|
Greetings of peace!
 Last week, Pax Christi USA was invited by Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) to submit testimony for a hearing on "Ending Racial Profiling in America" for the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. The hearing was called to explore the different faces of racial profiling, including discriminatory law enforcement against African Americans, state immigration laws in Alabama and Arizona that subject Hispanic Americans to heightened scrutiny, and anti-terrorism efforts that target American Muslims. The hearing also examined proposed solutions to racial profiling, including the End Racial Profiling Act, closing loopholes in the U.S. Department of Justice's racial profiling guidance, and the Justice Department Civil Rights Division's enforcement of federal civil rights laws to prevent profiling by state and local law enforcement agencies. Pax Christi USA submitted the following testimony.
Pax Christi USA's mission to create a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence. Pax Christi USA is committed to establishing strong, honest, caring relationships-both personal and institutional-across racial lines in order that together, with the whole Body of Christ, we can transform structures and cultures of violence and domination.
As U.S. Catholics, the right to be judged by the content of one's character rather than the color of one's skin is a sacrosanct value, and essential to the virtues of freedom and liberty which stand at the heart of our national and religious traditions. Actions which threaten to undermine this value, like racial profiling, cannot be accepted or tolerated if we are to be true to who it is that we say we are as a nation.
Racial profiling is a symptom of the persistent and destructive systemic racism that perpetuates violation of rights and violence against humanity. We believe it to be a manifestation of a deep spiritual and social brokenness which must be named and transformed...
To read the rest of the testimony, click here.
Additionally, Pax Christi signed onto letters sent to Members of Congress urging them to co-sponsor the End Racial Profiling Act.
|
