Conference is historic: Antiracism work essential to CTA mission

“It took grace and courage for CTA to tackle the immensely important topic of racism. You taught us so much about our own privilege.”

“This is the most essential theme we could be addressing. A Church NOT addressing its racist history and reality should not survive. We must continue and go deeper every year. This is the work of building the kin-dom.”

“CTA took a necessary, risky leap in approaching this topic. Thank you. We’ve a long way to go!”

These comments and dozens more, written on evaluation forms by attendees as they left the CTA National Conference Nov. 4 in Milwaukee, affirmed the rightness of the CTA board decisions over the last five years to attack institutional racism starting with our own organization, to get outside training, to form an Anti-Racism Team, and now to dedicate our first-ever national conference to the ongoing journey “From Racism to Reconciliation: Church Beyond Power and Privilege.”

Over 2,000 people took part in the conference: CTA leaders believe this is the largest U.S. Catholic conference ever assembled to deal specifically with the evil of racism.

Phelps: Church as communion

All three plenary speakers addressed aspects of racism. Theologian Jamie Phelps, OP, Friday evening traced its roots in American history: white privilege was built into the social contract from the beginning, and we all inherit it. So “we are comfortable living separate lives,” in church as well as society. But Jesus’ call to conversion is a call to reject that separateness in favor of one inclusive communion — to reclaim our true selves as one family of God. Phelps harbored no illusions that racism would end easily, but she struck a tone of hope because “we are empowered by the Spirit. It is only by the power of God acting in and through us that full communion will come.”

Moore: I don’t believe you

The second plenary talk was a more stark reality check. Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr., on Saturday pulled no punches with his overwhelmingly white audience: “When I hear you as white people say you want to end racism, I don’t believe you.” He shared his experience as an African American from all-black public housing in small town Florida coming to a small white college in Iowa to play football, and how it felt. “I came out of a segregated environment. But didn’t you also grow up in a segregated model? The whole system in this country was created by white people for white people. Now you say you want to end racism and white privilege and all the benefits it brings you every day? I’m not convinced.”

Time of challenge

CTA co-president Paul Scarbrough had opened the conference quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The measure of a man is where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” He called this convention “our time of challenge.” The challenge was most daunting when Moore speculated that racism and white supremacy might simply continue unchanged in the 21st century. But paradoxically, people seemed to be energized for action rather than immobilized by that alarm.

Even if you start small, do something, Moore said:

1. Educate yourself about racism. (The crowd did so. Workshops and films on the topic were crowded, and book sales were brisk).

2. Put your new knowledge to work in your day-to-day conversations. (Like black theologian James Cone at CTA in 2002, Moore accented the critical need for conversations across racial lines, and about race.)

3. Work, not singly, but in organizations — like CTA. The crowd certainly got that message.

CTA-USA board challenged the assembly to raise $100,000 toward the 30th Anniversary Campaign to fund current projects, including anti-racism. Board members distributed pledge envelopes and pitched donations at all three plenary sessions. By noon Sunday, through gifts and pledges the goal had been reached!

Dolores Huerta honored

Sunday morning the 2007 CTA Leadership Award was given to Dolores Huerta, the fiery 78-year-old Chicana leader who with the late Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers in the early 1960s. “It was all about racism,” she said. “When they passed the Labor Relations Act in 1935 allowing workers to unionize, they left out farm workers. Later on we asked a former U.S. president why they’d been excluded. ‘Because they were coloreds and Mexicans,’ he said.”

Huerta’s stump speech hammered the current “hysteria attacking immigrants” as a way to “distract the public from the war in Iraq and our disastrous economy,” but most of all as a racist issue. “The Statue of Liberty says ‘Give me your tired, your poor,’” she said. “There should be an asterisk: except Mexicans.”

She closed with an empassioned call to organize people of color. “We are the majority, right? But deep down, we are all one human race, homo sapiens, and where did we begin? In Africa. So we’re all Africans of different shades and colors, right? So we can say to the Minutemen, the KKK and the Aryan Nation, get over it. You’re Africans!”

Rodriguez: The world is browning

The last speaker at CTA 2007 was Richard Rodriguez, PBS commentator and the author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Rodriguez reiterated Huerta’s final point in his own way, through the color brown. He recalled as a child in Sacramento leaving a box of crayons in the summer sun. They all melted together and formed — brown! “Fellow Catholics, the world is browning. Despite all the obvious division and separation, the world is also browning. I was raised a brown child — born of Mexican immigrant parents, a student of Irish Catholic nuns, with an uncle from India who married my aunt and suddenly there were Hindus in my life. Brown for me means India, Ireland, Mexico. A planetary movement. Brown is, in America, the true color of our erotic life.”

What Rodriguez said he really wanted to talk about was love, urgent and powerful and revolutionary. Dangerous love. “Why don’t we find love in our history books?” he asked. “We hand our children books filled with hatred: stories of war, division, massacres, and civil conflict, and say, ‘Here is your history.’ As a child I was always looking for the alternate story. Sometimes in a footnote, a reference to the plantation owner who married a slave, and when he died, he left his wife their slaves. What happened to them? Or there is a massacre on the Great Plains. All of these bodies. Last seen leaving the scene of violence: one mounted man and one Indian woman. Where are they going? I want to go with them.”

Click here to purchase any of the talks given by the above mentioned plenary speakers.