Father Boroughs’ Thoughts on HC and Racism

Here is the challenge:
We can expose people/students to ideas, and even course requirements.
But that does not necessarily change someone’s heart.

There is a lot more work to be done.

White people have a lot more learning to do…to understand the reality on deeper and deeper levels. Fr. Boroughs included himself in this acknowledgement.

As students graduate, you lose the institutional memory. So every 4 years, 100% of that memory is gone. So the change needs to be at an institutional level and there needs to be a change in the culture.

Father Boroughs has encouraged students to challenge the faculty…he believes they listen to the students in a far more meaningful way and the students seem to be doing that.

Changes are necessary in the core curriculum and this is being worked on currently.

From a religious standpoint, Racism is a sin. Therefore, as Catholics we have an added layer of responsibility to ask ourselves, “what is required of me to change”?

How do we get people to a different way of Living? Thinking? Feeling? This is the key!!

How do we create experiences for the students (other than required courses) that take people to new places, ways of thinking? To help people shift? How do we create communities that foster love, which enable people to make commitments to each other to understand our differences and celebrate each other?

One possible way to do this is through common activities. If activities, like sports, have students mingling ethnicities then there is an opportunity to address change in those environments. And hopefully it would create a new way of thinking that would be carried into other areas of life. In many social settings, students seem to self-segregate. So these mixed activities are an entry point, as well as in class (see below)

Faculty involvement…

Departments are dealing with these issues and figuring out how to incorporate issues of race and the reality of our world into courses, and it will soon become a requirement to do so. The challenge is that often mandates create resistance. But more people are voluntarily talking about racism and that is hopeful.

But…can we make students take these courses that are being developed? And is that enough?

Can our group be an entry point to making a shift in the social culture?

White people need to help other whites undo and unlearn the culture of white privilege and white supremacy. So we can mentor students. Teach white students about their responsibility in anti-racism and we can also support students of color. (This seems to be a reoccurring theme of how members of our group can be a support).

HC is actively trying to raise money to offer more financial aid in order to diversify the student population. Currently, those with money can afford to be there, and those with no resources get financial help, but the middle class is a group sorely lacking in representation.

Fr. Boroughs is hopeful that their efforts to embed some structural change in the institution with a Black President and a number of other positions of leadership held by minorities will help further the mission of creating a more diverse, integrated community.

“BE THE PERSON THAT LIFTS UP THE PERSON BEHIND YOU”