From Dr. Stacey Patton, a journalist and professor at Howard University. Re-posted from social media.

Deep sigh.

So there’s chatter over a genealogist’s discovery of the new Pope’s Black relatives. The sudden excitement over a drop of Black ancestry in his bloodline is… weird.

As if that one ancestral thread is going to cleanse centuries of colonization, genocide, child abuse, and anti-Blackness woven into the very fabric of the Catholic Church. This institution literally weaponized Christianity to justify slavery, declared entire continents heathen wastelands, and baptized the whip before it struck the backs of Africans.

Do people think that a sprinkle of melanin in the papal family tree is some kind of moral redemption arc?

The Catholic Church has always been a war-mongering, imperialist machine. It funded conquest. It erased Indigenous cultures. It turned confession into control.

And it’s not like Black Catholics haven’t been sitting in pews for centuries, watching themselves be erased from religious iconography, leadership, and liturgy, all while being told to forgive white supremacy in the name of Jesus. But suddenly, because this Pope’s great-great-great somebody might have been Black, people think the Vatican might finally be about justice?

This is racial symbolism theater at its worst. Ancestry ain’t activism.

Unless that Black ancestry shows up as radical disruption, reparations, reformed doctrine, and full-throated repentance this is meaningless. Symbolic Blackness in a sea of institutional whiteness is just seasoning for white supremacy.