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In some Catholic media settings, there are people you\u2019re advised not to talk to, or topics that you\u2019re told in no uncertain terms not to write or speak about.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe audience really doesn\u2019t like this source because he\/she is too liberal.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe last time we wrote about this, we got angry letters to the editor for weeks. Stay away from it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cOur listeners are complaining. Stop talking about racism already.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n On that last point, just ask Gloria Purvis, who paid the price for her outspokenness<\/a> on racial justice issues by being fired late last year by the Eternal Word Television Network.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always been of the opinion that that kind of editorial self-censorship does no service to the Church. All that really does is to short-circuit the kind of engaging and faithful Catholic journalism that most audiences find compelling.<\/p>\n Thankfully, the Catholic journalist Olga M. Segura doesn\u2019t appear to have had any of those editorial limitations in writing her new book, \u201cBirth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and The Catholic Church.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The end result is a well-researched, well-written book that doesn\u2019t hold back any punches and engages controversial ideas and proposed policy prescriptions in a forthright manner. Segura<\/a> cites Black scholars and activists who are too often filtered out of the conversation in American Catholic media because of fears that their strong voices will rankle bishops, big-money donors, readers and listeners, a large number of whom are white and skew conservative in their politics.<\/p>\n Without a doubt, the book will reinforce negative opinions many of those Catholics already have about Black Lives Matter, both as an organization and a social movement. For more moderate readers, as well as progressive activists who may already have carried #BLM signs in the streets, \u201cBirth of a Movement\u201d provides enough intellectual food for fodder that the book should be read methodically over the course of a week, or two.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way Segura moves between the individual and organizational levels of analysis greatly benefits those who don\u2019t do that in their own thinking but need to,\u201d Tia Noelle Pratt, the religion socialist and Black Catholic scholar who curates The #BlackCatholics Syllabus<\/a>, writes in the book\u2019s foreword.<\/p>\n At the time of Pratt\u2019s contribution, Kentucky\u2019s attorney general had just announced there would be no criminal charges filed<\/a> in direct connection to the death of Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman shot in her own home a year ago when Louisville police officers executed a \u201cno-knock\u201d search warrant to arrest her boyfriend on drug charges.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is for her and so many others, including ourselves, that we say Black Lives Matter,\u201d Pratt writes.<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d is a self-evident truth, an innocuous enough observation \u2013 or at least it should be \u2013 that any Catholic or person of good will should have no problem embracing those three simple words as a fundamental truth, without any qualifiers. But in a country with deep racial fault lines dating back 400 years and an increasingly polarized political climate, BLM has been a lightning rod almost from the movement\u2019s very beginning.<\/p>\n The criticisms I\u2019ve seen over the years, from Catholics and others, have ranged from eye-rolls and dismissive responses that suggested activists were overstating the problem of racism in the United States, to condemnatory accusations today that Black Lives Matter champions anarchy, violence, communism, and seeks to destroy the family and Christianity.<\/p>\n Even against that heated backdrop, Segura presents Black Lives Matter in its complex ideological entirety, delving into subjects that overlap neatly with Catholic Social Teaching \u2013 at one point she describes BLM as \u201cthe secular version of Catholic social teaching\u201d \u2013 but also engaging matters that objectively seem difficult, if not impossible, to square with some of the Church\u2019s moral teachings, especially pertaining to sexual morality.<\/p>\n For example, Segura unflinchingly cites the work of the Black activist Angela Yvonne Davis, a Marxist and longtime member of Communist Party USA who the author says the nation\u2019s Catholic bishops would be wise to engage and learn from.<\/p>\n \u201cDavis encourages citizens to reject the evils of capitalism and, instead, uplift our communities over our individual selves,\u201d Segura writes.<\/p>\n On capitalism, which she describes as racial capitalism, Segura argues that people of color like her \u2013 she was born in the Dominican Republic \u2013 \u201cwere never meant to succeed in this system.\u201d<\/p>\n Segura is upfront about the Black Lives Matter movement\u2019s opposition to capitalism because of what she describes as that system\u2019s historical and continuing exploitation of people of color to benefit white people of European descent and the socio-economic system they created in North America that helps to reinforce the notion of whiteness as the normative default setting for American society, i.e. white supremacy.<\/p>\n Socialism and communism, Segura argues, \u201care more compatible with Christianity than capitalism. Both mimic Jesus\u2019 commands: love your neighbor; dismantle oppressive institutions; give power to the weak.\u201d<\/p>\n That claim, along with quoting Davis and utilizing the language of liberation theology throughout the book, will definitely anger conservatives and others \u2013 Catholic and otherwise \u2013 who place almost as much faith in free enterprise as they do in God. The\u00a0book may also be used to bolster claims that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist-inspired movement aimed at overthrowing \u201cthe American way of life,\u201d which can mean very different things to, say, white people in Orange County, California, and the Black community in Flint, Michigan.<\/p>\n More moderate readers may disagree with Segura\u2019s statements about capitalism, arguing that the system can be reformed to make it easier for communities of color to access capital and build wealth, that money in and of itself is not a racist convention, and that, after all, we have Black middle class families, and the market economy has lifted untold millions, if not billions, of people out of poverty. Thorny questions still need to be answered, however, as to why Black people in the United States have more difficulty, with the way the country\u2019s economic-political system is currently constructed, entering the middle class, getting credit to start businesses, and buying homes in white-majority neighborhoods, to name a few realities.<\/p>\n Black Lives Matter, both as an organization and a social movement, is all-embracing of those on the gender identity and sexual orientation spectrum. In her chapter on racial capitalism, Segura at one point writes of Clarissa Brooks, a \u201cblack, queer writer and activist\u201d whom Segura credits for pushing her \u201cto internalize the message that capitalism was violence.\u201d Segura also writes that church leaders should incorporate the work of \u201cBlack, queer women\u201d if they are serious about creating a church that vehemently condemns racism and white supremacy.<\/p>\n Issues of gender identity and sexual orientation are often a third rail in Catholic public discourse, electrocuting anybody who tries to seriously engage that tension between the Church\u2019s teachings on sexual morality, the innate dignity of the human person, our growing understandings of human sexuality, and fostering a dialogue between people of good will who disagree on these subjects. See Father James Martin.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n That Catholic critics of BLM point to its embrace of the LGBTQ movement does not surprise me, nor their critical takes on BLM\u2019s very critical view of the country\u2019s law enforcement establishment.<\/p>\nBlack Lives Matter, the Movement<\/h3>\n
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Defund -or Abolish \u2013 the Police?<\/h3>\n