Recently I read Jon Sobrino, SJ’s book No Salvation Outside the Poor. In it, he writes about the necessity and impact of calling things by name. Theologically, the simple act of naming, he writes, “means making things real, calling them into existence.”1 Sobrino cites Genesis here as the first example of the power of names. Names give validity. They give power. They take things previously unacknowledged and confirm their existence.
As a liberation theologian, Sobrino is deeply concerned with Catholics’ particular acknowledgment of and encounter with the poor. Writing in the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War, he seeks especially to call attention to the thousands of Salvadorans who were disappeared2 or killed in those years. “Just by mentioning the names of the tortured, dead, and disappeared,” he writes, “we recognize their fundamental dignity as human beings who deserve to be remembered as such.” Knowing the names of the poor allows us to enter into relationship with them, and in doing so we are able to acknowledge the dignity that exists within them as children of God. After all, God herself tells us in Isaiah 43, “I have called you by name, you are mine.”Sobrino examined his historical and cultural moment and cried out for justice. He believed that the central mission of the church is and would be lost when a society lost sight of her poor.
As I finished Sobrino’s book, I was confronted with questions. What massive poverty or injustice threatens our nation today? Who are the people whose fundamental dignity we should be remembering? Who or what, should we, as people of faith, be calling by name?
You don’t have to look too hard in our country today to discover situations fraught with injustice.
- The killing of unarmed black men and women by police with seemingly little legal recourse.
- A president who ran an election campaign inundated with references to Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” “murderers,” and even “bad hombres.”
- Children separated from their parents as they seek asylum on our Southern Border.
- A twitter storm that consumed our country in response to the behavior of students from Covington Catholic High School.
- The divisive rhetoric surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s insistence on kneeling during the National Anthem and the backlash that has met those who followed suit.
- Four years worth of unclean water for families and children in Flint, Michigan.
- A so-called “Muslim ban” which prohibited foreign nationals from Muslim majority countries from entering the United States.
What if we acknowledged that each and every one of those events is affected by, escalated by, or defined by race? What if we called the systemic inequalities that ravage our country by the name of racism? What if we, as people of faith, pushed our country to talk about race and racism in a way that honors the humanity of all people? What if we, as white Catholics, examined the ways in which our privilege has blinded us to the struggles of our brothers and sisters of color? What if as a church we spoke more intentionally and consistently about the racism that exists not only in our country but in our church? What if we spent time encountering and accompanying people of color rather the seeking constantly to explain why we aren’t actually racist? How could this naming change our nation?
To be fair, our world does not often provide us with strong examples. Mainstream media, for example, seems to bend over backward in order to avoid specifically naming any incidents or individuals as “racist.” For example, NPR recently reported on how, in response to remarks by Iowa Representative Steve King, an editor from NBC News sent an email to their staff which read, “Be careful to avoid characterizing [King’s] remarks as racist. It is okay to attribute to others as in ‘what many are calling racist’ or something like that.”
If you listen closely, you’ll hear similar, more subtle rhetoric everywhere. We’d rather say that our immigration policies stem from “concerns over national security,” not an underlying racism for those who look different than us. We’d prefer to argue that poverty in our cities is not the result of historically racist policies such as redlining, but is instead connected to “laziness” or “poor decision making.” It is more comfortable to claim black Americans are killed by police because they “were reaching for their waistband,” not because of implicit racial bias.
We cannot create justice and move beyond the racism that divides our country if we don’t first name it.
Father Bryan Massingale, Professor of Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham, speaks adamantly that “virtually every social challenge facing the United States [...] is entangled with or aggravated by racial bias against people of color.” He calls racism “the subtext of almost every social concern in our nation”3 and insists that Catholics lead the way in conversations about racial justice.
Instead of shying away, let’s use names.
Trayvon Martin.
LaQuan McDonald.
Sandra Bland.
Jakelin Caal Maquin.
Felipe Gomez Alonzo.
When we name the black men and women killed at the hands of the police, when we name the children who died in the custody of Customs and Border Patrol, it becomes much harder to look away. It becomes harder to imagine that their lives and deaths have nothing to do with us.
In my own life, I have been able to name the racism I see in our country because of my experiences as a teacher. Working in places like Baltimore City, the Coachella Valley, and Cleveland has caused me to look deep inside, recognize my own privilege, and realize I can no longer stay silent. Once I listened to the stories of my students I realized the privileged place I occupy in the universe and there has been no turning back. I learned names and stories and I haven’t been able to look away.
My job has enabled me, a white Catholic woman, to walk in the door each day and encounter people of color in a meaningful and intimate way. This accompaniment doesn’t mean I perfectly handle conversations surrounding race, however. They are moments my students and I struggle to understand one another, moments when I fail in my role as a compassionate educator, when I put my foot in my mouth and fail to recognize fundamental differences that lies between our experiences and realities. But in these encounters, I’ve been able to NAME the struggle. Racism is real. I see and hear it every day and I truly believe that my students have allowed me to recognize this in a way I never have before.
As a people of faith, we can do what God asks of us and lead the way in the naming of racism. We can recognize that racism and its implications are things we should absolutely care about. We can work actively to dismantle its effects. For many of us, meaningful encounter with people of color is not an everyday occurrence. So we must change our behavior. We must learn names, we must learn stories, and we must enter into meaningful relationship.
But in this effort, we shouldn’t put the burden of story sharing on our brothers and sisters of color. We have to do the work ourselves first. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Check out The Restless Hearts over the next several weeks as we dive more deeply into the ways race and racism intersects with our existence as Catholics. We can examine our own prejudices and begin to recognize our own privilege, and perhaps more importantly, our own blind spots. Let’s begin to call this thing by its name: racism.
1 No Salvation Outside the Poor, Jon Sobrino, Orbis Books, 2008.↩
2 There are thousands of Salvadoran’s who went missing during the Civil War whose deaths have never been accounted for - these individuals are referred to as having been “disappeared.”↩
3 Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Bryan N. Massingale, Orbis Books, 2010.
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