“As a Black woman who has been a member of the Catholic Church all of her life, it never occurred to me while growing up that being both Black and Catholic was an anomaly,” writes sociologist Tia Noelle Pratt in the introduction to her new book, Black and Catholic: Racism, Identity, and Religion (Notre Dame Press). Despite having deep Catholic roots reaching back centuries, Pratt found herself frequently having to explain the existence of Black Catholics to people for whom Catholicism was either overtly or covertly coded as white.