are simply part of human nature and that they will always be with us.

Most of you know that Mark and I have been doing a lot of reading lately in the areas of evolutionary psychology and neurobiology. Research in these fields can be disheartening because they seem to show that racism, or at least tribalism—the preference for one’s own kind and suspicion of those who are different—is so much a part of our evolutionary heritage that it is hard wired into our brains. These may have been necessary adaptive strategies at one stage in our evolution, but the effect, as one researcher puts it, is that “we’ve been designed to hate our enemies, to ignore the needs of people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us.” (de Waal, p. 248) Put another way, if this science is correct, racism is part of our very nature.

Morever, because racism is hard wired into the primitive parts of our brains, it operates at such an unconscious level that even when our conscious attitudes change, racism can still be effecting our behaviors and perceptions below our awareness, essentially against our conscious will. Add to this neurological predisposition the socialization effects of centuries of negative stereotyping and mistreatment of blacks in the western world and it seems that none of us are entirely free of racial bias. There is fascinating, but also distressing, research going on at Harvard using something called the Implicit Association test to measure racial bias. This is a gross over simplification, but essentially it works like this: By linking together words and images, the race bias test measures what associations come most easily to mind. People taking the test are asked to classify a series of faces into two categories, black American and white American. They are then asked to mentally associate the white and black faces with positive words such as "wonderful" or negative words such as "evil." Under time pressure, most Americans find it easier to group negative words with black faces, and positive words with white faces.

The bias tests have now been taken by more than 2 million people and used in hundreds of research studies. You can easily take it yourself on the Harvard web site. But I warn you that many people are dismayed by their test results. The tests reveal that 88 percent of white people have a pro-white or anti-black implicit bias. Further, blacks have internalized much of the same bias as whites—48 percent of blacks show a pro-white or anti-black bias. And these hidden negative prejudices or stereotypes hold even for people consciously committed to egalitarianism. One of the researchers who developed the test characterized the results this way: "The Implicit Association Test measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds. If Europeans had been carted to Africa as slaves, blacks would have the same beliefs about whites that whites now have about blacks."

So, okay, you might ask, we pretty much all have unconscious racial bias. What difference does that make as long as we don’t behave in racist ways? But further research shows that this unconscious bias does effect our behavior—we simply aren’t aware of it because it is unconscious. It effects things such as employment decisions, decisions about guilt or innocence in criminal trials, whether we judge someone to be friendly or hostile, smart or stupid - even when we think we are acting fairly and rationally. And these kind of results hold even for those who are deliberately working to behave without prejudice; they hold even for many activists working in social justice arenas! Considered in that light, what hope does your average Jo or Jane have about overcoming racism?

There are some people in fact who have seized upon this kind of research as a justification for their racist world views. If we’re all hard wired to favor our own kind, then no one is really to blame for the miserable consequences of treating others according to shorthand stereotypes and racial biases. In other words, why fight these old instincts?

Do we just give up? Say racism will always be with us? Stop caring and lie down in despair?

Of course not. Realistically, there may always be racism among us; we may never eradicate ever iota of preference for one’s own kind. But that does not mean that we cannot work at elevating our sensibilities, bringing to awareness our automatic responses so that we have more conscious control over them, so that we can choose to act morally in spite of them. We can counter our hidden stereotypical associations by consciously cultivating corrective images.

Mahzarin Banaji, one of the pioneers of the Harvard Implicit Association research, equates finding evidence of implicit bias to driving a car and discovering that, although the steering wheel is being held straight, the vehicle is drifting to one side. Although it may feel very strange, the driver can consciously hold the steering wheel against the drift. Similarly, although it may feel uncomfortable, unnatural at first, we can consciously steer against our bias. Banaji, who herself was dismayed by the results the first time she took a racial bias test, has applied her research to her own life. Her office at Harvard is testimony. At eye level on a bookshelf are pictures of African Americans: George Washington Carver, Miles Davis, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King. She often wears a brooch on her jacket in the shape of Africa. What might seem like political correctness to some is an evidence-based intervention to combat her own biases, Banaji says. And there is evidence that such conscious strategies do make lasting neurological imprints.

Because you see there is another side to the human story. Racism may be part of our biological heritage, but it is not the only part. We are also moral creatures. Theodore Parker’s father was correct. We have inside us an inherent sense of what is right and what is wrong. Our moral conscience is a product of the same selection process that shaped our xenophobic side. Human beings simply would not have survived if they had not developed vast capacities for empathy, love and cooperative behavior. At this point in our evolutionary history, morality is just as much part of our human nature. And I stake my heart on that better part.

When we hear of nooses for sale on the internet and find it repugnant, that is our innate moral sense, our empathy. When we are chastened and moved by the stories of lynchings in the past, that is our compassion welling up. When we feel sick with horror upon hearing Meghan Williams story—our reaction is the result of our empathy and inner morality. We have to remember this is just as much a part of our nature as the xenophobic side. And we must remember, too, that we have made progress. Slavery is illegal. Lynchings are outside the law. Civil rights are the rule of the land. If we haven’t yet eradicated inequality and racial hatred, they are no longer acceptable to the vast majority of Americans. And even if we all still possess unconscious prejudice, it is a long way from unconscious bias to overt racial violence. Clearly we are not biologically determined. Both our consciousness and our behaviors have changed. And we have the wisdom to know that behavior once useful to us when we first came down from the trees onto the African savanna has long since outworn its utility. We know that human beings simply must learn to live together in mutuality and respect. There are simply too many of us and the planet is too small to think any other way.

Martin Luther King had an audacious faith in the future of humanity; an audacious faith that one day human beings would overcome the “isness” of our nature and become what we truly “ought” to be. King often gave expression to that faith with the statement, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That statement is a powerful expression of his hope. But it was not original to King. King was quoting our very own forebear, the 19 th century Unitarian preacher, Theodore Parker.

King had the audacity to believe. Theodore Parker had the audacity to believe. And so must we. Yes, we must be realists. Yes, the work of eradicating racial prejudice and violence is long, hard work. But we must have the audacity to believe that “The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice”. We must believe that moral arc is written on our souls, part of our very nature. And we must add our weight, help bend that arc. For we human beings are the benders; God works through us. We must be the ones who work to overcome the remnants of our outworn past; to inscribe in our neural pathways those oughts to which we aspire; to strengthen the conscious well springs of our empathy and compassion. We must be the ones to help build a world where everyone understands that a noose is an abhorrent symbol; a world where racial epithets and inequality are mere footnotes in the annals of history; and where the kind of violence that Meghan William suffered is, quite simply, unimaginable.

That is the work we are called to do—as Unitarian Universalists, as citizens of the human race, beginning with ourselves. Yes, we are realists, you and I, my fellow Unitarian Universalists. We know this isn’t easy work, not work that we will see fulfilled in the near future. But that is why we need spiritual communities like this to sustain us for that long haul. Yes, we need this church to help us overcome the unexamined habits of thought that deny others their humanity, the petty divisions that plaque our nation. But we need this church also when the news makes us weep and makes us despair of human nature. Then we need this church even more, to help us overcome that feeling that nothing will ever change for the better, to help us overcome the feeling of isolation. We need this church to renew our vision of redemptive goodwill, to remind us that others, too, labor in this light. We need this church to remind us that love and compassion and mutuality are part of our very nature—and that is the part that will overcome someday.