Reviewed by: Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell Tia Noelle Pratt Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness. By Maureen H. O’Connell. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2022. 272 pp. $28.95. I I should say from the outset that I’m a sociologist, not a theologian like Maureen H. O’Connell nor one of the historians whose work frequents these pages. This is important to note because O’Connell’s new book, Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness uses a historical and social lens to examine her family narrative in the broader context of Catholic anti-Blackness. It is in situating her family’s story in this way that drew me to O’Connell’s book. It is also what makes Undoing the Knots particularly relevant to whites and, specifically, white Catholics. In writing this book, O’Connell is not a white scholar trying to tell Black people about themselves, nor is she a white scholar pretending Black people do not have a place in the context she is exploring. Instead, she is a white scholar doing the work so many others could do but aren’t. O’Connell is doing the difficult work of self-reflection and reckoning with whiteness, the privilege it generates, and the systemic racism that sustains and perpetuates both whiteness and its privileges. For well over two years now, I’ve described the labor of anti-racism as doing The WORK. I’ve specifically used capital letters in this description because it’s essential that we think of it and visualize it with the importance of capital letters. In Undoing the Knots, O’Connell provides an essential, and undervalued portion of The WORK by [End Page 61] engaging the portion of it that white people must do with and for each other—recognizing anti-Blackness, the societal systems that generate and perpetuate it, and reckoning with how they benefit from it. It is in doing this that O’Connell’s book helps to elevate the conversation, both in society and U.S. Catholicism, beyond the level of personal racism as individual bad acts to systemic racism—the ways in which racism is embedded in our societal structures. Doing that which allows us to move the conversation beyond the staid model of race relations to the anti-racism model from which we can enact lasting, sustainable change. As O’Connell says directly in the book’s introduction, “Racism ties me into knots when it shows up, especially in moments . . . when I’m trying as a white Catholic woman to resist it.” Through each chapter, she explores the themes of witnessing, aligning, grafting, manufacturing, maneuvering, defending, homesteading, and doubting. In exploring these themes, O’Connell elucidates her family narrative – dating from her family’s earliest days in southeastern Pennsylvania through her mother performing in a minstrel show as a six-year-old in 1950 to her father taking her to see the burning embers of the MOVE fire caused by Philadelphia’s city government in 1985 that killed eleven Black people and destroyed sixty-one homes, to her own twenty-first century experiences as a theology professor active in community based anti-racism efforts. O’Connell doesn’t just mine this rich history for its own sake. She could have done that and written a book that would have been lauded by whites as “brave” and “courageous” but would, rightly, be dismissed by Blacks for its refusal to do the hard, self-reflecting work mentioned earlier. Instead, she explores her family narrative by putting it, and U.S. Catholicism, in a broader social context. In doing this, she shows how Catholics—following the example of their church’s leaders— time and again sought societal power by choosing to prove their whiteness to the existing white establishment rather than align themselves with Blacks to form a coalition that could have exerted great power with the added benefit of achieving justice. This is the reason O’Connell’s book does The WORK. This is not to say that the herculean task O’Connell undertakes is executed perfectly. There is a sense while...