Relative races: genealogies of interracial kinship in nineteenth-century America

Abstract

to counteract the discrimination inflicted on students in white-taught private and public schools, was one of the greatest ‘threat[s] to America’s racial status quo’, noting how white Catholics attempted to stifle their Black counterparts’ work by protesting and closing down their schools (p. 68). Chapters Four through Six document Black American nuns’ relationship with the civil rights movement and the birth of Black Power, as well as an exodus from religious life partially caused by Black women’s exhaustion and frustration with the lack of support from the white-led American Church. These chapters showcase some of Williams’ strongest work in ‘recover[ing] the voices of a group of Black American churchwomen whose lives, labors, and struggles have been systematically ignored’ (p. xvii). In covering over a century and dozens of nuns’ stories, it would have been easy to pick a small number of the most influential to make ‘main characters’ of the book; there are certainly some standouts whom Williams follows closely. But her commitment to telling as many stories as possible presents the reader with an expansive sense of the diversity and fortitude of these women who were ‘unashamedly Black, authentically Catholic, and above all uncommonly faithful to their church’ even as they battled against the racism and sexism within it (p. 231). In the final chapter and conclusion, Williams examines the modern Black nun and her future – both in America and internationally. Williams is determined to make her narrative a hopeful one, and she succeeds, if not always in how her subjects’ stories end but in the triumph of having uncovered those stories at all. Subversive habits is an extraordinarily comprehensive history of Black Catholic female religious life in America. It testifies to Williams’ argument that the book is also a history of the American Catholic Church and of the country’s struggle for racial justice – the actions of Black sisters are central to either narrative. Identifying the book as ‘a work of historical recovery and correction’, Williams recovers a history that has been systematically erased and forgotten even as she corrects those misconceptions about Black nuns that do exist (p. 15). She confronts the white supremacist history of the Catholic Church head-on, both as an institution and of its individual members, demolishing the narrative that white nuns led racial justice efforts and demonstrating to her readership – even those like myself, white and largely ignorant of Catholic American history – the importance of recognizing the women whose achievements she has documented. Famous for speaking out in the 1965 protest marches in Selma, activist Sister Mary Antona Ebo marched once again for the cause of racial justice in 2014, reminding journalists that they were not there to ‘take a superficial picture . . . You are going to raise the rug up and look at what’s under the rug’ (p. 254). Williams, at least, has taken Ebo’s words to heart; this book is not merely a snapshot of Black American nuns: it proves that they fundamentally altered the course, not only of Black or Catholic American history, but of American history as a whole.