Vincent Rougeau’s First Day Message

Not that the bar was set high at all, but VR is exponentially more engaging in this video than his two predecessors would have been combined.

Wow, a great interview. Bravo! I am happy see our president getting out there in such a positive and authoritative way.

"Marxist roots"? I think that he actually addressed this very well in the interview:

One of the things I imagine you all had to deal with is the charge that it’s Marxist to do these things; that it’s Marxist and therefore not compatible with Catholicism.

VR: It makes me very uncomfortable when people say that because they said the same thing about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. I think that it is an attempt to deflect because people are worried about the consequences of having the conversation. There are some conclusions that some have come to through the use of critical race theory that some may find to be very much aligned with Marxism. And that may well be so, but that doesn’t mean we don’t engage the theory. And that doesn’t mean the theory itself is Marxist.

Any attempt by people to categorize something so that it becomes untouchable—in a way it’s the same way Black people were treated. You categorize someone as Black and they become untouchable. You don’t eat with them. You don’t touch them. You can’t marry them. That’s something we don’t want to see. We need to use the minds that God gave us to break down this injustice, and we need to stop labeling things so that we scare people.

He thinks of it as an analytic tool because that is what it is.  It is the stuff of graduate school political science and upper division law school seminars.  It will not be taught to elementary school kids.  It can, however, inform what we teach school children about race and our nation's origins.  Perhaps we will tell school children the truth that the Declaration of Independence complained King George was promoting slave rebellions and not protecting them from "the merciless Indian savages."  The kids might get to learn that although the founders did some great things that they were flawed as we all are and that many were slaveholders. 

When they get older, we could have them learn about federal loan programs in the 1940s and 50s that did not allow for integrated developments which forced Blacks into less valuable properties (which appreciated more slowly) with weaker schools and requiring longer commutes to better jobs.  Since for a large portion of American families, intergenerational wealth is based upon the equity in the family home and retirement accounts secured from jobs that require a good education, the discrimination of past eras put Blacks a generation or two behind in accumulating wealth. 

Telling kids the truth isn't hating America.

Read "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein or "The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans and How We can Fix It" by Dorothy Brown.

I think our new leader is an interesting bright guy who will make people think.  There is a lot more to the job than that but I like what I see. 

Preferential option for the "poor" , not for one race or another, correct?

You can expect certain people to keep misrepresenting CRT because discussions of race generate a lot of fear, anger, resentment. I applaud VR for discussing it. I think of CRT simply as a discussion of the origins of slavery (e.g. how is it that a Christian country was able to justify the enslavement and mistreatment of other children of God?), how issues of race have evolved (e.g., Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc.), and how race infects and informs our country today. Many proponents of CRT say that to heal, America has to first acknowledge its original sin of slavery, and that beyond such an acknowledgement we might achieve reconciliation and healing.

My point was that ‘mandated’ CRT in public K-12 curricula will turn many parents away from those schools toward faith based schools teaching ‘reading, writing, ‘rithmetic’ - leave the controversial material to the parents to explain to their kids.

Then why is the head of the teacher's union, Randi Weingarten, so adamant about the issue?

Agree or disagree, interesting commentary by Andrew Sullivan.

andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f

/\ Anti-CRT folks think some of the ‘anti-racist’ talking points are both false and divisive so they don’t belong in the schools. Like other false and divisive theories. But I do agree there is a bit of confusion regarding CRT v ‘anti-racist’ topics and, of course, fertile ground for opportunists/commentators/pols of all stripes.

It was great to see PVR on GMA this morning. It was part of a larger segment about MA, but still good to get some national exposure.