Maryknoll Affiliates & Racism
In recent months, many Affiliate chapters have dedicated a virtual session or two to a reflection (often with action steps included) on racism. Thanks to Mary Williams, of the Northeast Florida Chapter and Kathee Bautista of the Los Angeles Chapter, five Wednesday Zoom sessions for all U.S. Affiliates have already begun. This is an encouraging and important initiative. The conversations have been open, honest and sincere - genuinely reflective and expansive as is customary for Affiliates. But, the majority of us in those sessions are white. We have not personally and experientially (in our hearts, minds or bodies) known what it is like to live day in and day out in black or brown skin. When a black person in the session spoke of her painful experience of trying to get adequate housing (that she never got) for her graduate studies, silence followed. We were genuinely sad and angered at what we could only know by proxy. It told us that we need to listen really well and act with urgency if fundamental change is to happen.
Maybe a good starting place would be to acknowledge what Eddie Glaude Jr. (Begin Again) called, “the lie” about American history. It puts giant parenthesis around the ‘shining city on the hill’ claim. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence holds that, “…all men (sic) are created equal.” However, in actuality, practices of the genocide of native peoples, slavery, segregation, internment camps for the Japanese and the subordination of women, put serious questions around that declaration. Neither has Church always been a shining light. In recent homily by the Auxiliary Bishop of New Orleans, Fernand J Cheri III, O.F.M., sent out by Matt Rousso of the New Orleans Chapter and further distributed by Rich Lessard, Board chair, the Bishop said that, “The Catholic Church in the United States, primarily a white racist institution, has addressed itself primarily to white society and is definitely a part of that society.”
The lie has two essential parts to it. Both of them debase black people. The first part of the lie infers that black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people. Many of the writings of the Founding Fathers as well as the infamous Bell Curve proposition on IQ (a political, not scientific work) give illegitimate credence to this and thereby imply that black people don’t deserve any better…housing, education, healthcare, respect. The second profoundly false assumption (lie) is about how our history is written and perceived. It essentially leaves out all the pain and suffering that this country has laid upon people of color. It must do so to keep alive the American story whenever the reality threatens our ‘innocence’ as the shining city on the hill. In the end, this lie about how black and brown people have been treated in our country, deforms the soul. White people need to confront these lies however uncomfortable it makes us. Black people have been uncomfortable (to use a titanic euphemism) for centuries.
Thankfully, while there is at least a residue of racism in all of us, the vision of Maryknoll Affiliates (all of Maryknoll) is to option for and walk with the disenfranchised in our world. It is to see and come to know in our bones that all of us are in God’s image and truly equal. The Racism sessions initiated by Mary and Kathee are a wonderful start. I’d like to end with a beautiful and challenging quote from Roxanne Hughes-Wheatland, a black woman, member of the Washington DC Chapter and Affiliate Board member: “I pray that for those who are looking at this moment as a spiritual call to finally see all of God's creation as members of the beloved community they will have the fortitude to persevere so that profound and lasting change will happen.”
(Bob Short)