Bishops Misfire on “Racial Equity” 02/08/2021 at 9:12 PM Posted by Kevin Edward White
By Robert Royal, Catholic Thing, February 8, 2021
The American bishops drew a crucial distinction in a statement on President Biden’s Inauguration Day between things on which they can cooperate and “dialogue” with the new administration and those on which they cannot. Those distinctions were absolutely necessary to avoid the impression – amounting to grave scandal – that they had no problem with a self-proclaimed “Catholic” taking steps to further abortion, homosexuality, or transgenderism, all of which have been criticized by Pope Francis as a kind of “ideological colonization” in the developing world, but also in developed nations.
So is critical race theory poisonous or illuminating?
Twice during last year’s American presidential election campaign, the US president attacked Critical Race Theory (CRT). The first time, on Constitution Day in September, Donald Trump called the critical school that developed from Critical Legal Theory in the late 1980s “ideological poison” because it foregrounded the racial aspects of American history in the school curriculum.
The 1619 Project developed by scholars and the
New York Times was “radical”, he declared, because, among other things, it began American history with the arrival of the first slave in Jamestown, before calling for it to be replaced by “patriotic education”.