Back in the 70s and 80s, legal scholars pioneered the field of Critical Race Theory (henceforward “CRT”), which recognized and attempted to address the systematic injustices writ into the very fabric of American history, politics, and identity. The constitutional framework, after all, emerged from an inherently sexist and racist perspective: enfranchisement, property rights, and basic freedoms were only guaranteed to property owners, a category of folks restricted to free white men. Two and a half centuries later, we are quite obviously dealing with the repercussions of constitutional marginalization on a variety of levels.1
Equity in education is all the rage these days, and for good reason. It’s impossible to be an educator in an urban setting and not encounter professional development opportunities and in-services that address the varied injustices that plague student experience. One of my graduate school textbooks this fall is a reader of essays about CRT and education, and in August I attended a workshop with several colleagues on social justice education presented by Teaching Tolerance, a program founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1991. From their website, Teaching Tolerance’s “mission is to help teachers and schools educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy”.Attempts at teaching the actual virtue of tolerance run the gamut, from cheap and microaggressive2 to those that provoke genuine encounter. The latter requires some crucial elements: space that is compassionate and brutally honest, where people can speak their minds and hearts without fear of punishment; space that invites the resonance of all voices, allowing the marginalized and invisibilized ones to speak a bit more, so as to counteract those subtle, silencing forces; space that is not about solving any problems initially, lest it become preoccupied with the problem rather than with authentic and transformative human dialogue.
Tolerance, however, can only take us so far, and herein lies the problem, as summarized by Teaching Tolerance’s quoting of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on its website, where it states that he “used the Greek term ‘agape’ to describe a universal love that ‘discovers the neighbor in every man it meets.’”In short, here we see a blatant secularization of a devout Jesus-freak, one that erases the cruciality of King’s religious imagination to his overarching mission. It was love for Christ that motivated King to persevere through a house-bombing, love for Christ that drove him to embrace active non-violent resistance as the means to pioneer real change in the civil rights movement. To silence the man’s Christianity -- and to silence the Christian worldview that gave rise to the events of a half-century ago -- is another act of invisibilization. In a world whose media tends to highlight the brutal weaponization of religion, we don’t necessarily like to acknowledge its liberating potential.
Agape is more than tolerance, greater and deeper and richer than mere respect. Respect permits human beings to coexist in the same space, but it can also be reduced to a shallowness that permits me to hold my neighbor at arm’s length; I can respect someone without engaging them. Tolerance, if made the preeminent virtue we strive for, can maintain boundaries for the sake of diverse folks peaceably co-occupying the same space. Oppression can fill a community or a country, even though tolerance be espoused.
Civil law, without the introduction of personal belief systems into the pluralistic foray, is limited by the fact that it cannot truly inculcate authentic virtue within its citizenry. On its own, secular law can do little more than prevent us from doing harm to one another. It cannot make us better, only less worse. And so, I have to wonder if the entire project of Teaching Tolerance might be forfeit in the sense that without returning to the religious roots of the civil rights movement, its inspiration, it will never be able to accomplish what the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues hoped for.
In this, Catholic schools have a definite advantage, because we have the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, a stunningly beautiful corpus of thought that holds agape as made known through Jesus at its center. Though we might fail to live it out in application, and though we’re still figuring out how to use it within the American legal system, the beatific vision of the heavenly banquet at which all are welcome presents a dream far more vibrant and colorful than that of potentially lukewarm tolerance. May we know the God of all mercy and of all liberation in this work.
1 See the Netflix documentary “13th” for a mind-blowing take on the perpetuation of slavery into the 21st century.↩
2 For those uninitiated into conversations surrounding race, Merriam-Webster defines “microagression” thusly: “a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)”. Examples of this would include assuming that a person of color loves a particular sort of food or speaks a certain language based on physical appearance, or asking to touch an “exotic” person of color’s hair, or telling a person of color they’re attractive “for a [insert ethnicity here] person”.↩
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