Critical Race Sausage
When Chicago's Catholics met Harold Washington
[This essay was developed out of the research from my new novel Rosemont: A Novel of Rosemont, currently available for purchase on Smashwords and Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I like the book a lot and I hope you'll consider reading it; some of the writing process involved researching the Archdiocese of Chicago in the 1980s, and some of that research made for a very good G.O.T.H.S. subject.]
Chicago is segregated, and you still have to use the present tense for that. Through a combination of historical immigration patterns, discriminatory housing practices, punishing austerity in the public sector, and a million variations on "people being racist", our city continues to buckle under economic, social, educational, and countless other types of inequality. Mayors from Richard Daley to Rahm Emanuel to incumbent Lori Lightfoot have happily pursued policies that ensure that the richer and whiter parts of town stay that way, and the parts of our city where brown and black Chicagoans live are left to bleed and starve and die. This is what the mayor of Chicago usually considers to be the main thrust of their job.
Except for one mayor in our history, Harold Washington, who served from 1983 until his death in 1987. He was the city's first black mayor, and the public library and a city college are named after him today. Washington, a former state senator and U.S. Congressman, ran for mayor on an explicitly redistributionist platform, built around diverting wealth and resources from the rich white downtown areas to historically under-resourced neighborhoods, as a corrective measure for the long-term structural inequality in the city. He held campaign rallies in public housing projects, and spent every Christmas visiting inmates in the Cook County Jail, because he had once been one himself. His was a campaign for the poor in Chicago, one that faced significant opposition during the 1983 election - where white Chicagoans who had voted Democrat all their lives couldn't bring themselves to vote for him - and after the election - when twenty-nine white aldermen banded together to deadlock Washington's City Council for years.
One important Chicago public figure who was supportive of Washington's mayorship was the Archbishop, Joseph Bernardin. While Bernardin did not formally endorse anyone in the mayoral election, he was clearly impressed by Washington's commitment to economic justice and remained a reliable partner on key issues throughout his mayorship. I’ve told several stories on G.OT.H.S. in the past where bishops have made bad decisions for shallow racist reasons, and I’m thrilled that this is not that kind of story. Instead, this is the story of the laity doing that.
We'll start by understanding how Washington built the coalition that got him over the finish line in 1983. To help with that, here is a detailed and exhaustive ethnographic map of 1983 Chicago:
Washington’s campaign worked for and ultimately delivered previously unheard-of levels of turnout and support among black voters in the south side neighborhoods; completely blowing out the black vote in both the primary and general election were key to Washington's victory. These were neighborhoods Washington had represented in the legislature earlier in his career, and he had built up a base of constituents who showed up to support him when he returned to Chicago.
One area where Washington overperformed expectations was with Latinx communities on the west side of the city. In the general election, Washington ran against a white Republican running an explicitly racist campaign whose only plank was “we can’t let a black man be in charge of Chicago”; this is not an exaggeration, as candidate Bernard Epton was literally running ads that ended with “EPTON - BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE”, which...well, Chicago politics have never been known for their subtlety. So, the West side communities also came out to support Washington against Epton, and it wasn’t close. Without the votes from these neighborhoods, Washington would not have been mayor.
One area where Washington underperformed expectations was with the “lakefront liberals”, labeled on the map as “(Unintentionally) Racist White People”. These are affluent middle and upper class voters who are loyal to the Democratic party, but are also suckers for any candidate promising reform politics, anyone who would stand up to the party machine. Washington was clearly the reform candidate in the Democratic primary - the other two candidates were the incumbent mayor and the son of a previous mayor - but the votes along the lakefront did not materialize for Washington, because when push came to shove, these voters could not bring themselves to vote for a black man.
But the focus of this piece is on the group with whom Washington performed exactly as expected: the intentionally racist white people on the Northwest and Southwest sides. These are neighborhoods that were longtime enclaves of what city politicians called the "white ethnics": Polish and Italian families in the Northwest, and Irish families in the Southwest. These large, working-class, immigrant communities were also loyal Democratic voters, and they had no problem with the party machine that gave them reliable jobs; the powerful machine politicians like the Daleys and the Kellys all came from these neighborhoods. These parts of the city were very Catholic - you could find one Catholic church every square mile in these wards, each overflowing with families - and, as the 1983 election and its aftermath showed, they were pretty racist. In the primary election, Washington received basically no votes from the white ethnic wards, and in the general election, lifelong Democrats in these parts of the city defected to the Republican candidate in unthinkable numbers in order to prevent a black man from becoming mayor. Extrapolating implicit racist intention from the voting patterns in one election is, I'll admit, a big stretch. So we also have to look at the explicitly racist actions that these neighborhoods took before and after the election, actions rooted in their understanding of Catholicism.
One of the most notable came during a general election campaign stop at Saint Pascal parish on the Northwest side. Washington was scheduled to attend Palm Sunday Mass with presidential hopeful Walter Mondale during Mondale's visit to the city, but Washington never made it in the church because two hundred protestors showed up to scream at him and block the church's entrance during Mass. Again, I can't just assume that these people were acting with racist motives, except for the protestors holding signs that said "WHITES FOR EPTON". Or the ones holding signs that said "VOTE WHITE, VOTE RIGHT". Or the ones with the campaign buttons that just had a watermelon with a "no" slash through it. Or the one who spray-painted "NIGGER DIE" on the doors of Saint Pascal. But the other ones may not have been racist at all, to be fair.
The “white ethnics” also had a history of organizing their neighborhoods and parishes; in the 70s, several predominantly white parishes on the Southwest side formed the Southwest Parish Neighborhood Federation, which was originally funded by Catholic Charities. These were the neighborhoods where Martin Luther King marched for housing justice and got chased out of town, and where Catholic clergy like Francis Lawlor urged their parishoners to "hold the line" against black people integrating their streets. Despite that, the SPNF did start with some perfectly fine, non-racist goals like keeping out predatory real estate lenders and building a new neighborhood library, but they very quickly mutated into something worse.
In the 1983 election, SPNF directly asked the mayoral candidates for commitments to cancel a planned low-rise public housing development on the Southwest side, which on the surface looks kind of racist. They tried to flex their clout as a voting bloc throughout the election as a "pro-ethnic-white" interest group, which also looks kind of racist. And they also explicitly stated that part of their group's mission was to "protect property values" in their neighborhoods, which looked even worse. The SPNF leadership wrote newspaper op-eds warning that Washington's policies would result in "the most rapid and complete white flight that this city had ever experienced", which didn't fix the "looking kind of racist" problem. And after their once-formidable power as a voting bloc failed to keep Washington out of the mayor's office, they joined with the other white ethnic parishes on the Northwest side to form the "Save Our Neighborhoods/Save Our City Coalition", officially moving their group's tactics from "dog whistle" to "whistle".
SON/SOCC, which grew up out of old Catholic parish organizations, was formed primarily to oppose Harold Washington. They primarily opposed Harold Washington because of his race, and because they assumed that as a black man, he would have a vendetta against people of their own race. They were represented in the City Council by the white aldermen who were banding together to deadlock every vote and keep Washington from accomplishing anything; these aldermen, led by Ed Vrdolyak, did so explicitly because Washington was black. I'm not making assumptions here: Vrdolyak told his fellow aldermen that "it's a racial thing. Don't kid yourself. I'm calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct. We're fighting to keep the city the way it is." Again, Chicago politics are not known for their subtlety.
But SON/SOCC was also Catholic. They formed out of parish groups. They met in parish halls and churches, with a crucifix hanging above their heads, to ask "how do we stop our black mayor from giving resources to other black people?" But, remarkably, the archdiocese kept slapping the SON/SOCC down for using racially charged rhetoric. Monsignor John Egan, who was a trusted friend and advisor of many of the SON/SOCC leaders, thought they were going way too far, told them that repeatedly, and eventually cut off the flow of archdiocesan resources to what he thought had become an explicitly racist anti-Washington group. In response, Jim Keck, a member of SON/SOCC, really said this real thing which is real, and I had to emphasize the reality of this quote three times because it will blow your mind:
"I...wish the Chancery would stop siding with City Hall against the interests and just concerns of the people. If the Chancery and some of the local pastors continue to look upon the bulk of their parishoners in the city with indifference or scorn, they should stop eating the kielbasa and pasta that their parishoners lavish upon them and go to work in the inner city where their loyalties lie. Fat chance, most of these guys would rather be smug than mugged."
I read this quote months ago, and I have thought about it every single day since. I will probably be thinking about it on my deathbed. The idea that the "just concerns of the people" only count if they come from white people, and could be divorced from larger injustices in the city. The juxtaposition of decrying "indifference or scorn" with casually hoping that some priests get mugged. The laid-back racism of suggesting that clergy loyalties actually lie with the “inner city” Chicagoans who would mug them if given the chance. Most staggeringly, the thesis that these Catholics had earned the right to tell the hierarchy what to do through some kind of sausage-based barter system. It's incredible. In the past two years, I've combed through so many sources trying to get a better understanding of how American white nationalist Catholicism grew into what it is today, and I'll never find a quote that sums up the whole situation so perfectly or so hilariously.
Because for groups like the SON/SOCC, Catholicism was inseparable from whiteness. The parish was the neighborhood, was the faith, was the race, was the identity, was the sausage-based cuisine, and all of it was in danger of being taken away by an outsider; if the things around them became less white, then what was to stop the parish or the neighborhood or the faith from crumbling? Whiteness was something that they assumed was under attack, and something they assumed the Catholic church would have to step in and defend. Whiteness was the ability to go about their day without having to think about the suffering and oppression happening blocks away, because if they were confronted with that suffering, and if they were actually honest about their faith, they would have to do something about it. They might have to sacrifice something or be uncomfortable, and the alternative would be admitting that their faith was never that serious to begin with. That was not an attractive set of options, so defending whiteness was where they ended up.
Harold Washington faced racially-charged opposition throughout his entire tenure as mayor, but overcame much of it over time and was decisively re-elected to his office. He died at his desk in 1987, early in his second mayoral term. Estimates for the number of Chicagoans who attended his memorial service are as high as five hundred thousand; by comparison, two hundred thousand Chicagoans came to see the Pope say Mass in Grant Park in 1979. The "white ethnics" were not the only bloc in the city that opposed Washington's mayorship, but they were the one that most visibly made their faith, the faith that built their neighborhoods, a cornerstone of that opposition. And this wasn't a very long time ago; members of this group and this City Council bloc are still around. One of Washington's most prominent political opponents, Alderman Ed Burke, is working today as…the same alderman in the same white ethnic ward he represented back in the eighties. This isn't part of Chicago's “history” or the church's “history”, it's part of our present.
You can probably guess where I'm going with this: this is still part of the church everywhere, and parts of the church's leadership embrace it. White Catholics are still very much into defending whiteness, and are still refusing to see the suffering in front of them. When you see Archbishop Sample saying that protesting for racial justice is a waste of time, or Bishop Stika saying “racism is not a political issue”, or Bishop Barron going on his weird crusade against “wokeism”, or other efforts by the institutional church to minimize or ignore the realities of racial injustice in today’s world, know that none of it is new. Hell, before Robert Barron became a bishop and spent all day online railing against critical race theory, he was a pastor immediately northwest of Chicago, in a historically “white ethnic” suburb, so in a way he is very directly carrying forward the warped gospel of the anti-Washington days.
Barron and his coworkers are the intellectual heirs to the SON/SOCC, to the people who say "please, I don't want to think about race or suffering or injustice, that's not important, can't you just shove a casserole in my mouth and talk about something that doesn't threaten my own status and comfort." The leadership of our church is not just overwhelmingly white, they are overwhelmingly committed to whiteness as something to be defended, because that is easier than addressing the suffering right in front of them. These men grew up with this, and they're very obviously not smart enough or informed enough, or interested enough in getting informed, to grow out of it. With leaders like this, the institutional Catholic church in America has become an active impediment to justice and equality in this country, and anyone seriously interested in building a world modeled on the teachings of Christ will run away from us as fast as they can, the second that they see how our sausage gets made.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments. This essay is adapted from my new book Rosemont: A Novel of Rosemont, which you can now purchase at Smashwords or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Sources used for this piece include:
Faraone, Dominic E., "Urban Rifts and Religious Reciprocity: Chicago and the Catholic Church, 1965-1996" (2013). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 254. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/254
Millies, Steven P. Joseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground. Liturgical Press, 2016.
Peterson, Bill. "Washington and Mondale booed by angry whites." The Washington Post. 28 March 1983. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/03/28/mondale-and-washington-booed-by-angry-whites/a74396af-4a19-4c14-93e9-37441737fa17/
Rivlin, Gary. Fire on the Prairie: Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race. Henry Holt and Company, 1992.