Black History Month

Black History Month has given us endless news articles, ads, petitions to get involved in what is going on in current history and in past history among our colored brothers and sisters in this country. Strangely enough, I have found myself caught up in very thought-provoking, memorable quotations that keep calling for a response:

  • The concept of race itself is dehumanizing.
  • Black history is American history.
  • We have to be willing to be vulnerable.
  • What do we know about our stereotypes and biases?
  • What is the weight of our unconscious biases on us and on others?
  • Healing the racial divide requires long-term commitment and investment.

These are but a half dozen; do you have more? Others? How are you dealing with them?

Another uncomfortable and burning issue for me is if and how my faith raises an urgency to think deeply, not only about societal happenings but about my faith and how it affects my actions and relationships.

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old is gone, the new is here! (2 Cor 5:17)

Is the old creation gone? Are we experiencing and expressing the new? If so, St. Paul in Galatians 3:26 says, then: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave or free, nor is there male and female” (and may I add, there are not the privileged whites and the colored blacks and browns, poor, LGBTQ+ castaways of any kind).

‘Tis hard, indeed, to become WOKE!

Renée Domeier, OSB

Photo: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., taken by Sister Nancy Bauer