As a young man, I was introduced to the spiritual practice called the "examination of conscience." It is a good way to reflect on yourself and your life and improve it in line with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The examination calls us to consider the wrong we've done in thought, word, or deed. But it also calls us to consider our sins of omission, which is to say the good we could have done and didn't.
Back in 2011, I was listening to a friend complain about the plight of ethnic and racial minorities in the USA. I still remember the discrimination I lived through as a child in the Texas school system, which tried to X out our Latino/a and Mexican heritage, culture, and identity. We've come a long way, to be sure, in the struggle for human rights and equality, but as most of us know, we still have a long way to go. As my friend described her experience, it dawned on me that she had not experienced direct racism or discrimination, but rather she had been a victim of what I call racism of omission.
Racism of omission is everywhere, but as a Franciscan I especially see it in religious institutions. Often it is not so much what an institution does to or against a person of color (African American, Latino/a, Native American, Asian American, Middle Eastern...) as much as what it omits to do. For example, when I was in the seventh grade, I was finally able to go to a non-segregated school. I had been a bright student in the Mexican-American elementary school I attended and was used to being called on often. When I suddenly found myself in a classroom with "white" kids, I realized that the teachers would not call on the Latino/a kids. The teachers were not explicitly discriminating against us. They pretty much simply ignored us. Theirs, however, was an overt sin of omission. Racism of omission dictated that teachers prefer to support and encourage the white students. They were usually never mean to us or insulting of our origins; they simply did not give us the opportunity to show what we knew or could do.
Sadly, good Christian institutions like schools, parishes, and Church communities fall into racism of omission without ever really thinking about it. I would call them to practice a good examination of conscience and reflect not only on how they are overtly racist but on how they have practiced racism of omission. When attempting to make your institution more welcoming, consider what you could do to make it more welcoming to people of color. Is your bulletin only in English? Why isn't it in Spanish or Vietnamese as well, for example? When you invite guest speakers to your programs, are they always white men and women? Why don't you invite Lebanese, Nigerian, Brazilian, or other specialists from racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities? The answers to these questions will vary, and many of them are rationalizations and justifications for racism of omission.
More recently, our religious and educational institutions have pretended to be gender inclusive by referring to Latinos, Latinas, and Latines as LatinX, trading the gendered o, a, and e endings for an X. I, for one, resent that label and refuse to be X'ed out. Coming from a lifetime of having educators and others try to X out my Latinidad, I find LatinX troublesome. Many people and institutions adopt it without ever considering what it implies and how it affects Latino/a/es. Here the omission is no longer an oversight. It becomes a choice.
That is the difference worth naming as we mark the years since I first wrote this reflection in 2011. The racism of omission I saw in a seventh-grade classroom was, at least, unconscious, the fruit of habit and comfort rather than intention. What LatinX represents is the same omission but now dressed up as inclusion and chosen in plain sight. The examination of conscience must come to terms with both.
A cursory search today turns up several thousand pages using the phrase racism of omission. The reality it names is old. The naming is not. Carmen Nanko-Fernández's 2010 book Theologizing en Espanglish already credits me with the term, a year before I sat down to write this reflection, and I had been speaking of it in conversation and in presentations before that. Neomi DeAnda, a friend and fellow theologian, has spoken with me about this same reality, using the language of racial omission, or what she also calls the invisibility of race. She points to how mainstream discussions of race in the United States operate on a rigid Black-White binary, one that omits Latino/a/es and other ethnic and racial groups from the conversation entirely.
Sociologists have only recently caught up: Social Problems devoted a special issue to the concept in 2025, and related experimental work appeared in the Du Bois Review not long before that. As far as I can tell, in Latino/a/e theological circles and perhaps beyond, I may be the one who gave this reality its name. It seems the theologians were there first to address the issue; it is, after all, a sin, and sin requires a good examination of conscience in the movement of conversion.
The examination of conscience is a good practice for those who wish to improve their social and spiritual life. Reflecting on your institution's racism in what it thinks, says, does, or fails to do (cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissióne) will help you bring racism of omission under control and, hopefully, to an end.