Who Counts as “Us”? – February 23, 2018

As Black History Month draws to a close, I want to encourage you to read Father Bryan Massingale’s piece, Racism is a Sickness of the Soul.  Can Jesuit Spirituality Help Us Heal? in the November 20, 2017 issue of “America Magazine.” “America” is the Jesuit Review that provides “a smart Catholic take on world events, culture and the church.” Or better, watch Father Massingale’s talk at the 2017 Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice.

Father Massingale (who is a black diocesan priest who teaches at Jesuit Fordham University in New York) admonishes us to have an honest, adult conversation about race – and allow ourselves to be uncomfortable. Embarrassed.  Ashamed. Fearful.  Angry.  Overwhelmed. Helpless.  And paralyzed.

Father Massingale says we must be willing to be uncomfortable. We must be willing to talk and listen and start by looking at the signs of the times:  Ferguson, Charleston, Charlottesville, and the Trump Presidency.  He explains that we must understand that racism is NOT committing individual acts of meanness.  “It is NOT Person A doing something negative to Person B.  Person A, usually but not always being white, does something negative deliberately, consciously and intentionally to Person B, who is usually by not always black or Latino, because of the color of Person B’s sick.”  Obvious.  Deliberate.  Intentional.  Easily photographed.  A problem of bad white people.

No…that is not what we need to talk about. Father Massingale tells us that racism is something more insidious and more subtle.  It is “racially selective sympathy and indifference, the unconscious refusal to extend the same level of recognition and care to another that we would give to members of our own group, because of pervasive cultural implicit bias.”  This is what allowed the Flint, Michigan water crisis.

We need to talk about a system of white supremacy and white privilege.

I am a white woman, born in Kansas, raised in Iowa, attended college in Minnesota, now living in Missouri. I know – and am coming to know more and more – my privilege.  As we come to the end of Black History Month and continue our journey of Lent, I am challenged to keep asking the question, “who counts as us?” And I pray that my answer is the same as God’s answer.

Father Massingale says magis is the way.  He writes, “Magis is the antidote, a response to the soul sickness that so binds us that we cannot hear another person’s pain…that longing, that yearning, for what is beyond us.  It calls us to be ‘bigger souled’ than we ever thought we could.”

Father Massingale is a man of faith who believes, “the Spirit of God will make us ready and give us what we need” so that we can “become a nation of equals…a nation that we have never been.”

May it be so.