The Circular Firing Squad Arrives at Jesuit Antiracism School

A Jesuit educator weaves Critical Race Theory into Catholic Social Teaching; another priest demonstrates why, then, your children now have the devil to pay.

Argument: Jesuit students naturally begin as a band of brothers dedicating their lives to defeating the enemy—injustice. 

In the new Jesuit Antiracism schools, whose trinity is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the band of brothers discovers that they are in fact diverse identities, and some of those identities are aligned with and benefit from the enemy. 

Because these identities do not exist in harmony, the band of identities eventually forms a circular firing squad. Such a firing squad is not uncommon in matters political, and always presents a threat—one that requires struggle sessions to avoid exile but that may be alleviated by conformity and acquiescence.

This submission to approved perspectives—Good Think—occurs through the use of narrative and “lived experience” in order to manipulate the emotions of your children.

An incident that occurred in New York’s Central Park on Memorial Day 2020 provides a case study on the uses of narrative, a study that features a major figure in Fordham University’s Department of Theology, Fr. Bryan Massingale. This case study illustrates the dangers that shaping “truth” out of personal stories and lived experiences will have for all children attending a Jesuit school.

First, however, let us walk across Fordham’s Rose Hill campus and begin with the president of Fordham Preparatory School, Fr. Christopher Devron, S.J., who answers a question.

Part 1: “Should Catholic Schools Teach Critical Race Theory?”

The first “others” for whom you care are those with whom you go to school over four years, your own Jesuit band of brothers, each one a distinctly unique personality—each created in the image of God, alike in that each possesses a soul sparking the inner life.

Many of those individuals in the band become lifelong friends, and all of them remain forever linked in a chain of Jesuit being anchored to the high school, where each entered as a boy and emerged as a man for others.

It remains to be seen how much longer the rather idyllic band of brothers (or the band of brothers and sisters in the co-ed Jesuit high school) can exist at the Jesuit Antiracist School.

The Jesuit provinces have recently enfolded the trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within the shrine of Antiracism.

In the wake of 2020’s summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matters, the Jesuits, as we have observed in a previous post, reformed Domain 5 of their 2015 document Our Way of Proceeding: Standards & Benchmarks for Jesuit Schools in the 21st Century. 

The revised domain includes for the first time “anti-racism/anti-bias training for board, faculty and staff, and students.” 

Jesuit school personnel will work “to eradicate barriers between and among people such as misogyny, homophobia, and gender and socio-economic stereotyping and discrimination.”

The school will strive “to ensure that each community member experiences full acceptance, going beyond acceptance of difference to the experience of difference as a way the Divine is encountered in new and fuller ways.” Here is a direct reflection of Critical Theory’s reliance upon “lived experience” as a “way of knowing” what is true.

When and how one knows that the experience of “full acceptance” has been achieved is not directly mentioned.

The “art of genuine listening” will be taught so as to “promote equitable, deeper understandings of different backgrounds and perspectives.”

How “understandings” can be “equitable” is not explained.

This revision of Our Way of Proceeding circulating throughout the provinces was joined in June 2021 by a striking article, appearing in America, written by Father Christoper J. Devron, S.J., the president of Fordham Preparatory School.

In “Should Catholic Schools Teach Critical Race Theory?”, Fr. Devron examines the nature of the challenge faced by the leadership of independent private schools across the country, including Jesuit secondary schools. Since “the tragic murder of George Floyd,” the school leaders have been responding to the “growing demands from two (different) groups of alumni, parents and students.”

Reflecting the “larger movement of racial reckoning across institutions and sectors simultaneous with last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations and protests,” the leadership of these schools “heard painful stories ranging from neglect in some cases to outright disrespect and targeted, racist bigotry in others. Their preponderance and similar texture and character give credence to the veracity of these stories and the collective harm done over several decades and generations of students.”

According to Fr. Devron, the black alumni, parents, and students telling their stories, their “lived experiences,” have demanded that “their schools implement curriculum, student formation, hiring and programmatic measures to promote greater diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

Fr. Devron informs us that the various new DEI measures “adopted and announced” during the 2020-21 school year have provoked a “backlash from other groups of parents and alumni,” some of whom, Fr. Devron notes, apparently for clarity, “often expressed their opposition through anonymous letters.”

These critics “warn that critical race theory is Marxist and therefore anti-Catholic.” According to Fr. Devron, they urge schools to “either downplay, ignore altogether or transcend race in order to recover and emphasize the common humanity that unites us.”

The conflict between those “who favor solutions from critical race theory” and those “who prefer a common humanity approach” follows, says Fr. Devron, a “predictable pattern of polarization,” mirroring the secular division seen in “political discourse” between “cultural conservatives and progressives.”

While it is likely that the culture-war aspect is merely one of many layers in an increasingly stratified national community, the polarization is, I agree, “predictable.”

This conflict has “engulfed” some Jesuit schools, and it is “inimical to our mission and damaging to the body of Christ,” says Fr. Devron.

However, in an environment that transforms individual human beings into identities in opposition to one another, hostility naturally emerges. I would think such an emergence would be expected.

What is far more concerning is not this particular polarization but why the Jesuit provinces have responded to the summer of 2020 with an even more polarizing approach than DEI—the embrace of antiracism.

At this point in his essay, Fr. Devron proceeds to focus on what distinguishes the specific Catholic school response when addressing the conflict between these two groups: Catholic Social Teaching.

And it is here that Fr. Devron reinforces, in my view, what has become a problem for the Society of Jesus and much of the Church itself since Vatican II. 

He reminds us that the 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, “encourages Catholics to engage the human and social sciences as they strive to promote human dignity and justice in society. (54)”

This document regarding the “circumstances of the life of modern man“ was issued during a period in which the Modern World was already being undermined by the Postmodern World, and which has now successfully superseded it.

Postmodernism is a rejection of Modernism’s reliance on Reason, Objectivity, and Science. It is a rejection of Universal Truth and Free Will, and an embrace of subjectivity and personal realities. 

To ignore how postmodernism has distorted and corrupted the Church’s necessary engagement with the world is, at minimum, unwise.

This distortion is demonstrated by Fr. Devron himself when he justifies the attempt to weave Catholic Social Teaching together with Critical Race Theory.

Fr. Devron states that Catholic Social Teaching “affirms at least one significant element of critical race theory—namely, its claim that racism exists in systems or structures, as opposed to consisting merely of private acts of bigotry committed by individuals.” (The italics in this quoted statement are mine.)

Yes, “sin and evil manifest themselves in social structures” because sinners form all structures. A structure—slavery, gulags, concentration camps, to name three—may even be thoroughly evil. But a structure is not a sinner.

Nor does asserting that racism exists within a structure make it so.

Human beings are responsible for structures, institutions, and systems, but whether any of these remain racist now or are inherently so is determined how exactly? By pointing out racial disparities in social and economic matters? Do those demonstrate systemic racism, or does systemic racism cause them? This circular reasoning aside, what makes the racism “systemic” remains an assertion left unexamined and unproven.

Where lies individual agency in all of this, or is the individual simply a pinball within a systemic racist machine?

One of the curious elements of Critical Race Theory is its manipulation of language to assert a claim—systemic racism is the cause, for example—as though it is beyond dispute. And the claim itself destroys individual responsibility. The human soul, the human will is irrelevant here. The practical lesson for boys and girl in Jesuit schools is this: if I do not achieve my goals, it’s the system’s fault.

Since Vatican II, both the Jesuits and the Church have been freely borrowing from a postmodern conception of structures and systems that, through Critical Theory, becomes this and this only: if racial disparities exist, racism is the cause.

Fr. Devron continues in this vein: While Pope Francis and Catholic Social Teaching “deviate from critical race theory in other areas,” both Catholic Social Teaching and Critical Race Theory have a similar approach to “systemic racism.” 

Their similar approach, declares Fr. Devron, is this: “White people don’t get a moral pass by simply refraining from overtly racist acts. Rather, they must examine racial biases within systems; reflect on how they participate in and benefit from these biases; and then take deliberate action to change them.”

This approach is not similar to Critical Race Theory. It is a necessary assumption of Critical Race Theory.

Fr. Devron, as noted above, declares that the existence of racist structures and systems is “at least one” significant element of agreement between Catholic Social Teaching and Critical Race Theory.

“At least one” suggests there are likely more significant areas of agreement. And of course he and the Jesuit provinces, who see God in all things, are sure to have found them.

In fact, Fr. Devron brings up only one basic deviation from Catholic Social Teaching existing within Critical Race Theory. That deviation is directed at the heart of Catholic teaching regarding the imago Dei, which “holds that each person is created in the likeness and image of God and is therefore deserving of dignity and respect.”

Critical Theory has no such heart.

But not to worry…

“Appropriate attention to the imago Dei,” says Fr. Devron, “may reveal shortcomings in Critical Race Theory, at least from a Catholic perspective.”

May reveal, he says. That auxiliary verb may is a rather flimsy reed to carry the weight of Catholic Social Teaching when leavened with Critical Race Theory.

“Insofar as critical race theory relies on racial essentialism,” Catholic Social Teaching “renders it untenable,” admits Fr. Devron.

But only insofar as, of course. While some adherents of Critical Race Theory may say for public consumption that they reject race essentialism, all adherents ply the language of race essentialism—whiteness, for example—with ease.

As do any Jesuit educators who lead their charges down the rabbit hole of implicit bias so that these students recognize their all-too-white privilege and their all-too-white complicity with racism.

This weaving of Catholic Social Teaching with Critical Race Theory allows Fr. Devron to declare that Catholic Social Teaching “invites Jesuit educators to foster the capacity of our students to recognize racism in all of its forms—both in their personal implicit biases and in systems and structures that perpetuate unequal opportunity still today—and to oppose them vigorously through concrete action.”

The idea that a person possesses an “implicit bias” arises from Critical Theory, which is wedded to the slender notion that each of us possesses unconscious feelings about other identity groups that control our behaviors toward them. 

It is a postmodern notion that conveniently explains how one identity group (whites) can keep other identity groups under its collective thumb without realizing it. 

Those who promote the idea that you possess implicit bias are executing a tactic: You may believe you are not a racist, assert the advocates of implicit bias, but you are complicit in it anyway because you have implicit biases that you don’t know about. But don’t worry about this: we’ll dig them out of you so that you can acknowledge them. Then we’ll proceed to shame you into action to dismantle all the structures that your implicit bias has been maintaining. 

This is a corruption of Catholic Social Teaching. It distorts the idea of individual agency and free will. It says that no matter how justly you try to live your life, you still support and benefit from racist institutions and structures. 

It declares you guilty because you possess feelings you do not even know about. Oh, those unconscious feelings are not necessarily your fault. You too are a victim of the overall power of whiteness. But it will be your fault, you will be sinning, unless you acknowledge these implicit biases and then act to make amends. 

Antiracism requires that implicit biases be recognized and overcome. The antiracist school is designed to make that happen.

At another point in his essay, Fr. Devron declares that Vatican II’s engagement with the Modern World “rejects an approach” promoting “human dignity and justice” when that approach appeals “solely and simplistically to scriptural injunctions, such as ‘love thy neighbor as thyself,’ as an adequate response to racism.”

This is curious wording.

Are we to understand that “love thy neighbor as thyself” is simplistic when it comes to advancing human dignity and justice? Is the suggestion here that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are inadequate to the task at hand? Are we to understand that the Acts of the Apostles direct us insufficiently toward acting to end injustices? 

Is an appeal to the Word of God really another one of those “weak responses” to a serious human problem?

Surely there is more utility for achieving justice in Christ’s commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” than there is in digging out an “implicit bias” conjured up by a Critical Theorist who considers Christ a mythical figure? 

It ought give a serious person pause: can anything in Critical Race Theory be woven into Catholic Social Teaching without corrupting the latter?

All of Critical Theory rejects the imago Dei, which Fr. Devon rightly notes is “woven throughout the Christian Scripture.”

But…

“One rarely arrives at a truly Catholic position through ‘either/or’ thinking,” says Fr. Devron. It takes “careful discernment and thoughtful reflection” on the Church’s social tradition to “embrace a ‘both/and’ mindset and produce solutions that incorporate seemingly opposing perspectives.”

But what if that discernment is less than careful? What determines how thoughtful such reflection is?

What the Jesuit provinces have adopted as their response to our summer of 2020 is Antiracism, which is an either/or approach. 

Antiracism is not a “seemingly” opposing perspective. 

But it is the perspective that is currently advanced at Fordham Prep—as it is now at other Jesuit secondary schools committing their institutions to antiracism, schools such as Gonzaga Prep in Spokane and Brophy Prep in Arizona. As at Fordham, each student in the Jesuit Antiracism School will be taught “how to become an active participant in the work of anti-racism.”

Part 2: Re-engineering Your Child’s Psyche

In the world of the average family, whose concerns naturally gravitate toward the practical, one might think that being antiracist is nothing more than being virtuous.

As a parent of children, or as an alum, you likely consider yourself antiracist because you are not a racist. You know you are not a racist, and you have raised your children to know that racists are sinful and that racism is evil.

Just like the gentle everydayness of words like diversity, equity, and inclusion, antiracism is diction that appears unthreatening. It invites a “Sign me up” attitude.

The Critical Theorists have you exactly where they want you. Those who control the language now direct the Jesuit social justice mission.

You may believe ours ought be a color-blind society, but that belief aligns you with those who fail to see race and, therefore, remain willfully ignorant about how deeply racism is embedded in society. 

Fr. Devron echoes that assessment, for being color-blind with regard to race “fails to account for the historic remnants of racism that continue to perpetuate injustice.” In other words, Fr. Devron—and he is not alone—considers you benighted, a philistine perhaps, certainly unschooled, and likely suspect: you “fail to account for” matters he successfully accounts for.

Fr. Devron insists that Catholic Social Teaching “demands that we teach students what racism is and why and how to oppose it.”

And how does one oppose it? An antiracist opposes racism by supporting antiracist policies: this is the heart of Antiracism.

How Catholic Social Teaching requires the advocacy of antiracist policies will take quite the color-conscious discernment.

But that is now the way of proceeding at Jesuit schools, where Jesuit educators know what racism is and you don’t, where Jesuit educators know why racial disparities exist and you don’t, where Jesuit educators know how to oppose racism and you don’t.

Having raised your children to be “not a racist” now requires that someone, somewhere re-engineer their psyches. Jesuit Antiracism School will take care of that for you. They will graduate antiracists now.

Although antiracism in Critical Race Theory initially developed a few decades ago, it took Apostle Ibram X. Kendi to spread the Gospel. While Part 4 of my previous post, “In the Name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Amen.” discussed antiracism to some extent, let’s expand one key idea from the apostle.

In How to Be an Antiracist, he explains the core point: what matters is racial equity. 

Terms such as institutional racism, structural racism, and systemic racism are unnecessarily “redundant,” says Mr. Kendi, “since racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.”

For the antiracist, a far more exact term is racist policy because it is racist policy that “produces and sustains racial inequity between racial groups.” Racial inequity must be transformed into racial equity.

To achieve racial equity will require antiracist policies, which may very well include racial discrimination—which is not racist when it produces and sustains racial equity.

“If racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based upon that person’s race,” asserts Mr. Kendi, “then racial discrimination is not inherently racist.”

Your child will learn, then, that an antiracist supports racial discrimination that creates racial equity. Such discrimination is an antiracist policy.

If the mind reels when taking in the nature of antiracism, do not fear. The mind merely lacks the “radical re-orientation” of antiracist schooling, which Jesuit Antiracism School now offers.

Re-engineering the psyche to be antiracist requires “persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” To become and remain antiracist is lifelong work. Constant struggle. And that work, that struggle, begins at Jesuit, with the help of your tuition dollars.

The Jesuit Antiracism School is dedicated to teaching your children how to be antiracist. Why else would the Jesuits preface “racist” with “anti” in the third decade of the 21st century? 

The good priests and educators of the Jesuit provinces have adopted a way of proceeding that cannot be sugarcoated by platitudes. 

The vocabulary of Critical Race Theory proliferates at the Jesuit schools, the ideas associated with it poisoning the well of Catholic Social Teaching.

The logic of what the Jesuit provinces have decided to do crosses “men for others” territory into a circular firing squad. If logic were more valued, they would not be going there.

Part 3: Transforming Men for Others into Identities for Others

In the new Antiracism school, the first “others” with whom each student engages will not be brothers. The first “others” will be identities.

Specifically, the identity most prominent when talking about race and ethnicity: color.

[ Eventually, Jesuit students will see each other in their additional identities as well, for Critical Theory maintains that a person is a mixture of identities that intersect. Antiracism is always intersectional. ]

The Catholic appeal to the dignity of the individual person, when enmeshed within the Critical necessity of seeing group identity, must soon find itself overwhelmed by the demands that identity politics makes on an individual. And those demands come packed with emotions.

When identity is the focus, as it now must be, the bonds of brotherhood will weaken and may over time even collapse because the focus on identity requires each student to dedicate himself to the “constant struggle” that antiracism work demands. Struggle is a stressor.

An excellent overview of some ideas and training practices that may be incorporated can be found here at the Being Antiracist link at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Other training practices for schools (faculty and staff, and for students) regarding anything related to elements of Critical Race Theory can be found, for instance, here at The Equity Collaborative or here at Overcoming Racism, and at companies advertising themselves as consultants for Social and Emotional Learning, such as Empowering Education and Second Step. [Ah, Social and Emotional Learning: how benign that sounds.]

Racial identity has to be the focus in an Antiracist school, for “if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity,” states Mr. Kendi in How to Be an Antiracist. “If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies….Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.” 

Note the adverb potentially. Since antiracism, like all Critical approaches toward systems of power, is political, “terminating racial categories” will never happen. The Diversity bureaucracy will remain perpetually busy.

The move away from students as individuals toward students as identities is the logical outcome of the step-by-step incorporation of DEI into Jesuit schools. 

As DEI is coordinated with Antiracism, brotherhood becomes secondary to how you think about your identity and the identity of your brother.

Language itself becomes color-conscious as identity comes to the fore. 

Those who control the language control the debate.

And what is the debate?

There is none.

Antiracism alleges certain basic propositions about this country are realities already “known” by all:

• the United States is systemically racist,
• its institutions are racist, 
• its structures are racist, 
• those who are white are privileged by that racism from their birth, 
• those who are not white are victimized by that racism from their birth.

In the antiracism school, these propositions beg the questions. In other words, the truth of these premises is established merely by asserting them. The reasoning is circular—and fallacious.

Any racial disparities in education, income, health, crime or any other aspect of our social lives are disparities whose cause is attributable to this nation’s Founding, which embedded within the country’s DNA its racist core. 

This is the underlying proposition—the presupposition—of all discussion in the antiracism school. This is the premise understood to be true before any “honest” conversation begins, conversation that will teach students the “art of genuine listening.”

If any of your children question this premise, stating that they do not believe the nation is racist now…

If any say they do not believe that the nation’s Founding shaped racist structures and institutions that continue to this day…

If any of them go one step further and declare that this nation, while decidedly imperfect as is any nation, has nothing in the core of its Founding inherently racist…

Then the circular reasoning of the antiracist will advance toward the ad hominem attack.

Any disagreement by white students or teachers with the initial propositions serves as evidence of their complicity with racism, evidence demonstrating that radical transformations are required, evidence that their implicit biases must be rooted out, evidence that they are in a state of denial about their white privilege. 

That any black students or teachers might disagree with the initial propositions is evidence that their false consciousness must be addressed. If students of color have internalized the ideas and beliefs that are dominant in these institutions and structures, they too must be re-engineered.

The antiracist school “requires a radical re-orientation” of each student’s “consciousness.” His mind must be intentionally directed in order to graduate “doing justice.” That is what it means to become an antiracist, according to the Apostle Kendi, and the Jesuits are unable to make it mean anything else.

Antiracism does not seek different perspectives on the basic propositions. Antiracism guides everyone else, including your children, to those “known” propositions for the purpose of dismantlement.

George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” reminds us that “if thought corrupts language, language can corrupt thought.” He created a fictional language in 1984 called Newspeak, which, as the official language of Oceania, was designed “not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.”

There is nothing in the language of Critical Theories that suggests the antiracism school seeks “to extend” a student’s “range of thought” beyond what the antiracism school has determined is Good Think.

And how does a Jesuit Antiracism School engineer its students toward Good Think?

Pathos.

Pathos, the appeal to a person’s emotions, is older than Aristotle. And since Logic and Reasoning, since Science itself, is—like Aristotle—out of fashion in the world of Critical Theorists, pathos is the predominant mode of remaking the mind.

Adapting the language of Critical Race Theory to Catholic Social Teaching primes Jesuit educators for the pedagogy of storytelling, narratives, lived experiences, anecdotes, and “honest” conversations—a pedagogy of the oppressed—all designed to move young minds toward one singular way of perceiving and responding to social justice and injustice.

In the era of news streaming 24/7, events occurring thousands of miles away can create the stuff of useful narratives. A video gone viral supplies an instantaneous lived experience for public consumption. The passions it elicits are potent and combustible. 

Educators once understood the power of emotions but also understood that civil society requires human beings to act not upon emotion but upon logic and reason.

Schools once emphasized the art of public speaking and written discourse, of making the convincing case for a position through an argument crafted in all the modes of persuasion, with a decided emphasis on sound reasoning logically presented.

Nowadays, passion is the mode—the weapon—of choice.

Heretofore, adults guarded their charges against the natural inclination to succumb to peer pressure.  In the postmodern world, peer pressure is simply another tool, this one forged in the cauldron of adolescent emotions for the engineering of Good Think.

And such pressure finds release through other emotions: shame, guilt, anger, and resentment among them.

How many adults today say what they truly believe about “controversial” issues with companions at work or in the community at large? 

This silencing of oneself in order to avoid conflict is a common feature of the current era. But it is a survival tactic that the antiracist manhandles with ad hominem aplomb: your silence is violence. 

Teenagers may wish to remain silent, but is such “violence” to be permitted in an antiracism school?

Children with a highly formed ethical sense, who reside in a religious home with loving parents, who do not wish to disappoint anyone, can be easily manipulated into feeling guilty though they have done nothing personally about which they ought feel guilt. 

This manipulation towards guilt and shame may take place in a classroom under the trusted instruction of a teacher. It may take place among their friends—their brothers—whose victimhood has been established by their identities.

Antiracism, like all identity politics that stems from Critical Theories, advances the sought-for reengineering by engaging the passions. These provide a more certain means for establishing the antiracist policies and practices that will dismantle white supremacy.

It is, I believe, more likely that the antiracist school will succeed in unjustly abusing through the manipulation of their emotions children of all races than it will ever succeed in achieving the end of injustice.

If your children enter Jesuit not much caring about their racial identities, at the Jesuit Antiracism School all will learn to care: how else will your children be able to grapple appropriately with the consequences—for themselves and their country—of the Sins of their Fathers? How else can they acknowledge their white privilege and repent?

Perhaps this gives new meaning to the idea that your child’s school is a college preparatory school, for in the nation’s universities—with few notable exceptions—antiracism education and Critical Theories are nothing new.

Good Think is the norm there. 

As Orwell states regarding Newspeak, the purpose of the language of Good Think is “to make all other modes of thought impossible.”  

If Bad Think is not yet impossible, the Jesuits are doing their best to make it so.

Part 4: A Priest Presents a Master Class on the Uses of Narrative

Perhaps I exaggerate, you say. Well, in the Critical Theory manner, let me tell you a story.

The story is 70 seconds in length.

And it even appears on video, which is the story too.

One morning a woman was walking her dog in the park. Entering a part of the park with room to run, she unleashed her dog as she wanted to throw a stick so the dog would get some exercise by retrieving it. 

That same morning a man was birdwatching. He noticed the dog unleashed in a section of the park that required the leashing of pets. 

Here is the point where the man and the woman meet.

Here the story as we know it begins.

This story went viral and became “news” the same day, Memorial Day 2020.

We see that the story has a protagonist and an antagonist, the latter readily identifiable. The news coverage of the story added names: the protagonist, who is filming, is Christian Cooper. The antagonist, Amy Cooper. We learn they are not related.

The instantaneous news coverage of this video nailed the narrative nationwide—globally, even—and established the truth.

Two people meet, yes. But not until the camera is turned on does the story—the story, the one that reveals truth—begin.

What do we know now that we have viewed the story? What have we witnessed here this early morning in the park?

Well, let’s have a highly respected authority tell you what we have seen and what, thereby, we know.

After a black man tells her to obey the posted signs that require her to leash her dog in a public park, she tells him she’s going to call the police “and I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Then she does just that, calling 911 and saying, “There’s a man, an African American, he has a bicycle helmet. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” She continues, in a breathless voice, “I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble [a wooded area of Central Park]. Please send the cops immediately!” This despite the fact that Christian Cooper’s camera records the events and shows that he made no threatening moves toward her, spoke to her calmly and without insult, and kept his distance from her the whole time.

In short, she decided to call the police on a black man for nothing more than politely asking her to obey the park’s rules. And made up a lie to put him in danger.

The authority summing up what we have just seen is Father Bryan Massingale, whose essay, “The Assumptions of White Privilege and What We Can Do About It,” appeared in National Catholic Reporter June 1, 2020, within a week of the incident.

I recommend reading the essay in full as it exemplifies what happens when emotions are filtered through the “structural lens” of Critical Theory.

A significant figure for the Jesuits even though he himself is not a Jesuit, Fr. Massingale is the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics in Fordham University’s Department of Theology. A “noted authority on issues of social and racial justice,” Fr. Massingale, the author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, writes and speaks extensively on issues involving Catholic Social Teaching. 

The story he sums up was filmed in New York City the same day another story was filmed, one focused on the death of a black man, George Floyd, as a white police officer restrained him, his knee on the man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was eventually convicted by a jury of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. 

Father Massingale is writing during the first days of a tumultuous summer. It is an emotionally charged time for the country—and for him personally. 

He lists six specific situations of “the past few months (that) have pushed me to depths of outrage, pain, and despondency that are unmatched in my 63 years of life”: among those events are the ones involving Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and George Floyd. 

Also listed, and mentioned first, is the Covid-19 pandemic, which “shows that while all might be vulnerable, we are not equally vulnerable,” the pandemic having “infected and killed” Blacks, Latinos, and Native peoples far out of proportion to their percentages in the population. 

However, of all the events that have affected him recently, it is the event in Central Park that becomes the focus of Fr. Massingale’s essay because, although “not the most heinous” occurrence, “if you understand Amy Cooper,” the video’s antagonist, what is revealed is “how race works in America.”

What he relates in his essay about the factual details of the video is a received narrative created by the approved organs of information within hours of the video going viral.

Amy Cooper quickly emerged as the epitome of the “Karen,” a pejorative for what are usually middle-class white women whose behavior manifests their privileged position over members of a particular identity group—in this case, a black man.

Christian Cooper is a birdwatcher. He and Amy meet in The Ramble, a section of Central Park frequented by birders. He is the one who, as Father Massingale reminds us, turns on the camera and “records the events and shows that he made no threatening moves toward her, spoke to her calmly and without insult, and kept his distance from her the whole time.”

Before the world she has been exposed as an increasingly hysterical woman unnecessarily calling the police on a calm, reasonable, quite unthreatening black man. 

We hear his voice on the video. We hear hers and see her behavior. 

Along with calling the police on a black man, is she also going to throttle her dog too? She is to all appearances putting on a performance—the damsel frantic because the big bad black man has dared to ask her to follow the park’s rules.

And she is swiftly punished for it. 

Within 24 hours, she has been doxxed—her home address, phone number, and email are all over the internet. A crowd gathers in front of her apartment. She loses her job and the rescue agency takes back her dog: both the company for which she worked and the agency succumbed to the pressure they were receiving. 

By the end of the second day, she calls a news station and issues an apology for her behavior on a local news program. 

She left town, known to all as just another racist white woman. The media continued for perhaps two more weeks with stories about the incident—and what it means. Fr. Massingale penned his contribution for the National Catholic Reporter.

Narratives are the bedrock of all Critical Theory. The more striking the narrative, the more it fits within political parameters (the USA is racist at its core), the more it stirs emotions, the more solidly its reality becomes fixed in the national consciousness.

A truth—known in advance—is confirmed. 

Father Massingale says Amy not only lied about Christian, but that she lied “to put him in danger.”

He says the video shows that Amy Cooper called the police on Mr. Cooper “for nothing more than politely asking her to obey the park’s rules.” 

About this he is certain.

Amy’s words and actions “match what we know to be true about how the country works and about how too many white people think.”

About this he is certain.

Father Massingale is an expert on Catholic Social Teaching. He is one of the go-to guys when it comes to the Catholic Church and matters of race, an educator who has decades of experience leading difficult conversations about race among students, conversations in which uncomfortable emotions can arise.

So let’s take a look at two matters: 

1. What Father Massingale asserts that we all “know” from this incident.

2. What until recently has not been known to all about the Central Park story.

What we “know” is based on 70 seconds in the two Coopers’ lives. Fr. Massingale lists 20 assumptions that lie behind those 70 seconds.

Amy “knew what she was doing. And so do we,” says Father Massingale. And what was it that she—and we—“know”? “Why did she act as she did?”

• She assumed that her lies would be more credible than his truth.
• She assumed that she would have the presumption of innocence.
• She assumed that he, a black man, would have a presumption of guilt.
• She assumed that the police would back her up.
• She assumed that her race would be an advantage, that she would be believed because she is white. (By the way, this is what we mean by white privilege.)
• She assumed that his race would be a burden, even an insurmountable one.
• She assumed that the world should work for her and against him.
• She assumed that she had the upper hand in this situation.
• She assumed that she could exploit deeply ingrained white fears of black men.
• She assumed that if he protested his innocence against her, he would be seen as ‘playing the race card.’
• She assumed that no one would accuse her of ‘playing the race card,’ because no one accuses white people of playing the race card when using race to their advantage.
• She assumed that he knew that any confrontation with the police would not go well for him.
• She assumed that the frame of ‘black rapist’ versus ‘white damsel in distress’ would be clearly understood by everyone: the police, the press and the public.
• She assumed that the racial formation of white people would work in her favor.
• She assumed that her knowledge of how white people view the world, and especially black men, would help her.
• She assumed that a black man had no right to tell her what to do.
• She assumed that the police officers would agree.
• She assumed that even if the police made no arrest, that a lot of white people would take her side and believe her anyway.
• She assumed that Christian Cooper could and would understand all of the above.

Assuring us that he is, of course, “not a mind reader,” Fr. Massingale declares, however, that “I know, and we all know, that without these assumptions, her words and her actions—her lies—make no sense.” 

What’s more, says Fr. Massingale, there remains a “fundamental assumption” that lies behind these 20 listed ones: “white people matter, or should matter, more than people of color…. Amy Cooper knew that. We all know that.”

You may have thought Amy Cooper was someone whose behavior during those 80 seconds was pathetically embarrassing to her, behavior that you certainly would never manifest. 

You may have thought Christian Cooper was someone whose behavior exhibited a certain calmness and dignity while being confronted by a madwoman, behavior you certainly would prefer to emulate.

You may have thought those things, but also realized that what you were seeing did not include anything that happened prior to the camera being turned on. And then you would likely get back to changing a diaper or mowing the lawn or repairing the leaky faucet. 

But that would suggest you are living in the modern world, not the postmodern world, where every event is ruthlessly critiqued until all parts of the event confirms the truth “known” to all. 

Critical Theory nurtures the pulse of the postmodern world. In its engagement with this world, the Jesuits—and other Catholics, too—mesh Catholic Social Teaching with its manipulative language.

No one bothered to question the details of the story here. The truth was now “known.” We have the 80 seconds, what else is needed? 

Nothing. End of story. 

Father Massingale is one of a number of Catholic heralds of the prevailing Academy truth about America, a truth accepted by all public schools and now, apparently, all Jesuit schools. 

Amy’s personhood is shrouded in whiteness and, therefore, she must become, in the prevailing culture’s view, the model for white Americans.

Christian’s personhood is enveloped in blackness and, therefore, he must become, in the prevailing culture’s view, the model for black Americans, especially black men forever victimized in America.

So what’s wrong here? 

Almost everything.

Part 5: Oh, So That’s What Happened. 

At some point during the next year, Kmele Foster, a commentator and cohost of the podcast The Fifth Column, did some journalism, investigating all that happened prior to the 80 seconds. His report provides perspective—and context—on both Amy and Christian’s actions that morning.

Foster’s report, found at the Substack site Common Sense with Bari Weiss, appeared on August 3, 2021, as “The Real Story of the ‘Central Park Karen.’”

There you will find the full 911 recording of Amy’s phone call. You will, scrolling further, find the podcast in which Bari interviews Mr. Foster for 80 minutes.

Among the revelations are these:

• There had been tensions between dog people and birders for quite some time over the issue of unleashed dogs in that area of Central Park. What transpired in that 70 seconds of video was the conflict between a dog person and a birder.
• A few days before his situation involving Amy, Christian spoke at a community meeting, which was recorded, about the “super ugly” tension between those walking their dogs and birders. And he reveals in that meeting that he had “been assaulted twice so far this spring, people actually putting their hands on me, which really surprises me, because I am not a small guy.”
• Christian had therefore been involved in similar situations before this one that went viral. One of the people who had had an earlier confrontation with Christian, Jerome Lockett, who is himself black, stated that he had been approached “aggressively” by Christian, who shouted, “You need to leash your dog! They can’t be off-leash in here.”
• When Lockett ignored Christian, the latter attempted to “lure” Lockett’s dog away with treats and had “to be physically separated from” the dog by Lockett himself. Perhaps Lockett, who is smaller than Christian, is one of the two physical confrontations Christian mentioned in that community meeting.
• Lockett says that, in his experience, Christian can be “threatening with his body language and screaming.” He revealed that there are, to his personal knowledge, “two fellow dog owners (who) have had similar situations with this man, but don’t feel comfortable coming forward because they’re white. They think they’ll be seen as some ‘Karen’ or whatever.”
• Within hours of the incident with Amy, Christian wrote about his encounter on his Facebook page, saying that yes, he instigated the situation. Though he has no dog with him when he is bird-watching in Central Park, he does carry dog treats in a fanny pouch as part of his modus operandi when encountering dog owners with unleashed dogs.
• He has a method when confronting the bad behavior of dog people in order to achieve the desired result: he asks the owner to leash the dog; if they do not comply, he pulls out treats and calls the dog over; and then the dog owner puts on the leash real fast.
• In his own recounting of the incident that day on his Facebook post, Christian himself wrote that he told Amy, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.” Then, he wrote, he pulled out the “dog treats I carry for just (such) intransigence.”
• Is telling Amy “I am going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” something that might be considered threatening when she is seeing him at that moment with a doggie treat in one hand and his bicycle helmet in the other?
• This Facebook account was uploaded with the original video he shared with his sister, who subsequently posted it on Twitter. Did the major news articles about the 70-second video directly quote from the Facebook account as written down by Christian? The New York Times wrote in a 2,500-word article, this: “They exchanged words.” The Times did not mention what the words were. The Washington Post’s article reported their conversation as one whereby Christian makes a request that she leash her dog and Amy, in response, says she’ll be calling the police.
• When we see Amy speaking frantically on her phone to the 911 operator, what we do not hear is the operator’s voice, nor the bad connection, which turns the call into a fiasco of frustration that occurs whenever anyone is trying to be heard and is not being heard.
• What we also do not hear is Christian’s tone of voice prior to turning his camera on.

Now, it is possible that Father Massingale would still “know” all there is to know about Amy Cooper even if he had known all of this previously unknown information.

Why? 

She is white and she said something that is recorded in the video that violates all the prevailing culture’s rules if you are white. 

She says quite clearly to Christian before reaching the 911 operator, “I am going to tell them (the cops) there is an African-American man threatening my life!”

Two months after the incident, Fr. Massingale— in a video conversation with Mr. Randy Pedro, Fordham Prep’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—challenged those who might disagree with his 20 assumptions about Amy.

Of course, Father Massingale was not privy then to what Mr. Foster has discovered through his investigation of the incident, but his discoveries do not dispute the obvious: Amy Cooper did say to Christian Cooper, “I am going to tell them (the cops) there is an African-American man threatening my life!”

Anyone who disagrees with his assumptions, says Fr. Massingale, must then “come up with another explanation” for what she did. Why did she specifically tell Christian that she will inform the police not that a man is threatening my life, not that you are threatening my life, but that an African-American man is threatening my life?

Why did she immediately reference his race? Explain that, says Father Massingale.

I do not know why she used the phrase “African-American man” as she was getting ready to phone. 

The 911 operator couldn’t understand anything she was saying: but we apparently have no such luxury. We “know” what she was saying, and why, assures Father Massingale.

She said “an African-American man.” Hmm.

Perhaps she is intentionally—or unintentionally—a white racist as the prevailing culture assumed and likely still does. But Father Massingale absolves her of being a “dyed-in-the-wool” racist. 

After all, she’s a good person, Fr. Massingale tells Fordham’s Diversity director. “According to news reports,” he explains, “she voted for Hillary Clinton.”

Now there’s a mode of analysis—and from a professor of Applied Christian Ethics to boot.

Perhaps she has had a previous situation in which she had to report something to the police and the first words the police uttered were, “Can you give us a description?” 

Perhaps she is a binge watcher of TV police dramas and simply knows beforehand the first information a cop will ask for. 

Perhaps Christian Cooper had not behaved as the gentle, oh-so-calm, keeping-his-distance fellow that the tone of his voice during 70 seconds suggests to those who craft realities and truth and what we “know” from a snippet here and a snippet there.

Perhaps she is not color-blind. Perhaps she saw his color. Perhaps she is a Critical Race Theorist herself who demands that we must see the identity of the other, one who mocks the notion that society can ever be color-blind. 

Perhaps she is the feminine double of Father Massingale, who, like so many entangled in this Critical mindset, sees color during the 70 seconds he views the video and the entirety of the time he spends crafting the essay for National Catholic Reporter.

But she is white. She crossed a line. 

Oh sure, she can see color, but she can not verbalize color—unless that verbalization meets pre-approved standards of Critical reality.

And now Amy Cooper, a mere identity, has completed what might be called her “lived experience” in the Circular Firing Squad. A momentary casualty, she has played her part in confirming something: the truth about our nation’s soul.

Part 6: Struggle within a Circular Firing Squad Creates Good Think

What matters here is not the inner workings of Amy Cooper’s mind or of Christian Cooper’s. 

They are a dog person and a birder at a singular moment of tension turned ugly. That’s it. 

Whether either of them are “good persons” or not is hardly my call. I don’t know for whom they voted. 

What matters is what leading with emotions does to children, to students, boys and girls striving to learn under the subversion of adults, some of whom are willing to manipulate their emotions for political ends, for the creation of the policies and practices that antiracism demands.

The only end of Critical Theories is political, which revolves around power and what is done with it.

And the primary means by which those political objectives can be achieved is through pathos.

Pathos crosses the t’s and dots the i’s of every word in Fr. Massingale’s essay.

But the end of education—especially a Jesuit education with a thirst for justice—ought be knowledge, knowledge that forms men and women who have the wisdom and skills to decide for themselves as they become adults what practices in their own lives they wish to demonstrate and what policies in their own lives they wish to support to live their “commitment to justice.”

The Society of Jesus has within its educational institutions the capacity to form men with the ability to think rationally and coherently and logically about the various social problems that exist in any nation on the globe.

Its greatest contribution toward a more just civilization is the moral and spiritual armor the Gospels and Catholic tradition naturally provide when taught by educators who possess confidence in the Word of God and how the Word of God can transform people’s lives.

That armor protects the intellectual and physical integrity of each individual student as he deepens his understanding of all that is Good and True and Beautiful in Western Civilization so that he can use the knowledge he has acquired to demonstrate his love for his family and his concern for his fellow man.

Parents might consider the extent to which the postmodern Academic culture has placed in charge of your children’s education those whose appreciation of Western Civilization and of the United States has been overwhelmed by shame.

A sense of shame, of guilt, about human beings having sinned and having done so mightily, in ways that adversely affect the lives of countless millions, has the natural tendency to push the more sensitive among us to alleviate our sense of shame by submitting to those whose intentions are shameless.

The Jesuits are shamed by sin and, in their desire to rectify the ravages of sin—among which are surely all the injustices resulting from racism—have succumbed to the prevailing postmodern culture, where truth is determined in 70 seconds.

Truth derived from empirically-derived knowledge requires patience, willingness, and the time necessary for discovery, to sift that which we truly do know from that which we do not know.

Truth, then, requires humility, too, especially before we entrap another human being within our certainties.

For Fr. Massingale, the Central Park incident is the “key” for unlocking the truth about the hegemony of whiteness in America.

Amy Cooper, according to Fr. Massingale, reveals “what W.E.B. DuBois calls ‘the souls of white folks.’” And she “knew, we all know,” that she had “the support of an unseen yet very real apparatus of collective thoughts, fears, practices and history.”

This, asserts Father Massingale, is “what we mean by systemic racism.”

From 70 seconds in the life of Amy Cooper emerges the “soul sickness” of a nation.

And the acknowledgement of this “truth” about our nation forms the Jesuit’s way of proceeding in the antiracism school.

“There is no way to tell the truth about race in this country without white people becoming uncomfortable,” says Father Massingale. “Because the plain truth is that if it were up to people of color, racism would have been resolved, over and done, a long time ago. The only reason for racism’s persistence is that white people continue to benefit from it.”

“Repeat that last sentence,” he says. “Make it your mantra.”

So what is a white person to do once he accepts the truth about race in this country?

“Nothing,” says Father Massingale. Nothing at first.

Just “sit in the discomfort this hard truth brings. Let it become agonizing. Let it move you to tears, to anger, to guilt, to shame, to embarrassment. Over what? Over your ignorance….” Over all the things you did and you did not do when racist ideas and racist feelings and racist actions and racist inactions occurred with your encouragement, with your complicity, or even in your presence without your saying a word to the contrary.

“Stay in the discomfort, the anxiety, the guilt, the shame, the anger. Because only when a critical mass of white folks are outraged, grieved and pained over the status quo—only when white people become upset enough to declare, ‘This cannot and will not be!’—only then will real change begin to become a possibility.”

Here is why the antiracism school, which sees individuals first in terms of their identities, naturally creates a circular firing squad: all that is required is discomfort, anxiety, guilt, resentment, and anger.

These are the emotions generated by the struggle required to be antiracist. And antiracism is, of course, optimal—it is Good Think.

Released by the power of personal narratives and lived experiences, these emotions will reinforce certainties, the basic propositions “known” about our nation. 

Unless the implicit bias of students is dredged up and acknowledged, unless their unmerited privilege is conceded and lamented, unless the systemic racism in which some are complicit by virtue of their identity is recognized as a reality—the Jesuit Antiracism School will have failed to establish the Good Think necessary to succeed in its mission.

And what exactly is the mission of the Jesuit Antiracism School? 

To graduate students who support antiracist policies and express antiracist ideas.

That is what it means to teach students “what racism is and why and how to oppose it.”

Unless you are actively supporting antiracist policies, what are you? 

A racist who supports racist policies.

And what is the goal of antiracist policies?

Racial equity.

And how is racial equity achieved?

Racial discrimination.

And is racial discrimination bad?

Not when it creates racial equity.

And what happens if you have yet to acquire Good Think?

Constant struggle is needed.

Jesuit Antiracism School incorporates a Circular Fire Squad of identities.

You will, therefore, submit and conform.

We are Identities for Others now.