So Cone's question returns more forcefully. Why don't we have any theologians like Metz? Is it possible that, by and large, we white Catholic theologians are racists? Surely not, if racism means night riders, lynching, cross burning and race riots. Atrocities like these are light-years away from the sedate world of theological libraries and seminar rooms. Surely not, if racism means simply the attitudes, words and actions of individuals who discriminate openly and consciously against others on the basis of their skin color. But what if racism is more pervasive and subtle? What if racism is more a system than a symptom? James Boggs' understanding of racism is more perceptive:

"The first thing we have to understand is that racism is not a 'mental quirk' or a 'psychological flaw' on an individual's part. Racism is the systematized oppression of one race by another. In other words, the various forms of oppression within every sphere of social relations - economic exploitation, military subjugation, political subordination, cultural devaluation, psychological violation, sexual degradation, verbal abuse, etc. - together make up a whole of interacting and developing processes which operate so normally and naturally and are so much a part of the existing institutions of the society that the individuals involved are barely conscious of their operation. As Fanon says, 'The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal.'"(10)

Thus, racism makes oppression seem normal, preferred, legitimate and, therefore, hard to detect and uproot precisely because it is part of "the way things are" and "the way things ought to be."

Now there is a type of racism peculiar to us white Catholic theologians. It consists of ignoring, marginalizing and dismissing that body of theological insight and challenge born of the black struggle for justice, black theology.(11)

So I have to confess that I am a racist. I am a racist insofar as I rarely read and never cited any black theologians in my own publications. I never suspected that the black churches might teach me something that would make me a better Roman Catholic ecclesiologist. Occasionally I have assigned a short article by a black theologian to my students but never a complete book. I have learned much from other forms of Latin American and feminist liberation theology but paid little attention to black theology. So Cone is talking about me when he says, "They engage feminist, Latin American and other white reflections on God. Why are they silent on black theological reflections? If one read only white Catholic theologians, one would hardly know that blacks exist in America or had the capacity for thought about God."(12) Along with James Cone, Bryan Massingale has convinced me that I am not the only white Catholic racist theologian.(13)

It did not have to be this way. White Catholic theologians could have been dialogue partners with black theology from the very beginning. Thirty years ago, just four years after James Cone published his ground-breaking Black Theology and Black Power, Preston Williams addressed this society and urged the membership to find, mentor and support the black Catholic scholars who were so urgently needed.(14) Then one year later, 1974, the late Joseph Nearon delivered the preliminary report of the Research Committee for Black Theology to the CTSA. At this point, Nearon was a committee of one. "When President [Richard P.] McBrien asked me to take on this task," he said, "we decided that for the CTSA to address the question of black theology we needed someone who was (1) black, (2) Catholic, (3) a theologian. I noted that 'the field is fairly limited,' and McBrien immediately responded, 'To my knowledge you are the field.'"(15)

McBrien's invitation was the occasion for Nearon's own awakening because black theology was uncharted territory for him, too. Although he was black, his blackness had played no role in his religious life or theological career up to that point. So, before he could chair this research committee, he felt the need to educate himself. Yet even at this early stage of his work, Nearon could say to the CTSA:

"Catholic theology is racist. If this fact can be blamed on the cultural situation, if it is more the result of omission and inattention than conscious commission, it is still a fact. There is an insensitivity here which can only remain blameless until it has been pointed out, and I serve notice to you, my colleagues, that I am now pointing it out.... I do this not to condemn, but to awaken."(16)

If Catholic theology in this country was racist in the early 1970s, you might suppose that we would have acknowledged Nearon's critique and would have done what needed to be done to overcome it. I am not convinced that we have. Our theological journals, publishers' catalogs (excepting Orbis, of course), graduate course curriculums and undergraduate course syllabuses that make up our stock in trade as theologians show little evidence that black theology even exists. How can we deny Cone's caustic observation: "If one read only white Catholic theologians, one would hardly know that blacks exist in America or had the capacity for thought about God."(17)

Now this white Catholic marginalization of black theology makes a statement to black Christians. It says, "Your experience of struggle, suffering and triumph and your Christian reflections on your experience do not count." This is cultural devaluation. This is psychological violation. This is racism. And whites are its victims, too. To declare, in effect, that the slave trade's cost of 50 million ancestors, that the torture endured by the slaves and their descendants, that the martyrdom of Christian slaves at the hands of slaveholders outraged by their slaves' conviction that God loved them and wanted their freedom,(18) that the degradation of Jim Crow and the reign of terror known as lynching, that the faith-born and faith-nurtured resistance to these atrocities, which was sung in the black spirituals, proclaimed in black preaching, interrogated in black theology - to declare implicitly that all this has nothing significant to contribute to our understanding of the Gospel for our time and nation is a drastic truncation and impoverishment of our theology.