West Cook News

Crime, anonymity and discord among neighbors and racial polarization are inevitable, and River Forest residents shouldn't "long" for a community without them.

That was the message of "racial healing" expert and McCormick Theological Seminary professor Reggie L. Williams, who kicked off Mayor Cathy Adduci's "White Accountability" re-education series for caucasian village residents at Dominican University with a lecture titled, "Longing for Mayberry: How Cultural Ideals Serve as Weapons of Exclusion."

Mayberry, North Carolina was the fictional setting for The Andy Griffith Show, which ran on CBS-TV in prime time from 1960-68.

River Forest Mayor Cathy Adduci founded the "white accountability" re-education series her white constituents. | Village of River Forest

Williams argued that River Forest whites improperly glamorize “Mayberry, that fictional idyllic, where the police have no work, everyone knows one another, and differences do not include race" because its residents don't fear crime and aren't required to pursue "diversity" or race-training initiatives, as Mayberry has no black residents in the show.

The "ideals" of Mayberry are "Trojan horses for harmful practices" that favor "white land-owning males," akin to "Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa," which were "ideal communities populated with the ideal persons," Williams said.

Williams said white River Forest residents should reject "white aesthetic propaganda" and the "European" narrative in favor of “real, concrete embodied social interaction” like the Harlem Renaissance.

“Vitruvian man is something of an ideal," Williams said, referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s late fifteenth century drawing of a man with outstretched arms and human form, inscribed in a circle and square.  

“The answer to the math problem (in da Vinci’s drawing) is the perfect dimensions of the ideal body," Williams said. "And as you can see that’s a European white man."

"The work of man as universal human must be undone," he said. “It’s no exaggeration to say the well being of the planet is at stake in conversations like this."

“White supremacy, race-based slavery, the writing of the Declaration of Independence, were ideals born in the same moment, in the same Western spaces, ironically with the same intent," Williams said.

The seminar was moderated by Amy Omi, coordinator for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Center at Dominican, run by Chief Diversity Officer, Precious Porras, who joined the school from University of Kansas last winter.

“Dr. Williams comes to Dominican University at a moment when we as an institution are discovering what it means to be truly anti-racist”, said Omi. “That is, how do we disrupt the ideas, the policies, and practices that maintain racial inequity within our community, and how do we do so through a theological lens."

Williams, whose title is Professor of Christian Ethics, played college basketball at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif. from 1991-95 before playing professionally in Australia. He grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, Calif. community of Manteca.