Understanding Hagar through the Eyes of Race and Ethnicity
- Understanding Hagar through the Eyes of Race and Ethnicity
As I write this reflection, the white ex-police officer associated with George Floyd's death is now convicted; the Proud Boys are in downtown Portland, Oregon, fifteen minutes from where I live and teach; and faithful citizens continue to protest anti-Black racism. Off on a bluff not too far away from the city center sits Oregon's only Catholic university, where I work. Only 1.3 percent of its student population is Black or African American. None of its priest faculty or priest administrators is Black or African American, but then again, among a roughly 51 million Catholic population in the United States, only 1 cardinal, approximately 5 bishops, and only 250 of 37,302 priests are African American (with another 75 priests of African descent). In this Catholic university on the bluff, my task as a white Catholic Dominican sister and professor of theology (biblical studies) has been to dismantle racism in my undergraduate classroom while decolonizing my syllabus and myself, the teacher in the classroom. This task of dismantling and decolonizing began with new and contextualized interpretations of the Gen 16 and 21 Hagar-Sarah-Abraham story that led to a deep understanding of racism among 27 students. This essay addresses three pedagogical shifts that paved the way to a deeper understanding of racism in life and in the Bible.
Step 1: Shifting from Historical Criticism to Feminist Critique
As a teacher engaged in the work of reading and interpreting texts with students, before I could facilitate the learning of deconstructing and dismantling texts for racial justice, I first had to deconstruct and dismantle myself. I had to shift from the world behind and of the text to the world in front of the text. I had to move from the nineteenth-century world of author-text-meaning to the twenty-first-century world of critical hermeneutical interrogation of biblical texts [End Page 183] in the context of present day sociopolitical and religious global realities. I had to read "against the grain" not "with the grain," and I had to confront and deal with my own intellectual colonization from twenty-eight years of Catholic education where racism in my social location was never mentioned and feminist studies were disdained.
Not until I encountered my colleague Susanne Scholz and her writings in 2017 did my journey of self-decolonization and move away from historical criticism begin—a journey late in life that led me into feminist studies and all its intersecting hermeneutical approaches. In 2017, I "woke" more fully to the world in which I was living, and my research and teaching began to take on new life as I learned to read texts with oppressed, marginalized, and disempowered groups. I had been reading texts like a "good Catholic," with the hegemonic malestream! This waking experience also led me to "see" in a new way my only Black department colleague, Simon Aihiokhai, from Nigeria. Simon is the first Black person ever in our theology department of ten faculty. His presence in the department was also the first time I had ever worked with a Black person. Having lived and grown up in the northeast part of the United States, and having been a child whose family, like many others in the early 1960s, fled to the "white" suburbs, my entire educational experience, from third grade through graduate studies, was "white." As a friendship developed between Simon and me, and as we exchanged stories, I gained a deeper understanding of anti-Black racism from his lived experience of it. Then, when I reflected on my experience of being a woman in what was a hierarchical, patriarchal, hegemonic all-male department for years, I saw how Simon's experience intersected with my own lived experience of sexism. And I understood my friend's pain and erasure because it resonated deep within me. Oppression of any kind, whether it is racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or any other kind of discriminatory term, and all their intersectionalities, is systemic.
Step 2: Shifting from Texts to Students
Now awakened and with new information gained, I was able to understand...
