Week 18

A healing beatitude

Blessed are you who are willing to engage in a sincere conversation about race.
Blessed are you who embrace your Black sisters and brothers in the fight for social justice.
Blessed are you who are willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of healing our society.
Blessed are you who ask your bishop about racial equity training and programming in your diocese.
Blessed are you who pray to end racism as a pro-life issue.
Amen

These Beatitudes are featured in this article from US Catholic

Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., the former Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, is also the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity & Diversity). A world-renowned lecturer, she consults with educational institutions throughout the United States and the world on creating multi-cultural and gender-fair curricula.

Dr. McIntosh currently leads the expansion of the SEED Project, with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She directs the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project, which provides workshops on privilege systems, feelings of fraudulence, and diversifying workplaces, curricula, and teaching methods. One of her essays can be found here.  You can also watch one of her TED talks here: Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlaneSchools  

Consider this question in light of the following excerpt: 

• Why is it important to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, as Dr. King said?

Always Running

Our first exposure in America stays with me like a foul odor. It seemed a strange world, most of it spiteful to us, spitting and stepping on us, coughing us up, us immigrants, as if we were phlegm stuck in the collective throat of this country. My father was mostly out of work. When he did have a job it was in construction, in factories such as Sinclair Paints or Standard Brands Dog Food, or pushing door-bells selling insurance, Bibles or pots, and pans. My mother found work cleaning homes or in the garment industry. She knew the corner markets were ripping her off but she could only speak with her hands and in a choppy English.

Once my mother gathered up the children and we walked to Will Rogers Park. There were people everywhere. Mama looked around for a place we could rest. She spotted an empty spot on a park bench. But as soon as she sat down an American woman, with three kids of her own, came by.

“Hey, get out of there—that’s our seat.”

My mother understood but didn’t know how to answer back in English. So she tried in Spanish.

“Look spic, you can’t sit there!” the American woman yelled. “You don’t belong here! Understand? This is not your country!”

Mama quietly got our things and walked away, but I knew frustration and anger bristled within her because she was unable to talk, and when she did, no one would listen.

We never stopped crossing borders. The Río Grande (or Río Bravo, which is what the Mexicans call it, giving the name a power “Río Grande” just doesn’t have) was only the first of countless barriers set in our path.

We kept jumping hurdles, kept breaking from the constraints, kept evading the border guards of every new trek. It was a metaphor to fill our lives—that river, that first crossing, the mother of all crossings. The L.A. River, for example, became a new barrier, keeping the Mexicans in their neighborhoods over on the vast east side of the city for years, except for forays downtown. Schools provided other restrictions: Don’t speak Spanish, don’t be Mexican—you don’t belong. Railroad tracks divided us from communities where white people lived, such as South Gate and Lynwood across from Watts. We were invisible people in a city that thrived on glitter, big screens, and big names, but this glamour contained none of our names, none of our faces.

The refrain “this is not your country” echoed for a lifetime.

Source
From ALWAYS RUNNING: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. Copyright ©1993 by Luis Rodriguez. Published in paperback by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, by Open Road Media as an ebook, and originally in hardcover by Curbstone Press. By permission of