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still learning - by bill o'bryan
Bob True, a friend and CTK deacon, said that, if you’re not dead, God’s not through with you. Someone else once told me that you’re not an old folk until you stop learning. So ...
About a year ago, something (perhaps the Holy Spirit?) piqued my interest in the CTK adult education sessions and, in particular, the discussions generated by awful events in our society. Admittedly, I was concerned about a potentially distressing discussion focused on “black lives matter” debates and horrible, systematic injuries inflicted on certain groups of people. After all, I’m not a racist, am I?
Who even wants to ask the question, to risk the realization that they are described by that awful, negative term “racist.” I remember U.S. Representative Jim Cooper speaking at a Law Day luncheon sponsored by the Nashville Bar Association – the opening line was “My father was a racist.” I remember thinking about the courage it took to recognize and speak publicly about his father’s failings. Who wants to admit that their parents, their teachers and coaches, even their own diocese had not been as inclusive of all people as God intends?
As a child, I learned that we would always lock the car doors when we drove through the “bad part of town,” the black neighborhood. In sports, I was told that we had to get ahead of the all-black squad from St. John’s in the basketball game because “they’d quit if they got behind.” As an adult, only a few months ago, I learned that my diocese did not always allow blacks to worship with whites. I never thought about that before! Had I learned racist attitudes and behaviors that I wasn’t fully aware of?
For me, this first step in this new journey was learning more. Susie and I read Ibram X. Kendl’s “How to be an Antiracist.” If I’m not a racist, am I, can I be, an antiracist? Could I learn from ideas for anti-racist individual actions and changes in the systems?
Understanding what has historically been done to minorities and what they have experienced might give me a clue, if not a total understanding, of why those affected most may feel and react as they do in response to death or injury or oppression of members of their race. I haven’t walked in their shoes, but I could learn from someone who has. I can learn the whats, and sometimes the whys, of what happened.
So, my learning story and journey have started and continue. Despite good intentions, and the desire to avoid the awful “racist” label, I fail, daily ... in traffic, at Walgreen’s, at the office. I continue to judge people, and make assumptions, just because of appearances. Some of this may result from where I came from, but it is not where I want to learn to be. I don’t want to be one of “those people” who act unconsciously and impulsively on racist thoughts.
I hope that I can learn how not to be racist and how to be anti-racist. I pray that I can act daily on what I learn ... before I become an old folk. I hope, also, that God’s not done with me for a while. -
Driving While Black - by Carolyn Goddard
“I’m worried. My son got his license. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” Just listening to Chelle, I felt a familiar knot in my own stomach. I saw my son going down the driveway in that dark green Hondo all those years ago. Seeing him in my mind, in that driver’s seat still evoked the same scary thoughts and feelings. He might go too fast, get pulled over, run into something, damage the car, he could be hurt. “He could mouth off to the police. Then who knows what.” Chelle’s words jerked me out of the re-run playing in my mind. I stared at her face. She wasn’t worried about a ticket, a bent fender – her son could be killed, shot, by a police officer. Her fear was palpable. And it was a rational worry – one I certainly had never had. That was the first time I was struck viscerally by what it might be like to be black in this country.
I have been slapped in the face by that difference of being black in the United States a few times since then. A gentle minister friend of mine, after being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason, turned toward the open window to see the nozzle of a revolver in this face. Sweet and funny Cynthia became anxious about getting out of the car near a white neighborhood to watch a shower of falling stars; she didn’t have binoculars or a telescope to bear witness to her intention.
My awareness of the pervasiveness of systemic racism in this country has been intensified in Christ the King’s Anti-Racism Reading Group. Many of the accounts in the various books have shocked me, perhaps those in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law more than any other. I am not a person who believes my country is without faults, any more that I believe I am a person without faults – but I had not realized how deeply slavery and racism have disfigured our national character, my character, until recently. Certain people, policies and institutions have isolated me from my fellow countrymen, blinded me to their lived experience - and I have willingly turned a blind eye to our national stain. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Nostra culpa, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa.
That Sign - By Jim Bryan
I could never forget that sign!
When I was in perhaps the 5th grade, we would have an occasional day off from school for teacher’s meetings. My friends and I would catch the bus at the “end of the line”, which was just two doors from my house and spend a fun-filled day exploring downtown. We made the usual stops: The Magic Store on Demonbreun Street was always fun; the Fifth Avenue Cigar Store usually had a neat collection of pocketknives and pens; the Monkey Bar at Harvey’s Department store invariably presented the opportunity for mischief; Mill’s and Ziebart’s Bookstores had the latest Hot Rod magazines, that we could peruse until the owner ran us off. If we had as much as a dollar in our pocket, many other opportunities opened up to us, such as a hamburger at the Tic-Tok or the Krystal, a matinee movie at one of the many downtown theaters or a chocolate Sunday at Candyland.
We always made it back to the bus shelter before “rush hour” to catch the bus home. I am not sure why we wanted to avoid rush hour but suspect it was so we could claim our favorite seat - the long seats immediately behind the driver that were parallel to the length of the bus. From that vantage point, my eyes were always drawn to that awful sign above the aisle, about halfway to the back of the bus. I never understood why we had such a sign or what it meant, for that matter. “Colored People to the Rear” it proclaimed in dark, bold letters, with an angry tone. But what color, I wondered? We were all some color, weren’t we? At an early age in church, we had learned the song, “red and yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight….” If Jesus did love all the children, why were others not directed to the rear? And why to the rear, as opposed to the right or left? That sign made no sense to me and something about it was offensive, even at my age. But intuitively I knew what it meant and exactly who it was directed to.
On one of those return trips home. My friend and I sat in our usual seats and watched an elderly black lady get on the bus and slowly walk to the rear. We were the only three passengers on this seemingly huge bus. As we sat there looking past that sign at the lady in the rear of the bus, the absurdity of the situation struck us. Without speaking, we arose and walked to the rear, taking the seat across from the woman. I would like to say that this was my first act of protest, albeit a silent one. Actually, I think it was just our way of making fun of the stupidity of that sign and expressing solidarity with the only other fellow traveler on a huge bus.
We did not think anyone would notice our little private protest but soon the driver pulled over at a stop and got up and walked back to us and demanded we get to the front or get off his bus! At the time, we did not understand why the woman was also whispering for us to move. We definitely did not understand how that sign mandated that we take our seats in the front of the bus. Neither of us wanted to explain to our mothers how we got kicked off the bus, so we moved – but only to a seat one row in front of that sign. For the rest of the trip, the driver kept shooting his eyes at us through the mirror in the front with a look of contempt on his face.
That night, I expressed to my parents how stupid I thought that sign was, carefully omitting any mention of almost getting kicked off the bus, and asked questions about why we had such signs and the justification for treating people on a bus differently. Their answers were not at all satisfactory or comforting. Throughout my childhood, I was never able to completely excise the thought of that sign from my mind.
Years later as a sophomore in college, I heard the Executive Director of the National Urban League, speak about the attributes of color blindness. My immediate thought was – that is the answer, the way to get rid of that sign at last – be colorblind! The following year, I took a Black History course that had been added to the curriculum at the insistence of the students. I was shocked to learn about events and people I had never heard anything about in my previous education. No mention of any of them in all of my American History courses. I was angry! I felt I had been robbed. I felt information had been intentionally withheld from me. What possible reason could there be for such a contrived omission?
It then that I began to understand. That sign had long ago been removed from buses in Nashville and elsewhere, but it is still around. It is in our schools, our churches, our governments, our universities, all of our institutions. It is pervasive. It is harder to see now – sometimes invisible. But it is still there. Being colorblind is not the answer – even if that were possible. I began to understand it was going to take work, hard work. It was going to take action, affirmative action. It was going to take a commitment to the principle that none of us are absolutely free until all of us are free. It is going to take adherence to the conviction that none of us are free if some of us are systemically treated differently because of race, gender, religion, national origin, or sexual preference.
In order for me to attempt to do those things, I must never forget that sign!
RACISM - BY JEANNE MARCHETTI
A few years ago, a friend shared that he felt the need to tell his son to keep his hoodie down when running through his Baltimore suburb, I felt a knot in my stomach. I knew what was next. Wes is black and his precious son could be stopped by a policeman or worse. Was this conversation with his child necessary? Really? Sadly, the answer is yes.
Think back to February of this year when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while running through a neighborhood not far from a GA coast. It wasn’t until May 7 — two days after Bryan’s cellphone video leaked online and stirred a national outcry —then and only then were the McMichaels arrested.
In May, George Floyd was murdered by a policeman kneeling on his neck after trying to pass a $20 counterfeit check.
As a result of these horrible situations and more, our family decided in June to learn more about black history in the United States by listening to a 6-week podcast series called “Seeing White,” which provided a study guide for our Zoom meetings. The “Seeing White” podcast can be found on Scene on Radio. Our family listened on our own time in preparation for our weekly Zoom call. It was well worth our time.
A few weeks later, I noticed the “Why Black Lives Matter” blurb in the Christ the King bulletin. Gino and I joined those Zoom calls, which gave us the opportunity to learn more about implicit bias, systemic racism and the history of racism in our country through the lens of our Catholic Church. The good, the bad and the ugly—mostly the ugly. Our CTK Zoom sessions provided facts on racial incidents occurring in 2020, fostered discussions of these incidents and provided reading materials on the subject. Out of those sessions, came several interest groups to allow for more study of racism in our lives. One book discussed by the CTK book club was The Color of Law, which allowed me to understand that our country created laws and restrictions which are now illegal to prevent Blacks from enjoying the same benefits that whites enjoyed over a period of years. An understanding of our history has given me an informed perspective of current events.
As Pope Francis said, “we cannot claim to defend the sacredness of every human life while turning a blind eye to racism and exclusion.” I’m grateful for Jon Stotts, who formed this important study group, and I’m proud of our parish for bringing the group to fruition.
PRACTICING "COLOR BLINDNESS" - BY NANCY JUODENAS
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.
I GREW UP IN A SEGREGATED AMERICA BY JIM O'HARA
“Systemic racism.” Clinical. Abstract. In fact, it’s my lived experience. But for a white man, aged 70, it’s been an insulating experience.
By the time my family moved to Nashville in 1963, I had lived in Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Albany, N.Y., Helena, MT, and St. Louis. I had gone to parochial schools in five of those seven cities and would finish grade school at St. Henry’s.
It would not be until my freshman year at Father Ryan High School that I would have a Black classmate. Nor can I remember any Blacks at Sunday masses in any of our parishes across the country, or Black neighbors in any of our neighborhoods.
I grew up in a segregated America.
As a “northerner,” I found it quaint that my high school was named after the poet laureate of the Confederacy. I wondered why the Civil War was still being fought, at least in memory. In fact, there was little discussion of Father Ryan during my time there; it was just a name from a long time ago.
But neither was there much, if any, discussion of racial justice, and that was not a long time ago. Yes, Father Ryan had been integrated shortly after Brown v. Board of Education. Yes, Father Ryan had integrated sports teams. Yes, Father Ryan had been the first predominantly white high school to play Pearl High School.
However, it was a non-Catholic lay teacher who took me aside and told me I should get to know two younger Black students. We had a lot in common, she said. And she was right.
I grew up in a segregated America.
I have my father’s papers. In 1971 shortly after he became a member of the downtown Nashville Rotary Club, arguably then one of the most pre-eminent of civic groups, he and others began a campaign to admit Blacks. It dragged on. Finally in March 1972, the Rotary Club board rejected two potential Black members.
Members resigned. “I shall continue to pray that the Rotary Club of Nashville may some day find the ability and courage to accept the challenge of Holy Scripture: `Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers?’ (Malachi 2:10),” wrote one member.
Members resisted. “There are those who advocate `change’ for change’s sake, including etiquette, ethics, morality, etc.; but I prefer to stick to our established standards, and this includes our membership bylaws as originally written,” wrote another.
My father and others persevered, and the Nashville Rotary Club was eventually integrated – more than eight years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, more than 12 years after the Nashville sit-ins.
I grew up in a segregated America.
In 1977, I taught a journalism course at Fisk University before going to my day job at The Tennessean. For one semester, I experienced one of the small, everyday facts of systemic racism in Nashville: freight trains would unpredictably cut off any traffic between North Nashville and the rest of the city between 8th Avenue and 25th Avenue North. For me an inconvenience. For a Black person in an ambulance a matter of life and death. For all Blacks in North Nashville, a daily reminder of their place.
Many of today’s Nashvillians may not appreciate that Dr. D. B. Todd Jr. Boulevard and its overpass are both a reminder of our community’s systemic racism and a bridge to a different day.
I still live in a segregated America – unless I choose otherwise.
Jim O’Hara
December 2, 2020
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES BY JANINE CHRISTIANOWhen 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.
REVISITING EXPERIENCES OF RACISM BY AMY ASKEY
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.
FINDING MYSELF IN THE STORY OF RACE BY JON STOTTSGrowing 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.
A LIFELONG JOURNEY TOWARD ANTI-RACISM BY MARY LOU O'GORMANAs 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).
MY STORY FROM RACISM TO ANTIRACISM BY ARLENE MARCELLO-STONE
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.
