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 Alex Mikulich II In Undoing the Knots, Maureen O'Connell thoughtfully probes the entanglements of Roman Catholic Anti-Blackness. Yet in her efforts, she fails to address one of its enduring dimensions, namely: coloniality, the hidden, oppressive side of European modernity. Being a colonized and raced person is, by definition, “to be incapable of giving” explains Jane Anna Gordon in her celebration of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Gift of Double-Consciousness.”1 The colonial epistemology that the Roman Catholic papacy initiated in the early fifteenth century inaugurated both the sinful idolatry of racial superiority and Eurocentric people’s refusal to celebrate the divine giftedness of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. The interconnected economic, ecological, and racial crises of our time remain unabated, in part, because we white settler Americans consume a “happy story” about economic growthism in our socialization systems even as this so-called “free market” impoverishes billions of people and destroys the planet. We white American settlers conveniently forget that the economic rise of the West and the United States depended upon enslavement of African and American Indigenous peoples, expropriating both labor and capital, and dispossessing them of lands and abundant resources. This is the Colonial Matrix Power, aptly named by the sociologist Anibal Quijano, that perpetuates police and vigilante violence against Black people at rates nearly the same as that of lynching just a century ago. This so-called “modern” system colonizes Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous space and bodies through the school to prison pipeline, hyper-incarceration, and by fostering a political economy of segregation through a combination of racially structured banking, real estate, and [End Page 64] governmental policies that “hastens physical decline in urban neighborhoods [and] forever incentivizes their perpetuation.”2 Before any white theologian articulated racial mercy, W.E.B. Du Bois’s gift of double consciousness is only one example of many gifts African peoples offer to practice the porousness and mutuality O’Connell invites (168). Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples offer love within the binds of oppression, like the gift of double consciousness, inviting white folks to perceive and lament our own complicity in anti-Blackness, and celebrate the divine giftedness, beauty, grandeur, and dignity of Black peoples. A sense of awe before the Creator and celebration of the giftedness of Black people fosters the humility to open ourselves in vulnerability and acknowledge our need for Black people in the intimate, interdependent web of relations of human and non-human kin. Then, perhaps, we might loosen knots of coloniality and begin to sew a new cloth of mutuality and togetherness. When and how will we white folks celebrate the divine giftedness of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples and engage the impasse of anti-Black coloniality? Alex Mikulich Independent Roman Catholic social ethicist Footnotes 1. Anna Jane Gordon, “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 143–163. 2. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 11. Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society