How can well-meaning white people help create racial justice? This book is an interesting, insightful, practical, and challenging response to that complicated question. It seems easier for straight people to be allies in the struggle for LGBTQ liberation, so the authors use that quest both as an analogy and a contrast to white solidarity in working for justice for black people. Thus both issues are analyzed, but the focus is on racial justice. The primary sources for the guidance offered here are the stories of activists working for justice, which include the authors themselves. Shannon Craigo-Snell is Professor of Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. Christopher Doucot is cofounder of the Hartford (CT) Catholic Worker House, which is located in a poor, black neighborhood. Both are white and straight, as am I.
Racism is a form of structural oppression. To explain structural oppression, the authors use the brilliant analogy of a car-centered transportation system—“carism.” Public policy decisions refocused the US transport system from rail (trolleys) to the car. The system is so all-encompassing that you don't even notice it, unless you don't have a car. Just as giving up your car won't end carism, not being prejudiced won't address white supremacy, a socially constructed society that is designed to favor whites and subjugate blacks. The racist, white-centered system has to be replaced with a just and equal society. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) fails to perceive this point in their Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love—A Pastoral Letter Against Racism (November 2018). Although aware of a social dimension to racism, they primarily understand racism as prejudice and discrimination. (Nor do the bishops grasp that heterosexism is also an unjust social structure.)
A major problem for white allies in the struggle for racial justice is that whites benefit extensively from racism and have adapted the system from slavery, to segregation, to the “New Jim Crow.” The contemporary system of white supremacy is a bit more subtle than slavery but no less effective in helping whites and hampering blacks. Thus the black experience makes it difficult for blacks to trust whites, and “woke” whites, aware of how oblivious they are to the pervasive ideology of white supremacy, are afraid of offending blacks.
The book offers concrete advice for being an ally in the struggle for racial justice rooted in traditional Christian virtues. For example, fortitude, the courage to act when the going gets difficult, is required of justice activists. Whites must face the fear of giving offense and learn to deal with it. We probably will mess up, and when our black friends call us on it, we should apologize, thank them for letting us know, and promise to try not to do that again. We also learn that standing close to the oppressed requires fortitude because it means that the forces of oppression will hit us as well.
Stories illustrate the ways to work for justice, and the final chapter presents four models to follow, one of which is Anne Braden. In 1954, Anne and her husband, Carl, helped their black friends, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, buy a house in a working-class, white neighborhood in Louisville. This house was about a mile from my boyhood home. I was six and only vaguely aware that something was going on. Violence prevented the Wades from ever moving in to their house. The Bradens were charged with sedition under the presumption that they had to be communists to do such a thing. Carl was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, which was overturned on appeal. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence against the Wades and the Bradens. My uncle was a suspect in those crimes. All whites in America are implicated in the unjust system of white supremacy.
My hope is that this important and helpful book will find its way into every college library and into many undergraduate courses on social justice. It should be required reading for the US Catholic bishops before they write another pastoral letter on racism.
