In a Catholic newspaper doing what it should be doing — speaking the truth of the Gospel — one more essay on the evils of racism would seem like wasted ink. Every media-conveyed color-related disaster evokes familiar admonitions about why racial bigotry is so morally wrong. We should know the drill by now. So I will try a different tack. Let’s consider the stupidity of racism.
Even the most intellectually challenged sports fan, seized with the need to proclaim his or her virility by bad-mouthing minority people knows how his or her team needs star members of color to win. So the bigot ignores the inconsistency of racial epithets in one sentence followed by cheers when the minority player scores. All this many times in the same game. All with a straight face.
This should come as no surprise since by virtue of the player’s given-at-birth minority status, he or she had far fewer opportunities growing up other than basketball or another sport while Caucasian youths had more and better chances. Anything we do often enough we get better at, just by repetition. Play enough hoops and you get good at it. Inferior schools in racially impacted areas do not offer as much. Such schools do not provide the menu of classes or athletics. Doomed early without having done anything to deserve it. Thus, highly stupid.
How about the minority doctors and nurses we see in TV coverage of hospitals treating COVID-19 patients, as well as the vital orderlies with mops cleaning the floors? We plainly see the skin color of brave workers we easily call “heroes” doing work we ourselves would not want to do, putting their bodies between our life and death. When the news gives their names or interviews them, we detect non-European names and accents. They are different from us. And where we live, different means bad. How stupid to look down on people braver than us, saving our lives.
Idealistic people migrate to America because of our vaunted opportunities to get ahead in life. Such escalators to success usually do not exist in their places of origin. To leave one’s land and travel here, even legally, takes gumption. It means learning a new language rife with more exceptions and pronunciations than are logical. It also means arriving and knowing to expect contempt, since they televise worldwide our American distaste for caged immigrant children and other diversity. You would think that doctrinaire capitalists would scramble to hire people driven to produce because returning to the poverty they fled just will not happen. It reminds me of the scene in “Doctor Zhivago”: while Yuri’s brother narrates the troubled rise of Russian communism, the camera slowly pans across a deserted battlefield until it comes to the snow-covered back of a dead soldier manning a machine gun. He says, “Even Comrade Lenin underestimated our cursed capacity for suffering.”
How would middle class Caucasians behave if the tables were turned and they had to confront inferior schools and faulty education, red-lined neighborhoods, lack of insurance, less access to health care, negligent care by some healthcare professionals, racist police, overcrowded housing, ghetto-impacted housing, no housing, food-desert neighborhoods, unsafe or unsanitary work conditions where there is work not monopolized by racist hiring?
Twenty-eight years ago I attended the meeting in Washington of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops representing the priests councils of the New Jersey and Pennsylvania dioceses. I heard the speech of then-president Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, now the ordinary of Washington. He is a black man who spoke of how hard it is to be Black in America. In litany fashion he spoke from experience of the daily uphill struggle of minority people just trying to live the same family life of other Americans.
Black and other minorities do not want government free gifts that our laws rightly say must go to poor people. Many surveyed Whites deny this and thus libel minorities. Minorities would much rather have the same access to homes and schools and jobs that go to majority people. But this comes as a bolt out of the blue for many of the majority. Many flat-out deny it. Blacks are 13% of U.S. population and Latinos are 18%.
What else describes shooting ourselves in the foot and then wondering why it hurts? It’s far smarter to affirm our God-give equality.
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