Chapel Veils and Implicit Bias – April 20, 2018

Coffee Shop Racism was in the news this week when two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks.  You probably know the story.  The two men had not ordered anything…an employee called the police…the men were arrested for trespassing…video was posted online.  Starbucks chose not to press charges, the men were released, the CEO of the chain apologized and called the situation “reprehensible.” The company has set about to ensure “a greater sense of community,” beginning with some mandatory racial bias training.

I heard a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last night about all this.  It was fascinating and challenging – not just to my own white privilege/racial bias but my liberal Catholic bias.  Ailsa Chang’s interview with Alexis McGill Johnson of the Perception Institute included information about our brains’ “automatic processing of negative stereotypes that have become embedded in our brains over time about particular groups of people” – oftentimes without our conscious awareness. I am very interested in how our brains work and by the idea of “rewiring the brain.” Our brains DO automatically process things, automatically anticipate things.  I know this.  I also believe (want to believe!) that we can change the way we think.  We can change the way we “see” the world.  We can change the way we respond.

Many of my friends (and most of their daughters) have left the Catholic Church in the past fifteen years – discouraged and disappointed by the Church’s position on women’s ordination, LGTBQI inclusion, and other issues.  My experience of many of the young women who remain (and the women who have come into the church through the RCIA in the recent past) is that they are drawn to the Church’s devotional piety that was never a part of my life.  Like chapel veils.

I must admit, when I meet a Catholic or someone-interested-in-becoming-Catholic who is wearing a veil or talking about apparitions or telling me how beautiful the Latin Mass is my brain automatically screams, “what the what?!” It is only after I take a breath and LISTEN do I find out that some of these women think women should be ordained and gay people accepted fully.  They are more than just one thing.

Like men in a coffee shop are more than the color of their skin.