This season of INTEGRAL we are exploring how issues of racial and ethnic justice intersect with the common good. Pursuing racial and ethnic justice today requires the critique of structured patterns of racial privilege and systemic racial injustice that adversely impact all of us in the United States. Pursuing the common good requires us to acknowledge and dismantle what ethicist David Hollenbach, S.J. terms “the common bad.”

And yet, there have been serious obstacles to a forthright engagement with issues of racial privilege and implicit and explicit racial and ethnic injustice in the United States and in the Catholic Church because as theologian Fr. Bryan Massingale notes: “we don’t know what we are talking about, we don’t know how to talk about it, and we don’t really want to talk about it.” Our hope this season is to talk about it – engaging what is at stake for racial and ethnic justice and the common good.