La Salle professor explores ‘undoing the knots’ of Catholic anti-Blackness through her own family history

In a new book, La Salle University associate professor Maureen H. O’Connell explores generations of American Catholic anti-Blackness within her family and the larger community and what she sees as the long-standing failure of Catholic universities to respond to racism.

In Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness, O’Connell, 49, who grew up in Elkins Park, traces her own family’s history from the time her ancestors arrived in the United States and how she benefited from their whiteness, wealth, and decision-making.

O’Connell, an associate professor of Christian ethics at La Salle since 2013, combed through Archdiocese of Philadelphia archives trying to understand what was happening in parishes when her ancestors lived in them.

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Though she is a scholar of social ethics and trained in the basics of anti-racism, the Chestnut Hill resident with a doctorate in theological ethics from Boston College said she still finds herself stumbling at times as she tries to stand with colleagues or students of color.

I’m trained as a Christian ethicist, so that means I think about the ways in which the Christian tradition can understand and respond to a variety of social issues. For me, those tend to be issues around poverty, race, and equity.

For more than 10 years, my focus has been on thinking about the Christian tradition and the Catholic tradition, in particular, in response to racial inequality and racial inequity in society but also in the church.

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My book is really a pilgrimage for me through my family’s history in different parishes around the archdiocese to try to understand the interplay between our Catholic identity and our racial identity over a series of generations. It’s also intended to be an introduction to some of the very basic ways of trying to understand racism.

There were two moments. The first came when I was leading a mural pilgrimage in Philadelphia for folks, introducing people to some of the faith-based murals. I was standing in front of the mural at 13th and Erie. I kind of knew that was my maternal great-grandparents’ neighborhood but all of a sudden the mural was behind me and everybody was facing me ... and I sort of glanced across the street and came to the realization that it wasn’t just their neighborhood, but that was their block. And I had this very real sense of belonging to that place and being an outsider at the same time and wanting to figure out how did we become separated from that space and what impact did that separation have on that generation, on me, on the folks who remained.

The second moment was in the fall of 2016. I was teaching this religion and racism class, called “Building the beloved community” with a question mark. We were having a discussion about the “all lives matter” rejoinder to the Black Lives Matter mantra and trying to have a very honest conversation ... and I’ll never forget a Black student just said, “You know, when it comes to racism, I just wish people would believe me ...” And I started to think why is there reluctance to believe that on the part of white people.

There is really a strong desire for self-preservation and institutional preservation over the well-being of the whole community, whether that was the need to preserve a neighborhood by making sure that people of color don’t move in because we need to preserve property values of our homes and we need to preserve the value of the physical infrastructure of the church and the school and the rectory, or we need to preserve our test scores at our institutions because we need to continue to be selective and competitive.

This desire for self-preservation came in the long run at losing the things that I think in the end were very valuable to Catholic communities.

I was very surprised by the proximity that my people, my family members, had to real experiences of what some scholars call the social death of the afterlife of slavery. Slavery might have ended but the implications of slavery continued. And it was surprising to see how close family members were to that and chose their own comfort over responding with a shared sense of humanity or responding in a way that their Catholic tradition would have encouraged them to respond.

My mother’s father was a developer in the post-World War II suburban housing boom ... The wealth my mother experienced as a child and the financial stability they had came from anti-Blackness in federal housing policies ... That stability for my mother gets plowed into her first house. [O’Connell’s parents] were just able to accrue wealth through homeownership and that wealth and equity was handed on to me.

That has left me ill-equipped to teach the students who show up in my classrooms. It makes me ill-equipped to be able to support colleagues of color and the change they are attempting to make because there is so much work I could do on myself before I can begin to be a meaningful partner to them.

Too much of our Catholic core curriculum or our Catholic intellectual tradition is very Eurocentric. So I think that that is making it sort of hard for our students of color to see themselves in our curriculum. White students do not have places where [they] are being challenged or confronted by learning and cultures and stories that are different from that Eurocentric frame and that is not setting [them] up for success.

We just finished a very extensive review of the institution and have come up with a variety of recommendations. So I think having done that work was an important and courageous step. It’s now on us to figure out how to convert institutional resources to support those initiatives.

We are currently searching for a senior administrative position to help guide and create accountability for diversity and inclusion. There are also some initiatives to try to diversify the curriculum. We’re trying to lean into the particularities of our mission, and our mission has long been to educate the folks who have been made poor.

I hope that the message is one of candor, that in telling the truth we can be liberated from all the energy we spend trying to hide or dodge it. And if we tell the truth, we also find all sorts of historical and contemporary examples of people who are working on a vision, committed to a vision of an inclusive community.