Right Out the Gate: A Performative Auto-Ethnography on Race, Place, and Faith

Abstract

Racial justice rhetoric is approached via collaborative auto-ethnography and oral interpretation, demonstrating how race, place, and faith intersect in a community devoted to religion and education. Community narratives wield immense power, but they are never complete. Stories and the cultures that retell them are alive and growing, so finding a voice can influence change. When racial justice voices are gradually over-written and forgotten, archival research and a commitment to engaged scholarship can identify and hold up historical leaders as role models. This article reintroduces a largely forgotten Catholic leader, Monsignor Thomas G. Fahy, into higher education’s narrative on race. Freie’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides a theoretical frame for an auto-ethnography relating pentimento “un/re/discovery” of Fahy leading to a digital oral/aural performance of some of his most enlightened speeches. Northern New Jersey saw widespread civil unrest and violence in the 1960s, and rather than turn away, Fahy turned “right out the gate” to listen and collaborate with Newark’s racial justice activists. Conclusions include a need for sustained attention to historical justice leaders in nurturing positive futures and the socio-political power of storytelling as a digital/oral rhetorical form.