A conference on racism.

At a bishops-sponsored conference on racism February 2-5 at Chicago's Bismarck Hotel, "Healing the Past...Creating the Future," the goal was to advance the cause of "racial harmony," as newly appointed Belleville Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, a Chicagoan and the meeting's honorary chairman, phrased it in the opening session. Harmony prevailed at the conference itself. What little disagreement there was developed along the heart vs. head spectrum by which such gatherings are often measured.

A young West Side pastor quizzed two speakers about what he considered "a new conspiracy in our country" of government and others against young black males, making them scapegoats for drug-makers and shippers. We should be concerned not so much about gang-bangers, the priest said, as about "people in three-piece suits" who profit mightily from their endeavors. He drew instant applause from the 300 or so conference participants.

Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune responded with the observation that it's "a complex problem." "Blacks don't fly the planes that bring the drugs into this country," he noted. "On the other hand, the pilots don't kill anybody on street comers." The Washington Post's Thomas Edsall found the priest's explanation "too facile. It's too easy to blame outsiders. A conspiracy notion is comforting, but it doesn't really answer problems." (Edsall's book Chain Reaction, which examined the disaffection of blue collar Democrats on issues of race and taxes, provided some of the starting ideas for conference organizers.)

Neither Page nor Edsall got applause for these answers.

There was much applause, on the other hand, for the conference's keynote speaker, the encyclopedic and histrionic author-professor Cornel West, even if he was short on concrete solutions. Asked by a young participant where she might start in working toward racial unity, West lamely ticked off a list of programs and agencies. His strong suit was wrenching guts, not organizing or even strategizing. The audience loved him. They came from the Archdiocese of Chicago and the five Illinois dioceses which comprise the church "province" headed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. The sponsoring body, The Catholic Conference of Illinois, is a public policy arm of the Illinois bishops comparable to the U.S. Catholic Conference. The Chicago meeting, a first for any state bishops' agency, came out of what Jim Lund, head of the archdiocese's peace and justice office and co-chair of the conference, said was a desire to show how racism permeates our lives, ever present, never visible. "The conference was intended to unify blacks and non-blacks, even as it exposed the "sin of racism." This was to be "the start of a transforming action in Illinois," Lund told the assembly. So there were gatherings of "delegations" from the six dioceses, people delegated not to this meeting but by it, informally, to return home and spread the word and carry on the fight, whatever shape it would take.

The audience responded warmly to black Baptist keynoter West, whose style was part-preacher, part-professor, part--dare I say it?--nightclub performer. He romanced the microphone with extended sesquipedalian sequences (two can play at that game), his voice sometimes breathy, sometimes flat, and sometimes like nothing more than the voice of the Thin Man's wife's at the end of the weekly radio show, sleepy and cracked. Shades of Myrna Loy?

T.S. Eliot, John Dewey, John Brown, Daniel Berrigan, Abraham Heschel, Thomas Jefferson (for his slaveholding), Robert Penn Warren (for writing about it), Henry Ford (for trashing history), Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac (for being rootless, like Americans in general) struggled for mention in West's crowded text. There was a quote from Malcolm X: "A nigger is defined as a victim of American democracy"; and the self-exiled francophile Josephine Baker: "The very idea of America makes me shake." West didn't want to "demonize" people, he said. "I can empathize with you even if you hate me," he reported he had told whites recently in Cairo, Illinois, which is as far south as you can get in the state of Illinois. American "market culture" could use a little demonizing, however. It "pushes virtue to the periphery" and makes "base performance" the goal. On top of that, he added, it's where young blacks learn "gangster sensibilities."

"What if black nationalists are right?" he asked. In that case, we would face the "slow, slippery slope to chaos and anarchy." Retreating from apocalypse, West closed affirming his "audacious hope" that we can avoid that. "But I'm not optimistic," he finally concluded, recommending a "leap of faith, energizing and holding on to each other and to the ultimate power."

Later, newsman Page, himself an African-American, questioned West's references to elites who control things. "What does he want to do?" Page asked. "Some remedies are worse than the disease." Instead of redistributing wealth, Page recommended "expanding the [economic] pie."

Addressing the controversy about antisemitic, antiwhite, and antipapal statements by Kalid Abdul Muhammad, Nation of Islam spokesman last November at Kean College in New Jersey, a questioner wondered why so much was made of it, while so little was made of remarks about blacks by Senator Ernest Hollings. It was a matter of manipulating the media, said Page. Nobody paid attention to the New Jersey speech until the frustrated Anti-Defamation League publicized it. "If you're upset, you have to make an issue of it," he said.

Thomas Edsall added, "The media makes too much of all these things, rather than to the reality we have to face. We pay too much attention to these bizarre and off-the-wall comments." This time, Edsall got applause.

What now? The conference heard Newark auxiliary Bishop Joseph Francis urge use of the admittedly little known 1979 national bishops' statement on racism to combat it. Eleven workshops directed at more specific problems--education, college life, pastoral ministry, housing, etc.--offered something for everybody. Ideally each diocese now would hold a racism conference of its own, geared to local specifics. Given proper doses of heart-and-head harmony, this one may have had the desired jump-start effect.

Jim Bowman is author of Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics, due from Crossroad in June.