Cover
story Program unearths, heals racism
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
Detroit
Most Americans would probably deny
being white supremacists. Its a label associated with the Ku Klux Klan
and their latter-day counterparts, skinheads.
Precious Blood Fr. Clarence Williams thinks most Americans are
wrong. Americans fail to recognize that they are white supremacists, he
believes, because the attitude is so deeply rooted as to constitute the very
backbone of our culture.
Williams, who heads the Office for Black Catholic Ministries for
the Detroit archdiocese, has developed a Recovery from Racism
program to help people, black and white, to examine their own negative racial
attitudes and move beyond them. The program, in its fourth year, borrows
techniques from 12-step programs.
Martin Luther King Day, 2002, Williams said, is an appropriate
time for local communities to sponsor such a program on a continuing basis, as
several organizations, including Catholic Charities USA, the National Black
Clergy Caucus, the National Federation of Priests Councils, Bread for the
World and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, have done. The program
is in place in about 15 dioceses and archdioceses, he said.
Williams points out that 2002 marks the 500th anniversary of the
year the first enslaved African arrived in the Caribbean, setting the stage for
racial conflict throughout the hemisphere.
According to a statement issued by the National Black Catholic
Clergy Caucus, the 1501 event preceded full-scale importation of Africans,
which began in Spain in 1518. The statements purpose was to challenge
people everywhere to repent of racism and take steps to overcome it.
Bill Waldmann, a deacon in the Detroit archdiocese and a
Williams-trained facilitator, said of the program, Its a power tool
to help us understand how weve been affected by racism. Most of us are
not even aware of how weve been racialized. Its part of us in ways
we dont recognize.
Recovery, Waldmann said, is a lifelong process. But
first, we all need intervention, he said. Like alcoholics who need to be jarred
into recognizing that they need help, members of a sick society need gentle
confrontation aimed at moving them from complacency to health.
To that end, Williams founded the Institute for Recovery from
Racisms in Detroit. He has trained more than 50 facilitators in the Detroit
area, 150 nationally, to offer workshops, using materials hes refined
over a decade.
As a black priest, Williams deepest personal concerns are
over U.S. societys black-white divide. The program, though, is applicable
to all forms of racism, he said, whether the target is Asians, American
Indians, or, following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, toward Arabs and Muslims in our midst.
In addition to elements of 12-step programs, the program draws
from Elisabeth Kubler Rosss five stages of grief, laid out in her
now-classic psychological study, Death and Dying. The stages are denial
and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
But Williams goal is hardly mere acceptance of racism.
Rather, in the manner of 12-step programs, his program aims at inspiring people
to live in new ways. Recovery begins with identifying ones
dysfunctional behaviors and identifying the benefits of change. So,
beyond Kubler-Ross final stage of acceptance, Williams adds three stages
of racial sobriety. He calls them reengagment, forgiveness and
witness.
The workbook Williams has developed for the program -- a product
of his doctorate dissertation -- is extensive and incorporates a variety of
worksheets. It begins with a warning of discomforts, even dangers ahead. Those
who enter the program and begin to change their lives can be viewed as
breaking taboos, he said.
Workshops begin with a Racial History Journal.
Participants are asked to write down memories of significant experiences
involving persons of another race, starting with primary years and, by decades,
moving onto the age they are today.
NCR attended a workshop last year at a parish in suburban
Detroit. The reporter was paired up for a period of one-on-one discussion with
a black man.
The reporter recalled her first serious negative impression: the
racist language and fear exhibited by aunts and uncles when blacks moved into a
neighborhood that had formerly been an enclave of European immigrants. Their
fear took on new life when one of the uncles was killed in a robbery by a black
man.
Her partner recalled attending a new, predominantly white school
as a boy and being told by a teacher, You dont belong
here.
Rather than repress such memories as racist, its
better to let them surface and deal with them, recognizing how they can develop
into dysfunctional patterns, the program suggests.
If I understand how my history makes it difficult for me to
dialogue with a member of another race, at least I have a starting point,
Waldmann said. I may work in a multicultural workplace, then go home to a
homogenous neighborhood. So we move in and out of these frames. Our repertory
of behaviors changes from work to home.
People want to preserve their innocence, so they become
angry when someone points out their prejudice, Williams said. Change
begins when we say, Im tired of this. Racism is not something
Im going to play along with anymore. I want to make a change.
Once you accept the concept of racial sobriety, all our
interactions change, he said. Think of President Truman, when he
integrated the armed forces. He embraced racial sobriety when he did that. He
did not wait for consensus -- that is, for people to feel comfortable
with the change, or to endorse it.
Detroit has been an excellent laboratory for such a program,
Williams said. The city has one of the largest urban black populations,
70 percent of the city, Williams said. The black Catholic
population is also large: 30,000 of the citys 1.3 million Catholics.
But Williams believes Catholic parishes everywhere are a good
starting point for recovery because Catholics played a major role in shaping
racial attitudes as they exist today, he said.
Catholics and blacks from the South have defined racial
relations in all the Northern major cities, Williams said. When
blacks came from Alabama to the Midwest, the first people they interacted with
were Catholic ethnic groups, the people who made up the inner cities.
Blacks moved into their neighborhoods. They attended the schools,
interacted with the police, the judges, and ultimately those interactions began
to define the language of race in the North.
Immigrants to U.S. cities were first identified as members of an
ethnic group -- Irish-Catholics as opposed to Protestants, for example, he
said, and only later as whites against black.
Pamela Schaeffer is the former managing editor of NCR.
Related Web sites |
Institute for Recovery from
Racisms www.ifrfr.org
National Black Catholic Clergy
Caucus www.bcimall.org/nbccc
National Black Catholic
Congress www.nbccongress.org
National Black Catholic Evangelization
Forum www.nbcef.org
Secretariat for African American
Catholics www.nccbuscc.org/saac |
National Catholic Reporter, January 18,
2002
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