A simmering cultural revolution is approaching its boiling point.
This can bring a certain clarity and resolve as more people grasp what is happening.
The stories of woke toxicity coming out of elite secular prep schools follow similar patterns: a top-down implementation of extreme “antiracism” and gender ideology in the curriculum, progressive parents speaking out in anonymity due to fear of reprisal, and students feeling pressured to affirm and parrot the new creed.
It’s not just happening at secular schools.
In the fall of 2020, at Loyola Academy, a tony Catholic prep school outside of Chicago, parents began whispering to one another about the loud and swiftly-escalating political ideology pressing into all corners of their kids’ education.
The high-paid diversity consultants brought in for the sake of training faculty and students were an early warning sign.
Teachers including their gender pronouns in Zoom meetings was another.
Students were racially segregated for school assignments on privilege.
A working-class student was bewildered to learn that because of his skin colour he is an oppressor to his peers, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar homes.
In a video recording of one of the diversity training sessions, a student asks a consultant what he thinks of the phrase “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards).
After seeming to not know what the acronym stood for (despite it being commonly written on signs and chanted at Black Lives Matter rallies) he went on to authoritatively misinterpret the plain meaning of the words.
“When you hear something like ‘ACAB,’ it’s a reflection of anger,” he instructed.
“A lot of times I think the mistake that people make, people take it personally. But we’re actually asking structural questions.”
I wonder — if students were chanting, “All Diversity Consultants Are Idiots” would that be taken personally or structurally by the diversity consultant?
This exchange between student and consultant introduces to the students’ minds one key woke tactic and a central woke dogma.
The tactic is to make people doubt their ability to interpret reality and plain language without a woke expert shepherding them to the approved interpretation.
The dogma is that there is no such thing as a universal principle.
What all reasonable people know to be grotesque — collectivized personal vilification — is deemed to be acceptable when deployed by some people, but not by others.
Most kids have an innate sense of fairness and intuit that a principle must be applied universally if it is to be a principle at all.
Undoing that moral understanding is done by design, and is an essential step in re-educating them into the ideology.
Marxism Syndrome By Proxy
Upon watching this school diversity video, one mother described it as “chilling,” especially seeing the effects of these ideas as they took hold of the students and reverberated into the larger school community.
Once unified, many families report the school now is fractured and marked by suspicion.
“People did not feel the school was ripped apart by racism, but now they do. It is heartbreaking,” the mother relayed.
“There are a handful of people who are driving this and not allowing moderating voices. This doesn’t represent the community or many of the teachers, or the coaches. This is not a racist institution. Our families have always stepped in and stepped up to make sure everyone feels included and is looked after.”
In the movie The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment plays a child who can see dead people. A young girl who had been chronically sick during her short life reaches out to Osment’s character from beyond the grave to give him a videotape, instructing him to show it to her father.
At the girl’s wake, Osment’s character presents the video to the dad, who is shocked to find that it contains footage of his wife intentionally spiking her daughter’s meals with some sort of poison that causes and maintains the sickness that eventually kills her.
Through this scene, many people were introduced to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a mental disorder whereby a caretaker invents, exaggerates and often causes an illness in a child.
People with MSBP seem attentive and motivated by care and compassion. They can recite a litany of alleged poor symptoms, and demand tests and procedures to “cure” the child. All the while they skirt data and evidence that run afoul of the illness narrative.
In reality, though the child thinks she is sick, it is the caretaker, not the child, who really is sick (though the child might truly become sick as a direct result of the actions of the “compassionate” caretaker).
Usually, the only way this stops is if people who sense that something is amiss have the care and the courage to challenge the caretaker’s narrative.
Many parents at Catholic schools, from high schools to even some grammar schools, have been rightly sensing that there is something very unjust in this justice movement.
Injustice can and should be fought, but why, they wonder, do the schools need to go beyond the canon of Catholic social teaching to address this?
The Church has a sophisticated, thorough and historically radical body of teaching — theological and philosophical — upholding the universal dignity of all persons and condemning racism as an intrinsic evil.
What do woke consultants and critical theory add that the Church has not covered?
This question remains unanswered because it cannot be answered in an honest way.
As I write in my book, Awake, Not Woke (TAN Books), the truth is that critical theory does not add to the Church’s teaching. It assaults it in three fundamental ways. Continue reading