A Critical New Study on Black Catholics

My entire career has been about ending the erasure of Black Catholics from academic and public discourse. A refrain I've heard throughout my career across religious and racial lines is "I didn't know there were any Black Catholics." After more than 20 years of doing this work, this refrain persists despite the decades of brilliant, influential work by Black Catholics on Black Catholicism. This is one of the reasons I began the #BlackCatholicsSyllabus and articulated from the outset that the point of the syllabus is to prioritize the voices of Black Catholics in the creation of our own narrative. It's also why this week's Pew Research Center report, "Black Catholics in America" is the data I dreamed of having as an undergraduate and graduate student. I also dreamed of having a report like this in the years since I finished graduate school.