FEBRUARY 2023 - EDITOR’S NOTE
by Bonnie Gregg, Poverty Awareness & Communication Team and member of Madeleine Catholic Parish
At last month’s zoom First Thursday meeting, we learned from Jillene Joseph, executive director of the Native Wellness Institute and leader of Future Generations Collaborative (for indigenous people). Jillene Joseph showed us how healing of Native American wounds requires an understanding of the historical, inter-generational trauma the people have endured. She explained that oppression leads to an internalization of the oppressors’ negative views, particularly after knowledge of their own culture has been suppressed by those who seek to establish superiority.
This repeated trauma is also the experience of the African American Community, whose Black history we celebrate this month. A couple of years ago, I asked Pastor Don Frazier how he thought the Interfaith Alliance might improve its relations with the Black community. In October 2020, he presented his “Reflection on the Way Forward” at a meeting of the Alliance. He commented, “When people are degraded and devalued, and made to feel inferior, it is hard to trust.” (Find excerpts from his “Reflection” in this newsletter.)
Beginning in 1915, half a century after the Civil War and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, Carter D. Woodson, a young Black graduate from Harvard University, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life & History, believing that young African Americans not only in the Jim Crow south but across America were not being taught enough of their own heritage, and achievements. Carter’s efforts eventually led to the establishment of Black History Month. (Read about these efforts in “The Black History Month Story” together with the CNN Report on “Today’s Leaders Making Tomorrow’s History” in this newsletter)
CNN notes that today efforts are being made in several states to ban Black History under the guise of protecting White children from discomfort. Opinion: Black History Month exposes the fallacy of White 'discomfort' | CNN
What is our comfort level about our past? We are now a nation of displaced landowners and those forced by circumstances or by others to immigrate. My mother’s family was Irish-Catholic. When a white-robed Klansman made the mistake of trying to drop off his pamphlets in her neighborhood, my grandmother “Maggie Coyle” chased him down the street with her broom. The Irish endured their share of persecution upon arriving in this country, as did most immigrant groups. My father’s family descended from Virginia slaveholders, and my grandfather, reputed to be an otherwise decent man, proudly donned his Klansman’s robe.
So, it is complicated. Our roots go deep. So do our fears, particularly of the other, anyone unlike us, who has a different skin color, language or heritage. It is easy to justify ourselves, as righteous, and blame the other for whatever is wrong. What would happen if, instead, we looked beyond our differences to our common humanity and achieving our common good? If every child was nurtured in a loving, safe community, we might tap the genius of the human spirit capable of solving all our problems.
The first step to healing may require an honest accounting of our past. Painful as that may be, it may help us to keep from repeating our mistakes. If we learn from our past hopefully, we will find the will to change our future, making it possible to establish the justice and peace for which we hunger. Bonnie Gregg