Why Bishop Boxie Didn't Flinch at the DEI Label

Some insults tell on the person saying them.

That was my first thought reading Bishop Robert Boxie’s comments about being called a “DEI bishop.” He didn’t scramble to soften it. He didn’t perform wounded outrage. He more or less said, if you think I’m here because I’m Black, I can live with that. There’s a steadiness in that response that I admire.

Not because the label is fair. It isn’t. He plainly said his education, formation, and ministry speak for themselves. The point is that he refused to accept the terms of a small, mean little game that a lot of church people know how to play.

And yes, I said church people. We can dress prejudice up in pious language faster than we’d like to admit.

The dog whistle everyone heard

Boxie called the phrase a dog whistle, and he’s right. “DEI bishop” is a way of suggesting someone got promoted for appearance instead of merit, without having to say the ugly part too directly. It lets a person sound clever while keeping their hands clean.

I’ve heard versions of this kind of thing in Catholic spaces for years. Not always about race, not only about bishops, but always with the same chilly implication. We all know why this person is here. As if someone’s presence needs an asterisk beside it.

That does something to a soul over time.

What struck me most was how plainly Boxie named the deeper problem. When he was asked why there are so few African American bishops, his answer was short, almost painfully short, racism. Not bureaucracy. Not bad luck. Not some vague pipeline issue floating down from nowhere. Racism.

A lot of Catholics can handle racism as a historical topic. Safer that way. We’ll talk about sins from long ago with solemn faces and then get terribly nervous when someone points out an undercurrent in the present tense.

I’m not sure why this still surprises us. Actually, no, that’s too generous. I do know why. It’s easier to imagine the Church as embarrassed by racism than touched by it.

Holiness has a face, and sometimes we narrow it

Boxie said Black Catholics need stronger advocacy in the hierarchy, parish life, and even in the Church’s understanding of holiness. That last part stayed with me.

Because holiness is never abstract for ordinary people. We learn it through faces, voices, habits, grandmothers praying in worn pews, choirs that carry grief without making a spectacle of it, men who show up early to unlock side doors and count collection money with quiet reverence. If those lives are missing from how a Church sees itself, something gets distorted.

I keep thinking about his comment on responsibility too, being one of very few Black men in elite schools and institutions and carrying not only his own future but also a sense of debt to those who were denied those opportunities before him. That felt honest to me in a way polished church statements often don’t.

Years ago, after Mass, I stood in a parish parking lot talking with a man who told me he was tired of being treated as if every step forward by a Black Catholic had to be explained away as symbolic. He laughed when he said it, but not because it was funny. More like because if he didn’t laugh he might say something sharper than church coffee hour could handle.

That conversation came back while I read this story. Sometimes what wounds people isn’t open hatred alone. It’s suspicion dressed up as discernment.

Also, small tangent here, but parish coffee somehow always tastes like penance to me. Maybe that’s part of our shared ecclesial identity too.

The seminary room next door

The detail I can’t shake is the Confederate flag hanging in the seminary room next to his.

Not on a random street corner. Not in some anonymous online comment section where cowardice thrives. In seminary.

Boxie said he was taken aback and refused to enter that room while the flag remained there. I don’t blame him for one second. Some symbols aren’t neutral conversation starters waiting for charitable interpretation. Sometimes they say exactly what they say.

And this is where I get frustrated with fellow Catholics who want every account like this filtered through endless caveats so nobody feels accused too quickly. There is such a thing as patience. There is also such a thing as asking wounded people to do all the emotional heavy lifting while everyone else gets credit for being measured.

The Church teaches the dignity of every person. Boxie said that clearly too, along with the painful truth that Catholics have not always been faithful to that teaching when it comes to racism. That shouldn’t be controversial among us. It should be obvious.

Still, obvious things become strangely hard once they ask anything from us.

What would it look like if more Catholics heard Bishop Boxie without immediately translating his words into partisan categories? Not left or right, not culture war code, not HR jargon projected onto apostolic ministry. Just listened.

A young bishop says Black Catholics need advocates in the hierarchy because too often they haven’t had them. He says racism remains an undercurrent in Church life because he has seen it himself. He says if some people reduce him to his race anyway, he won’t let their reduction define his calling.

There’s grit in that. Also peace.

Maybe that’s what unsettles people most, when someone names an old sin calmly and keeps walking toward the altar anyway.

I keep picturing that apostolic letter in his hands and thinking about all the young Black Catholics watching from pews or phones or some half-interested distance they learned for self-protection years ago. What might change if they saw not just one bishop appointed, but a Church willing to hear what he’s saying?