My son has a knack for picking good movies for us to watch as a family. We just finished watching The Finest Hours on Memorial Day about a daring Coast Guard rescue of the coast of Cape Cod in 1952. Last night we watched Safety about a freshman football recruit at Clemson who takes in his little brother when his mother, who is addicted to drugs, is unable to care for him, which was really well done and inspiring (it was based on a true story).
Because my son is really into basketball lately, another movie we watched was Glory Road, which was a sports drama (again, based on a true story) about a white coach for Texas Western College who recruits and starts an all-black line up and leads them to a NCAA division title in 1966. When they start winning games and hitting the road, they encounter much of the same vicious discrimination the vast majority of blacks endured during the 1960's.
Living in an all white suburb and being homeschooled, I'd say my kids are pretty sheltered. Even though they are tisoys (half-Filipino), they have literally never experienced any form of discrimination on the basis of their race. My wife could probably count on one hand the number of times she has. Racism is simply not something we have to think about.
But should we? Glory Road brought up a lot of questions for my kids. Why were those black players treated so poorly in the movie? Why were there laws back then that kept blacks drinking from separate water fountains and riding in different parts of the bus? My wife and I being raised in the 1970's and 80's did not live through the Civil Rights era--it was something we read about in history books. And because we are responsible for our kids education as their primary teachers in academics, morals, and ethics, we felt that it was a good opportunity to talk, intentionally, about racism and discrimination with them by using the movie as a springboard for these things that actually do exist. If we don't, who will?
As traditionally minded Catholic Christians, we (the collective 'we') sometimes have a reflective tendency to react to things like BLM (which is, of course, Marxist in origin and focused on dismantling notions of the nuclear family, among other things) and write off all efforts of addressing undue racism as a leftist ideology. I'll admit, I kind of cringe when I see memes and things that posit a kind of "White Lives Matter" counter-punch to such demonstrations; mostly, because I think it misses a lot and holds a kind of subtle ignorance at its core. Secondly, because I think it works counter to it's intended purpose.
Here's a case in point--two weeks ago I had lunch with a friend I had met a few years back while evangelizing on the streets of our local university town. It was a chance encounter--my now-friend had just moved to the area and was walking around killing time while his girlfriend (who was local to the area) was at her yoga class. "Something told me to walk down (x) street, and there you guys were." When he encountered our "Catholic Truth" sign and accepted a free rosary and Miraculous Medal, we got to talking and we gladly prayed over him for some difficulties he was having in his life. We exchanged phone numbers, and he and I would meet periodically for coffee.
Though he never became Catholic as a result of our meetings (he was a Christian), I genuinely enjoyed his company and vice-versa, and we prayed for one another and kept in touch. He and his girlfriend (soon to be fiance) even invited our family to spend Thanksgiving with them last year, which we took them up on. When we pulled up the driveway, the kids kept saying, "woah this place is like a mansion!" It was a completely random and wonderful Thanksgiving; my friend's fiance (who worked in product development for a pharmaceutical company) was the hostess-with-the-most-est, warm and welcoming, and the spread was to die for. A true blessing.
When my friend and I had lunch a couple weeks back, he recounted that he was still recovering from a car accident he was involved in, in which a 95 year old man (who probably shouldn't have been driving) slammed into his car. When the police arrived on the scene, the officer kept shouting at my friend to blow into a breathalyzer. The officer assumed he had been drinking. When it came up 0.0, the officer would tell him "Again! Blow harder!" He hadn't been drinking, and the accident was not his fault. When my friend went to the VA (he was a veteran) to be treated for his injuries, they assumed he was a drug addict (he has never done drugs). In previous chats we've had over coffee, he also recounted how he faced constant job discrimination (he listed me as a character reference for one job) and ignorant assumptions on account of being black, and how frustrating it was (he worked in the HVAC and property management industry previously in Cleveland).
Now granted, I could have just been getting one side of the story, and there may have been other issues at play in these scenarios. But I have known my friend to be an honest and trustworthy man with no reason to make things up. Just because I had not experienced these kinds of things in my life did not mean he didn't in his.
When my wife and I had the conversation with our kids after watching Glory Road, we stressed the same point--these types of things--racial hatred, discrimination, and prejudice--really did occur back then. But not even just 'back then,' but today as well. We discussed it in a matter-of-fact manner--not virtue signaling or being defensive or trying to explain it away, but as simply as you would state a historical fact. We didn't get too in depth, but in tying it to their faith as Catholic Christians--that Christ died for all men, and as Paul said in Galatians 3:28, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus." This is the radical freedom and equality of the Christian faith, and we want our children to see through this lens--the lens of Christ towards men.
We also had discussions last year about organizations such as BLM and their Marxist, anti-Christian, anti-family ideology, that co-opts and converts genuine racial injustice into race warfare. As many who have studied it know, Marxism is classist by nature, but can have many contemporary offshoots beyond economics--Marxist feminism rooting itself in war and systems of oppression between the sexes; BLM utilizes Marxist class theory to move the ball into the sphere of race as its basis. If there were any doubt, the website marxist.org (which I visited shortly after BLM moved onto the national scene) lent their full, unwavering support for their "comrades" waging war against the bourgeoisie and bringing the country that much closer to the inevitable revolution to take place under the BLM banner.
The trap many progressively-sympathetic whites fell into following the death of George Floyd during this stoking fervor was that in order to be seen as "against racism" and "show support," one must support organizations like BLM because they purported to address these "root causes of systematic racism." This is the classist guerrilla tactics of Marxist ideology under simply different guise. As Saul Alinksy wrote in Rules for Radicals, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules," Alinsky also wrote. If Christians (white, black, or otherwise) were considered targets (ie, "the enemy"), it was obvious what our "book of rules" was: the Word of God in Holy Scripture.
But what does our "book" teach us? "Love your enemy, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (Mt 5:44). Marxists know how so few Christians love as Christ commands us to love, and so there is leverage there. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," Alinsky wrote. A ridiculed Christian who is not rooted in faith and the Spirit will easily capitulate to the ridiculer in order not to be seen as what he is being painted as. Unless one is living with integrity (you know because they can look you in the eye), they are vulnerable to such exploitation.
As parents, we are raising our children to go into the battlefield of the culture. They need to know the enemy's tactics, have their wits about them, and be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves so as not to be co-opted into it by way of faux-sympathy for a cause that paints them as virtuous but lacking any true virtue. They also need to be rooted in prayer (the family rosary, and personal prayer) to know the nature of the One they serve, so that they will recognize true injustice when it is present and stand up to it. We are called to give voice to the voiceless--the unborn, first and foremost, since a culture built upon the demonic scourge of legalized abortion rots out the foundation from below--but that does not mean we also stand for other things opposed to Gospel values.
If our children are on the playground and a child taunts another with racial slurs (which cut deeper than a knife), we do not encourage them to turn their heads away but to stand up for their maligned brother. If our children are to learn the radical equality God bestows on us, and the demand to defend the proverbial aliens, orphans, and widows, it is not enough to give it lip service as a homeschool lesson from a book; we must as parents mirror it in our own lives--not through 'token' friendships with people who are different from us, and not simply because of that difference as a way of virtue signaling or being race-obsessed, but because we teach them that we are all brothers in Christ: neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free and in that freedom we can judge people on their merits, not their skin color. If we are indifferent, they will be too. If we as parents love well, serve well, and fight well, and respect the dignity of all men because of the dignity God has bestowed upon them--they will too.
Aspiring to be a social justice warrior is to be preoccupied with how the world see us, rather than how God sees us. And in it, they have already received their reward. For God sees the hearts of men, and if our hearts are preoccupied with optics rather than vision, with posturing instead of sacrificing, with virtue-signaling rather than cultivating virtue, we are ripe for being co-opted by the faux-compassion of the worldly. Instead, the Christian parent lives by the words of the prophet so that their children might do the same, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, and plead the widow's cause” (Isaiah 1:17).
I love this! Just what the country needs right now.
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