Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Catherine Meeks

Catherine Meeks is a prolific author of works on race and justice, including the recent memoir, A Quilted Life: Reflections of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, and one of the Episcopal Church’s most impactful teachers on racial healing. After retiring as the Clara Carter Acree Distinguished Professor of Socio-Cultural Studies at Wesleyan College, she became the founding executive director of the Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, where she served until 2024. Meeks may be retired, but thankfully she continues to speak in churches, universities and for church organizations, and offered one of the inaugural keynotes at Baylor’s 2022 program on Racism in the White Church. I learn from her every time we meet and am so grateful to share this edited version of a much longer conversation.

Greg Garrett: In the first weeks of the Trump administration, they started removing words, phrases and abbreviations about race, diversity and justice from the federal government. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how it feels to be in a world where the federal government of the United States is erasing Black people and brown people and queer people.

Catherine Meeks: Well, I have a lot of different responses to that. One of them is it feels to me what post-Reconstruction must have felt like to people. I kind of consider this as post-Reconstruction because we made all kinds of gains, including electing a Black president. And it’s like the racist system said, “Oh my God, we must have gone to sleep because of how far they got. And now we’ve got to rectify this.”

“We are too far down the road for this to become a new Jim Crow era.”

They’ve got their chance at the bat and they have got to be told they’re not going to be able to prevail. They are going to strike out. They can do all this stuff, but we are too far down the road for this to become a new Jim Crow era. I mean, look at the energy that’s getting unleashed across the country against this whole tide for all different kinds of reasons. The reason people go out to protest, what matters is that they’re standing up against this tide that says, “We don’t want progress. We don’t want people to be free. We don’t want equity. We don’t want a diverse country. We want the white male to be supreme like it was in the 18th century.” That’s their daydream.

Catherine Meeks

We elected Obama, we’re about to elect somebody else. Just know all those things are not reasons for you to take a break. You take a deep breath and you get on with it. So I feel like in some ways, this is horrible. I’m sick of it like everybody else, but it’s a great call to wake up. People need to wake up.

GG: One of your ongoing messages, particularly for white audiences, is that the waking up moment is a good moment, but it’s not the only moment. One of the most important teachings I think you carry into the church and into the larger culture is the idea that white people want to have that moment of recognition and be done. So what should people who look like me be doing to repair and push back this damage?

CM: I don’t get up in the mornings thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to be a resister today.” I just get up and live my life, and my life understands that resistance is as much a part of what I have got to be about as breathing oxygen.

White people have had the luxury of never having to be there because there’s always been this sense the world belongs to you and you’re OK. We have had to be vigilant. I’m not going to tolerate oppression against white folks, Black folks, brown folks, any kind of folks, because my life is intentionally focused on making sure oppression doesn’t have a chance to live. So what does that mean?

“My life is intentionally focused on making sure oppression doesn’t have a chance to live.”

The Episcopal Church talks about seeing the face of God in people. I don’t know if you see the face of God or if you just are willing to accept that that person was created by God like you were, and you have a responsibility to be respectful of them. And that’s everybody everywhere, all the time, every day, in every way possible. That’s a pretty big, big space to occupy.

It’s not so much the white person who wants to go protest or go make soup in a soup kitchen, but the white person who’s willing to not let themselves or their neighbors denigrate another person. I mean, just a simple no, we’re not going to reduce anybody here to being less than a human, even if we don’t understand or we don’t like them. They’re still human and they have to be treated in our thinking as human. Now, they may be acting badly and have to be dealt with. That’s a completely separate issue.

GG: Kelly Brown Douglas and I had a conversation back during the pandemic. She had posted something on Twitter: White people, I do not want you as an ally. You’ve got to accompany, she told me, you’ve got to walk alongside us. Could you talk a little bit about your understanding of the place of white people in the fight against racism, sexism, transphobia? I mean, at this moment, this government is trying to privilege everybody who looks and loves and identifies like me.

CM: “Ally” assumes a kind of separateness. You can come and be with me for a little bit in some struggle, and then you help me out. And then you go on your way, and then the next time something comes up, you come and do a little something. Whatever’s convenient, when it’s convenient, even if it’s a little inconvenient, it’s not that risky. And you’re always in the position of being the one to come to help because you’re just OK.

That is a perception of being a white person in America. You are OK. Part of what’s wrong with white people right now is that they’re so shocked that they are being treated like the rest of us have been treated for hundreds of years. We know what being on the margins is like, and now white folks are being treated that way. I mean, this administration doesn’t really care about anybody unless you’re male and rich and white.

If you’re not one of those people, then you don’t matter. So I make a big distinction about pilgrims and allies, and fellow pilgrims are people who say, I do have white skin and I do have privilege, and I have had the thought that this country belonged to people like me, but I know I’ve been wounded, and I want to get better. I want to get well. I want to not be caught in that bubble, that illusion, because it is an illusion, the illusion of supremacy. I don’t want to be in that and I need help. And the best way for me to get help is to join other folks who’ve spent their lives struggling against the illusion that I thought was for real.

“Pilgrims are equal in power. We’re both suffering.”

I just purchased Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound because I think there’s a misunderstanding in people who want to be allies about their own health and wellness. I love how in this notion about the wounded healer that, yes, you can bring healing, but you are also wounded and you are sharing with people what you have learned. It is more of an even situation where we’re two people looking for bandages, one’s white, one’s Black, and we know there’s something out here that has impacted us both. And that thing is worse than anything that’s between the two of us.

We’re just these two pilgrims here, these two entities trying to make sense out of stuff. And it creates a kind of kinship that is missing so much in relationships across any kind of difference. There’s no kinship as long as you keep a hierarchy, always somebody beneath somebody else, and you’re coming in with the answer or the potential or power that the other doesn’t have.

Pilgrims are equal in power. We’re both suffering. We’re both underneath something here and we’re better together than by ourselves.

GG: You and I are talking on Easter Monday, and I want to live into Easter hope. Where are you finding hope and courage just now?

CM: Did you happen to hear the conversation I did with Bishop Mariann Budde and Bishop Craig Loya and Bishop Michael Hunn? It’s called A Conversation on Hope. That was a really good conversation. Things are hard and bad at the moment, but see, this again is the difference between people who live in the margin and people who don’t.

There’s no special new dispensation of reasons to be hopeful. It is a part of the capacity to be vigilant, finding the reasons to be hopeful every day. I grew up in a house with a father who could not read and write, and a mother who graduated from college the same year I graduated from high school. So I was taught that every day was a new day and you don’t know what the day is going to bring. That’s hope.

God is bigger than me, God is bigger than what’s going on, and God knows more than I do about it all. What is my job then? My job is to be focused and to be faithful, and that means I have to listen, I have to think about where have I been. Where am I and where do I think I want to try to go? I have to do what my soul requires, and my soul requires me to stay in the struggle, to be vigilant, to be a bearer of light to the best of my ability.

“If we didn’t have this disruption coming from Trump, we would be able to pretend we were much better than we really are.”

If we didn’t have this disruption coming from Trump, we would be able to pretend we were much better than we really are. And now we can’t pretend, so when I think about it that way, I say, OK, God is interested in truth. And I am interested in truth. So let me not be freaked out by this truth, because if I let myself tell the truth to myself, I’ve always known it.

This is an invitation to tell the truth more, to embrace the truth, to see ourselves the way we really are. I have not had a day that I’m not concerned about the safety of young people of color in this country. I mean, this mess with the gulag right now is just straight up what has always been true, that Black and brown people were in danger. My sons included, whenever they were out on the street. That always has been the case.

This stuff is bad, but so much of it’s been going on all the time. It’s just going on now where we can see it.

So I want to say about hope, look at where you’ve been, look at what you’re doing, look at who you are, and you can have hope that the same God who has been fuel on that journey is not going to go away. And I just trust that God is not going to go away. Plus, I know from my own life and the little signs, I mean, there’re so many little signs.

I go out of the house and some days there’s a bird sitting there to say, “See, you don’t really have to worry. I live and I don’t worry. How about you? You want to try not to worry?” Yeah, I do. I want to live with contentment and peace.

And so Sojourner Truth can say, I will not let slavery and all of this bad stuff take my joy away. If Sojourner Truth can say that, then I best be trying to figure out how to say it to him.

Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.

More from this series:

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Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Yolanda Pierce

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Rep. James Talarico

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Malcolm Foley 

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Jonathan Eig

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Greg Jarrell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Robert G. Callahan II

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Andrea Russell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Bishop Michael Curry

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Melissa Deckman

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Matthew D. Taylor