Daily Archives: December 1, 2021

As a protest against violence toward African-Americans, Black Lives Matter burst onto the national scene just two years ago. But according to Harvard scholars, it is a movement that has historical roots that go back more than 300 years.

Violence against black lives began when slave ships brought black people to America, said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies.

In the history of African-Americans, the story of struggle has been a constant one, she told an overflowing crowd Tuesday at Robinson Hall Lower Library.

Sponsored by the Harvard History Department, the seminar #BlackLivesMatter in Historical Perspective underscored the growing movement for racial justice taking hold across the country.

On Monday, the president of the University of Missouri resigned in the wake of student protests against racial tensions.

In August 2014, Black Lives Matter chapters demonstrated after Michael Brown was shot dead by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo.

The movement was born in 2013 after a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of second-degree murder in the shooting death of African-American teenager Trayvon Martin.

Higginbotham drew parallels between earlier protest movements and Black Lives Matter, which describes itself as a chapter-based national organization working against police violence and anti-black racism.

She compared Black Lives Matter to the anti-lynching campaign of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, led by Ida B. Wells and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. The campaign brought international attention to extrajudicial killings of black people in the United States, Higginbotham said.

Some were lynched because they stood up to a landowner. Some were lynched because they crossed the color line, consensually; and some were lynched because they were successful, Higginbotham said.

The NAACP understood that you didnt have to look a certain way to be lynched, she added, because they lived daily with the fear of not only violence but with the fear of constant segregation.

Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and a professor of African and African American studies, spoke about St. Louis history of segregated neighborhoods.

St. Louis, Missouri, is to this day one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, said Johnson. What happened in Ferguson is that the history of structural racism was expressed in the systemic racism of the Ferguson police department.

Black Lives Matter also bears similarities to the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s, said Brandon Terry, an assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. That movement, he said, also supported black self-determination and aimed to galvanize the public into action.

Terry said Black Lives Matter represents a unique moment in the history of black political thought because it rejects the idea of black uplift, which proposes that educated blacks are responsible for the well-being of the black population.

Black Lives Matter folks dont get dragged into that argument, said Terry. They think thats not what theyre supposed to do and that its kind of crazy to think that a group of activists are supposed to solve this centuries-long problem.

In shedding light on African-American life from the beginning of slavery to the anti-lynching crusade to the Civil Rights Movement, the speakers shared their hope that history can provide clues for Black Lives Matter to achieve its stated goal of changing a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.

History is crucial, said Elizabeth Hinton, an assistant professor of history and of African and African American Studies. It helps us figure out ways in which we can move forward and transcend the institutions and systems that have made black lives not matter for the entire history of this nation.

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Background on Black Lives Matter Harvard Gazette

The first time, he stumbled on it by accident, after following a dirt track through fields of sugar cane that came to a clearing. There was a sign, Hakeem Ward remembers, beneath which someone had left an offering.

The sign said it was a slave burial ground, he says. We went and Googled it, and then I realised it was actually one of the biggest slave burial grounds in the western hemisphere.

Ward, 24, lives nearby, within sight of the turquoise waters that lap at Barbados south coast, but had never learned until then of the Newton Slave Burial Ground, where the remains of an estimated 570 enslaved people were found interred in unmarked graves. At school he says they brushed lightly over the history of the slave trade on the island. We learned a lot of stuff about Christopher Columbus and how he discovered and colonised the world.

But the past still agitates, making itself known. Dogs occasionally vanish into the bushland, returning with skulls and other remains, Ward says. He and his friends try to avoid hanging out near the site. With the spiritual energy, we dont want to see anything, he says. Because we see things, and we want to avoid that as much as possible.

Late on Monday night, local time, Barbados will declare itself a republic, becoming the first nation to remove Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state in nearly three decades. The transition, flagged last year in the thick of activism inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, is being executed amicably, in the presence of Prince Charles, and circumspectly, more than 20 years since it was recommended by a government commission.

But, unmistakably, it is a repudiation of the British monarchy, part of a wider campaign that includes strengthening ties with the African nations from which most Barbadians claim heritage and renewing demands for the UK government to make reparations for its historical crimes. Aimed at authoring a liberated future, many hope it will also soothe the restless ghosts of the past.

As its peak tourism season approaches, Barbados is bearing the brunt of its worst Covid-19 wave. Masks are ubiquitous and many supermarkets and government buildings have installed imposing machines to check temperatures. Still, visitors are coming, drawn by the islands famously pristine beaches, lush hinterland and gentle weather.

It was these same natural blessings that made the easternmost island in the Caribbean an exquisite laboratory for the development of a new form of capitalism in the 17th century. Sugar, backbreaking to produce and for centuries reserved for Europes ultra-wealthy, flourished in Barbados rich soil. The islands even topography offered vast space for plantations.

But it was a third innovation, the perfection of a model using enslaved Africans to work the fields, which set off a sugar revolution that made England extraordinarily wealthy and created a template that soon spread across the Americas. It was in Barbados that the slavery plantation production model was invented right here, says David Comissiong, the countrys ambassador to Caricom, a Caribbean regional integration body.

Reclassified under British law as property, the men, women and children who worked the cane fields of Barbados were subject to unimaginable brutality. The first systematic study of the health of those buried at the Newton Slave Burial Ground found the average life expectancy of those examined was 18 years old, with the lives of women thought to be especially appalling: until then, no lower mean age of death had been documented among enslaved females anywhere in the world. Barbados was a hellhole, Comissiong says. For black people, Barbados was a brutal, hellish society.

It is easy to be among the more than 1 million people who visited Barbados each year before the pandemic and never encounter this history. There is a single statue commemorating emancipation, at the centre of a busy roundabout, depicting a man who has come to be identified with Bussa, the leader of a failed 19th-century revolt, whose broken chains dangle from arms raised skyward.

For centuries after slavery ceased, over the islands shameful history, there was almost a kind of indifference, a kind of silence, recalls Esther Phillips, Barbados poet laureate, that she believes stems in part from guilt and shame among those who were freed. Who wants to revisit the pain of trauma, once you get out of it, or appear to get out?

That muffling was passed down through generations, and reinforced in the colonial education of her youth, which some argue has not sufficiently been reformed to this day. I never knew there was anything called West Indian history or Caribbean history, Phillips says. I knew all about the English queens and kings.

The decades since Barbados became independent 55 years ago have seen gradual efforts to face the past, and confront its implications for the future, but always cautiously. A government commission in the 1970s examined the question of becoming a republic and advised against it, conscious that similar experiments in Caribbean states such as Suriname and Guyana had led to authoritarianism and instability.

Even the Barbadian leaders who wanted to break away from the monarchy recognised they still lived in the world colonialism made, and had an economy critically dependent on attracting a pipeline of sun-starved British tourists.

The fear, I think reasonably, was that it would not be received well, and that there would be a narrative, for example, of telling tourists in the UK: Maybe you should wait about going to Barbados, because you should make sure the political situation is stable, says Melanie Newton, a professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Part of this conservatism, too, was pragmatic: Barbados was building a society that was, by any measure, a tremendous success, with some of the best human-development indicators in the formerly colonised world, an enormous leap from the desperate conditions that prevailed in the last decades of British rule. Barbados has a very strong public service system, amazing education, good healthcare, Newton says. And a lot of that is paid for by tourism and international business and investment banking.

Over the past week, workers have been busy erecting and painting a dais in central Bridgetowns national heroes square, formerly called Trafalgar, where the handover ceremony will take place at 11pm on Monday, and the surrounding colonial buildings including the countrys Gothic parliament, the third oldest in the world are decked in the national colours, ultramarine and gold.

At the head of the square stands a grand pedestal with nothing on it.

The year 2020 produced seismic changes everywhere. In Barbados,too, it was a watershed, opening the way for government to finally propose a republic that had been promised for decades but always postponed.

Alexander Downes was supposed to be studying in Australia, but was trapped at home in Barbados early in the year when borders suddenly closed. He would pass national heroes square, glancing at the statue of the English admiral Horatio Nelson that had stood there since 1813, three years earlier than its twin in London.

At 32, Downes was part of the first generation without memory of Barbados colonial-era nor its hangover in the early years of independence. He and his friends were more inclined to question the things their parents took for granted, he says. Sometimes I would talk to my father, as we drove through certain areas, and he would be like, Oh, when I was a kid, I couldnt come to this area. And Id be, like, why not?

Those things included the pride of place given to the defender of British slavery Nelson, whose bronze statue had first stirred small protests decades earlier, to which the government had responded in 1990 by rotating it to face away from town. The compromise wasnt, lets get rid of it, says Downes. It was, literally, just turn it.

In the middle of the year, Black Lives Matter protests were spreading across the world, including to Barbados, and Downes sensed that in his careful society, something was shifting. After consulting with friends, he posted a petition calling for Nelson to come down.

I said to myself, in Barbados, what are we doing? he says. We have a colonial past, we have a past steeped in racism [The statue] is just brick and mortar. If we can start with this, then we can get the ball rolling to start addressing some bigger issues.

It caught fire, attracting more than 10,000 signatures and culminated in meetings with government officials and, months after, confirmation that Nelson would be removed in November 2020 and relocated to a museum.

Some objected, including among the more than 90% of the population with African heritage, urging him to not to meddle with the past, Downes says. They were saying, Why do you want to move this thing that has been there from before you were even born? Have some respect for your history. Im, like, 10 years from now, what I do today is going to be our history as well, he says.

At the ceremony to mark the removal of the statue, Barbados prime minister, Mia Mottley, called the tribute to the hero of Trafalgar, an assertion of power, of dominance. She held her phone to the crowd, telling them her screensaver was the reggae artist Bob Marley, to remind me always that the mission of our generation is the mental emancipation of our people.

In the ruptures of the year, Mottley appeared to sense an opportunity. The same day the statue was dislodged, her government announced that, in a years time, Barbados would remove the queen as head of state and elect its own president.

Monarchists have worried for years that the end of the reign of Elizabeth Windsor may trigger a new wave of former colonies to seek native heads of state. Barbados suggests that threat, at least in the Caribbean, may have arrived in her diamond jubilee years instead, as a conviction stirring in the minds of some of her youngest generation of subjects.

Asked what the crown means to him, Downes is clear. It signifies a time when people who looked like me were almost considered just a part in the process of generating wealth, he says. Humanity was not considered. Civil rights were not considered.

At sundown, before the cars on the nearby highway switch on their lights, the view from the top of the slope of the Newton Slave Burial Ground appears much as it may have three hundred years ago. The stone chimney of the plantations boiling house still stands. There is still the sea on the horizon and bristling pastures of sugar cane in every direction.

The burial site, too, is still an open field, but for the park benches recently installed at its edges, and rows of bougainvillaea and crotons lining the perimeter. They are freshly planted, some still seedlings, and dwarfed by the surrounding cane fields, but growing.

The map in this article was amended on 30 November 2021 to add detail about the dispute over the British Indian Ocean Territory/Chagos Islands.

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Nelson, BLM and new voices: why Barbados is ditching the Queen - The Guardian

As we draw near to the end of a year once again characterised by COVID-19, in this Decembers highlights, iwonder pulls together a selection of documentaries that delve deeper into some of 2021s other most defining world events.

Despite news emanating from all corners of the globe, its once again hard to look past the US for issues that have dominated the past 12 months, with the Capitol riots, Black Lives Matter and the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all leaving an indelible mark on our view of the year gone by. This month, iwonder takes a closer look at each of these themes, starting with the HBO Documentary Films production, Yusuf Hawkins: Storm over Brooklyn, new to iwonder from December 1st.

Then in this months iwonder What Top Five, we cast our reflective net further afield, with a closer look at everything from COVID & cruise ships, through to the new era of space exploration and the pressing issues addressed at COP26.

See you in 2022.

New to iwonder this December, Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn tells the story of a black American teenager who was shot and murdered after being trapped by a group of white youths in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989. The incident shocked New York and the country, resulting in long-simmering racial tensions finally reaching a boiling point, as protestors and counter-protestors took to the streets where the crime occurred.

With the conviction and sentencing of former police officer, Derek Chauvin, in June this year for the murder of George Floyd, which lit the fuse on the Black Lives Matter movement that continued to make headlines for much of this year, the story of Yusuf Hawkins is a reminder of the progress that still needs to be made globally when it comes to stamping out racism and addressing racial inequality.

On August 30th, 2021, the US officially completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, bringing an end to a 20-year military presence, which had already ended effectively ended two weeks earlier on August 15th when the Taliban reasserted their control over the nation.

As the world looked on with fear as many questioned the fate of Afghans, particularly women, under the harsh rule of the Taliban, one American woman who knew well what it was like to fight for freedom and justice in the troubled nation was Kimberley Motley, the subject of Motleys Law.

Kimberly left her husband and three kids in the US to work as a defence lawyer in Kabul in 2008, becoming the first foreign lawyer to litigate in Afghanistans courts. Human rights cases and troubled expats motivated her to stay, but personal threats, including grenades thrown into the front of her offices, and general conditions in the country, made it harder and harder for Kimberly to continue her work.

On January 6th, 2021, the US experienced one of its darkest days in living memory, as a group of Trump supporters, spurred on by the tirades of the former President, stormed the Capitol building, wreaking mayhem which lead to the deaths of four people. It marked the last frenzied days of a turbulent Presidency that exposed some of the ugliest fissures in American society and the deepening divides between the political left and right.

Pardoned by Donald Trump in one of his last acts as President, alt-right figurehead, Steve Bannon, was hugely influential in setting the former President on his path to the White House, having served as Chief Strategist for the 2016 campaign. Interviewed by Academy Award winning documentary legend Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) for the documentary American Dharma, Morris presses Bannon on his controversial views, exposing the inner workings and beliefs of a man with a dark and disturbing view of American politics and society.

Democracy itself came under attack just days into the new year, when a rally in support of President Donald Trump turned deadly, as thousands of protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol building. The unprecedented chaos in the nations capital began midday Wednesday at a Save America rally where Trump incited his supporters to march to Capitol Hill, where Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. From there, rioters overpowered security and stormed the building, looting offices and forcing lawmakers to flee in panic. While the chaos resulted in the sad deaths of four people, the day will long be remembered as a dark episode in Americas proud history.

Yusef Kirriem Hawkins was a 16-year-old black teenager from East New York who was shot to death on August 23, 1989, in Bensonhurst, a predominantly Italian-American working-class neighbourhood of Brooklyn. After Hawkins, his younger brother, and two friends were attacked by a crowd of 10 to 30 white youths, one, armed with a handgun, shot Hawkins twice in the chest, killing him. Hawkins death was the third killing of a black male by white mobs in New York City during the 1980s. The incident led to a torrent of racial tension in New York City in the ensuing days and weeks, culminating in a series of protest marches through the neighbourhood.

COVID-19, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, space exploration, climate change and tensions with China, all get the iwonder up-close treatment with this months Top Five selection of documentaries, addressing some of the most prevalent themes and events of 2021 around the world.

This documentary tells the story of how the biggest global crisis in living memory brought the multibillion-dollar lucrative cruise industry to its knees and hundreds of ships around the world to a standstill across six extraordinary weeks. It also explores the role of cruise ships and the spread of the virus, and asks if the wellbeing of passengers and crew was always put first.

Trapped in the worlds largest open-air prison and ruled by war, a new generation is drawn to the beaches. Sick of occupation and political gridlock, they find their own personal freedom in the waves of the Mediterranean they are the surfers of Gaza.

In the short span of just 3 decades, China has seen the largest lifting of people out of poverty that has ever taken place in human history. How China Got Rich looks at the astonishing story of how an impoverished and backward communist country became the engine of global capitalism that it is today.

A field currently dominated by men, the private industry space race reached new heights in 2021 with a slew of spaceflight companies launching their billionaire owners into orbit. From a Lego-loving young girl who includes female pilots in her toy airplanes, to a courageous woman who helped lead shuttle missions to space, Fly Like a Girl tells the stories of girls and women who also dared to aim higher.

The Pacific Island of Kiribati is a beautiful, tranquil place, seemingly far removed from the pressures of modern life, yet it is one of the first countries to face one of the most perilous side-effects of industrialisation: sea-level rise. With the promise and frustrations of COP26 still fresh in the worlds minds as we rush to avoid climate catastrophe, Anotes Ark serves as a poignant warning to the world of the cost of failure.

Note: All content highlights are based on availability in Australia. Variations will apply across New Zealand, South East Asia and the Middle East.

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The Capitol riots, Black Lives Matter and troop withdrawals in Afghanistan the focus this December on iwonder - TV Blackbox

In the year since the death of George Floyd triggered a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, societies across the world, including here in Britain have reckoned with racial disparities.

These include the lack of representation in boardrooms, to biases in the criminal justice system. Another area being examined is mental health.

Campaigners have highlighted the lack of counsellors and therapists from ethnic minority backgrounds as well as the mental impact of dealing with racism in day-to-day life.

Research by the Health & Social Care Information Centre in 2013 showed that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals make up only 9.6 per cent of qualified clinical psychologists in England and Wales, in contrast to 14 percent of the population.

Speaking on The Daily Podcast with Dermot Murnaghan, Eugene Ellis a practicing psychotherapist and the chair and founder of The Black, African and Asian Therapy Network, said that group has grown in the last year, but the wider industry needs to get better at having conversations around race.

"I think it's a skill set that people learn," he said. "The problem is that racism is a taboo area we are not supposed to talk about."

"It's a big problem," he added, "people might be in distress and turn up wanting help, but the therapists don't know how to work with it, especially if you're abiding experiences are of being seen in a particular way through racism."

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Another issue addressed our podcast was the fact Black people were more than four times as likely as White people to be detained under the Mental Health Act - 321.7 detentions per 100,000 people, compared with 73.4 per 100,000 people.

One person who has experienced this first hand is Eche Egbuonu, who has bipolar disorder. After being sectioned, he checked himself out of a hospital and returned home where he had an altercation with his family, leading to his parents calling the police.

A struggle ensued, before they used a taser to restrain him and put him in handcuffs.

"I do remember the sensation, he said. "It is so strange one second, you have control of your faculties of your legs, and then in the next second, you're on the ground, you've collapsed."

Although he is not certain the incident and the police's use of force was linked to his race, it was "definitely a possibility" because of perceptions of black people as aggressive.

Using his lived experience, he has is now campaigning for greater intervention in the black community before people like himself reach "crisis point" like he did, something he feels could be addressed by training more community leaders in mental health first aid.

"I think if some people in the community had access to that kind of training that would have helped them maybe identify what the issue was and to signpost and find the kind of most appropriate resource in that particular moment," he added.

Marlon Bruce, a community consultant, says using counselling services since he was a student has benefited him, but he also feels there is a need for more black mental health professionals.

One thing he is pleased about however, is how more black men he knows are talking about how they feel.

"It's been the biggest shift I've ever seen, he said.

"No longer is it the black guy who's strong and macho. But we can cry, we can share what's bugging us.

"You know, we can have those conversations. What I've realised is the longer you bottled up those emotions, the worse it is in the long run."

The Metropolitan Police refused to comment specifically on Eche's case, but it said police officers draw their use of force powers from Common Law Section three of the Criminal Law Act 1967 and Section 117 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

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Are perceptions around race holding back mental health services? - Sky News

In few places in Oregon are cultural politics as toxic as in Newberg, where the school board in September banned displays of Black Lives Matter symbols and Pride flags.

Tai Harden-Moore traces the fracture to her unsuccessful bid to serve on the school board in 2020.

Harden-Moore, 41, a diversity and inclusion consultant, moved to Yamhill County when she returned to Oregon in 2015 because renting a house in Portland was unaffordable for her family.

On Nov. 30, she announced shes running for office againthis time for Yamhill County commissionerwith priorities to tackle the homelessness crisis, the economy and the lack of access to good-paying jobs in Yamhill County. But in Yamhill County, any bid for elected office means a confrontation with the Newberg School Boards racist and homophobic policiesthe states most prominent example of conservative panic over critical race theory.

We asked Harden-Moore what she makes of the political outrage Yamhill County has sparked in Portland.

WW: Is there something in particular that inspired your run for office?

Tai Harden-Moore: I ran for school board in the last election cycle, and I lost that election, and weve seen the repercussions of that loss with the Newberg School Board and the racist and discriminatory policies that theyve put forward, banning Black Lives Matter and Pride symbols. And that was a direct result, I think, of my loss.

But I was very committed to helping this community, to addressing the issues that need to be addressed in this community. This is my home. And, as a Black woman, I have just as much right to say what I like and what I dont like about the community I live in. Im going to do something to fix it.

How did your loss result in this?

The other candidates ran as a slate of Save Our Schools. And the question continuously was: Save our schools from who? And [the answer was] from them, those women of color, those outsiders. And so there was a lot of drama around my run, and folks were tearing down my sign, saying that I was un-American, I was unpatriotic and things like that based on nothing more than the fact that Im just a Black woman. And so a Black woman living in Newberg and Yamhill County, they felt I could not be patriotic, could not be a proud American, which is completely untrue. My father was a veteranhes buried in the national cemetery in Washingtonso thats not true.

And that really did help me make the decision to make this run because those people cant have the loudest voice.

Whats the most alarming thing to you about the decisions that have been made by the school board?

I think the potential illegality of it. There hasnt been a legal decision made yet on the policy or the firing of the superintendent or any of the things going on in Newberg.

Have you experienced a change in how youre treated in the community because youre a Black woman?

Newberg has not been a completely unwelcoming place to me because Im Black, but it hasnt been a completely welcoming place either.

My primary concerns were always for my children. And my son left the district at his request because he was called the N-word in seventh grade and just felt like he wasnt able to make real connections with friends. He was kind of boxed in by teachers. Hes an athlete. So he was the Black athlete and no one wanted to see him as any more than that, but hes also a brilliant student who gets straight As now that hes at another school.

Is there anything hopeful for you about whats happening around the school board or the high school?

Were not this racist place where nobodys welcomed here. Thats not Newberg. If it were, I wouldnt live here, but thats the narrative thats being pushed by some folks that dont like Black Lives Matter.

You mentioned surviving cancer: What does that experience mean you bring to elected office?

Im actually currently still in treatment. Im in treatment for stage IV metastatic breast cancer, and will be in treatment for the rest of my life. Ive been in treatment for four years [as of Nov. 30], so the launch date of the campaign was not by accident.

I had cancer in law school and it didnt stop me, then why would it stop me now?

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Tai Harden-Moore Is Running for Office in the Center of a Battle Over Anti-Racism in Schools - Willamette Week

November is Black Catholic History Month, but the faithfuls ignorance of the historical issues of race, racism and invisibility continue to strain Black Catholics' relationship with American Catholics and bishops. The insensitive and incendiary Nov. 4 speech by Los Angeles Archbishop Jos Gomez, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, helps explain why.

Gomez managed to offend Black Catholics, lay and clergy alike.

Gomez managed to offend Black Catholics, lay and clergy alike, with his ill-advised, ill-timed remarks about social justice movements being pseudo-religions. The speech, given online to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, obliquely referred to, but avoided explicitly naming, the Black Lives Matter movement. Calling social justice movements a rival 'salvation' narrative, Gomez went on to say social justice movements are political religious movements and "replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs."

Clearly the archbishop did not consider the Pew Research Center survey from February that showed 77 percent of Black Catholics consider opposing racism essential to their faith. This kind of white supremacist culture war talk from the head of the USCCB is, frankly, a disaster for the American church if it wants Black Catholics to remain in the pews.

The negative reaction to the archbishops speech in Americas Black Catholic community and the larger Catholic community was swift. As of Wednesday, more than 13,000 people had signed a petition condemning the archbishops remarks, calling for him to apologize and to stand with social justice movements as Pope Francis has. The National Black Sisters' Conference, a group of Black nuns in religious orders across the United States, in a statement also called on the archbishop to apologize and reiterated the role of Catholics in the civil rights movement: When African-American lives are systematically devalued in this country and in the Catholic Church, we must speak out. BLM is not a pseudo-religion; nor is it a dangerous substitute for true religion. It is a movement very much in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.

Racism within the American Catholic church has been a problem for far too long. In 2017, the USCCB formed an ad-hoc committee against racism in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since the 1980s, the USCCB has published a series of statements about racism. The most recent one, Open Wide Our Hearts: the Enduring Call to Love, was a pastoral letter issued after the events of Charlottesville. Yet the history of racism has plagued the Catholic church in America. That history includes the Jesuits at Georgetown selling off their slaves to save the institution.

To put it baldly, Black Catholics are tired. The Catholic church in America has time and time again claimed to be aware of the deep wound of slavery and racism in the church. Yet from the top of the bishops conference to the diocesan priest, it seems the need to identify with racism and white supremacy continues to destroy any progress the church has tried to make. Consider thesuspension of an Indiana priest over statements he made in summer 2020 about Black Lives Matter protesters being maggots and parasites, or the Michigan priest who compared Black Lives Matter protesters to terrorists.

Gomezs comments are right at home with these priests. Thats scandalous.

Black Catholics are tired.

The irony is that Gomez calls the Black Lives Matter movement and others like it political religions, but the USCCBs continued favoritism of the Republican Party and the disdain some of its members have for Pope Francis is just as politically motivated as they believe Black Lives Matter to be. And their politics has more dire consequences for their churches.

The consequences include the alienation and departure of Black Catholics from the church. The Pew survey "Faith Among Black Americans" estimated that 6 percent of Black Americans are Catholic, but Religion News Service, which reported on the study, pointed out that "nearly half of those raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic (46%, compared to 39% of all Americans raised Catholic). About 1 in 5 Black adults who were raised Catholic have become unaffiliated (19%), and a quarter have become Protestant (24%).

Thats why the National Black Catholic Congress series Black Catholics and the Millennial Gap is important. With so many Black Catholics leaving the church, the archbishop might want to rethink his culture warrior stance to shore up an already dwindling flock.

For Black Catholics who have endured racism in the pews, in Catholic schools and from priests and bishops, it is becoming clear that statements about opposing racism are not enough. If the American Catholic church does not want to lose an important, vibrant part of Catholicism in America, it would behoove the head of the bishops conference to apologize for his ill-advised remarks, which threaten to make the Catholic church in America just another pseudo political movement.

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Black Catholics have a right to be frustrated with a church that ignores racism - MSNBC