There is a wonderful and welcome irony to the fact that the Trump administration is working to sideline or silence the history of racial struggle in the United States while the new American pope is raising the profile of that struggle in a very unexpected way.
It’s remarkable enough that Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, is the first pope from the United States, and the second to spend much of his career in Latin America. But the real revelation is that this man from Chicago has roots in Creole Louisiana, specifically the Seventh Ward neighborhood of New Orleans.
“Creole,” which originally referred to French and Spanish-descended people who lived in the territory before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, has long referred to an ethnic and racial gumbo of people with Black, French, Spanish and Native American heritage.
It’s a unique subset of Black America, one that brings together a complicated and unresolved history of slavery, miscegenation and white fear of “race mixing” that gave rise to the local and state laws known as Jim Crow that enforced segregation after the Civil War, especially in the South.
This is Pope Leo’s history, courtesy of his maternal grandparents and great-grandparents who lived in the Seventh Ward and were quickly identified by a New Orleans genealogist as Afro Creole. The pope’s father has been described only as French and Italian, but it’s noteworthy that Prevost is a name familiar in the Seventh Ward.
Also noteworthy is that the pope’s brother, John Prevost, confirmed that the family has Black roots, but said he does not identify as Black.
All of this would be merely interesting were it not for the fact that being Black, including Creole, is never just a fact, it is a political stance. That was certainly the case for Creole people, despite an assumption among some observers that being lighter-skinned exempts them from racism or puts them above the fray. To the contrary, it puts them squarely at the center of it.
I was born in Los Angeles but my family is Creole, from the Seventh Ward. Stories about “the oId country” I heard growing up included stories about the almost panicked efforts of white people to police the color line in New Orleans, to cleanly separate the races.
Pope Leo has been outed, so to speak, to the great astonishment and satisfaction of Black people and particularly of Creoles. When I told my mother about his lineage, she was amazed, and then stoked — there is no other word for it.
She’s stoked not just because a Creole from the provincial Seventh Ward has ascended to the world stage. He’s also the pope of an ancient, all-powerful church that was part of the racial elite that made life in the American South so suffocating for people of color.
Yet, in their insulated neighborhoods, Creoles made the Catholic Church into a community institution that was as culturally Creole as red beans, jambalaya and Mardi Gras. It was markedly different from the mainstream church, one of many ways Black people made the most out of segregation.
This church migrated west along with the waves of Creoles who left New Orleans for Los Angeles in the 1940s and ’50s — my family among them. Los Angeles was the last big city that promised more opportunity and, as important, less obsession with the color line.
Like so many immigrants in their new home, they re-created aspects of the old one. Creole traditions flourished, mostly in Crenshaw and South Central, in churches like Transfiguration, St. John of God, Holy Name, St. Anselm.
My uncle Leon Aubry was a barber and entrepreneur who was also an activist involved in Catholics United for Racial Equality in the 1960s, amongst other local justice campaigns. His younger brother Larry, my father, was also an activist who was emphatically not a practicing Catholic; the way the faith was segregated in New Orleans offended him, he told me.
But he respected the traditions of family, of all the things that shored up Black people’s identity and dignity and held it together through hard times. The church was one of them.
When my parents were growing up, there were no Black priests or officiants. The Catholic schools virtually everybody attended didn’t even have Black or Creole teachers or administrators.
White priests and nuns were not always sensitive, to say the least, and could be clueless about the racial subtleties of the Seventh Ward.
That Leo himself doesn’t publicly speak about his Creole heritage (at least not yet) is a kind of “passing in plain sight” that many Creoles know very well. But his silence thus far doesn’t really matter: They know who he is and where he comes from.
I’m sure none of this sits well with Donald Trump — if he’s even absorbed it — given his push to reassert the full power of a white American state — a fight that’s become almost religious in its fervor and its refusal to compromise with Americans and other residents who aren’t powerful or unambiguously white.
The president will be sharing the global spotlight and influence with a pope who personally knows all about the hypocrisies, lies and fear that built America’s racial hysteria, which has been checked at points but never extinguished, and is now threatening to consume us all.
Creole people have brightly illuminated the existential threat to democracy posed by that hysteria throughout America’s history, and fought against it. Hopefully Pope Leo will provide more illumination at another very critical moment.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is an award-winning journalist who examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California. This article was produced by Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.
