Revisiting Racism

For white people living in the United States, the entanglement of Christianity with chattel slavery and antiblack racism forms a set of deep and confusing paradoxes. As a nation, we understand ourselves in terms of freedom, but we have been unable to grapple with our depriving blacks of freedom in the name of white prosperity and with our tolerance of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. As a nation, we have been shaped by racism, habituated to its presence, indifferent to its lethal capacity to inflict lingering human damage. Too often, Christians not only failed to defy slavery and condemn tolerance of racism; they supported it and benefited from these evils and ignored the very Gospel they had pledged to preach.

Not surprisingly, 11 a.m. on Sunday morning remains the most segregated hour in Christian America, yet most white Christian theologians have given little attention to slavery or racism. In the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the black liberation theologian James H. Cone denounced the lukewarm responses of mainline Protestant and Catholic Christians to the plight of black Americans as well as the willful blindness of Christian theologians. He declared racism to be America’s original sin and proposed the concept of black theology.

When confronted with this unseemly history, many Catholics argue the “immigrant thesis,” which dates the bulk of Catholic European immigration from the 19th century, thereby exempting Catholics from earlier slaveholding and active participation in racism. This is not the case. Many Catholic planters in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries acquiesced in and prospered from slaveholding, and many white Catholic neighborhoods in the 20th century intentionally staved off housing integration. Most Catholics have heard little, if anything, about black theology, and given our national insistence that we now live in a “post-racial age,” many may wonder whether such a theology is at all relevant. Recurring public acknowledgments of landmark events in the modern black struggle for civil rights provide opportunities for reflection on our nation’s recent past and for an examination of conscience.

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