Elevating Black Voices

This article first appeared in the GIA Quarterly 32.3

“There is some beauty, the beauty of some flowers, that only grows in the darkness of night,” he wrote, in his first letter to me. Roger Holland and I made a commitment in late 2019 to embark on a sacred journey together—to walk through the liturgical year with one another in an exchange of letters to explore our diverse perspectives about what it means to be Catholic music ministers. It was a lot for me to ask him to do—to commit to a year of writing about race and liturgy, a year of vulnerability between two acquaintances who really were only beginning to know one another in a professional capacity. I am humbled that he said yes.

We couldn’t possibly have known that we would end up sending the majority of our exchanges in the midst of a global pandemic, a prolonged season of loss and uncertainty, and a wave of national protests and riots against systemic racism. When I read them back now, I see the heartbreakingly beautiful, painful, real, and raw work of accompaniment as two companions poured our vocational love and anger to one another.

Like most white people who try to engage in a conversation about race, I am frequently awkward and stumble through my sentiments. It is hard to know how to start. I began by telling him how the last few years have been some of the most politically charged of my lifetime, as I’ve watched a divisive rhetoric rip through our nation, our church communities, our families.

It has been too convenient for some of us to simply vow not to raise politics at our holiday dinner tables, but I cannot ignore the impact of the hate-filled atmosphere that surrounds us. For some, these last few years have been increasingly uncomfortable. For others, fatal. I feel helpless for this. I can’t help but ask myself if I am part of a solution or part of the many problems that have led us here.

I loquaciously tripped through my questions about symbols and metaphors, using lots of words that really just meant: “help me, please?” Embedded into his response was the most gentle and loving invitation to listen: “There is some beauty that only grows in the darkness of night.”

Getting comfortable with discomfort

The work of dismantling a system of racism is both personal and communal. As individuals, the work of listening, learning, and engaging looks different for each person. You can choose your pace. You can take breaks. Corporate efforts can be more difficult to negotiate, as the risks and ripple effects tend to raise the temperature more quickly.

After the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and so many other Black brothers and sisters in the spring of 2020, many organizations took a hard look at their own role in systems that repeatedly harm the Black community.

As part of GIA’s own reckoning with our part in those systems, we took steps to examine all of our relationships and publications, and to hold one another to account. Because we have such enduring and rich relationships with the African American Church, we feel particularly accountable to take up this work, to avoid the tendency to proclaim past successes, and instead confront our complicities.

Alongside other partner organizations that began to issue their own initial statements, GIA issued this public commitment:

GIA opposes racism in all its forms, including systemic racism, injustice, cruelty, and oppression. We stand with the Black community. We emphatically state and believe Black Lives Matter. As a company, we are committed to conducting business based on these values, and through ongoing dialogue to holding ourselves accountable.

In addition to this statement, we began to further evaluate our relationships with individuals and organizations who were unwilling to commit to this value. In doing so, we stand with our composers and authors who have been hurt and disappointed over many years by their experiences with organizations in regards to diversity, and with many others who have expressed concern to us about feeling neglected or ignored. This statement of solidarity was long overdue, and in no way satisfies that which we know is lifelong work.

Elevating Black voices

In the previous issue of GIA Quarterly, I suggested that there is work we can do to help elevate these underrepresented voices:

Are all of the beloved songs of your community written by white people? Are the spirituals your community knows arranged by white arrangers? Does your repertoire list reflect a fullness of the image and likeness of God, or does it only reflect the God who looks like you?

These questions added to our process for selecting music and arrangements guides our process for hymnals, as you may find reflected in our forthcoming Gather—Fourth Edition. Comprised of a diverse body of music ministers from across the nation, the hymnal committee reviewed each song with intense scrutiny and discussion that included deeply intentional focus on representation.

We favored spirituals arranged by Black composers. We included more music from the Black Catholic community, and we avoided the tendency to include upbeat Gospel music as the only offering from Black Catholic composers. We resisted the urge to pigeonhole a culture or a composer into what we “think it should sound like.” Listen for more about this focus as we unroll the hymnal later this year.

Elevating Black voices also means ensuring that they will be at the decision-making table. Building on the incredible offerings of Black Catholic composers like Dr. Kim Harris, W. Clifford Petty, Thomas W. Jefferson, and Jalonda Robertson, Roger Holland will be the series editor for the In Spirit and Truth music series, founded by our World Library family and showcasing the treasury of Black Catholic liturgical music of today. Learning more and more the offerings already available by these gifted artists gives me great hope that our sung prayer is alive and well, urgently calling us to let it shine.

Let yourself be changed

I think for many of us, part of the ongoing discomfort is that there is no recipe to “fix” this, once and for all. There is no list of boxes that can be checked so that we might be “done” with racism. There will always be more that we can do—more to learn, more hard work, more making room and finding new ways we are being called to more just ideals. I wish it were easier, but 400 years of inequality cannot be righted overnight. The work of re-membering this body broken is the work of many lifetimes.

To say our exchanges have been pure gift doesn’t do justice to the selflessness, grace, and true labor that Roger continually shows to me. The least I can do in return is be changed by his example. To make more room where I can, to make a point to allow Black voices to more often have the first and last word. To treat metaphors and symbols responsibly, so that we’re not always escaping darkness for light, but rather appreciating that, in fact, “There is some beauty that only grows in the darkness of night.”