The Office of Racial Justice celebrated its 10th anniversary July 1. It was formed in the wake of the beating of Lenard Clark, a 13-year-old African-American boy who was beaten unconscious by three young white men in the Bridgeport neighborhood in March 1997. Since then the office has worked to transform the Archdiocese of Chicago into an “anti-racist” institution, by, among other things, training all archdiocesan employees about institutional racism and how to fight it. Daughter of the Heart of Mary Sister Anita Baird has led the office since its inception; she talked about what it has done and hopes to do with assistant editor Michelle Martin.

Catholic New World: Take me back 10 years to when the office was formed. What was the impetus behind it?

Sister Anita Baird: The impetus was the beating of Lenard Clark. He almost died, and the young men that beat him were Catholic and graduates of one of our high schools. The sense was, what are we not doing right that something like this could happen?

That happened in March of ’97. Bishop (Raymond) Goedert was the administrator. He formed a task force and invited people from all walks of life, political people, other religious leaders, laypeople in the community, activists.

The key recommendations of the task force were that the cardinal write a pastoral letter on racism that would be really reflective of the city of Chicago and the role of the church here, and that anti-racism efforts should not just be part of the work of the Office for Peace and Justice, but that it would be a separate office that would have its entire focus on implementing their recommendations.

CNW: How did you start?

Sister Anita: We knew one of the first things we had to do was have the cardinal write the letter to address racism (“Dwell in My Love”) and that was issued in April 2001. But we also knew it couldn’t be something that would just end up sitting on a shelf. ... So we formed the anti-racism team and the pastoral letter became the founding document for the work we’re doing today.

CNW: Is the goal to eradicate racism throughout the archdiocese?

Sister Anita: That’s the dream. We always say that we’re on a journey, and we’re certainly a pilgrim people. The goal would be to have a transformed institution in a transformed society, but we know that’s a lifetime commitment. As long as we’re human, we will always be dealing with the sin of division, and that’s really what racism is. Each generation will have its own work to do.

Our goal is to acknowledge, number one, that it’s not just an issue of people’s personal prejudices, but that it’s built into our institutions. What I mean by that is when most of our institutions were formed, including the church in our country, it was built to serve an immigrant population primarily coming out of Europe..

The institutions were built to reflect the values of the people they were founded to serve. The church has always been welcoming of the people of God — that’s who we are, that’s what it means to be Catholic and universal. But then you get down into people’s ordinary lives and their communities, into what they learn as children in their homes and that has impact on us and it has an impact on the church.

CNW: On a practical level, how do you make an anti-racist institution?

Sister Anita: On a practical level, you do a lot of praying, you do a lot of talking, you do a lot of relationship building. It really is one-on-one kind of work. We began with the parish workshops on racism and ethnic sensitivity. We had over 300 parishes participate, and some good things have come out of that. We tried to bring together parishes of diverse backgrounds. We had people that would give witness talks, and they would share their experiences of how racism has impacted their lives.

Out of that, last fall, we published “Witnesses to Racism,” and it’s really the talks of people who participated in the workshops.

CNW: Ten years later, do you see any change?

Sister Anita: I would say yes. If we say this is long-term and that before an institution really is at a point where you can see that change in all its documents, in its leadership, in how it works with communities of color, you’re talking about a 20- to 30-year timeframe. In the meantime, you’re trying to expose as many people as possible to the analysis, which is our understanding that racism is our personal prejudice coupled with how we use or misuse power in our systems and institutions.

We have to transform our institutions and transform our parishes to become those welcoming places where people really feel at home and they are respected for who they are and they have an equal role to play. Have we made progress? I think we definitely have in the sense that 10 years ago, the archdiocese had not made this long-term commitment, we did not have Cardinal George’s pastoral letter, we did not have an anti-racism team that has been mandated, we did not have thousands of people who have gone through the training within our agencies and departments.

CNW: How effective are the workshops?

Sister Anita: People who are exposed to the training begin to ask the question, “Does racism play a role here?”

We should always ask the question when we’re looking at hiring, especially in the upper levels of our organization. How do we recruit? Do we recruit people of color? Why do we not have more people of color at the higher levels? If I’m a teacher, how do I relate to children of color? Do I have preconceived notions and prejudices that may be teaching what I teach and how I relate in my classroom? It’s growing in higher awareness in the ways that race and racism play out and to understand that we can each address it in our own particular setting, particularly in leadership that we can make a difference.

CNW: What are the next steps?

Sister Anita: There is a continuum that we do in our training and it has six sections. It moves us from where we say we were 50 or 60 years ago, when segregation was the law of the land. We have moved from that to a period where we were accepting of certain people of color — not a lot of them — then we moved to the period in the mid-’70s and the ’80s where we started embracing multiculturalism and started seeing it more positively. That’s really where we’re at, most of our institutions. Then we say, why are we still having problems?

Now we are at that point where we want to begin to effectively address the institution. We are now crafting what our recommendations are going to be to the cardinal and the administrative council for what we are calling Phase Two, looking at what does an anti-racist institution look like.

CNW: What would it look like?

Sister Anita: What I think an anti-racist institution would look like is one that really reflected the makeup of the institution. In our training programs, in the seminary, in our lay-ministry programs, our training would be inclusive of cultural and life experience of people of color. Leadership across the board would reflect the makeup of this local church.

You’re going to have significant numbers of people of color that are helping to shape the institution, setting the goals and the vision, and you’re going to see it in the language of that institution, and you’re also going to be able to physically see it. If the Latino population today is almost 50 percent of this local church — it’s at least 40 percent, and probably closer to 50 — then I should see more Latinos in positions of power in this archdiocese.