Catholics and Racial Crisis

Extract

‘I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.’—Malcolm X.

‘And the white Lt.-Colonel from the civilized USA jumped back, snorted and said: “My good man, where I come from we don’t eat people when we kill them. We’re civilized.” And the chief said, “Well baby, why you kill them?” ‘—Stokely Carmichael.

By Summer the American public will be as accustomed to the idea of racial riots as to a well-advertised eclipse of the sun. The actuality of events, sifted through the mass media into print, polls, radio and television, stays comfortably once removed from the affluent. Most Americans watch the auguries of doom on the TV with the numbing disbelief of a rabbit caught in a truck’s headlights; erudite predictions of urban chaos substitute for immediate reform; election charades are played out with unusually large audience participation, and the administration plead for unity and patriotism. It all seems unreal.

In March while President Johnson played golf in Puerto Rico, conspicuously absent from the communal confiteor of churches and liberal establishment, the public glanced at the findings of his commission on civil disorders. The report, a literary genre popularized by the 1966 McCone Commission report on the Los Angeles riots, told them that there was a racial crisis. In New York it was the time of the interregnum; priests were working feverishly on a policy statement while the laity passively awaited a seventh Irish-American Archbishop to ascend the throne of 451 Madison Avenue.