If we want to confront the evils of racism, we must begin with ourselves. These testimonies reflect the efforts of the parishioners of Christ the King to recognize the reality of racism -- in its individual and systemic forms -- in our own personal histories. Stay tuned for more.

I grew up in a white world. My suburban neighborhood was lily white, the schools I went to were a monochrome of whiteness. Even the small liberal arts college I went to in Ohio had very few people of color and I was woefully unaware of their presence. It was not till I went to live in NYC as a young adult that I had any contact or relationships with people of color. 

Growing up in NJ, there was not any overt atmosphere of racism. But……it was there. It was there, in my parents’ purposeful move to a town with “good” schools. It was there in the “negro” neighborhoods of a neighboring town. It was there under everyone’s breath, in their denial and in their attempt to be color blind. This is what I learned by osmosis.

But…my parents were also people who believed in social justice, and I was taught values of acceptance, fairness, open-mindedness.

So when I moved to TN, and encountered people of color in the workplace, and in the rural town where I lived, I still held those same values and practiced them in the only way I knew how. By practicing “color blindness”!

Much later, after teaching in mostly white private schools, for many years, I started teaching kindergarten in an urban school that was to be my teaching home for 17 years. This experience was the greatest joy of my teaching career and my greatest challenge. My classes were divided evenly, 30% white, 30% black, 30% Hispanic. Ninety-seven percent of the children were receiving “free lunch,” which reflected the poverty level. My principals were African American as were the school office staff and many of the assistants, cafeteria staff, and cleaning staff. Interestingly, we had only one black teacher, until the last two years before my retirement. This was a whole new world for me. I enjoyed getting to know all these people from diverse backgrounds. I held parent-teacher conferences with parents of color and tried, not always successfully, to communicate with them from my position of white privilege. I had to learn new strategies for understanding and working with difficult behaviors and new strategies for teaching the most hard to reach learners. But the most difficult (and many times it was the black boys), to reach were also the ones that grabbed at my heart. I did not understand the difficulties they lived with, the prevalent racism and corresponding white privilege. I see that now. 

After the killing of George Floyd, I looked at photos of the students, I had, had through the years. I imagined what their lives must be like now as young adults. I imagined that Montavious and Darius would have to be careful how they carried themselves while walking down the street. I imagined that Jordan and Dontez would automatically know to put their hands up when detained by police simply because of the color of their skin. I thought about the conversations that the parents of Jermaine and Tyrone would have had with their sons, to keep them safe. I imagined the worry and fear that Jeff and Tai’s parents have to live with all their lives, while raising black sons in our world of racial profiling and I cried!

I have many regrets from those years. I regret that I never tried to get beyond the surface level of relationship with many of my African American friends at that school. I regret that I did not understand what so many of the parents of these children had to deal with. I regret the ignorance of my white privilege. But healthy regrets come with amends and I’m working on those. By the grace of God.
 

When considering my complicity with racism, I am confronted with the multiple times in my life when I did or said nothing, retreated in to inaction, or failed to push beyond routine norms and expectations because of either intimidation from people in power or because of my own internalized racial oppression as a person of color, an Asian-American woman, living in a white dominant society. In most instances I have been blind to the harm my complicity caused until reflecting on the unintended consequences during times of quiet and truth, face to face with God. 

Most vibrant and painful in my mind is a situation when I supervised a young black man (I’ll call him “AJ”) at a previous workplace. AJ was “aging out” of the foster care system and was sent to my office as a 19 year-old intern to learn soft skills and acquire work experiences in hopes he would get a job and soon be able to successfully transition in to an independent life without support from any social safety net. This was ambitious for a 6 week program, but I was optimistic and convinced I had the temperament, skills, and experience to meet the program’s stated goal; to get him where he needed to be. 

I was a person of color, did not come from extensive resources, but did well in school and in work, and considered myself a good manager and coach. He was tall and lanky with a shy smile and a gentle, if not timid, personality. He loved rap, was passionate about honing his writing and freestyling skills, and was determined to do well in this program. To me he was like a piece of clay, something to be molded. The outlines of the mold were outcomes created by leaders in the field of education and youth development. We were asked to pick a project for him to work on in hopes that through the experience he would acquire skills that, statistically speaking, led to mainstream benchmarks of adult success. We decided together we would co-produce a spoken word and hip hop event and he would get to perform. How could we lose?

From early on there were challenges during the program. It was clear he had no experiences in an office environment and also needed help navigating life skills like public transportation and buying his own groceries, things previous foster parents or case workers had taken care of and that he was never asked to do. He struggled with meeting the “professional” expectations of the office and following directions as stated, never out of willfulness, but most likely because of lack of experience, unfamiliarity with the environment, and other personal challenges he had. 

I was not experienced with the challenges of trauma informed care and became frustrated he “wasn’t getting it” not considering his mind and body were in fight or flight mode, probably all the time, and definitely when he was in our mostly white, privileged office environment situated in an affluent area that was completely foreign and likely intimidating to him. I was getting negative pressure from coworkers and messages that they were uncomfortable with him. There were baseless suggestions he would steal food from our shared fridge. They didn’t want him to use our common lunch area as a temporary workspace. They warned their interns, who were mostly white teenaged girls from privileged backgrounds, not to interact with him and asked that his duties not intersect with their interns.

This was clearly racist, prejudiced behavior and it angered me, but because of my understanding of what was expected of me, my “place” in the organization, I made the effort to make my coworkers more comfortable and worked with AJ to conform to our environment’s standards. My own boss urged me to “play nice” and not cause conflict with the rest of staff. 

The challenges during AJ’s internship continued. The day of the event came and AJ retreated instead of rising to the occasion. Outwardly he seemed completely disinterested and bored during set up for the event. He chose not to perform even though he had been practicing for weeks. He hid backstage or in the balcony of the audience during the show. He left early instead of helping with clean-up. I understand now this was probably a learned defense mechanism.
 
At the end of his time with us, there was a hope that if he had successfully completed the internship we might offer him a job, but because of my coworkers’ discomfort and his inability to meet our standards, I did not advocate for him. I know now I probably could have, but I didn’t. When I told him we couldn’t offer him a job, his eyes welled with tears. He said if we gave him a job he might be able to get placed in housing close by and out of the high crime neighborhood where he was currently placed. He said he was scared he would die there. I dismissed his fears and said he would be fine. We could still stay in touch and I would help with his job and housing applications. 

He eventually did get a job loading boxes at a shipping company. He even earned enough money to buy some new Beats headphones for himself. One day, wearing his headphones, he took a walk to a skate park near the housing complex where he was placed. He was just standing back, observing and not participating, as he often did, listening to his music when someone came up to him and asked for his headphones. When he refused, he was stabbed. Everyone ran. He bled to death on the ground by himself. 

I got a call the next day about his death from the program’s main supervisor and I learned about the details from a police report I found online the following day. His death did not make news; it was not tragic or stunning enough. It was just another death of a young black man in a poor neighborhood. 

I went to his funeral service a week later and heard from well-meaning, mostly white, educated one-time foster parents, case workers, and program managers. Everyone had similar things to say, he was gentle and sweet, a little challenging, we all tried our best to help him, and we thought he would be okay. After that day, I truly understood the consequences of systemic racism and the importance of proclaiming “black lives matter.” Because it was clear, his life didn’t matter, not enough. 

We all left his funeral and went back to our own lives in different parts of town. How could all of us well-meaning people and all those programs fail this young man? All of us were doing our jobs, meeting program requirements of grants we received to help at-risk youth (code for black and brown kids), but ultimately we were trying to get these kids to change so they could survive in the world, instead of changing the world so we all can survive. 

I didn’t have the term at the time, but on that day, my eyes opened and my heart changed, and I became an antiracist. 

I grew up in a small city in western Kentucky, in a family that was never violently, hatefully racist, but most of my immediate relatives assumed African Americans – “blacks” we called them when I was growing up – were behaviorally, socially, and intellectually inferior. My parents were solidly decent, good people, who passed on many positive values to us kids, and who were also molded in part by the biases inherent in their own upbringing.

I remember awkward conversations with my parents when I was in grade school. I came home one day when I was in second or third grade, after a lesson in which our teacher taught us that ALL people are equal, whether “white, black, yellow, or red” (Caucasian, African American, Asian, or Native American). I enthusiastically shared this with my parents, and they were politely silent. My mother disappeared, and my dad swallowed, looked uncomfortable, and did not respond. I was deeply confused.

A few years later, I talked to my parents about my single black classmate whom I will call Reggie, who was a smart, hard-working, warm, kind, sociable fellow who smiled and laughed a lot, and all of us kids loved him. My parents didn’t respond. They didn’t speak any negative words, but their silence bothered my 11-year-old self. What was wrong? They didn’t hesitate to speak up in response to my talking about my white classmates. Clearly there was something about Reggie that didn’t add up. 

As I grew into my teens and observed the seemingly natural segregation in the lunchroom at school, and in the hallways between classes, I absorbed the understanding that different races congregated together, and chose not to intermingle. Clearly, this was natural. A white English teacher routinely came down hard on the behavioral exuberance of a black kid whom I will call Will but overlooked similar acting out from white kids. I understood this was because Will was a little too boisterous, too talkative, he didn’t know how to behave. He somehow didn’t know his place.

As I grew into puberty, I learned that when white boys behaved badly towards me, even to the point of touching my body inappropriately, it was probably because they were just boys being boys, or because I had done something to encourage them. But a black boy smiling at me or flirting with me was deemed a threat, a potentially violent transgression. The explanation that “boys will be boys” did not apply to them. I learned to fear black males as potential sexual predators, and simultaneously absorbed the idea that white males had some unique privilege to invade my personal space. This progressed, at the age of 14, to my tearfully seeking the advice of the school counselor, because a black classmate was flirting with me, and I was terrified, surely it meant he wanted to assault me. I was dreadfully confused. The counselor, to his credit, was quiet, thoughtful, understanding, sought to reassure me, and did not overreact. 

I continue to heal from this distorted teaching, that African Americans, especially males, are to be viewed at best with suspicion, and at worst, to be feared as potentially violent offenders. My life experience in high school and since has taught me that ethnicity absolutely does not define an assailant. The effort of unlearning this stereotyping of people based on race and gender is staggering. Not to mention coming to terms with my own participation in fostering and continuing this stereotyping, even unconsciously.

In the difficult exercise of writing this testimony, I’ve revisited experiences I’ve never shared before and knitted them together to see the insidious seepage of racist attitudes into my budding adolescent understanding of the world around me. As an adult, I was never completely blind to this development during my teenaged years, but I now have a heightened clarity about it, and see how I, and my loved ones, were slowly drawn into a complicit mindset. 

Growing up in a small white town in Indiana, I never saw any outright racism, probably because there weren’t any non-white folks to be racist against. I attended a private Christian college for undergrad, pretty much all white as well. My exposure to people who didn’t look like me was minimal, and I had never considered the effects of this on my understanding of the world and my place in it.
I spent the January term of my second year of college at an urban mission in Chicago. Touted as a “cross-cultural” experience for white evangelical students, the Olive Branch mission invited participants to live for a month in a rehabilitation center on the southwest side of Chicago. We spent our days learning about the racial and political histories of various Chicago neighborhoods and volunteering for local agencies. Our evenings were spent getting to know the center’s residents and processing what we had experienced that day. 

I had several eye-opening experiences during my time at the mission, but the one that most readily comes back to me almost twenty years later is our visit to the DuSable Museum of African American History. On arrival, our cohort of some 30 students had assembled in the museum’s auditorium for a talk with someone from the museum staff.

“Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Benjamin Banneker.” The question came without preamble from a Black man who had appeared on the stage. He glared out as no one raised a hand. “How about Mary McLeod Bethune?” Nothing. “W.E.B. DuBois.” No hands. “Sojourner Truth.” One hand. “George Washington Carver.” A few hands, finally. “Right. The peanut guy. Some of you know that one.” He nodded, unimpressed.

“Yours is a whitewashed history.” Simple words, a statement of fact. “Your history books are full of white people whose successes in this country were owed to them as part of Manifest Destiny. When a non-white person shows up in your history books, it is because he or she is part of the story of white people. You just can’t tell the story of how white people eliminated racism without Martin Luther King, Jr.” 
But, as the speaker went to explain, our history books could easily neglect mentioning Banneker, Dubois, and Bethune without apparent consequence. And even if these names had been included, we were given no reason to remember them. “Your whitewashed history is no accident. You are trapped in a story which you do not yet understand.”

It wasn’t an easy thing to listen to. Our speaker was not gentle. He didn’t coddle us as he went on to describe the effect on Black communities, Latino communities, Native communities of a whitewashed history. Some among us were visibly upset, angry, hurt. Some of us felt unjustly blamed for not knowing a history that wasn’t ours. “It’s not my fault. I’m not racist. I didn’t make any of these choices.” I wasn’t the only one working over these thoughts in my mind.

Suitably primed, we were admitted into the museum. Exhibit after exhibit revealed a world that I had never encountered. The Bronzeville exhibit, chronicling the rise and fall of a golden age of Black culture in Chicago. Slavery exhibits with chilling material history. Civil rights exhibits, going far beyond the simplistic Rosa Parks and MLK narrative that I had been fed in school. The Black Wall Street Massacre. Scientists, inventors, mathematicians, religious figures – all part of a story that I had never heard.

Was this someone else’s history, some other people’s story, or was it also my own? What must our story be, if this all is part of it? What’s missing in my story, if so much has been omitted? Whose people are these people around me? Are they my people? Are they part of my history? Am I a part of theirs?

I took public transit out for some errands later that evening. Looking around on the way back, riding through those south Chicago neighborhoods, I saw that mine was the only white face on the bus. 

As I watched the protests following the death of George Floyd, I found myself reminiscing about my own experiences of racism. During my childhood, it was not unusual to hear racial and ethnic slurs spoken by my parents, maternal grandparents or neighbors. I recall feelings of discomfort, even as a child, and struggled to understand why those terms were being used to label "difference." 

Two formative events stand out for me. The first occurred when I was about 12 and my parents announced a planned move to the suburbs. I recall my horror at the thought of my family joining “white flight”. My objections fell on deaf ears. I remember venting my outrage to school friends and even teachers. Later, when I was in high school, two girls from Little Rock arrived at my high school (which also housed “boarders”). They were sent to Saint Louis to escape the newly mandated integration. Once again, I realized something was dreadfully wrong. Those experiences awakened something in me.

That sense of dis-ease stayed with me and contributed to activities that were significant to my adult ministry: my husband to-be and I tutored in a downtown housing project in Saint Louis in the early 60’s; my commitment, as a chaplain, to facilitate the relevant rituals and customs of diverse ethnic groups as death approached and to assist staff in becoming more comfortable with often, unfamiliar activities, to support the dying and their families; and, in later years,  I provided diversity education for new hospital staff. 

As a grandparent, over the past decade, I have celebrated the integrated education of my grandchildren on the edge of the city of Saint Louis, not far from my original home. I have watched them participate in school activities and sports and enjoy playdates with black and brown friends. 

However, over the past several years, the cumulative effect of repeated and violent deaths of primarily, young African American men and women, has challenged me to examine the rampant racism and the systemic injustice that discriminates and limits the potential of so many. I have been struck by the narratives of African-American parents (and those of other ethnic groups) describing the specific details of having the “talk” with their children in order to protect them from persecution and even death. I recall the words of one parent who described the called-for response as “humiliating etiquette”. These stories “hit home” for me, the mother of three grown sons. I realized that, for those parents, this ominous task was vital in order to mitigate the threat they bore given the color of their skin.  As if the “wooden beam” (Mt 7:5) has fallen from my eyes, I am becoming aware of the implications of the “white privilege” I have enjoyed and the cost of that privilege for so many.  
 
Story after story of racism, has shattered my complaisance and led to the realization that incremental change will not bring the needed transformation of unjust systems that continue to violate the human dignity of our brothers and sisters. Episodic efforts at inclusion are insufficient.  

This dawning awareness has shaped my commitment to join anti-racism efforts in order to confront the disparities and prejudices that defy the values Jesus lived and taught.  As a Catholic, I am grateful that my parish has provided an opportunity to explore, as well as to develop strategies to address, the inequities that perpetuate oppression and undermine the capacity to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:39). 

As a teenager in the sixties in Philadelphia I wasn’t concerned or interested in the arguments that would ensue from family members over the Vietnam War and/or how these “colored people,” wanted Civil Rights. 

My father, who was a product of his own prejudicial upbringing, would make negative comments about these colored people and always warned us kids to stay away from their neighborhoods which were in the worst part of Philadelphia. 

Our neighborhood, however, was in one of the upper middle-class all white neighborhoods. A tight neighborhood with blocks of row homes that covered a three-mile span in all directions. With our homes being so close there wasn’t much that went un-noticed. I’ll never forget the day, after a neighbor put up a sales sign some neighbors saw a black couple enter their home. Within minutes of seeing the couple leave, other neighbors were knocking on their door, asking them if they were thinking of selling to a colored family?” Without even waiting for an answer, one guy said, “If you do, you and them will be sorry.” The crowd disbanded. The couple moved and a white family moved in.

As the years passed, I married and move to Eugene, Oregon, into another all white affluent neighborhood where whites felt the same about black folks as they did in Philadelphia. 

It wasn’t until 20+ years later did I become aware that I had become the prejudicial person my father was – unbeknown to me his stories now had become mine.  

At that time, I accepted a Contracting Officer’s (CO) position with the Department of Agriculture for whom I was working since my arrival in Eugene. My mentor was a bi-racial man and along with mentoring me in the field of Contracting, we soon became friends and often would have discussions about where I lived, how I was raised and/or him being bi-racial and married to a white woman. 

After one such discussion, he said to me, “Are you aware that you are a racist?” “What?,” I responded. Hell, I didn’t even know what a racist was! 

He told me and gave me a list of websites, suggesting that I check them out.  

Seeing and reading what Jerry’s people have been going through for so many years I was overwhelmed with grief and remorse. I was compelled to admit that I had known, I had heard, I had seen, I had denied it all!

Suddenly plagued with thoughts of the many negative racial jokes I had uttered over the years, the negative thoughts and feelings I experienced about these people and especially the time I played an influential part in stopping a low-income housing project in my Eugene neighborhood still causes me to hang my head in shame. This housing project would have afforded people of color a nice place to live – my justification was that it would reduce our property value. 

When Christ the King began the Antiracism Initiative, I knew I had to get involved. I was not surprised to learn that I still had racist beliefs. The only difference now is that I am not in denial of those beliefs and therefore, have made a promise to God that I will strive to learn and do all that I can to be an anti-racist treating all humans the way I want to be treated. With respect, dignity and equality.

In closing, my hope and prayer is for many of my white friends and neighbors to confront their own denial of their racist behavior and most importantly to not just say it but believe with all their hearts that we are indeed all God’s children, all being made in His image and likeness regardless of the color of our skin.