Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell James Wolfinger IV In this deeply personal work, Maureen O’Connell explores five generations of her Irish Catholic family’s experience in the United States. O’Connell focuses on how her family strove to make it in America, following a familiar story of poor and often despised Irish immigrants coming to a new land, gaining education and financial stability, and building their churches, homes, and communities. Their advance went hand-in-hand with a growing anti-Blackness that set them apart from, and falsely demonstrated their superiority to, African Americans. For O’Connell, this excavation of her family and her broader [End Page 66] community’s past represents a painful, if illuminating, effort. Undoing the Knots, as much as anything, is a journey of personal discovery and familial reckoning. Throughout the book, O’Connell foregrounds anti-Blackness as a constant theme in the nation’s history, emphasizing how the Catholic Church was embedded in racist practices and sometimes led them. Her exploration of Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick’s 1840s justification of slavery (78) and Cardinal Dennis Dougherty’s failure to integrate Philadelphia’s Catholic Church a century later (174) illuminate how Catholic leadership neglected to right historic wrongs and too often made matters worse. Parishioners like the O’Connells followed right along, seldom questioning the church’s hierarchy or racial orthodoxy. As a personal and familial exploration of the Catholic Church’s involvement in anti-Blackness, Undoing the Knots offers history with an emotional punch. At the same time, the book raises larger questions about U.S. history and political engagement with which O’Connell could more fully grapple. Scholars have clearly established that the United States was founded on racist and xenophobic assumptions, principles, and policies. Anti-Blackness is the most virulent strain of this thinking, but discrimination harmed many groups, including the Irish. O’Connell claims that “oppression in the United States actually had very little to do with religious identity. It was all about race” (73). The work of John Higham and other scholars going back three generations shows that such a point is, at best, overstated. O’Connell could explain more fully how anti-Catholicism shaped the Irish experience and likely limited their latitude to act in more egalitarian ways. Historians must often rely on subtext and read silences, but that can make interpreting the evidence tricky. O’Connell uses phrases such as “likely developed practices” related to racist views (47), suggests her grandfather’s use of VA and FHA loan programs demonstrate his racism (191–193), and posits that her earliest ancestors participated in the social death of Black people because they were white in a racist country (58) [their “whiteness” in the mid-nineteenth century, by the way, has been a debatable point]. O’Connell hits the theme of anti-Blackness so hard that it leaves little room for people to have other motives for their behavior, to challenge as well as support racism. Are all white people implicated in the same way in the creation and functioning of the nation? Could silence in the record be more positive for some individuals than O’Connell argues? How would we know? Since the book explores an action—undoing the knots of anti-Blackness—what is O’Connell’s path forward, her political strategy? She capably lays out this history, but to what purpose? It is not always [End Page 67] clear if “racial mercy” (168) is a mindset or an actionable plan. What should the church, parishioners, readers of the book do? James Wolfinger St. John’s University Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society