By DENNIS CODAY
Milwaukee, Wis.

Thirty years after it began, the Catholic reform movement Call to Action is getting back to its roots in a way, tackling racism, one of the issues that brought it to life in Detroit so many years ago.

The theme of this year’s national conference is “From Racism to Reconciliation: Church Beyond Power and Privilege.”

Racism whether in the church or in society “goes beyond personal prejudice and settles into the bones of institutions,” said Tom Honore, leader of Call to Action’s Anti-Racism Team. It is a cancer eating into the bones of society and church, he said.

Call to Action is meeting in Milwaukee, Nov. 2-4. About 2,000 people are attending the conference and most of its 52 chapters are represented.

Eradicating racism is more than just a topic at this year’s convention. In key resolutions and parts of the action plan put forth at Call to Action’s foundational meeting in Detroit in 1976, the U.S. bishops called for extensive work and instructional support to battle racism.

Call to Action reasserted this as an institutional goal in 2001. Since then it has been working to eliminate racism from its own structures. Board members and staff underwent racism training, and the organization hired Crossroads Ministries to help it reach its goal of racial justice.

Now the Anti-Racism Team is taking what it has learned to the entire Call to Action network. Talks, presentations and training sessions are scattered throughout the three days of workshops at this year’s convention.

All the plenary addresses this weekend cover aspects of eradicating racism from self, society and church.

The Anti-Racism Team hosted a pre-conference training seminar Nov. 2 that through guided exercises helped participants recognize and understand racism in their lives, identify racism in societal and church structures, and then to begin to develop ideas for combating racism.

About 100 people joined the training seminar. Victor Lewis and Peggy McIntosh got the crowd warmed up with a sometimes humorous but always pointed presentation about white and male privilege being the flip side of race and sex discrimination.

McIntosh, associate director of Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, talked about how her work in women’s studies and feminism lead her to an epiphany about her own privileged status as a white woman.

McIntosh is the author of a widely circulated paper, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In it she writes: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.”

In the paper, she lists 26 conditions or situations in life that she give “unearned advantage” over a person of color. She lists things like, “I can be pretty sure that my neighbors will be neutral or pleasant to me” and “I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.”

Her conclusion was that a first step in dismantling racist structures is exposing the unacknowledged advantages of white privilege and destroying the myth of meritocracy.

Lewis, who formerly worked with the Oakland Men’s Project, told the audience that as an African-American he felt very qualified to talk about racial oppression, but that he had decided to address another issue. “The challenge I take up is male privilege,” he said.

He described what he called his battles with sexism as he learned about feminism from books like Andrea Dworkin’s Hating Women and Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.

Lewis said that he had always prided himself on being knowledgeable and educated. But after reading these books, he said, he was angry. “How come nobody told me about this stuff?” he asked.

Lewis said, that women can and do educate men about their privilege and that is good. But he said it is also humbling when one realizes that “that education comes at the cost of the educator” and her long suffering patience.

In the next part of the seminar, the Anti-Racism Team led the group to see racism as more than individual actions and behaviors, but an inherited part of our legal and societal structures.

The last part of the seminar was a self-examination of what Call to Action and the church are and aren’t doing to fight racism.

A good number of attendees are already members of anti-racism programs in their home cities and counties.

It was mentioned that within the last couple of years a number of bishops have issued pastoral letters on racism. Archbishops Harry Flynn of Minneapolis and Hughes of New Orleans were mentioned specifically and their letters praised.

One attendee mentioned that Catholic Charities USA had recently concluded its annual convention were it was announced it will release a major position paper on poverty and racism in January.

The consensus of the group seemed to be that despite years of work and some advances in legal and interpersonal areas, the core causes of racism have not been addressed. Furthermore the national debate over immigration and fears engendered by the “war on terror” have inflamed racism in society.

Call to Action is getting back into this fight at a crucial time, the group seemed to say.

Or as Patty Hawk, co-president of the CTA Board told the membership in plenary session Friday night: “It is time to make the 1976 resolution to end racism a reality.”