“In race relations there is a strong tendency to blame ‘society’ for our errors. We pass the blame on to any one of a number of impersonal causes—environment, education, etc. But Shakespeare was right ... to say, ‘The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”
Our Quote of the Week questions our tendency to blame outside forces for the racial injustices in our history. We reflect on these words as we mark Juneteenth, the day when we officially mark the end of slavery in the United States.
In 1963, an interfaith group of leaders from around the country, including Sargent Shriver and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gathered in Chicago for the National Conference on Religion and Race. It was during this conference that Sargent Shriver spoke these words. He referred to laws and government as “coarse and inefficient instruments for remolding social institutions or illuminating the dark places of the human heart.” He then called on “those institutions whose task it is to teach moral values” to take an active role in battling discrimination and hatred.
Throughout his life, Sargent Shriver used various strategies to combat racism and White supremacy. One such strategy was to challenge the Catholic church and other faith-based institutions to do their share in building a more inclusive, loving, and just society. A key part of building such a society, reasoned Shriver, would be to foster conversations about race in houses of worship.
Shriver’s words remind us that to achieve true racial equity and justice, we must reflect on and discuss the topic of race, including Black history, in our common spaces every day: in our churches and in our temples, but also in our classrooms, at our dinner tables, and in all of our intimate settings. We must be especially intentional about doing this in environments that are predominantly White and where we have perceived racial bias or casual racism. We must listen to the voices of those directly affected by racism, and we must be moved to action as a result of these conversations.
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