Reverend Irene Monroe talked with students about the rewards and challenges of developing a diverse community as the 2014 Martin Luther King speaker. Rev. Monroe is a pastor and syndicated religion columnist. Her writing focuses on how religious intolerance and fundamentalism perpetuate other forms of oppression, like racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism. A Brooklyn native, Rev. Monroe graduated from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. She served as a pastor at an African-American church before attending Harvard Divinity School as a Ford Fellow for her doctorate.
“We may speak up about certain oppressions, but not others. That silence makes us willing or unwilling participants in prejudice. This is the hierarchy of oppression. If we only concentrate on race, then we ignore other issues, like gender or sexual identity. You can’t heal the world of its ‘isms’ if you can’t heal the ‘isms’ in yourself.”