Resistance

And theologically, it just seems to me that we have every reason to embrace the work of decentering whiteness and creating a different cultural climate on campus as a Catholic university. It ought to be at the heart of our mission and that's, as a theologian, that's I think one of the most painful parts of it.

I'll also say too that, you know, within the Catholic Church itself, there is such a climate of whiteness culturally, still so trenchant, and a real resistance to even thinking, or much less articulating the lens of, white supremacy or white privilege and you know, I don't ever remember getting so much pushback from white men as I have this semester at the very idea that somehow Church social teaching documents ought to be using the language of white supremacy. To name that as a way of then doing the work of dismantling it within the Church itself and then within society.

So that's striking to me. It's, it's something that I've been processing actually the last couple of weeks because it's taken an enormous, just an enormous amount of energy to have to explain that. And still I have some students that are just not, they're not ready for that at all. And I found myself thinking, oh, do I have to take a different approach to this because, you know, they're shutting down and I, I think that it is a sign of our times, the reaction I think among some, especially white men who identify as Catholic is, you know, don't put that on me.