Sidebar: Thoughts about racism

* Racism "impacts our decisions on where we live and where we send our children to school. It frequently determines whom we count as friends and with whom we spend our free time. We are very often a society separated by color. Albany, the capital of New York State and the largest city in our county, is segregated in many aspects and it is becoming more and more a city of color....

"Study circles create more than just talk. An evaluation of a program in the Cleveland area, where 700 citizens have participated, showed that people changed their attitudes about race as a result of their study circle experience. In Lima, Ohio, where over 2,000 citizens have taken part, participants have done everything from building new playgrounds to winning minority representation on a regional development board."

-- from a TRAC grant proposal

* "Racism is a sin: a sin that divides the human family, blots out the image of God among specific members of that family, and violates the human dignity of those called to be children of the same Father....It is a radical evil....To struggle against it demands an equally radical transformation, in our own minds and hearts as well as in the structure of our society."

-- from the U.S. bishops' 1979 pastoral letter on racism

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