By The Catholic Thing

Msgr. Charles Fink wonders how much of what is deemed racism in our society is really only a matter of feeling more at home among those with whom we are most familiar.  

My grandfather was what might be called an old-world gentleman.  He dressed in a shirt and tie for work, even into old age when he was running a small family business on his own, at a desk in the unfinished basement of his Bronx home.  I don’t remember ever hearing him swear or raise his voice in anger.  He was unfailingly courteous and kind but by no means perfect, one of his flaws being a mild form of prejudice that manifested itself in his referring to members of other races with words like “darkies” or “chinks,” usually with an almost embarrassed smile, never derisively.  Nevertheless, by contemporary standards, he was a racist.

But here is a fascinating fact about my grandfather.  A lifelong practicing Episcopalian, who was a lay preacher in his church in the Bronx, he remained an active member of the congregation as the church’s neighborhood changed and the largely white congregation became predominately black. And when his funeral service was conducted in this church, one after another of the almost entirely black attendees approached me to offer their condolences and to say, “Your grandfather was a real gentleman.”

What to make of this?  Does my grandfather deserve to be lumped in with Ku Klux Klansmen?  Were all the black congregants of that parish duped by a charlatan and hypocrite?  Could it be that because of nature, nurture, and God knows what else, my grandfather had prejudices but, being a Christian and fundamentally decent man, didn’t allow those prejudices to determine his interactions with others?

Before I was a Catholic priest, I served in the military as an infantryman in Vietnam.  Two black boys (we were nearly all boys) from Tennessee helped break me in when I reported for duty in my unit.  Two months later, wounded in an ambush, I was rescued and evacuated with the help of a strapping, athletic black soldier over six feet tall and a stocky Puerto Rican who threw me over his shoulder and carried me to safety.  Color didn’t matter in the field.  We were, as the saying goes, “a band of brothers.”

Nevertheless, when we returned to our main base on rare occasions, and were able to get to the enlisted men’s club for some downtime, the blacks and the whites seemed automatically to separate and sit among their own.  I’ve found the same pattern repeated as a priest at clergy conference meals.  Black priests from all over the world, now serving in our diocese, most often in largely white parishes with white fellow clergy, everyone getting along, gravitate to tables of all black priests.

I asked a wonderful and much-loved priest from Ghana if he thought there was anything racist about this.  He laughed and said something like, “Of course not.  People just naturally feel comfortable with those most like themselves in race and national origin.”

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