Alison M. BENDERS. Recollecting America’s Original Sin: A Pilgrimage of Race and Grace. Collegeville: Liturgical Press Academic, 2022, pp. 158. $19.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-8146-6508-4. Reviewed by Dolores L. CHRISTIE, Cleveland, OH

As I opened the book, I was prepared for another ho-hum description of racism in the United States. Professor Benders’ treatment was a delightful surprise. She uses a very different lens to observe racism in this country. The reader joins a pilgrimage of prayer and enlightenment guided by an upper class academic, the author. Written beautifully, the book uses marvelous metaphors to nail the message. The author combines her own experience and growth with the wisdom of scripture. She walks through the history of racism, recapitulating decades of horror, change, and hope. The main message, delivered powerfully, is to “hear” (shema) and take action, as Hebrew scripture commands.

The book is much like the four weeks’ Ignatian Exercises. Week One relates the author’s own misgivings about this journey. As she travels the history of slavery and racial strife in the south, she takes the reader deeply into Ignatian prayer. She describes vividly the place, the feel, the real of what happened. With her the reader revisits Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, those who crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge. Each scene evokes a reference to scriptural passages and accounts: the Exodus, the plaintive utterances of the psalmist, Jesus before Pilate, Jesus “giving over his spirit.”                                               

Week Two moves further into the south. The echoes of slavery still haunt many areas where Benders lived as a child. Her descriptive skills are exhibited exquisitely in her account of the devastation of hurricane Katrina in the “lower” ninth ward of New Orleans. She notes that “lower” meant more than geography. It refers to a persistent “tragedy of indifference” toward people of lesser value (read: poor, non-white) than the average New Orleans citizen. She speaks of the flood waters being “emancipated” as the levees broke. One cannot miss in the image the chains that bind together poverty and slavery.

Week Three moves beyond New Orleans to other cities that represent the oppression of Blacks as well as the Civil Rights movement it sparked. We meet the “characters,” but see them in context and in relationship to today. We stop at Selma, the Montgomery Memorial for Peace and Justice; we hear echoes of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” of lynched Blacks and the Ku Klux Klan.

The final week the journey travels north and to Cleveland, Ohio. With the author the reader walks the streets of the inner city, where in the 1960s in the Glenville neighborhood protests raged. Even as “white flight” continues today, there are sounds of hope. Intentional integration and removing covenants that keep persons of color from buying homes in restricted neighborhoods become practice.

The book contains an extensive bibliography: some scholarly, many by the cream of Catholic scholarship.  Included also are church documents that deal with these issues. Who should read this book?  It would be a profitable addition to a college class that explores racism in the United States. But I would recommend the book as well to almost anyone.  Narrative is always more a more powerful instructor than a litany of facts. Even more powerful is a first-person story from the lips and heart of someone who has walked and lived the pilgrimage in consort with her Black husband. Not to mention the racial bias—to put it mildly—that her family has experienced. It is a quick read.  I was going to say “easy,” but the emotion evoked in its description is not easy. Aside from a few purple patches—perhaps more elaborate description than necessary to make a certain point—it is very well written and compelling.