October 24, 2020

October 24, 2020 By

Recently, I was asked to write an essay from my Secular Franciscan region’s quarterly newsletter, similar to the one I wrote a few months ago.  This time I chose the topic of structural racism.  I just submitted the final draft and I will post it here when it appears.  But this one went through a couple major drafts, and I want to salvage for use here an argument that got dropped at my editor’s recommendation.  (Like any good writer, I do not want anything to go to waste!)

The idea I wanted to develop was to use the lives of two famous Franciscan saints–St. Louis, King of France, and St. Junipero Serra, found of the California missions–to illustrate how structural racism can shape the lives and actions of even good people towards wrong ends.  I got the idea of using the two because during the protests this summer, statues of Louis and Junipero Serra were targeted by demonstrators.   By considering their lives, my goal was to help my fellow Franciscans see how their lives could be shaped by broader social and cultural forces into supporting racist structures, even if they themselves were not personally racist.   In retrospect, I realize that I also wanted to go the other direction, and use the ideas of critical race theory to help us understand in context the lives these two men, and those of other Catholic saints whose lives contain actions that we recognize today as evil.  I have never liked the attempts I have seen to whitewash these elements out of their lives.  Indeed, I started thinking about this after reading a comment on FB in which a very conservative commentator tried to justify the actions of St. Louis:

The Jews were punished during King Louis’ reign because of their excessive usury, the practice of charging excessive interest upon money lending. Their Talmuds (religious texts of the time) were burned because a Jew who had converted to Christianity brought charges against them for blasphemy regarding Jesus and Mary. Such vile things were written that the texts were considered outrageous for the time period. A debate, a trial, ended in an agreement that the Jew’s talmuds would be destroyed and the texts rewritten. Jews wore identifying garments just as many Muslims elect to do so today.

On the other hand, it seems unproductive to simply dismiss him as an anti-Semite and remove him from memory.  Historical persons, like the past, are more complicated than that.

But, anyway, this argument was complicated, and after working it out, my post was too long even though the argument was underdeveloped, so my editor sent it back to be reworked.  I reproduce the text below, with the hopes of spurring a discussion about this idea.  I think this approach, though underdeveloped in what I wrote, is useful for both understanding our past and ourselves.

 

To help us understand the ways in which good people can still be enmeshed in racist structures and have their actions distorted by them, I want to reflect on the lives of two great Franciscan saints:  St. Louis, king of France, and St. Junipero Serra, founder of the California missions.  Both came to prominence this summer when demonstrators, having targeted statues of Confederate heroes (which were not erected to celebrate Southern heritage but as symbols of white supremacy), also called for the removal of statues of St. Louis and St. Junipero Serra.  I do not want to discuss the complicated question of whether they should be honored with public statues; instead, I want to consider the parts of their lives that open them to criticism.  Further, I want to do so by grounding them in the social structures they were part of.

During the Middle Ages, anti-Semitism was an accepted part of society.  The world was divided between Catholics and the “Other”–Jews within and Muslims without–who were regarded as both inferior and a threat.  Discrimination, ostracism and open violence against Jews were the norm across Western Europe.  St. Louis, during his reign, was an active participant in this anti-Semitism.  His most notorious act was to order the burning of thousands of copies of the Talmud, after show trials in which rabbis were forced to defend it against charges of blasphemy. He also forced Jews to wear distinctive badges; authorized magistrates to compel Jews by force to attend “missionary sermons”; ordered the seizure of their property as part of anti-usury campaigns; and late in his reign planned for the forced expulsion of the entire Jewish population of France.

The Spanish colonization of the New World followed the conquest and subjugation of the millions of indigenous inhabitants.  In Mexico and South America great civilizations were thrown down and everywhere the native population was reduced to second class status.  They had some defenders but they were generally regarded as inferior, so much so that they were regarded as natural infants, children who needed to be educated and disciplined by the superior Spaniards.  Their native culture and social structures were suppressed, and the Spaniards did not hesitate to use force to reshape them into imitations of Europeans.   Junipero Serra shared in this sense of superiority.  He clearly loved the native peoples of California, and at times strove to protect them from the rapaciousness of Spanish governors.  But at the same time he accepted uncritically Spanish imperialism and the new order being imposed on an unwilling population.  He viewed the natives with paternalism, and he felt no compunction about using violence–manhunts for runaways, floggings, shackles–to discipline his “wayward children.”

In the case of both saints, we see how the social structures around them led to acts that we cannot and should not approve of.   These parts of their lives are sometimes whitewashed by their defenders, or we are told that we should not judge them by modern standards.   But this is not acceptable:  violence, oppression and discrimination are always and everywhere wrong, and we must accept that sinful acts are committed even by saints.  But what we can do is try to understand the social forces that led these men to do these things–to be accomplices in anti-Semitism and racism, respectively.

It is relatively easy, with hindsight, to look back on the lives of historical figures and see how they were led astray.   Since we are not part of their societies we can see the faults within them and the impact they had on their lives.   But, if we can see this in the lives of saints, we also need to see this in our own lives.  This is harder, and more uncomfortable, because it requires that we acknowledge, not what historical figures did, but what we, our families, our friends, our Church, our society, our government, are doing now.   We need to look around ourselves and acknowledge the ways in which we have become accomplices in racism.

The one advantage that we have over both St. Louis and St. Junipero Serra is that the oppressed and marginalized are no longer silent.  Today Blacks and other minorities have voices, and they are in a position to tell us–in ways that the Jews of the Middles Ages or the indigenous peoples of the New World could not–how they are affected by the social structures that the white majority has created.  Our bishops have called on us to hear what they are saying:

As Christians, we are called to listen and know the stories of our brothers and sisters. We must create opportunities to hear, with open hearts, the tragic stories that are deeply imprinted on the lives of our brothers and sisters, if we are to be moved with empathy to promote justice. (Open Wide Our Hearts)

If we open our hearts and really listen, we can finally see structural racism for what it is, and take the first steps towards racial justice.

October 24, 2020

October 24, 2020 By

My late friend and mentor Ivan Kauffman once described himself as “probably the only living person who speaks both fluent Mennonite and fluent Catholic.” If these words were true when he first wrote them, a handful of others, myself included, would eventually follow him to the same ecclesial bilingualism and, if not quite an official dual citizenship, an inescapably dual identity as self-described Mennonite Catholics.

More precisely, 10 years ago today, with Ivan standing behind me as my sponsor, I professed the Catholic Church to be my home. That moment was both the end of a long period of exploration and the beginning of a long (surely lifelong) period of acclimation. I’ve often thought of the whole experience as something analogous to expatriation – perhaps no less appropriate a model than even the language of conversion. I strongly relate to Ivan’s self-description as “a cultural, historical, theological and institutional translator between these two very different worlds.” Like Ivan, I feel most at home among those familiar with both worlds; unlike Ivan and his wife Lois, who together blazed a path between these two worlds that I and a few others would later follow, it was in large part the already-existing presence of an expat community from my ecclesial homeland – people who understand with equal depth both the attractions that drew me to my adopted home and the moments of homesickness and culture shock that every expatriate knows – that made it possible for me to find a home in the Catholic Church.

And there certainly have been culture shocks, both big and small. A trivial yet oddly frequent one is my observation of a widespread tendency for those who arrive earliest for Mass to gravitate to the ends of pews, forcing any relative latecomers to either search for an empty pew or climb over someone to find a seat. The phenomenon puzzles me to this day; anytime I’ve commented on it, I’ve been met with a few personal excuses (usually claustrophobia) for why the responder feels the need to do it, but nothing that explains why it’s such a common habit as to be observable in virtually every parish I’ve been to.

Another that was less apparent when I first began regularly attending Mass in Haiti, but became noticeable as I continued to do so back in the US, is congregational singing. Being accustomed to robust, often a cappella, four-part hymn-singing sets high expectations for the musical participation of one’s fellow congregants. Invariably, the first thing I do whenever I join a new parish is to join the choir – not just because I love to sing or because it’s a contribution I can offer to the parish’s life and worship (though both are true), but just as much to feel the comforting familiarity of other people singing strongly around me, rather than feeling as though I’m singing a solo from the pew.

But my most serious and troubling Catholic culture shock has to do with a deep-running and widespread impulse that I’ve struggled to get my mind around, to grasp its logic and even to name it adequately, since I entered the Catholic Church: an impulse toward cultural and institutional upward mobility, or to put it more boldly, a libido dominandi – lust to rule. It doesn’t always appear as insidious as that sounds, which is precisely its seductive power. More often than not, it comes dressed up in good intentions such as promoting the common good and building the Kingdom of God. And many Catholics simply seem to be unable to conceive of any way of pursuing these good ends that doesn’t involve the pursuit of governing power and social privilege, seeing top-down control as an ideal, if not a necessity, for influencing society – always out of love, or so they manage to convince themselves. And I, for my part, can’t not see such pursuits as inevitably compromising at best, easily leading to gross distortions if not outright contradictions of the very gospel we’re aiming to spread – what Mennonite author Donald Kraybill would call right-side-up detours away from the upside-down kingdom.

I come from a culture of counterculture, forged in the harsh crucible of experience on the receiving end of Catholic and Protestant entanglements with governing power at their ugliest – a culture that, no matter how assimilated some parts of it become to the surrounding cultures in which it lives, always instinctively chafes against power and privilege, and has struggled to reconcile its own increased social acceptance and admiration with its ancestral belief that persecution was the mark of the true Church, now stressing all the more strongly in the absence of martyrdom that Christians must always remain a “sign of contradiction” within the world.

In H. Richard Niebuhr’s taxonomy, I migrated from a deeply “Christ against culture” communion to a deeply “Christ of culture” one. This remains a source of deep tension for me, and it is in this sense especially that I resonate with Ivan Kauffman’s self-observation, “The more Catholic I have become, the more deeply Mennonite I realize I actually am.” This Christ-of-culture, libido dominandi, upwardly mobile impulse, especially in the ways it plays out with Catholics in positions of public influence, is why I sometimes feel embarrassed to admit to being Catholic. I had certainly wrestled for a considerable time with the Catholic Church’s historical ties to power before joining it, but sometimes I wonder, if I had fully perceived how deep and broad and ideologically cross-cutting (yes, I have observed something of a theocratic left) the impulse goes, if I had known all the things I would hear said in its defense, even at times among people I otherwise hold many values in common with (to the point of insistently taking as a legitimate point of debate whether it’s morally acceptable to “burn heretics”!), whether I would still have joined.

The more strongly I feel this tension, the more tightly I cling to those witnesses within the Catholic tradition that

stand as countercurrents against the pull of the libido dominandi impulse, whose very existence is a much-needed reminder that I was never alone in the tension, that the tension already existed in the tradition itself: the resolutely countercultural example of Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin; the prophetic defiance of violence by modern martyrs of conscience such as Blessed Franz Jagerstatter and St. Oscar Romero; the unearthed witness of ancient conscientious objector saints such as Martin of Tours (that most ironic patron saint of soldiers) and Marcellus of Tangier; the great cloud of witnesses represented in my co-blogger Mark Gordon’s Novena for Peace. I’m encouraged by ongoing work such as that of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative – a project that includes my fellow expatriate Gerald Schlabach, whose writing also continues to reground my own vision of the meaning of catholicity. As I’ve experienced a wide spectrum of Catholic parish life from dry bean-counting to vibrant discipleship, I’ve continued to cling to memories of and connections to those communities that first showed me what it meant to live the Eucharist: St. François Xavier in Désarmes, Haiti; St. Patrick’s Cathedral in El Paso, Texas; St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. If I had not seen that there is a place for such lives and voices and works as these within the living Catholic tradition, I most certainly could not have joined it.

When I did take my oath of citizenship, such as it was – publicly and personally professing belief in “all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God” – I saw in that phrase a living conversation embracing all the above witnesses and many, many more within an ecclesial big tent. I hoped then, and still hope now, that I have a contribution to make within this conversation that I couldn’t have made from outside of it, even though – or perhaps because – my now-fluent Catholic is still spoken with a heavily Mennonite accent.

October 23, 2020

October 23, 2020 By

In November 1900, a fashionable, urban Polish poet from an upper-class background married a rural peasant. In a region of Europe where people of different class backgrounds were usually kept apart by strict social norms, this was a rare event. But some were seeking to break that pattern. In 1795 Poland had been completely colonized by Prussia, Russia and Austria, and the Polish people had spent the entire nineteenth century fighting a series of failed uprisings. Many believed that marriages across class lines would be a way for the Polish people to unite, organize, and ultimately take their country back.

One of the guests at the wedding, the playwright Stanisław Wyspiański, observed this meeting between the bourgeoisie intelligentsia and working peasants with satiric humor and disappointed admiration. For Wyspiański, the wedding illustrated a desperate attempt to repair a failed national project – an effort that he dramatized in his 1901 play Wesele (The Wedding), in which magical guests from Central European history arrive. One of these, the 17th century Ukrainian poet Vernyhora, gives the host a magical golden horn meant to arouse all of the guests to battle at dawn. It is the clarion meant to ignite the Polish uprising that will at last bring liberation. However, the guests ultimately fall under the spell of a magical straw man called the chochał and fail to wake up in time for the rebellion that they have planned. They fall asleep, the golden horn gets lost, and they remain in bondage.

Though the chronicle of a defeat, Wesele is considered one of Poland’s national dramas, and it was famously made into a cinematic tour de force by Andrzej Wajda in 1973. Giving hope to Polish people up to World War I, during the short period of independence from 1918 to 1939, and then during World War II and the fifty years of communist rule that succeeded it, this play itself became a golden horn, a symbol of national unity. I believe this play – and other literary and artistic works from the same time period – have much to say about the political realities many in the world are experiencing today – especially in the United States.

Ariel and Caliban

A visual artist as well as a playwright, Wyspiański was part of a cross-cultural artistic movement usually described as modernism. The word “modernism” might most immediately recall Joyce and Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, Picasso’s Cubist art, or Schoenberg’s dissonant music. But amid all of the dissolution lay a deep desire for wholeness. Dealing with the destruction of traditional religious paradigms in the nineteenth century, rapidly advancing technology, and in some cases, colonialism or the threat of it, modernists were eager to seek what might be salvaged from the ruins. “These were people imbued with a scientific, evolutionist Weltabschaung, and their revolt against it did not spell their rejection of its basic tenet,” said the famed Polish poet and cultural critic Czesław Miłosz in his History of Polish Literature. “Yet science could not give them any foundation for Value. Although their religious beliefs were undermined, they could not renounce the search for the meaning of life and death.”

This quest for meaning was just as prevalent across the Atlantic in Latin America, where nations that had recently gained independence from Spain were seeking to forge their own cultural identities while dealing with the same questions about spirituality, science, and technology as other modernists. They were likewise facing the threat of a new colonial power: The United States of America. Their response was a cultural movement that became known as modernismo. According to literary critic Cathy Jrade, modernismo “proposed a worldview that imagined the universe as a system of correspondences, in which language is the universe’s double capable of revealing profound truths regarding the order of the cosmos.” One of the movement’s representatives, the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó, famously urged the young people of his country to seek spiritually meaningful lives and to avoid the pitfalls he saw in consumerist, technology-based US culture.

Published in 1900, his essay Ariel urged his country’s youth to seek a synthesis between reason and passion. “Never give up to utility or passion but a part of yourself. Even within material slavery there is the possibility of saving inner freedom: that of reason and feeling. Do not try to justify, through the absorption of work or combat, the slavery of your spirit,” he said. For Rodó, freedom of the spirit was epitomized by ancient Athens, a society where the “conception of life was realized in the concert of all human faculties.” Interestingly, Wyspiański shared Rodó’s love of ​​Greece so much so that he came up with a plan to rebuild the Wawel, the royal castle in Krakow where the kings of Poland have been buried since medieval times, in the style of the Acropolis.

But if Greece is the emblem of the “Ariel” that Rodó hopes that Latin American youth will follow, the United States is its Calibanesque* opposite:

North American life effectively describes that vicious circle that Pascal indicated in the pursuit of well-being with no end beyond the self. Its prosperity is as great as its inability to satisfy even a basic conception of human destiny [… ] there is no doubt that US civilization as a whole produces a singular impression of insufficiency and emptiness. And if, with the right given by the history of thirty centuries of evolution presided over by the dignity of the classical and Christian spirits, one asks what is the guiding principle in it, what is its ideal substratum, what is the purpose beyond the immediate concern for the practical […] one will only find, as the formula of the ultimate ideal, the same absolute concern for material triumph. Deprived of any profound traditions that might guide them, this nation has not been able to replace the inspiring ideality of the past with any higher, disinterested conception of the future. They live for the immediate reality of the present, and therefore subordinate all activity to the selfishness of personal and collective well-being.

When reading these words about the USA, I struggle to believe that they were written in 1900 and not in 2020. This description, though harsh, reflects our current reality. With this inability to “replace the inspiring ideality of the past with any higher, disinterested conception of the future,” in 2016 we elected Donald Trump, a president for whom the most important thing is a positive image and a booming stock market (at the expense of the environment).  “The immediate reality of the present” is more important than the future. And while a year ago at this time I might have argued that Trump seeks “personal and collective well-being” – at least for some US Americans – his handling of the pandemic indicates that this is not so.

For too many US Americans, ecological destruction is not a problem of grave concern; the harsh realities of many countries in the world – often created directly by US imperialist policy – are not our responsibility. Like many I have spent the last four years struggling to understand the reasons for this toxic nostalgia, this great fear that has led us to the election of a president whose words and actions demonstrate dangerous excess. I also wonder how we can resist racism, xenophobia, the normalization of war, and the denial of reality – issues that, however, existed in the United States well before Trump’s election and will likely continue in the future.

Stanisław Wyspiański did not comment directly on the United States, and Polish attitudes toward the US have been generally positive throughout history. But I believe there is much to be learned from Wyspiański’s comment on the social division of the Polish people – a class division that, although we deny it, also characterizes US society. In the drowsiness of wedding guests paralyzed by the magic of chochoł, we see an image that rings true for us today: a society more or less paralyzed, lacking self-understanding, and easily seduced by a straw man’s spells.

This widespread irrationality in the US might seem surprising given our current intellectual climate among those with more formal education. In reaction to postmodernism and the politics of a “post-truth,” various movements of skeptics have emerged who believe that science should be the basis of all our decisions. There is a lot of promotion in the educational field of the STEM disciplines; meanwhile, fewer university students choose to study the humanities, which are sometimes threatened at the institutional level. Religious practice – even in a traditionally very religious society like that of the United States – has diminished. Efficiency and market requirements exert influence over all aspects of life, even – through the rise of social media – our most intimate relationships. Indeed, Rodó’s description of the US as a society hyperfocused on reason at the expense of spiritual concerns continues to ring true today.

The Enlightenment and Excesses of Reason: Too Much of a Good Thing?

According to Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, the populism and demagoguery we see in today’s world – Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK the advent of ultra-right parties in Europe, Ergogan’s power in Turkey, and Modi’s nationalism in India – are all part of the same phenomenon. In his 2017 book The Age of Anger, Mishra observes that our economic system and our Enlightenment values ​​have not afforded us a full understanding of human nature. With a fear of change, a loyalty to the familiar, and tendencies toward vanity and loneliness, we are not rational. The conflicts of our age reveal that a political, economic, and educational system that presupposes rationality – without considering people’s emotional or spiritual needs – can neither characterize the human condition nor promote the development of a better world. For Mishra, the European intellectual project of the 18th century has become the basis of politics at the global level:

From its inception in the Enlightenment, the modern world was driven, and defined, by the self-affirming autonomous individual who, condemned to be free, continually opens up new possibilities of human mastery and empowerment. His project was deemed crucial to the collective escape, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from prejudice, superstition and a belief in God, and into the safety of reason, science and commerce. Since then, freedom has been synonymous with the developing natural sciences, new artistic forms, free trade and increasingly democratic civil society and political institutions.

According to Mishra, the well-intentioned Enlightenment project has not paid off for all. This has provoked resentment from the Hindu nationalists who support Modi, the ISIS terrorists who tried for several years to create an Islamic state, and the US Americans who, blaming undocumented immigrants for their lack of stable employment, have supported Trump’s racist and xenophobic agenda. Mishra goes on to assert, “Billions of the world’s poorest are locked into a Social Darwinist nightmare. But even in advanced democracies a managerial form of politics and neo-liberal economics has torn up the social contract. In the regime of privatization, commodification, deregulation and militarization it is barely possible to speak without inviting sarcasm about those qualities that distinguish humans from other predatory animals – trust, co-operation, community, dialogue and solidarity.”

For Mishra, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, with their emphasis on reason as the most important faculty of the human being, ignored people’s emotional and spiritual needs, and now we are living with the consequences. Looking at Mishra, I see echoes of various 20th century thinkers, especially those who wrote in the decades immediately following World War II and the explosion of the atomic bomb. According to Frankfurt School philosophers Teodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Dialectic of Enlightenment, “For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals.”

According to them, the Enlightenment – which began with the ancient myths of Homer and the Bible, when direct experience was replaced with representation and consciousness was divided b between subjective and objective spheres – is totalitarian, absorbing all experience and each worldview in its rational process.

To understand the political divisions plaguing the US today, we must accept that human beings are not fully rational. However, in addition to the categories of rationality and irrationality, I would also like to speak of the conflict between moderation and excess – an overabundance of repressed emotion that is not found. only in right-wing movements, but also in some left-wing movements. For Adorno and Horkheimer the Enlightenment had been excessive in its rationality. For Mishra, an excess of reason has fostered an excess of emotion in the form of the anger that we see today.

Resisting the Straw Man

What is the solution? I believe the modernists might be able to offer some guidance. While Wyspiański’s straw man seduces the masses like the demagogues of today, I would look for a possibility in the thought of Rodó. Obviously there are many weaknesses in this thinking: the lack of any discussion about the reality of indigenous people in Latin America and a critique of the United States made without ever having set foot on US soil. Carlos Fuentes comments that the book would have been stronger if Rodó had cast his critical gaze not only on the United States, but on Latin America as well: “He would, perhaps, have arrived at similar conclusions: we are both, North and Latin Americans, still projects of history, incomplete societies, working models, not paradigms of perfection.”

Despite all his weaknesses, Rodó’s dynamism and lack of dogmatism are, in my opinion, urgently needed in today’s world. While he admires US American energy and our national penchant for hard work, he also recognizes the value of contemplation, cultivating an active inner life, and the need to think before acting, to see if one’s desires and goals really conform to one’s life. the noblest values. He admonishes the young, “And while guarding yourselves against any violation of your moral nature, while aspiring to the harmonious expansion of your being in every noble sense, remember at the same time that the easiest and most frequent of violations is, in the present character of human societies, that which forces the soul to deprive itself of […] the life of disinterested meditation [and] ideal contemplation.”

It is difficult to imagine how today’s youth would react to Rodó’s words. Several psychologists have investigated the effects of current technology on subjectivity and human relationships, and they have commented that in our age of instant communication, we are losing our capacity for attention, empathy, and authentic connection with one another. Instead of reading an entire newspaper, we only read articles that confirm the points of views that we already have. As such, we lack contact with – and empathy for – people whose opinions we do not share. Perhaps that is why in many countries today we see so much fear and anger directed toward those perceived is different; perhaps, in this somnolent state, we are seduced by the words of our own straw man, Donald Trump. Rodó, while fully defending democracy, criticized its tendencies toward vulgarity and mediocrity – tendencies that are seen more clearly than ever in our age of instant communication.

However, Rodó expresses the faith that the youth of America – and that includes North America – can resist this vulgarity through attentive thought and belief in a better future. “Thought will conquer, inch by inch, by its own spontaneity, all the space it needs to affirm and consolidate its kingdom among the other manifestations of life,” he asserts. He expresses faith in our ability to build a better society, promoting the unity of reason and passion found in Ariel, instead of the rage, violence and vulgarity that Rodó has located in the figure of Caliban. Our world yearns for a balance between reason and passion, intelligence and emotion, practicality and spirituality, a healing of divisions and moderation of excess, so that Ariel – instead of Wyspiański’s Calibanesque chochoł – might be the one we choose as our guide.

 

 

 

*Many critics have commented on the problematic nature of Rodó’s use of the dichotomy between Ariel and Caliban. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, evil and vulgarity are associated with an indigenous person from a colonized land. This is particularly problematic in the context of Uruguay, a country founded on settler colonialism. For the purposes of this essay, however, I am choosing to accept Rodó’s Shakespearean metaphor in the way he intended it – where Ariel represents synthesis of reason and passion, while Caliban represents barbarism and excess.

October 4, 2020

October 4, 2020 By

It has become something of a cliché, but like all clichés it holds a truth: the American Dream has become the American Nightmare.

For many groups of people living in this country, this is nothing new. Founded on the genocide of indigenous people and built with the labor of people forcibly taken from their homes, enslaved and abused, the United States of America originates in a story that was a dream for some and a nightmare for others.

Meanwhile, as the growing nation amassed wealth and power, the American Dream became a nightmare for others around the world, as does any imperial regime that uses violence (or the threat of it) to take resources by force or manipulation. Did this nightmare start with the end of World War II and the myriad of US military global military interventions and anti-Soviet proxy wars throughout the twentieth century? Did it start with the US War against Spain of 1898, or the one against Mexico fifty years before that? Did it start with the Monroe Doctrine? Again, some would say that this imperialism was implicit in the nation’s founding.

Even those who have been the primary beneficiaries of the Dream of US power and prosperity – white men (and to a lesser extent, women) who usually start with some basis of opportunity that helps them to move from rags to riches – know that it is simultaneously a dream and a nightmare. Think of some of our classic works of literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where no matter how much wealth is amassed, the promised fulfillment always remains out of reach; the naturalistic novels of writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris and even Henry James, where despite our best efforts, heredity and environment determine our fate; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, where the protagonist’s pursuit of Dale Carnegie-esque popularity and prestige cannot salvage his bonds with the people closest to him. In the 21st-century golden age of television, series like Breaking Bad have told similar stories of downfall. Even for the ones at the top of the social pyramid, the nightmare within the dream is an open secret.

Now, as fires rage on our West Coast, as protests against racial injustice continue across the nation, and as our president who once expressed a belief that COVID-19 would simply vanish and eschewed the use of masks is now receiving hospital treatment for his illness, many are saying it is time for the US to wake up from its dreams. To the last point, Richard E. Besser recently wrote in The Scientific American that President Trump’s falling prey to this virus should serve as a sobering wake-up call for us all:

During this pandemic, our societal and structural failures have been laid out for the world to see. At least 28 million Americans don’t have health insurance, and millions of others are underinsured. Too many parents, often those in low-wage jobs, don’t have paid sick leave. About 60 percent of the workforce is paid hourly, and the strains on these workers during the waves of closures and economic shutdowns have proved devastating […] We must redouble our commitment in both the short- and long-term to provide the support the most vulnerable people in the U.S. need for the duration of this pandemic. Nutrition support, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums, rental assistance and support for education programs must be extended well into 2021. The short-term needs are acute, and the long-term system challenges must be addressed in the new year.

But will the USA wake up? Nineteen years ago, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 shook us to our core. We responded by initiating two major wars whose negative impact continues to be felt in the US as well as Iraq and Afghanistan to this day. Sixteen years ago, New Orleans was devastated by a hurricane that disproportionately killed and destroyed the homes of that city’s poorest, shocking world media with images that we are used to seeing in the Global South but not here at home, laying bare the stark realities of socioeconomic inequality. And for a solid two decades at least, scientists have been sounding the alarm on global warming and ecological collapse, their calls for policy change going unheard even as we experience more extreme weather events and see birds, bees and monarch butterflies disappearing from our own backyards.

In his famous 1953 book The Captive Mind, Polish poet and scholar Czesław Miłosz dissected the psychological impact that totalitarianism was having on his country as, one by one, the best critical minds gave in to the seductive sway of communism. However, as much as he critiqued the system he was under, he did not automatically assume a positive alternative in the democracies of the West, especially not in the United States of America. 

The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. . . Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be ‘unnatural,’ and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger, and the sword.

These words stuck out to me when I first read the book, and they seem especially relevant today. The American Dream is built upon a bedrock of exceptionalism: the idea that we are somehow shielded from the winds of chance that befall others. This exceptionalism can be seen at the individual level in the widespread doctrine of the prosperity gospel – the belief that good things happen to good people, and that if you pray hard enough, God will protect you from suffering – which has permeated our culture (for a powerful analysis of this mentality, see Kate Bowler’s work) and ignores the basic Christian tenet that we live in a fallen world. Though close at hand, the Kingdom of God in its fullness is not yet here.

At the collective level, meanwhile, this ethos is found in the widespread belief that the United States is somehow essentially different from other nations and exempt from the sufferings that befall the rest of humanity. A writer like Miłosz, coming from a country that in the Middle Ages was a vast empire and by the nineteenth century was absent from any European map, a nation that over many centuries became a homeland for Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere and then became a principal site of Nazis’ genocide against them, offers a different perspective. Indeed, as someone who was born and raised in a democracy and came to maturity under a dictatorship, he knew how fast the world can change.We US Americans are a people who like our slumber. We have been ignored the warnings for a very long time, and it is costing us dearly; as of October 4, 2020, our country has seen 212,000 people lost to COVID-19, with unfortunately more to come. No matter who gets elected on November 3 (or, if the race is close and a winner is slow to be confirmed, then weeks after November 3), the reality of our social and political decline is not going to disappear.

As much as anyone else, I am an American dreamer. Having recently read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, I am reminded of the gifts our women’s movement, abolitionist and civil rights movements, and our labor movement gave not only this country, but the world. We are the nation of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. We are the country of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost. We are a country of many scientific discoveries and technological innovations, without which I would not be sharing these thoughts with you right now. We are a country of people who refuse to accept apparent conditions as given, who say, “We can do better.”

I am a patriot,” sings Jackson Browne in a song that has proven a consolation in these nightmarish times. “And I love my country / because my country is all I know.” Though I sing these words, they are not true: I have lived in five countries other than the US and have visited many more. And honestly, I do not see the US as the best of them; even a middle-class, educated white woman like me has seen enough to know that other countries, including our immediate northern neighbor, offer a much better quality of life to more people than we do.

I love this country not because it’s all I know, but because it is mine. I recently told a respected friend and mentor (who is not from the US) that the United States is my father, and the Roman Catholic Church is my mother. They are both extremely flawed; I’ve at times felt the temptation to abandon them. But though I start to run away, I never get far. I love my country. Ultimately, I want to see it survive and thrive, to live up in the truest possible way to its ideals of liberty and justice for all.

Waking up from the American dream/nightmare, if it ever happens, will not feel good. It probably will feel like waking up on a chilly, dark October morning and remembering you’re out of coffee (or tea, or whatever your preferred morning beverage is) and that you’ve slept through your alarm and will inevitably be late for work. And my, is there a lot of work to do.

But as Catholic Christians, we are graced with some resources that might make this awakening a little more bearable. We believe in the new life embodied in the Resurrection. We believe in free will, which means that change is possible. We believe in grace, mercy and redemption.When the pandemic started, I perhaps indulged a little too much in my own dreamy musings, imagining a new world with drastically reduced pollution and an end to homelessness. Alas, that world has not come to be. But every day, these terrible situations offer us abundant chances to respond with compassion. Over the past seven months I have seen people deliver food to those who’ve need it. I’ve seen a little girl sew masks for health care workers. I’ve seen my high school alma mater, a 150-year-old Catholic all-girls’ school, finally take an active stand against inequity and racial injustice after decades of silence. I’ve seen anarchist Catholic Workers put aside their anti-government ideology and pledge to vote for the lesser of two evils. These movements are small, but they serve as gestures of hope. Together, they might help make our collective US awakening a little less rude.

September 27, 2020

September 27, 2020 By

In 1848, Karl Marx opened the Communist Manifesto with the now famous sentence,

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.

Reflecting recently on the challenges facing the Church in the United States today, I realized that many of our problems can be summarized by paraphrasing Marx:

Two spectres are haunting the Catholic Church — the spectres of communism and racism.

In the original, spectre meant a ghost, a phantom or phantasm, an apparition.  It was, like the three ghosts that appeared to Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, a harbinger of what was and what would come–a terrifying vision of reality to “Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies” who stood opposed to any kind of reform.  This meaning is relevant to my restatement, but I also need to introduce another meaning.  A spectre is also, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an unreal object of thought, a phantasm of the mind.  I want to bring both of these meanings into play.   In our present circumstances, communism has become a phantasm of the mind for many Catholics:  an unreal threat conjured from the past and imposed on the present.  The threat is identified by many names:  communism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, socialism, post-modernism, liberalism.  While these terms have real and distinct meanings to philosophers and political theorists, they are conflated in the popular imagination into a single menacing force that is threatening our American way of life.

In reality, communism is a spent force, politically.  The Soviet Union is gone.  Cuba and Vietnam still keep up some of the trappings, but are now just dictatorial regimes.  North Korea has slid into an absurd and terrifying cult of personality.  China is still ruled by the Communist Party, but it has no interest in fomenting revolution:  its goals are to exert its military and economic power for its own benefit: nationalism in the trappings of Marx.   And Venezuela, though never communist, is a failed state, an attempt at authoritarian socialism that was propped up by high oil prices, and now brought low by mismanagement, corruption, and a hostile United States government.   So we are not threatened by communism externally.

Socialism does exist in social democratic movements throughout Europe and elsewhere.  It is stolid, thoroughly left of center, and quite respectable.  And its policies are very much in line with Catholic teaching.  One only need read the Catholic social encyclicals, or listen to the words of Pope Benedict XVI to realize this.   More radical political ferment lies with the various Green or left alternative parties, but, while they are very much opponents of unfettered capitalism (particularly because of its impact on the environment), their center of focus has moved away (moved on?) from socialism, per se.  They are less interested in seizing the means of production and abolishing private ownership of productive property than they are in retooling markets and industries towards more sustainable models, with the active assistance of the government.

As an intellectual movement, Marxism still has its adherents, but I would not call it dominant anywhere, except perhaps in a few rarified English or Cultural Studies departments.  It is just one of a number of threads that are part of the intellectual inheritance of the 20th century.  It is important to know, and it has valuable ideas, even for Catholics:  studying Marx, or even accepting and building on some of his arguments, is no more objectionable than reading Luther, or finding value in the ideas of Calvin.

Nevertheless, the spectre of communism/Marxism/socialism haunts many Catholic circles.  Quotes, articles and film clips from Bishop Fulton Sheen abound, and he is described as “The Man Who Knew Communism Best“.  Four years ago, my Diocesan newspaper published an essay by Alice von Hildebrand on communist sleeper cells which had infiltrated the priesthood.  In several groups I belong to on Facebook, any attempt to discuss Catholic social teaching is met by howls of anguish and denunciations of Marxism and socialism.   This has been going on for a while–while searching for the link I just shared, I stumbled on another piece I wrote about an op-ed in the Catholic newspaper of the Archdiocese of Hartford, again railing against communism, this time in the guise of the centrist prime minister of Italy, Mario Monti (mis-identified in my original post as “Governo” Monti, a reference to the government he headed.  Io sono una brutta figura!)  Marxists and communists are the enemy, and must be opposed at every turn.  Moreover, anything even vaguely to the left of center (European democratic socialism, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden) is part of a socialist threat that leads directly to a communist hell.

Racism, on the other hand, is a real and abiding problem.  Moreover, the spectre of racism does fit perfectly the first definition:  an apparition of what was done in the United States and continues to this day, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that lives on, embedded in our society.  Like the ghosts of Christmas past and present, tt haunts the Church as it haunts society in general.   Like Scrooge, far too many Catholics want to deny the vision, turn away their eyes and cry out.  But in some sense their cries are in vain.  For the past decade, the spectre of racism, hidden by the promise implicit in the first Black president, has been brought into the open by the killing of Black men and women by the police or by quasi-vigilante white citizens.  The list of names is long and painful:  George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Stephon Clark, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin.  This haunts us because it so omnipresent that it can no longer be dismissed as a few individual acts of racism.  We are being confronted by the racist structures built into the fabric of our society.   It does not matter if individual white people are themselves racist; they  are part of a culture which maintains white privilege and continues to deny full and equal rights to Blacks and Latinos.   It can still manifest itself in displays of open racism–the examples are too many to count, beginning with our president.  However, I do want to note two:  the racist arguments in the video posted by Abby Johnson, a prominent Catholic pro-life activist, and more recently, the racist ideas in a homily by Fr. Altman of Wisconsin (the whole homily is here; a short excerpt can be found at the bottom of this blog post).   But it is so much more than “a few bad apples.”  To quote Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Black priest and theologian:

Racism, at its core, is a set of meanings and values that inform the American way of life.  It is a way of understanding and interpreting skin color differences so that white Americans enjoy a privileged social status with access to advantages and benefits to the detriment, disadvantage, and burden of persons of color.  It is the set of cultural assumptions, beliefs and convictions that justify the existence of a “kinder, gentler” racism, that is, one that advocates interpersonal decency, kindness, and respect for all while it yet protects white systemic advantage and benefit.”  (Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, p. 42)

I was spurred to think about the spectre of racism, and so write this blog post, because I have grown increasingly frustrated with the response of my fellow white Catholics to the problems of racism.   In one Catholic Facebook group I belong to, attempts to post about systemic racism were met with denials and vituperative attacks.  The tragic outcome:  the one Black person in the group who was trying to speak out was banned; everyone else was free to continue to post, no matter how hostile or bigoted their comments.   In another group, I had a post taken down because I attempted to advertise a Black Lives Matter march being organized by a local group.  I was told that “Black Lives Matter” upholds an anti-Catholic ideology, and I needed to reflect on what was appropriate for a Catholic Facebook page.  The fact that Black Lives Matter is a slogan, adopted by a large, diverse, grassroots movement of Blacks to express their own sense of oppression and disenfranchisement, did not matter.  The existence of one group, somewhere, that held views at odds with Church teachings, was enough to declare them beyond the pale.

And it was here, too, that I saw the two spectres emerge, with the illusionary spectre of Marxism being summoned to deny and drive away the real spectre of racism.  Black Lives Matter here and elsewhere, is denounced as Marxist:  “Bitter Little Marxists” in one clever attack.   It is claimed that Marxism, whether the beliefs of a handful of activists, or the supposed Marxism of critical race theorists, has created the charge of “systemic racism” out of whole cloth, distorting the social fabric and encouraging people to violence, anarchy and the destruction of America.   Attempts to discuss the problems of racism or white privilege as systemic issues were routinely misinterpreted as accusations of personal racism; and again, the fault lay with the pervasive hand of Marxism.   The argument that the problems of racism are not real, that they were created by communists, is itself an old argument:  throughout the Jim Crow era, attacks on the status quo were regarded as being generated by communist agents and fellow travelers.  So it makes sense that the spectre of communism would be pressed into service in this way again.

As I finished writing this post, I realized that while it makes me feel a bit better (as the title of the Harlan Ellison story trenchantly puts it, I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream) I am probably not going to convince anyone who does not already agree with me that a) the appeals to Marxism are a diversion, and b) Racism is an abiding problem in America.  It will be interesting to see if anyone actually does read to the end, so if you do, whether or not you agree with me, simply comment,  St. Martin de Porres, pray for us!  As always, your prayers are appreciated.

 

Cover Image:  The Spectre of Communism, from Goodfon.com and in the public domain.

July 9, 2020

July 9, 2020 By
Two weeks ago Abby Johnson posted a video to YouTube and her Twitter feed in which she defended racial profiling and made an extended argument blaming the problems of the Black community on the breakdown of the Black family and on absent Black fathers.  The video was later taken down from Twitter and was made private on YouTube.  A copy was posted to YouTube, but was removed because of a copyright complaint from Abby Johnson.   However, another copy may be found here.   In addition, an extensive partial transcript can be found interspersed in a long blog post by Mary Pezzulo, blogging at Steel Magnificat.
This video has provoked considerably outcry and condemnation.  Besides the blog post above, see the discussion by Simcha Fisher at her blog, Liza Vandenboom at Religion Unplugged, and Jacob Tonglet at the blog of Rehumanize International,  a secular pro-life group advocating for the consistent life ethic.   A petition calling on the USCCB and the pro-life movement to distance itself from Abby Johnson has gained almost 200 signatures.  (Simcha Fisher also had a follow-up conversation with four Black Catholics, talking first about the video and then about racism in the pro-life movement and in the Catholic Church.)
I found the video very disturbing in its use of racist arguments, especially from someone in the pro-life movement.  But based on some private conversations about it, I realized that a lot of people did not really understand why I believed the arguments in the video to be racist.   Much of it was addressed in various ways in the blog posts above, but there seemed to be an underlying assumption that it was racist and that this fact did not need justification.   So in this blog post I want to go through the video in detail and explain how its language and arguments are embedded in and reflect the broader racist ideas that are, unfortunately, still very common today.  I think this is important, as racism has no place in the pro-life movement, and I want people to understand the outrage and why there are calls for pro-life organizations to distance themselves from her over this and previous incidents (discussed here).  For my part, I fully support these calls: whatever good she has done (and certainly her book and the movie Unplanned have gained a lot of attention, and her work with current and former employees of abortion clinics is important) racism is a grave evil and we need to confront it no matter where we find it.
The video begins with her professing her love for her biracial son, a love I do not question.   But notice how this child, in her description, evolves from an “adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy” into an “large, intimidating-looking maybe, brown man.”  Her White children will become “nerdy white guys” but her black son will become threatening.  She gives no reason for why her White children will appear innocuous but her Black child will not.  It is as if his blackness makes him threatening.   This is nothing more than a stereotype—a softer version of the language of black “thugs” and “gangbangers.”   It is language which is frequently used to describe black men,  even skinny teenagers such as Trayvon Martin.   The stereotype of black men as brutes and savages dates back to slavery, and has been in continual circulation since then.
In the video Abby Johnson then mentions having “the talk” with her son, though she never describes what she will say.  Will she try to explain to him why it is okay for the police to profile him?   I do know that this conversation is a source of dread for Black parents (as well as for White parents of Black and biracial children), as they try to explain to their children how to live and survive in a world where their color makes them a threat.  One of my friends, who grew up in South Carolina, recalls having these lessons driven home by blows:  his father, perhaps in frustration, wanted to convey to him the potentially fatal consequences his actions around White people could have.   To really understand what is involved in “the talk”, I recommend this video, a Proctor & Gamble commercial.   Another friend of mine wrote about his anxieties and fears for his biracial sons in a very thoughtful Boston Globe article.
Abby Johnson then goes on to justify her own son being racially profiled because police have good, rational reasons to fear Black men.   Let me quote her at length:
“So, statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road, as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men, walking down the road – because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
This is a perfect illustration of racial profiling;  singling out her son only because of the color of his skin.  And she justifies it as “smart.”  Moreover, she is not even talking about it as a fear or emotional prejudice, a bad consequence of larger societal stereotypes.    Instead, she is arguing that cops are right to profile black men based on “statistics.”  I have heard this argument before, often in this context:  yes, there are racial prejudices in circulation, but there are also “facts” which exist side-by-side that need to be taken into consideration.  (At this point, someone almost invariably says, “It may be politically incorrect to bring these up, but….”)
There are two problems with this argument.  First, the statistics she cites about Black incarceration rates are either wrong or taken badly out of context.   She conflates prison population with criminality, and takes no notice of the ways in which the judicial system, from the police through prosecutors and judges, treat Black people very differently than they do White people. This misuse of statistics is nicely discussed in the Rehumanize blog post linked to above.  For an exhaustive discussion of the ways in which the criminal justice system has singled out and mistreated the Black community, and on White perceptions of the Black community, I recommend Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Second, and intertwined with this is the way in which “facts” and “statistics” are used to rationalize racial prejudice and reinforce a broader, false narrative above violent black men.    I think the best example of this comes from a story I read (but which I now, unfortunately, cannot source):  a Black prosecuting attorney is talking to a White colleague about a drug trafficking case they are handling.  His colleague is proposing that they offer a relatively lenient plea deal, saying, “It’s not like he is a gun-wielding drug-dealer!”  But, in fact, he was:  he was charged with trafficking, and had been arrested with guns in his truck.   The DA instead chose to interpret the guns through a different, exculpatory lens:  he was a hunter, everyone who lives in rural areas carries a gun, etc.  Were the defendant Black, the attorney telling the story argues, the interpretation would have been very different.  The point of this story is that “facts” are not self-evident they have to be interpreted and placed into some context.  Statistics about Black crime are interpreted and misinterpreted in support of preconceived notions about what Blacks, particularly Black men, are “really like,”  and these preconceptions are driven by racist stereotypes that have a long history in America.
Abby Johnson then turns to the heart of her video, which is a denunciation of Black culture in general and absent Black fathers in particular.  She drags out a statistic that she repeats several times, that 70% of black fathers are absent fathers.   She gives no citation for this information, neither in the video nor in a follow up interview with Simcha Fisher (see the link above).    After some searching, it appears that this number comes from a misinterpretation of data in a 1992 book by Andrew Billingsly, that found that (at the time) 70% of Black children were born to unmarried parents.  However, unmarried does not mean that the parents are not living together.    More recent studies claim that a majority of Black fathers live with their children, though the data is extremely complicated.  (You can see the CDC data set and its analysis here.)  Moreover, the same data suggests that Black men make a greater effort to be good fathers than White fathers do.
 I want to turn from this specific, incorrect statistic, and look at the rhetorical basis of this argument.
She shifts the blame from any of the larger institutional problems and blames the Black community for what is happening to them.  In her own words:
“If you wanna solve this madness that’s going on right here, right now in our society, that is where you start, because what’s happening right now with police, and criminals, and rioting, and violence – that is just a symptom of what has been going on for a long time in the homes and the communities of our Black families.”
Mass incarceration, police violence, racial profiling:  none of this is the fault of a racist system—Black people are responsible for their own fate.  And, presumably, they can solve all the problems of the Black community by fixing it themselves.
I will admit that I find it particularly repugnant to watch a White woman lecture the Black community about what their real problems are.  (Given the tenor of the video, hectoring may be a more apt description.)   Her presumption seems to be that the Black community is unable or unwilling to understand its own situation, and it necessary for White people to show them the truth.   This attitude is grounded in a stereotype that predates the Civil War:  a common justification for slavery was that Blacks were simply unable to behave in a civilized fashion without White oversight.  This stereotype shifted after the war and became one of the pillars of Jim Crow segregation:  that White dominance over Blacks was necessary and just because Black people were unable to manage their own affairs in a civilized manner.   This was a major theme in D.W. Griffith’s superbly made but completely racist film, Birth of a Nation, and it continues to underlie many discussions of the Black community.  By way of comparison:  discussions about drug abuse, single parent households, gun violence, etc. in the White community are never framed as “problems with White culture.”
 This line of argumentation also ignores the fact that the Black community is fully aware of these issues and discusses them at great length (though usually out of the sight and hearing of the White community).    Note, for example, the discussions about the 70% figure linked to above came from a prominent Black newspaper, the Chicago Reporter, or see the more critical discussion here.  The nature and problems of Black culture and the Black community have been discussed since the end of Reconstruction:  they were central to the divisions between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, and the rise of the “New Negro” movement.    (For a clear discussion of this history, I recommend Henry Louis Gates book, The Stony Road.)
Admittedly, there are some similarities between some internal critiques and the argument Abby Johnson is making.   For instance, Bill Cosby gave the controversial “Pound Cake speech” which was highly critical of certain aspects of Black culture.  There is, however, a significant difference.  With the exception of a small handful of Black conservatives (besides Cosby, Candace Owens, mentioned by Abby Johnson, springs to mind) whose principal audience seems to be White conservatives, when these debates occur in the Black community they are generally about the Black response to White racism and the systems which helped to create and perpetuate black social pathology.  Criticisms of Black culture exist, but are not uncontested–see the discussion about “respectability politics.”   In other words, the Black community know there are problems, but they ground their discussion of them in the larger structures of racism that surround and oppress their community.  For one good example of this, since rap music is frequently mentioned by Whites when criticizing Black culture, I recommend the video “Hip-Hop:  Beyond Beats and Rhymes” for a nuanced discussion about black culture and the role of the larger society in shaping it.
But, returning to the argument made byAbby Johnson:  she appears to be unaware of this discussion within the Black community.  In the video she repeatedly accuses Black people of either ignoring these issues or trying to pretend they are not problems. Note her assertion that
They are trying to redefine Black fatherhood, because they don’t like that 70% stat, so instead of setting the bar higher, for Black fathers, they’re simply redefining fatherhood in the Black community. (Emphasis added)
She instead lectures Blacks on what she believes their real problems are.  She is not trying to engage with the Black community, or listen to it:  they need to listen to her.  Or, as she puts it:
“If Black America wants to start writing and talking about something, this is it. This is it.”
Finally, I want to call attention to the one glaring omission in this video.  Nowhere in it does Abby Johnson mention the incident which triggered the current round of protests and riots:  the brutal murder of George Floyd by a White police officer.  She makes at best an oblique reference to it, dismissing his murder because it does not conform to her narrative about problems in Black culture:
Mark my words. It’s not because of bad cops. It’s because of bad dads. You want to jump on board with something? Jump on board with that.”
From beginning to end, the argument that Abby Johnson makes in her video is grounded in and expands upon racist stereotypes and assumptions that have been part of White America for a very long time.  That she supports and disseminates these arguments is a bad thing.   Silence by the pro-life community in the face of this can  be interpreted as support, or at least a belief that these concerns are not as important as other issues (i.e., abortion).  I hope and pray that in response to the outcry the video has generated, Abby Johnson does the “research” she talks about in the video and modifies her views.  But until then the pro-life movement should distance itself from her.
Coda:  I want to address one question that I have heard in private conversations:  is Abby Johnson racist?  I will stand by my assertion that the arguments she makes in this video are racist.  But as to whether she herself is racist, in the (narrow) sense of harboring deep and abiding hatred or fear of Black people, that is unknowable based on a single video.  Moreover, I think framing the question in this way misses an important point:  racism is a problem not because of personal prejudice, but because of the systems of racial oppression which were created and continue to exist in the US, systems that most White people cannot see or do not understand the full implications of, simply because they never have a direct impact on them.  (“Driving while Black” is a thing; there is no commensurate offense of “driving while White.”)  As the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, we now live in an America filled with “racism without racists.”  I feel it is important to challenge Abby Johnson’s arguments because they are part of a broader, false narrative which exists to support and sustain these structures.
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