What I Ask of You, Father McGrath
The Jesuit president of a Catholic high school hides the influence of Critical Race Theory.
This is post one-of-six in a series explaining Critical Race Theory, defined here as Race War Marxism, and its replacement of the Catholic religion at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Wilmette, Illinois. The author is a graduate of Loyola (Class ’80).
Rev. Patrick E. McGrath, SJ President Loyola Academy 1100 Laramie Avenue Wilmette, Illinois 60091 847-256-1100
Dear Father McGrath,
You said that Loyola Academy would never ask students to apologize for their race.
“Let me be clear,” you said. “We have never -- and will never -- ask students to apologize for their race.”[i]
I am curious father: What do you ask of your students on the question of race? If they do not have to apologize, what do they have to say and think about race?
In the ethics class taught by Peter Jansen, whose questions for his students made Loyola Academy international news, you asked white students to confess to their whiteness.
What is whiteness, father? Whiteness is imposing white supremacy on American society. And what does white supremacy create? White supremacy makes America systemically racist.
And is their proof, father, of systemic racism? The proof of whiteness, of white supremacy, of white privilege, and of systemic racism, is that there are rich and poor in America. As long as there are rich and poor in America, there is systemic racism.
What you ask of your students is to acknowledge their whiteness, to admit to the privilege they win due to white supremacy. What you want especially is a confession of shame. You want students to admit they are ashamed of their race.
What can be done to end whiteness, father? How can your students end white supremacy? How can your students truthfully renounce their white privilege, once they finally know and admit they are ashamed of their whiteness? They simply join the Marxist revolution against capitalism. They overthrow the constitution. They fight to destroy America. This is what you ask your students to do father.
The best repudiation a student can make of his whiteness, father, is to dedicate himself to destroying America. This is what you ask.
In summary, father, you ask your white students to admit to using their inborn whiteness to impose white supremacy throughout America so that they can lock in and guarantee the systemic racism they guard fearlessly to maintain the power and the glory of their white privilege. They will use all of their whiteness to maintain their status, wealth, and security. For readers who don’t know, this is the starting point of Critical Race Theory.
You ask your white students to confess and admit and to be ashamed of and to renounce themselves, their race, and their history. And you ask your students to change their ways, and to change the world, by taking up and joining in the Marxist cause. There is only one source of redemption for those cursed by the plague of whiteness: Violent Marxist revolution against the United States. We have an old word for this, father: Treason. When convicted, you can hang, or go before the firing squad. This is what you ask of your students father.
A good student at Loyola will seek to counter his white privilege. He has used white privilege for his entire young life to punish the oppressed. Now, while he is still in school, he can change his thinking. A good student at Loyola will be competent when he sincerely allies himself with the radical blacks and whites who are pursuing Marxist revolution. It is time for America to be overthrown, father. A good student will seek to nullify the constitution. He will seek the classless society.
You ask a good student to join forces with those pursuing a violent revolution against a systemically racist capitalist society.
Critical Race Theory, at its beginning and at its end, seeks a race war. Seeks hatred between black and white. Seeks unrest, chaos, anarchy. Seeks violence. Seeks violence between tribes. Seeks conditions on the ground that will set things right to overthrow whiteness, capitalism, and America.
This is what you ask your students to believe father. This is what you teach. You seek supplicants devoted to the religion of Critical Race Theory, which is best defined as Race War Marxism. And, in all candor, father, could it be more obvious, after I have just outlined here the basics of Critical Race Theory, that you had an obligation to explain this foreign religion to your students, your teachers, your administrators, the board members, and to God. You had an obligation to seek approval from all of them before you made it Loyola’s new religion.
If you read your teacher’s questions, and if you know what Critical Race Theory is, then you know the teacher, Peter Jansen, wanted white students to confess to being ashamed of their whiteness and to admit to all of the ways they had benefitted from their white privilege. He asked for their confession, to accept responsibility for all the sins of history. “No sugar coating,” said Mr. Jenson. “It’s about pulling out white supremacy.”[ii]
In the Catholic church, believers confess their sins to God, by admitting to a priest their sins. By their admission, they are not celebrating their sins, but they are apologizing to God for their sins, hoping for forgiveness, and expecting to do penance for their wrongs.
Now, at Loyola, Critical Race Theory trainers, “theology” teachers, hear the confessions. The penitent, the student, can be forgiven, not by God, and by confessing his sins to God, but by the teacher, who will require that the guilty student, ruined by his original sin of whiteness, join the Marxist enterprise.
A good student must apologize for his whiteness by confessing to his privilege. You do ask your students to apologize for their race, despite your claims that the opposite is true. They are asked to apologize for their whiteness and to seek forgiveness, not by saying prayers, or by committing to avoid sin, or by going to confession, but by joining the Marxist cause.
Something else you said to the international media captured my attention. To analyze it, we must review a basic “insight” of Critical Race Theory.
Loyola’s trainer on Black Lives Matter, Jacqueline Battalora, argued that her approach to ending whiteness, which she said must be our highest priority, is superior because “the historical approach utilized helps to remove defensiveness”[iii] and motivates whites to transform themselves into black allies in the Marxist revolution.
Robyn DiAngelo, who gave a lecture sponsored by Loyola Academy, and one of the leaders of the national movement for Critical Race Theory, has argued that “white fragility” blocks us from seeking an end to whiteness. There is “a set of psychological defense mechanisms that white people use in order to avoid acknowledging their own racism.”[iv] Highest among these mechanisms is “defensiveness”.
Ms. DiAngelo said whites feel anger, fear and guilt when first confronted with their racism. This leads them to hide behind their “defensiveness.”
The defensiveness of whites, Ms. DiAngelo states, discourages people of color from providing honest feedback on racism. Defensiveness makes progress against racism impossible. People of color who speak up “risk even more punishment with our defensiveness, our hurt feelings, our minimization, our explaining away.”[v]
The dictionary says a defensive person is “constantly protecting oneself from criticism” and seeks to avoid “exposure of one's shortcomings.”[vi] A defensive person is too temperamentally weak to objectively consider useful criticism.
The Critical Race Theorists say defensiveness is a quintessential white strategy which is used to maintain their privilege.
When whites use defensiveness, “They are engaging in a ‘defensive move’ called privilege-preserving epistemic pushback,’ which means that they are just arguing to keep their privilege … .”[vii]
The truth is that “defensiveness is a cornerstone of white supremacy culture.”[viii]
If you have not been trained in Critical Race Theory, you may think a person is racist when they act in a prejudicial manner towards another person. You believe in “the simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people.”[ix]
Ms. DiAngelo says this backward relic definition of racism is “at the root of virtually all white defensiveness.”[x]
What did you say, Father McGrath, when Peter Jansen’s questions first aired publicly?
When the world came to your door to ask about a controversy, and when Loyola was headed to the front pages of the largest media companies in the world, what did you say about your students, who you are obligated to defend and protect, to teach and guide? You said the questions which encouraged white students to be ashamed of their race; the questions which asked them to repudiate the value of the lives and accomplishments of all of their ancestors; the questions which asked them to repudiate the greatness of their country and of all American history; you said that it “left some students feeling defensive."[xi] The students at Loyola Academy, according to the school president, are defensive.
Your answer, father, comes straight out of the handbook of Critical Race Theory. The students who objected to Critical Race Theory were protecting themselves with the “cornerstone of white supremacy culture.”[xii]
You told the world your students lacked the fortitude to bear the teacher’s lesson. You broadcast to fellow travelers that your students failed to confront their white supremacy. You said your students lack the strength to question their whiteness. They could not admit to the systemic failings of the white race. They failed to own the shame they should feel for their whiteness.
You told the world your students are unworthy and incapable. If your students disagreed with Race War Marxism, the students were at fault. It could not be the fault of the violent, atheist, murderous religion that they were asked to adopt. It could not be the fault of the teacher and the school telling them to submit to a bizarre, cruel religion. Critical Race Theory “left some students feeling defensive.” Are you really incapable of seeing, Father McGrath, that you were defensive when you described your students as defensive?
If you lied to the world by saying you did not ask your students to apologize for their race, if you were brutally dishonest by failing to disclose and explain to students and parents and the board the new religion of Loyola, Critical Race Theory, and if, in your public comments for the whole world to see, you denigrated and demeaned your students as weak and temperamentally incapable of learning, when you called your students defensive; even with all of that disgraceful behavior, you still avoided a primary question which all parents and students were asking at the time: Are you teaching students how to think for themselves or are you indoctrinating students into a new religion? Has Loyola Academy cancelled critical thinking, the greatest skill a student can take from school, in favor of indoctrination into Critical Race Theory?
If Peter Jansen had taught students that Critical Race Theory supports a race war between blacks and white allies against white capitalists, leading to a Marxist revolution to overthrow the constitution, to end material inequality and systemic racism, then he would have been teaching.
What Peter Jansen did in the classroom is something else. He encouraged white students to confess to their white privilege, to loathe the influence of white supremacy, to admit to being guilty of systemic racism, to confess to their guilt for the historical sins of their race. All of these things he did to recruit white allies to the Marxist revolution against capitalism and America. You and your teacher were indoctrinating your students into Race War Marxism. You were asking your students to be Marxists. You were making them Marxists. Don’t you think parents deserved to know and approve your plan? You are the leader of a school that is supposed to be Catholic. Marxism is anti-family, anti-capitalist and especially anti-God.
The truth, of course, had you explained it, would have led to your immediate dismissal. You put your cause, and yourself, ahead of truth. You added to many years of deception with a bold new deception. You announced your lie openly, for the whole world to see. The gold bars you are removing from the open safe are not gold bars and you are not removing them from the safe. “Let me be clear,” you said. “We have never -- and will never -- ask students to apologize for their race.” You did ask your students to apologize for their race. And much more. And much worse. And you lied to the whole world about it.
Which makes me wonder. Is it true, father, that when you have fully embraced Marxist privilege, you are incapable of shame? Is it true, when you have fully embraced Marxist privilege, that you can do no wrong when serving the revolution? Is it true, father, when you have fully embraced Marxist privilege, you are, in a strange way, god almighty yourself, and God in heaven, who made heaven and earth, and everything everywhere, including the Catholic Church, that God himself no longer has importance or meaning or influence?
After what you have done, father, isn’t it obvious what I ask of you? I ask you to apologize for elevating a kill-your-neighbor, race-war-loving, God-hating Marxist religion at Loyola Academy. The proof follows that this is, in fact, what you have done.
Sincerely,
Michael David White Class of 1980
This is post one of six in a series explaining Critical Race Theory, defined here as Race War Marxism, and its replacement of the Catholic religion at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Wilmette, Illinois. The author is a graduate of Loyola (Class ’80).
[i] Patrick McGrath. Loyola Academy Press Release. 3/29/21.
[ii] https://www.foxnews.com/us/loyola-academy-chicago-white-privilege-race Jonathan Garber. 3/30/21.
[iii] https://goramblers.myschoolapp.com/app/detail/video/6974107 Jacqueline Battalora. 10/14/20. Your Life Matters. Diversity Dialogues Poster.
[iv] https://www.city-journal.org/white-fragility Coleman Hughes. 11/29/20.
[v] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/28/racism-white-defensive-robin-diangelo-white-fragility/637585002/ Alia Dastagir. 5/28/18.
[vi] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Definition of defensive.
[vii] https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/ James Lindsay. 6/12/20.
[viii] https://mynorthwest.com/2910702/rantz-wa-dems-force-critical-race-theory-training-highline-schools-leans-in/ Jason Rantz. 5/23/21.
[ix] White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo
[x] White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo
[xi] Patrick McGrath. Loyola Academy Press Release. 3/29/21.
[xii] https://mynorthwest.com/2910702/rantz-wa-dems-force-critical-race-theory-training-highline-schools-leans-in/ Jason Rantz. 5/23/21.