Preliminaries:
1. What follows are my practical, sociological observations and judgments, about which we can disagree, not Catholic moral truths. I myself welcome argument.
2. This is am important question with significant moral consequences and is extremely sensitive. For example, my point of view would be scorned and "canceled" in many progressive circles as hateful and racist. This is another topic you would do well to discuss with your parents, aunts, and uncles.
3. My perspective, like everyone's, is limited by my life experience and study. I speak from "my world." Yet mine is relatively rich: fifty years living and working in the most diverse city in the nation, Jersey City. Where I work, live, worship and engage I am almost always a minority as white and often not even a plurality. For example, in Magnificat Home over the last 14 years I have worked very closely with 11 managers: 7 black women, 1 Hispanic woman, 2 white women, 1 white man. Also, for over sixty years, since I was myself a teenager, I have been fascinated with the causes of social injustice, violence and suffering and have read widely. I read mostly conservative journals but subscribe to the N.Y. Times and read it every day; I have done so my entire life. So I know the liberal viewpoint and accept aspects of it.
4. This (1 of 3 letters) will argue our country is not systematically racist; the second will try to understand the actual underlying causes for racial inequality; and the third will view the new anti-racism as itself toxic.
Yes, there is racism in our country, of many stipes; but No it is not systematic, defining, foundational!
Tribal resentments are part of the sinful, human condition. Today we have in Nigeria black Jihadists massacring black Christians; in the Middle East, Shiites and Sunnis kill each other and both despise the Jews; Russians are destroying the infrastructure of the Ukraine. Last week in Portugal we were warned by our guide not to say "Buenos Dios" as the Portuguese carry centuries-old resentments against their Iberian neighbors (but they like English-speakers). A refined, educated Chinese woman who married and divorced an Irish-American told me she would Never date a Japanese man, because of the suffering of her grandparents in World War II. Every Friday afternoon at 5 PM in areas like Newark or Jersey City a system of racial violence occurs: Hispanic men, many undocumented, who work in construction are mugged by black thugs as they go to the bus with the $500 in cash they earned for the week. Asians who run small businesses in urban areas suffer patterns of racial violence that are largely non-white. Recall the NYC street gangs of the 1950s, the Jets and the Sharks, as portrayed in West Side Story!
The vile system of slavery (200 years) and Jim Crow (100 years) in our South crashed decisively in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I was a teen at the time. ALL the credible moral agencies of our culture...ALL of them...renounced white-on-black racism: Churches and synagogues, universities, law, both parties, sports, entertainment, media. White racism became an unacceptable taboo, overnight. This consensus had been building in the years since World War II, just as anti-Catholicism widely disappeared in the aftermath of that immense exercise of national unity.
Aware of centuries of injustice against Afro-Americans, a new anti-racist system was implemented. Discrimination in housing and employment prohibited; new quotas in college selection implemented to compensate for past wrongs; busing of children around cities tried to equalize education.
An equally important but not immediately overt development was happening within corporate capitalism. By the 1980s, when I was in supervision in UPS, our entire managerial culture was receiving workshops on diversity in which we were firmly instructed: racism is bad for business. We MUST hire, promote, and serve the broadest possible base to succeed financially. Anti-racism became systemic and intrinsic to capitalism as it went global. For example, at UPS in the late 1970s, I was eager to move from a low-paying clerk job to driver and then into supervision but I was delayed as the company at the time was preferring women and minorities.
This new anti-racist system was (in my view) morally required and successful. But it is still being debated. For example, Asians have a higher bar than other minorities for acceptance into elite programs: that is a problem. After 50 years, it is probably time to relax those preferences. There are different ways to look at this situation.
The point of this letter: Yes there are residual pockets of racism in places of our society. But this is neither systematic nor systemic. "Systematic" indicates a set of observable policies and practices such as "blacks sit in the back of the bus" or "Catholics need not apply." The racist system of 300 years in our South has been replaced by a largely effective anti-racism one across our society for the last half century. "Systemic" (as in a medical condition) suggests an indeliberate, unconscious but toxic dynamic at work in an organism. This would include prejudices such as "Irish are drunks" or "Jews are cheap" or "Blacks can't swim" or "Asians are smart" and so forth. Such stereotypes are unavoidable; like tribal resentments, they are part of the human condition. But regarding white/black relations, such have been overcome by a rigorous anti-racism across all our defining and elite institutions.
Yet, there remain excruciating racial inequalities across our society. The next letter will try to understand why. Stay tuned!
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