Racing tradition: Catholic schooling and the maintenance of boundaries

Abstract

This article seeks to add to the underdeveloped strain of inquiry on the raced social experience of students in private and parochial institutions. We examine the role Catholic schools in the city of Chicago play in the maintenance and creation of racially problematic policies, spaces, and rhetoric. The research uncovers a multitude of responses framing African American students as an exotic other in mission and action through the leveraging of liturgical, ideological, and political language and practice. Using Cultural Studies and Critical Race Theory the work seeks to create a discursive space for representation and resistance in the repositioning of dominant and sanguineous narratives about Catholic schooling both in the US and globally. We use moments when race became particularly and often painfully salient in our experiences of Catholic schooling to expose the structural and racial inequity perpetuated in establishing and enforcing racial barriers to success through religion-for-segregation educational policies.

Keywords:

• Cultural Studies
• Critical Race Theory
• Catholic schooling
• whiteness
• space and place

Notes

1. Our argument is, to a certain degree, provincial in that it deals with the specific contours of one city and our versions of racial narratives remembered. The use, however, of liturgy, tradition, and private schooling in particular to foster (de facto and de jure) segregation has a long national flavor in America (see: Robinson and Lugg 2012). There have been reams written about the racialized (and genocidal) moves made by missioning whites the world over; less has been said about the ongoing shape of missionary work of long-established religious schools, serving – or in our case, refusing to serve, new populations – that might be problematic. Our particularized setting makes an argument, we think, for the use of historical and localized analysis using critical geography in particular, to uncover counterstories about the shaping of cities, regions, nations (e.g. Schein 2006) using religion-as-tradition as a bulwark to support white dominance.

2. We find the contesting of racial demographic shifts and the responses of the attentive schools positioned within contested borders to be present in multiple contexts: Australia (Arber 2003); Great Britain (Gaine 2000); and South Africa (Dolby 2001). As common thread in all instances are the structures of schooling serve to circumscribe the chances of non-white children in historically white controlled institutions.

3. www.ncea.org.

4. We find similarity in the narratives of these spaces and the notions of settled inhabitants combating invading others as contextualized in Ireland with traveller sub-populations. The nomadic travellers have been framed as unpatriotic, immoral, and bringers of figurative disease (Garner 2006) in much the same way black populations have been framed as invading others in Chicago and other major US cities.

5. In 2012, a coalition of ‘concerned’ parents representing key recruiting areas/parishes for several Southside Catholic high schools demanded a meeting with the administration of one of the institutions studied here. The parents were requesting an audience to address the ‘black’ problem currently facing the school. The parental coalition informed school representatives that the increasing number of black students was becoming a problem within the community. The parents expressly stated that if the enrollment of black students was not curtailed, parents from key areas would begin sending their students to local competitors. Even before this, in 2010, a meeting of school administrators, key members of the school board and faculty was held to discuss an acceptable percentage of black students within the school population. A combination of location and economic factors had recently led to an increase in the number of black students attending the school. During the meeting it was determined it would be in the best interest of the institution to maintain a percentage below 20%. A continuation of the discourse resulted in a ‘hard cap’ being set at 25%. The group concluded should the number rise above this threshold the white base population would begin to decline and the school would become equivalent to the small percentage of black catholic schools in the area. The prevailing sentiment was it would be better to close the school than become one of ‘those’ schools.

6. These issues, particularly in the realm of sports, don’t only rise to the level of the high school. Indeed in 2001, the Southside Catholic Conference, a basketball consortium of grammar schools, refused admission to St. Sabina Academy, an (uniquely for the city) African American parish school (Bury 2001). Citing fears about crime, voting members who rejected the potential inclusion of Sabina, noted the hypothetical danger to ‘a young mother going over to St Sabina on a Thursday night for a fifth grade girls basketball game in August by herself’ (McLory 2001, 4). Leaving aside the odd specificity here, we are best to note the implied whiteness of the young mother in this particular moral panic. The correlative concern that remained unspoken was the distaste many schools had at the idea of young black mothers (fathers, children, etc.) coming into white neighborhoods on August nights as well.

7. We anonymize CHS to protect student research subjects.

8. We find similar notions of administrative apathy and ambivalence tied to disciplinary practices in Canadian schools as overt racism is framed as a minor transgression (Raby 2004).

9. http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/how-we-teach/new-evangelization/.