Michael Emerson Quotes
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I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you're an integrated congregation? It doesn't happen.
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Life will be simpler when I don't spend two-thirds of the year in the middle of the Pacific.
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There's a lot of terminology, like "washes whiter than snow," and these things which when they're said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they're said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, "Why are you saying that? What are you saying?"
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We've had people say, "Now when I go to work, I don't feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn't have done otherwise."
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I really do think that every time you play a role well, you are in danger of being identified with that role until the next big thing comes along.
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Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don't.
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So we didn't get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What's happened then, of course, is now that we've had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship?
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We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.
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I think with President Obama there's going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There's going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era?
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So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there's a variety of ways.
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There's always that sense of because we're so racially defined, if you're trying to cross the boundaries you don't fit into any particular space.
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I liked the scenes with the baby, but the baby steals all the scenes that you're in. So that would get old after a while, because the baby is too perfect. I liked being high on ecstasy.
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As you may know, previously as Attorney General and now as Governor, I have supported legislation to close the gun show loophole in North Carolina.
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It's one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say "Amen," maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.
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So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.
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We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There's something different. They are somebody who - they don't exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other.
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One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they're doing that. Sometimes they're questions about selling out on their race or "Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?" So there are costs to it, and I think they're a little bit higher in the South because of its history.
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I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people - when they're in mixed company, we speak differently.
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I think it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of energy there and life, and you'll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they're listening in Spanish.
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So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn't remove your shoes and someone's taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship.
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Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.
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I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"
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Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they'll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn't mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time.
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It's the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.