The teacher had her sixth-grade students come up the center aisle single file. She would look directly at each child, then have each go to her left or right. More than three quarters of them went to her right while the rest to her left. She told the large group that they would have snacks, no homework and could report tomorrow in dress-down. The smaller group would stay after school, clean the room and have twice the usual homework load. After whoops and laments, they began to notice the reason for the treatment: eye color. The wronged children said it was unfair. The teacher asked why it was fair to do the same based on skin color.
Adults struggle with the same thing. Put that way, it is unfair. When the small group is denied jobs by the larger group, partially because the minority did not have adequate schooling in the first place, partially because it did not have job experience, and partially because long-term poverty hurt family life with alcoholism, drug abuse, arrest and more, the small group cannot help but suffer. Compound that with the family history of being brought to this country in chains, bought on the auction block, separated from spouse and children and forced to live a demeaning life with no hope other than that the master would be merciful, it was hard being black.
Righteous retort argues that accepting the poor of whatever color means slums. Note that whites get most government aid inasmuch as blacks constitute only 13 percent of U.S. population. But money for even house paint is scarce when food and clothing take precedence. Of course no one wants their real estate values to go down. Who would want to live in a slum? But since black unemployment is always double white, and since whites are in charge of hiring, and since today there are three applicants for every job being offered, minority members start at a disadvantage. Department of Labor studies find that minority folks in great percentages want to work and resent being denied work for which they are qualified. To be told to stop being so lazy and to get a job while being refused a job tends to enrage. If this does not expose the delusional nature of white pretense to superiority, nothing will.
Catholic social teaching clearly comes down in favor of racial fairness. It begins with the early Genesis tenet that we are our sister’s and brother’s keeper, made in the image and likeness of God, with no justification for discriminating on the basis of skin color. In God’s Kingdom, the topic about which Jesus speaks more often than any other in the Gospels, all are equal subjects of the King. In fact, the poor and marginalized enjoy a privileged place called the preferential option for the poor precisely because they have suffered discrimination.
Catholic worship has to reflect this at the risk of being called hypocritical if it ignores this. For us to gather at Eucharist with a mentality of some feigned superiority over a minority is to render that worship empty. “Whited sepulchers” is the racially embarrassing epithet Jesus used for hypocrites who pretend a law-abiding religiosity that excludes people dismissed as other. The tombs were lovely to look at but were filled with the stench and rot of dead men’s bones. That’s his language.
One of his parables has become a favorite. It makes a Samaritan the hero of a rescue story when the pious folks side-stepped the body of the famous mugging victim. In Jesus’ time the Samaritan easily qualified for today’s minority person, hated by fellow countrymen for being of mixed ancestry, something about which he or she could do nothing, like today’s minorities. Archeologists have uncovered roads in ancient Israel taking Jews miles out of their way so they could avoid Samaria. They testify to how long discrimination has been going on and to what foolish lengths people would go for it.
Systematically reducing someone to sub-human status because of his or her race is condemned by Scripture and by Catholic pastoral leadership. The inhumanity of it is self-evident.
With fewer Catholics attending weekend worship these days, we have no choice but to merge parishes, with God seeing to it that sometimes races mix. Could the angst we continue to feel about mergers be God’s wake-up call to sensitize us to long-neglected sisters and brothers?
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