Racist like me: the editors interview Jon Nilson.

A relative of Jon Nilson once implied that the only reason Nilson had been given a scholarship to graduate school at the University of Notre Dame was that he had put in a good word for him. Nilson was completely furious. "I was one of the best prepared people in that entry class!" he shot back.

Today he sees it differently. "We have this myth that everything we accomplish we do alone. That's simply not true." For example, he says, just being white can involve dozens of benefits one may not even realize.

Nilson, a theologian at Loyola University Chicago and author of a forthcoming book from Paulist Press on the topic of racism and theology, got his wake-up call about racism after reading the challenging words of a black theologian friend. After some soul searching, he came to a startling conclusion. As president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Nilson revealed his discovery in a speech, "Confessions of a white Catholic racist theologian." People are still talking about his title and his message, just as he had intended.

You've achieved a certain amount of notoriety as having said that you're a white racist theologian. Why did you feel the need to make that confession?

It goes back to an article in an issue of Theological Studies on black theology by Sister Jamie Phelps, a black theologian teaching at Loyola at the time. In her article she makes the statement that the silence of white Catholic theologians about racism is comparable to the silence of the German theologians during the Holocaust. I couldn't stop thinking about that line because I had done a lot of reading and teaching about Germans during World War II. I had been asking myself how these Christians could have stood by while these horrors were going on right in their own country.

In effect Jamie was saying that if you're looking for a contemporary analog to the German theologians, look closely in your bathroom mirror. At first I thought maybe this is a rhetorical strategy on her part; she's just trying to alarm us, to engage us in these issues. But I was thinking about it while I was jogging, while I was driving. It wouldn't leave me alone.

I decided I had to find out for myself: I started reading, and I came to the conclusion that in fact it was the truth. James Cone, the father of black theology in this country, calls racism America's original sin. He's absolutely right.

At the time I was scheduled to deliver an address at the Catholic Theological Society meeting. I knew I couldn't speak about anything else. I've never been much for the traditionally bland title, so I specifically chose, "Confessions of a white Catholic racist theologian." I meant "confessions" in the same way that Augustine meant his Confessions: It's an acknowledgment of responsibility, but it's also praise, meaning I'm grateful to God for Sister Jamie's remark that began to wake me up.

How do you understand racism differently now from before?

I used to understand racism the way many people understand racism: deliberate, overt forms of speech and action that denigrate people of another race. It can go as far as cross burnings and lynchings, which are very, very dramatic. But I came to understand that it's far more than that. It's oppression and marginalization, and this oppression and this marginalization goes on simply as a matter of course. It's a part of the common sense of the dominant white majority. For example, do we find it odd that in a city like Chicago, the black presence in something like the Chicago Tribune is so minimal?

We don't understand our history, we don't see the way our economy works by marginalizing, oppressing, and keeping African Americans in poverty. We accept a grossly unjust educational system that ties the fate of children to where they happen to live. All this falls under the name of racism.

Do you still consider yourself a racist?

I would say yes. Let me make a comparison. I raised two strong daughters, I'm married to a strong woman, and I have a lot of very good women friends and colleagues. So I think I'm sensitized to issues around the status of women, because through these friendships and through these relationships I'm more able to see situations through the eyes of women.

I don't have those same kinds of relationships with black people. I have black friends, but they teach at Marquette University or Boston College; we see each other once or twice a year. I don't have the frequent contact that would enable me to see my city, my university, our situation through their eyes in the same way. I live in a 99.9 percent white world. So I suspect yes, in some very significant ways, I am still a racist. Too often I simply accept the status quo as just the way it is.

How did others react to your talk?

They were extraordinarily positive, which heartened me a good deal. It showed me there is a tremendous openness on the part of my white colleagues to these issues.

In other words, insofar that we are racists, it's not because of some sort of deliberate decision that we've taken with respect to African Americans. It's rather that our attitudes and our modes of operation are reflective of the history of this country and the history of this particular church. Most Catholics don't know that history; I didn't know that history.

What about the backlash against so-called political correctness? As in, "Well, you're just a self-hating white liberal and the rest of us are beyond that response." Have you heard that?

No, so maybe I've been too measured in everything I've said so far. I haven't even gotten an angry e-mail or a nasty phone call. If someone tried to put that kind of a tag on me, my response would be: No, I and others thinking along these lines are not self-hating white liberals. We're simply white people who want to be sure that we're living in the real world. The world of white privilege is illusory, insofar as it shields us from the insights and the perspective and the wisdom of other cultural and ethnic traditions, most notably the black tradition. I will not ever truly understand how this society works until and unless I see it how it works for African Americans, especially those who are exploited and at the bottom of the ladder. For me it's not a question of nurturing self hate, it's simply wanting to open my eyes.

One of the difficulties here is that there are a good number of white intellectuals who are trying to tell us that racism is a thing of the past, that that war is basically over, except for a few battles here and there, and we're on our way to full equality. I think there's a lot of evidence to show that these people are either dishonest or incompetent. They're trying to lull us into even greater complacency than we're already in.

The term "white privilege" is becoming common in some circles. What do you think about that?

I think the term paints with too broad a brush. It suggests that every white person has a significant step up by virtue of their white skin. However true that might be, it doesn't resonate with the experience of a lot of white people. I think it's more off-putting than engaging.

I prefer to say "white benefits." When I look at my own biography, I can see that I've had a certain set of benefits by virtue of my being white, but those wouldn't necessarily be the same as yours. This idea invites white people to investigate their own biography in that way. That said, I think we may be stuck with the term "white privilege."

So what are some "white benefits"?

One of the best entrees into the issue of white privilege for white people is Peggy McIntosh's classic article, "White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack."

In this article McIntosh identifies benefits that she enjoys that she is fairly sure her black friends do not enjoy. It includes things like how she can walk into a store and not immediately look around to see if she's going to be followed by somebody who thinks she's there to steal something.

Or, for example, when I'm driving and I get stopped, it's probably because I've been going too fast, not because I'm the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood. If I make a mistake, I don't have to worry that someone is going to say, "Geez, white people are really stupid--did you hear what Nilson just said?"

I have never, ever worried about how to prepare my children for the insults and the contempt that they might face through no fault of their own. I haven't had to control my rage. The chief benefit of white privilege is not having to think about race at all. You get up in the morning and go about your day. You don't have to sweat it.

There is a remarkable book by Thomas Shapiro, an economist at Brandeis University, called The Hidden Costs of Being African American (Oxford). He documents in detail how being African American subjects you to fairly stringent financial disadvantages. Whites are more able than blacks, for instance, to help out their adult children. Parents will provide free babysitting or buy a house and let adult children live there rent-free for a few years.

Shapiro and his investigators interviewed white families at length and documented the ways in which their financial status was the consequence of parental assets accumulated over the course of two or three generations. Yet they still could not convince a lot of these couples that somehow their financial status wasn't the result of their own hard work--which feeds into the great myth of America that we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Over and over again it's been shown this is simply not true. I think for many people it's a blow to their self-esteem that maybe they didn't make it this far all on their own.

Should white people feel guilty about this situation?

I don't think guilt is the appropriate response. I really don't. Without calling for pity or compassion for myself, I do think everybody in this society lives a life that has, in some significant ways, been impoverished because of our racial divisions. Sociologist Joe Feagin in Racist America (Routledge) points to the amount of time we spend commuting to get out to the suburbs, the money we spend on gas, the time we are away from our families, so we can get away from the inner city where all those "other people" live.

Rather than guilt, perhaps the best response to all this is sadness, profound sadness for one's self, for each other, sadness that is willing to open myself to the pain that this situation inflicts on us.

Was sadness the emotion that motivated you to this new consciousness of yours? Doesn't guilt work better?

I think for me it became a matter of personal integrity. Either take on the issue of racism or stop calling myself a white Catholic theologian. Call myself a historian of religion or something, but don't call myself a Christian theologian if I'm ducking the main theological issue of this society. So I guess in the end it wasn't really sadness that motivated me.

Why, when we talk about racism in this country, do we think of the relationship between whites and blacks far more than relationships with other races and ethnic groups?

The perception that other ethnic or racial groups have negotiated the obstacles and moved on better than African Americans implies a comparability between blacks and other ethnic groups that I don't think historically can be sustained. Slavery begins shortly after the appearance of white people on this continent. No other group was brought here in chains or was enslaved for so long, no other group was subjected to legalized forms of slavery after the Civil War when the North withdrew its troops and Reconstruction collapsed.

Even today it's far easier for Asians or Hispanics to intermarry with whites. There's a higher level of social acceptability, unless you happen to be in the military, because the military has remarkably effective anti-discrimination programs. Whites in the military are ten times more likely to marry an African American than whites not in the military. People say we can't legislate race relations. Of course we can. We can get people to wear seat belts and to stop smoking. I think we can do much better where race is concerned if we really want to, but we don't want to.

What have you learned from this issue that affects your faith?

Two things leap to mind, one very practical and one more theoretical. The practical thing is that I think residential segregation profoundly affects the nature of Catholic life at the parish level. We have many all-white parishes and therefore our most frequent ordinary Catholic experience is already giving us a distorted picture of who we are as a church in this country. I think we need to rethink the parish system so it is not so tied to the social sin of residential segregation.

On a more theoretical level, and with the help of people like James Cone, I've come to believe that the main challenge to Christian faith is not the latest writing by an atheist but rather the tolerance of injustice in this country, mainly racial injustice. Why should anybody believe that Jesus has come to transform our lives and reconcile us to one another, as long as we continue to tolerate these divisions?

So what can the church do?

The credibility of the gospel in great part depends upon our church being profoundly countercultural about racism, and I don't think the Catholic Church is. We are far too comfortable with this culture.

A lot of my students are very attracted by the prospect of a church that is countercultural, a church that accurately diagnoses what is going on in this culture, that can recognize why people are suffering and what needs to be done about it. There's something deep in us that wants the church to be a leader in that respect. It's not to say that the other things the church is concerned about aren't important, but if we haven't invested most of our energies in trying to achieve social justice, my God, no wonder it looks like we're butchering the gospel.

It gets to your question before about what makes people change, and I think you're right, maybe sadness doesn't do it, although you put in a strong bid for guilt. The other thing that gets people to change is of course pain: It hurts too much to continue the same way. We have to begin to educate ourselves to the ways in which we are all hurt and damaged by racism. We accept our distorted social situation as normal.

We literally don't know what it would be like to have tension-flee interactions with people of all different kinds of races. We don't know what it would be like not to segregate people by economic class or ethnic background. We don't know what it would be like if everybody had a certain floor of economic security so that they could participate in the doings of the neighborhood and their government. We just say, this is the way it is and it's sort of fine.

But think of the work of Joe Feagin: "Look pal, you're losing 45 minutes each way out of your day because you're commuting out of the city to get away from the black people. You're spending all this money on gas and you're away from your family longer." That's just a small indication of the costs that we individually and collectively pay to maintain this crazy system. The more we are shown how we are in pain, the more progress we're likely to make.

RELATED ARTICLE: How to recognize white privilege.

In her 1988 article "White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack," Peggy McIntosh identifies some of what she sees as the daily advantages of being a white person in U.S. society that are not enjoyed by her African American friends and coworkers. Among the privileges she lists are:

"I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

"I am never asked to speak for all of the people of my racial group.

"I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the 'person in charge,' I will be facing a person of my race.

"I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

"I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

"I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

"If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones."

--Excerpted from "White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies," Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1988.

On the Web

For Jon Nilson's handpicked list of good books on the topic of racism, visit uscatholic.org.