The Sin of Racism in America is not “Unbelievable”
Dr. Elsie Miranda interrogates disbelief with the principles of her beliefs
On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd’s senseless murder, under the knee of a white police officer was captured on video, while three other officers looked on.
This crime ignited the justified rage of millions of people in the United States and around the world. As throngs of protesters took to the streets, gangs of rioters and looters took advantage of the moment, and social chaos ensued. Local police and National Guard troops were called in to restore order across the country, but everyday more people came out to proclaim Black Lives Matter—Black Lives Matter!
On May 30th, the eve of Pentecost, I had a conversation with friends, expressing my heartache and outrage at yet another murder of a black person in America. My friends’ knee-jerk reactions were simply, “I know, I can’t believe it,” “That is so sad,” and “This is just so unbelievable!”
“Why,” I asked, “Why do we find this reality so sad and unbelievable, when Black people are killed by police all of the time in this country, and nothing ever happens?”
My response to their disbelief sparked defensiveness, and the conversation was redirected towards the intolerance of violent protesters and the destruction of property. Our inability to dig deep to address the disparity of power, the dynamics of white privilege and the evils of systemic racism beyond the binary “us” and “them” dead-ended the conversation, and awakened my internalized shame and indignation at the institutionalized racism in America and the politicization of human dignity. Although my question was not meant to indict, it did, and as I pled guilty to my own historical indifference, I began to write...
En solidaridad
As an American citizen, what I have come to understand is that the Civil Rights Movement of the late 50s and 60s attempted to challenge 500 years of institutionalized racism in the United States, where Black bodies were commodified, terrorized, sexualized, scapegoated, and killed with impunity. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., modest gains were made in dismantling Jim Crow laws, and in enacting new laws that began to address the economic and educational disparities that legitimized violence and promoted the systematic diminishment of Black Americans.
Too often, however, many well-intentioned programs, such as school desegregation and food and housing subsidies, generated systems of dependence and oppression that appeased the conscience of the privileged while accommodating apathy and yielding death-inducing actions that have snuffed our brothers and sisters of their inherent dignity and their rightful place at the table.
In other words, the Civil Rights movement changed laws but the spirit of the laws failed to transform the hearts and minds of many who felt they had too much to lose. Sixty years later, we find ourselves at this historical juncture, where racist hatred and violence make living in the U.S. utterly un-American.
As a Cuban-American, I know a good deal about social indifferences, given the intergenerational social stratifications and political vitriol that exists among many Cuban exiles in the United States. My friends and I are first-generation children of political exiles; we were raised under the banner that the United States of America was the land of the free and the brave. Our families’ deep-seated wounds were more about loss of identity and “country” than about loss of property (although traumatizing). Required to leave everything behind, our parents experienced economic hardship when they first arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s, yet we never considered ourselves poor. We always heard that this first wave of (mostly “white”) Cuban exiles had come to the U.S. in search of freedom and not opportunity. In the process of living into their newfound reality, they found opportunity and capitalized on it.
My friends and I come from stable, traditional homes. We received a Catholic education and were taught that hard work, faith, and upholding family values were the essence of a meaningful life. We believed that every challenge was an opportunity. Looking back, I think that we unconsciously felt superior to our darker-skinned brothers and sisters, allowing us to pass judgment on most Black and Brown persons, based on stereotypes, and never questioned the systems that ensured the disparity in opportunity, because the system was rigged in our favor. As Hispanics, we never identified with American white privilege, because the category of “white” was not available to us until the 2010 U.S. Census, and thus seemed irrelevant.
However, in a time such as this, how could the ongoing murder of unarmed Black and Brown bodies without impunity not engender the same, if not more, justified rage that loss of property and civil unrest were igniting among my friends and many others?
Witnessing George Floyd’s death under the knee of a police officer has also, however, awakened a wide array of Americans to cross over from apathetic disbelief to a proactive rage that cries out in solidarity: “Enough!”
The time is now for our religious and civic leaders to join the community of men and women who have arisen to say, Enough!
The time is now to boldly model “love of neighbor” through acts of mercy and justice that might lead to reconciliation and fullness of life (see James 2: 8-13).
In this spirit, the challenge arises for all men and women committed to the founding principles of this great country and to their faith traditions, to stand in solidarity with, and as part of, the Black community and to take a knee, to promote peace, and uphold justice. For “what does it benefit someone to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36).
Fire, wind, language
Pentecost commemorates the birthday of the Church and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples. Symbolically, the Holy Spirit is represented by tongues of fire, which aim to transform a person’s inner life; a great wind, which aims to transform human communities; and multiple languages, which aim to transform relationships between humans.
The night my friends and I had that conversation, I hung up the phone and saw protestors burning a police car; others had created a fire pit in the center of the street, and revelers fed the flames as people chanted “Don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe,” “George Floyd,” and on and on. I felt a gnawing in my heart that both troubled and excited me. I prayed for the Spirit to reign down and grant us the wisdom, the fortitude, and the piety to live into the fullness of faith that will empower us all to give birth to a new moment in “our story.”
I asked myself hard questions:
What has happened to us—what has happened to me—that our collective soul has been deadened to the sorrow of our brothers and sisters?
What has perpetuated the selective blindness that kills our capacity for empathy?
Why do we as a society use incredulousness to protect us from accepting responsibility for how we have failed our neighbor?
Why can’t we acknowledge that we use both our privilege and our minority status to feign innocence and to exonerate us from culpability?
Furthermore, are we willing to admit to the fear of racial equity that prevents so many of us from recognizing our participation in the systemic injustices and abuses of power that fuel a justified rage?
What forms of honest engagement with the inconvenient truths that these questions yield might usher in the possibility of accountability, reconciliation, and peace?
I don’t pretend to have your answer to these questions of life and death, but I do know that blaming one group over and against the other or avoiding hard facts will never yield the transformative action that is needed to bring about the restoration of our common humanity, without which there can be no systemic change in this country.
I also know that, in the context of my own life, it has been the honest encounter with the other, where listening gave way to the possibility of “walking a mile in your moccasins” that gave way to the Spirit of transformation. For me, this moment is that place, where I am broken open, where my vulnerabilities are exposed and I don't need to be “right,” I just need to be true.
“As a woman of faith, I have been empowered by the seven principles of Catholic Social Teaching…”
Engaged response and honest encounter
Even though I am considered a person of color (POC) in most of the United States, I have rarely feared for my life because of my skin tone. At this juncture of our collective American history, however, what hangs in the balance is a matter of life and death. So long as indifference, disbelief, blaming, and other soul-numbing rationalizations legitimize the killing of Black lives, death is propagated by law enforcement to feed an idolatrous system that values property over humanity. When this veil of deceit is pierced, and we are able to “see again,” the conscience is awakened, and our heart then compels us to act—for surely, our very life requires an engaged response.
What might this place of engaged response and honest encounter look like writ large?
For our religious and civic leaders, this moment is certainly ripe to model “love of neighbor,” for them to lead us into the difficult conversations in such a way that acts of humility and mercy might further lead to reconciliation, “for what good is it to claim to have faith, but have no deeds?” (James 2:14). Perhaps our deeds could involve public acts of repentance, listening sessions, healing circles, charettes, poetry readings, and neighborhood potlucks, where State and regional leaders from different sectors of society show up to share food, listen to one another and promote mutual structures of accountability.
As a mother and civic leader, Atlanta Mayor Keisha L. Bottoms recently delivered an impassioned address reminding America that care for our most vulnerable communities can, and must, give voice to a justified rage that yields mercy, justice, and solidarity.
For institutions like civic centers, churches, and schools could provide time and space for people to read books, watch movies, and participate in collaborative projects where the good is lifted up and celebrated. These actions would provide the space to grieve, lament, dream, express gratitude, and offer praise together. Our communities need to reclaim the lost and forgotten stories of black, brown, and red bodies in America that have been summarily excluded from the U.S. Department of Education’s curricula in an attempt to erase histories.
These are just some paths that could lead to a conversion of heart that would yield systemic change, but they cannot be doled out to appease communities of color in exchange for a vote. These actions need to revitalize systems of rights and responsibilities across all sectors of civic life in ways that will impact our national identity and legitimize the diversity of We the People of the United States of America.
We the people must ask ourselves hard questions:
Are we willing to walk the path towards systemic change?
Are we willing to hold our business, our government, our churches, and schools accountable to the standards every citizen pledges allegiance to as “one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”?
Catholic Social Teaching
As a woman of faith, I have been empowered by the seven principles of Catholic Social Teaching that uphold:
The inherent value of human dignity;
Call to family, community, participation;
The rights and responsibilities of persons;
The protection of the most vulnerable among us;
The dignity of work and rights of workers;
Solidarity and the promotion of the common good; and
Care for God’s creation.
These teachings have been animated by relationships that have enabled me to claim my power and my voice across racial and cultural divides. This privilege has embodied my love of God and committed me to take responsibility for living a life informed by mercy, justice and hope.
As a Catholic theologian, I know that the Gospel compels all Christians to confront the sins of racism and sexism, along with other forms of systematic oppression. In doing so, we have to individually and collectively ask ourselves:
How have I—how have we, as citizens, neighbors, and fellow human beings—defended the voice of the oppressed?
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, recently issued a statement acknowledging racism as a “real and present danger,” calling on the entire Church community to profess respect for every human life, as a testimony that the Church has a moral responsibility to defend the life of Blacks against systemic injustice. This position broadened the Church's public emphasis on “Respect Life'' forums, which have historically favored the fetus while remaining somewhat silent on the spectrum of whole life.
Recalling the response that Jesus offered to the rich young man desirous of inheriting the Kingdom of God (Luke 10:25-37), we must affirm how it is that we concretely “love God with all our heart, with all our strength, with all our mind, and love our neighbor as our self.” In doing so, we seek ways to stand together by taking a knee together, to genuinely see and hear the cruel realities that require redress so that incredulousness is no longer our pat response to the evil that seeks to destroy all that is good, sacred, and holy. For surely, we cannot love a God we do not see, if we cannot love the neighbor who is right before our eyes.
In seeking the right road, may we remain open to the invitation of the Holy Spirit to work through us to give rise to a transformative love that remedies the sin of indifference, that embodies the fortitude and humility to be reconciled, and animates wisdom and understanding that upholds the dignity and rights of all, for love of God, love of neighbor, and love of country.
In memory of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and all the fallen victims of racism in America, let us work in solidarity with one another and with the Spirit until mercy, justice, and peace are realized.
