Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

I met Katie Cannon in the early 1980s in a small antiracism group sponsored by the stillborn Feminist Theological Institute in New York. My son was four or five at the time, and he told me one day that he thought someone was "ugly because she was black." I was beside myself, and although I was aware that it was not a terribly productive way to talk to a five-year-old, I gave him a ten-minute lecture on the history of racism in the United States. I then brought my dismay and uncertainty about how to respond to our antiracism group.

Katie had a lot to say about the research on children's early absorption of racist messages, and although she didn't have an answer to the question of how to respond, we spent the session reflecting on the multiple subtle and not-so-subtle ways kids pick up racist cues and then brainstorming about how to counter them. That was pure Katie—being more than willing to share the immense amount she knew about racism but also wanting to learn from me how I dealt with it and to explore together how to imagine a meaningful response.

In some ways, I think this set the pattern for our relationship. Over the years, Katie and I talked about many things: our radically different childhoods, our families, intimate relationships, the challenges of teaching and scholarly work, selfcare, work/life balance, travel, the joys of grandparenting and great-aunthood, and the current hideous political moment. Winding through all these subjects, our conversations were always also explicitly about race and racism. I learned so much from Katie on so many levels, I can't begin to give an account of all the ways she influenced me.

One thing I learned was the burden of being the first in so many ways, with all that meant for maintaining a particular public persona—a burden I am sure contributed to her too-early death. I remember a weekend Katie spent with my partner and me, when she had come to give a lecture at Smith. We talked a lot [End Page 125] about race and racism all weekend, and at the end, I was very tired. But I realized afterward that it was all the more tiring to be Katie, and that the essence of my privilege as a white person was my ability to cycle in and out of conversations about race and racism. However much I may choose to think and talk and read about race, I cannot do other than move through my days unmarked—and even cultivating an awareness of being unmarked is an act of vigilance, self-education, and will.

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nahisi Coates says, "But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth." Insofar as I understand what Coates means by this, it is because of my friendship with Katie. For this and for so many other things, I am profoundly grateful to her and miss her deeply already. [End Page 126]