Discerning Justice

A. Taiga Guterres

when i was about eight years old, I moved to a neighborhood with a high concentration of Japanese people. My mother, being from Japan, finally had somewhat of a community where she could speak her native language and have a felt sense of home. But some time in middle school, I found out that nearby in the neighborhood had been a site for a Japanese internment camp at the height of World War II. That was why my mom had other people to talk to in her native language. Once I became aware of this, there was no unseeing it for me.

Anytime I saw the town or met another Japanese family, there was always that ghost of what had happened to those who looked like me almost 80 years ago. The consciousness of this history forever changed how I saw and related to my neighborhood and home.

About five months ago, I happened to be in Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered, and the third precinct was burning. The anxieties of quarantine fatigue and the unsettled cries for justice continued as I came back to Boston. Out of the signs that many were holding, there was one in particular that haunted me for weeks. It simply said, “60 years later.” And while I am not African American, and have not experienced police brutality, it was clear to me that here, too, there was a haunting and scratching of open wounds that started long ago.

It stirred in me these questions—What does it mean to heal from these historical and embodied wounds? What am I looking for when I call for justice and how am I to think of this as a person of faith?

For some, the murder of George Floyd has ingrained the reality of racialized traumas into their visceral memory. Yet, for others, this was an event that has cut into a wound that has always been there. In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, there is an emphasis on both memory and imagination. But in my discernment for justice, whose memory do I include and whose imagination?

As a Catholic, I’m called to draw from the sacred Scriptures, but I’m also called to draw from the richness of the tradition. Catholic social teaching challenges me to discern justice in light of things such as the common good, the option for the poor, and solidarity. Saint Oscar Romero pushes this even more concretely in his notion of epistemological privilege. This notion is that those who are experiencing the injustices—the marginalized and crucified peoples—have a certain privileged knowledge of what is wrong and of what is needed. This is whose memory and imagination I must faithfully incorporate into my discernment of justice.

In my own community here in Boston and in my parish, I am continuing to be more conscious of the haunting of racialized violence toward Black and brown bodies and the lamentations of their open wounds. My faith calls me to formulate a moral imagination that is informed by their epistemological privilege in order to authentically discern justice toward the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. ■

Antonio Taiga Guterres is the Assistant Director for the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. He is also a candidate for a Master of Arts in Theology and Ministry and Master of Social Work through the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.