A bishop writes about America’s “racial divide,” his experiences of “walking while black”

Bishop Edward K. Braxton, from the website for the Diocese of Belleville, IL.

From CNS: 

In a 19-page reflection on the “racial divide” in the United States, Bishop Edward K. Braxton of Belleville, who is African-American, said he twice had been the victim of what he considered to be unjust police attitudes.

The episodes “made me very conscious of the fact that simply by being me, I could be the cause of suspicion and concern without doing anything wrong,” wrote Bishop Braxton in “The Racial Divide in the United States: A Reflection for the World Day of Peace 2015,” issued Jan. 1.

In the first episode, when Bishop Braxton was a priest, “I was simply walking down a street in an apparently all-white neighborhood. A police car drove up beside me and the officer asked, ‘What are you doing in this area? Do you live around here? Where is your car? You should not be wandering about neighborhoods where you do not live.’ I never told him I was a Catholic priest, but I wondered what it was I was doing to attract the attention of the officer,” he said. “This was long before I heard the expression, ‘walking while black.'”

The second episode, Bishop Braxton, by this time a cleric, was “driving in my car in an apparently all-white neighborhood with two small chairs in the back seat and a table in the partially open trunk tied with a rope. A police car with flashing lights pulled me over. The officer asked, ‘Where are you going with that table and those chairs?’ Before I could answer, he asked, ‘Where did you get them?’ Then he said, ‘We had a call about a suspicious person driving through the area with possibly stolen furniture in his trunk.’ I wondered what I was doing to make someone suspicious. Many years would pass before I would hear the expression ‘racial profiling.'”

In neither case was Bishop Braxton wearing clerical garb. Even so, “I am not a completely impartial outside observer in the face of these events.”

Read the rest here. 

And you can read the full letter at this link.