Speaker issues challenge
By Kristi Walker
Staff Reporter

Americans today are more acutely aware that the wars of racism and tension stand between more than just the black and white communities, Harold J. Recinos said to an audience of Brite Divinity School students and faculty Tuesday night.

Recinos discussed the issues of America’s view of Hispanic immigrant assimilation, history of racism and American society’s role in addressing immigration.

“Latinas, latinos have been made scapegoats for overcrowded schools, spreading of disease and even the declining numbers of the white race,” Recinos said.

Recinos, a professor of Church and Society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, has worked in community activism on issues related to immigrant and refugee rights in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Recinos offered a challenge to Hispanics, Americans and the church to evaluate the society in which they live. Racism permeates America’s culture systems and means of identifying one another, he said. America needs to get past the color line of only seeing each other as a race and get to the borderline where citizens try to understand each other and other cultures, he said.

“We need to assess how we think of ourselves nationally and how we determine who ‘belongs’,” Recinos said.

Coordinator of the Borderlands Center for Latina/o Church Studies Ismael Sànchez said he agreed with Recinos’ view of using history and innovation to learn from and explore new possibilities of integration and immersion.

Sànchez said people need to learn about each other’s cultures and histories to allow us to have better relationships.

Tiffany Vann, a freshman kinesiology major, said the lecture showed how different aspects of culture can be used to create conflict among races.

“It is amazing to hear how much the religion and history of a nation intertwine with racism,” she said.

This lecture was the first in this year’s series brought to Brite/TCU community by the Borderlands Center to explore what the intersections of faith and culture look like. The center offers opportunities to the community and TCU to learn more about Hispanics in the Southwest and borderlands, Sànchez said.