I am stunned at the speed with which Wokeism has taken control of many of our institutions. On the national level, it has inserted itself into the N.B.A., MLB, and the N.F.L. Many major corporations have allowed it to infect its operating system—Bank of America, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, Gillette, to name a few.
But locally, too, the movement has swept through our
not-for-profits and educational institutions like wildfire. The new American Writer’s Museum went from a
special exhibit featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder and a live performance of
readers of Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to featuring an obscure
transgender author alongside Kathy Griffin in just a few months. The Newberry Library went from a celebration
of Herman Melville to sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour and launching a vigorous
campaign to rid the city of Columbus Day.
The University of Chicago, the originator of its laudable Free Speech
Principles, shut down admissions to its graduate English Department to all but
Black Studies scholars.
Most troubling is the grip it is now asserting over our
primary and secondary school system, threatening to indoctrinate young minds with
its pernicious creed. James Lindsay has
brought to light its overt strategy, comparing it to a virus that hijacks its
system to self-replicate. In The
Parasitic Mind, author Gad Saad similarly
asserts that Wokeness and CRT acts as a parasite, infecting its host and
sucking the life out of it.
And now it has infected the local Jesuit High School, Loyola
Academy. Imagine the horror and
revulsion of the caring, devout Catholic parents that sacrifice to scrape up
the $16,000 per year to ensure that their son or daughter receives an education
aimed at forming the whole person as a responsible, family and community
oriented citizen, only to wake up and find that he or she is being shamed for
the color of their skin and subjected to a large BLM sign (whose stated
objectives are the destruction of the nuclear family) now proudly displayed in
the school. A large group of parents, dismayed and angry,
has formed an opposition group to oppose the teaching of CRT in the school, has
put up a website and is organizing a campaign to attempt to put a stop to
it.
While I share their dismay and anger and I am very
sympathetic to their cause, the parent group
faces an uphill battle to expunge CRT from the school. The Loyola administration has turned itself
into a hardened target. The parents
opposing CRT are trying to persuade the administration to hearing them out—they
are playing the Persuasion Game. The
school’s administration has already foreclosed that—it is now playing the Power
Game, not the Persuasion Game. It is not persuadable.
In order to stand any chance of successfully dislodging the
poison of CRT, the parent group will need to decide how close to the Buzzsaw
they wish to get (See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Dark Horse Podcast
#82 5/29/21 – Avoiding the Buzzsaw)—being maligned as “racists,” otherwise smeared in social media or canceled. The propagators of CRT know this. Parents do not want to put their kids in the
crosshairs of controversy during their high school years.
To start with, they will need to do two things: recognize
and acknowledge that outgoing Father McGrath was a terrible steward of the
school, and they must be willing to litigate.
McGrath cannot be seen as a reasonable or positive actor in
this drama. His primary job as leader of
this institution is to educate and train young men and women to become critical
thinkers, to lead a Christian life as “men and women for others,” to foster a
“Loyola community” and to be cognizant of, and prepare against, the threats
that institutions like Loyola will face in the future.
McGrath has failed miserably in his most essential tasks. Under his aegis, the school has been torn
apart. There is no Loyola community
anymore.
By permitting CRT to take root in the school, McGrath
allowing intellectual and emotional abuse of these young men and women. This is substantively no different than the
sexual abuse that was endemic in Catholic institutions and he is responding in
the same fashion—stonewalling and setting up impenetrable defenses.
McGrath has manipulated the board of trustees, shrunk it to
rid itself of dissenters (apparently using some “emergency” bylaw
provision. He has engaged PR firms to
deal with this. The sympathetic column
written by Clarence Page was clearly arranged, with Page declaring it a
“tempest in a teapot.” It is not
that. It is a fundamental battle over
whether Loyola students are going to be intellectually abused. McGrath’s quote in Clarence Page’s column is
revealing, stating that he seeks critical thinking about race. CRT does NOT welcome critical thinking about
race. It does not tolerate dissent from
its views. Already, other Woke parents
are labelling those that oppose CRT as “racist.” No apology for this has been forthcoming from
those parents or McGrath.
McGrath correctly identifies racism is a sin. But McGrath does not offer any evidence at
all that racism has been an issue at the school. Specific incidents of racism should be dealt
with on an individual basis, just as Rocky Wirtz, president of the Blackhawks
did when 2 fans made racist comments at a black player. They were summarily removed and permanently
banished from the United Center. Loyola, it appears, is and has been a very
welcoming place, a place where black, Hispanic, Asian and white kids can all
thrive.
I would advise the parent group to watch the film Spotlight
to see what they’re up against with respect to the Catholic Establishment. In that case, it was the sexual abuse in the
Boston Archdiocese. Here, it is
emotional and intellectual abuse that McGrath is welcoming into the school. In addition to the documented “white shaming”
that he has permitted to go on, he has permitted a large Black Lives Matter
banner to be prominently displayed in the school. In addition to be led by avowed Marxists, BLM
is anti-law enforcement (“What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.”), antisemitic, and its mission is explicitly
anti-family and has no inhibitions of using violence to achieve its ends. It belongs nowhere near an educational
institution, much less a Catholic one.
Moreover, he ignores its real aims—to displace a free and liberal
society borne out of the Enlightenment with a Marxist one. McGrath has demonstrated that he has not
followed Ibraham Kendi very closely, nor has he become acquainted with the
writings of CRT’s progenitors—Michel Foucoult, Antonio Gramsci, or Herbert
Marcuse.
Further, McGrath fails to understand that Wokeism and CRT
are antithetical to Catholicism. Intellectual
leaders such as Douglas Murray, Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter and others have
correctly identified it as a new religion, complete with its own scripture and
clergy. It is a religion that will
compete with Catholicism. By embracing
CRT, Loyola is no longer a Catholic school.
It is a Woke school. Over time,
they cannot coexist. The Kairos
retreats, which dealt with the development of the individual and spiritual
growth will now focus on race—and the oppressed and the oppressors.
McGrath (and the board of trustees) needs to be called out
for what he is and what he has done to this once fine school.
What to do? I don’t
have a dog in this fight. My children
are long gone. My interest only is in
pushing back against this insidious intellectual abuse of children.
I know what won’t work.
Withholding donations won’t matter much. While Mr. Purcell’s loud withdrawal of
support is laudable, organizations that have been taken over by Woke and CRT
have shown that they really don’t care as long as they can hijack the
organization for their purposes. Even if
half the funds dried up, and Loyola reduced its enrollment by half, the CRT
crowd consider it a victory—a North Shore school pumping out Woke teens.
Letter writing won’t work.
One writes to persuade and this administration is well beyond that.
The only path to satisfaction---and there is only one that I
see—is through litigation, carefully orchestrated with a skilled PR firm. This administration will do nothing until
costs are imposed on it. I have
identified at least four potential claims that could be made against the school
and there may be more. The litigation
needs to be coordinated with a PR firm.
McGrath has apparently employed one.
The parents need one to even the playing field. The parent group has done a good job of
documenting the abuse on their website (kidswinloyola.com) but they will
continue to get stiff armed and outflanked by an administration that is
determined to shut them out, and treat them with contempt.
The parent group should take a cue from one of the New
Jersey girls that lost in the state finals to a transgender athlete. She is suing, making it very public and has
launched a very public campaign on social media to promote her cause. A girl is Oklahoma likewise has filed claims
because she was dropped from her volleyball team because of her political
beliefs. And we all know that Nick
Sandman of Covington would have languished after being demonized by the media
until he filed claims against the media giants.
In addition to filing claims and engaging in a public PR
battle, they should demand access to classrooms, especially those classes of
teachers that they know are teaching and promoting CRT. Knowing they are being policed may help
curtail the indoctrination.
The Catholic Establishment knows how to defeat dissent and
deflect charges of abuse. It is very
skilled and has a great deal of resources at its disposal. The parents group will need to re-think its strategy
if it does not wish to be ground down.
Another institution has fallen. If it can be restored at all, it will take a
tough, bruising, and expensive fight to restore it.
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