Copy Desk Daily, July 13, 2020

Southern Africa's Catholic community spurred into action by Black Lives Matter. The Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, which covers Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland, has invited Catholics to dialogue on racism and racial divisions, even though "this is not an easy conversation, one that many of us may prefer to avoid." Patrick Egwu reports from Johannesburg on how the movement is drawing attention to incidents of racism and xenophobia in that region.

As the issues of racism and white supremacy have been thrust into the spotlight in the U.S., Sr. Colleen Gibson has found herself admitting blindness: seeing my blind spots and trying to do better. In her Horizons column for GSR, she says, "If we remain blind to our actions and intentions, carrying on what is 'normal' and thus perpetuating the racism ingrained in our society, we serve only ourselves and impede the work of movements that are trying to create change."

America needs a post-COVID national service program, and the bipartisan CORPS Act deserves our support, Yonce Shelton argues in a commentary on NCR. The legislation, recently introduced in the Senate, would fund 600,000 service positions for a three-year period of pandemic response and recovery.

Sr. Deirdre Mullan has spent much of her career tracking numbers and statistics. Every figure represents real human lives, she notes, and watching the numbers of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, she wonders about who gets counted and who gets left out.

Time for Biden to build a big tent, Michael Sean Winters declares. "Ambivalence be gone" on joining forces with Reaganites or others with whom Democrats may have ideological differences. "The goal is to win and win big in November — and then to set about the task of uniting this great country."

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