A classroom teacher and social organizer for 25 years, Debby Irving served on multiple diversity committees before she had a wake-up call: “It turns out I had no idea what I was doing.”

At the time, she felt that she was a good person and that it was enough, relative to the issue of race. “I was sheltered in a white suburban, private college education life,” she said.

Traveling the country, Irving is bringing what she knows now about race to the public as part of an interactive presentation, “I’m a Good Person! Isn’t That Enough?” In Brunswick, the presentation will take place at 7 p.m. Monday at the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Irving’s wake-up call came when she was 48-year-old grad student, who had taken a course on racial and culture identification.

“I was so excited to learn about other people’s students and instead it made me delve into my own racial identity,” Irving said in a recent phone interview. “I had no idea what a racial identity would be for me as a white person.”

Continuing her research, Irving published a book in 2014, “Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race.” Her learning curve still isn’t flattening out, she said.

“We have been, as a congregation, doing a study of white supremacy and racism,” said the Rev. Sylvia Stocker, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick. “We are mostly white people in this church — not all — but mostly white people and realize that if all it took to change racism was black people doing their work, it would have been eradicated 400 years ago.”

The church congregation took a stand last November, deciding to hang a “Black Lives Matter” banner on the church.

“White people have to do their work now,” Stocker said. “So we’re trying to do our work. We’re trying to look inside ourselves, see the privilege we carry, understand it and see there are behaviors we need to change.”

On Monday, Irving will share her story, examining how she used her whiteskewed belief system to interpret the world around her — and, according to the event announcement, how she spent decades “silently reaffirming harmful, archaic racial patterns instead of questioning the racial disparities and tensions she could see and feel.”

“There are churches all of the country calling me up because it’s a particularly poignant time in the civic community,” Irving said in the interview, “both because of the divisiveness in the country is creating division in churches.”

Churches are struggling with the conflicting ideas that race is a political issue that shouldn’t be discussed within their confines, and that race is entangled with Christianity because it’s about the human spirit and what race does to the human spirit.

Other churches

Many churches are examining what is and isn’t racism, trying to make meaning for people feeling rattled in this historic moment, Irving said. The racial upsets are huge right now and very blatant.

“One of the tendencies of white families, white communities and white schools is, we’ve been taught that talking about race is taboo or it’s rude or maybe if we talk about it we keep it alive,” Irving said. “If we don’t talk about something, we have no hope of understanding it.”

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick is located at 1 Middle St. Those attending may leave a donation in the jar by the door to help defray the cost of the presentation.

dmoore@timesrecord.com