A “Woke” Examination of Conscience, by Casey Chalk

By Casey Chalk, The Catholic Thing, Nov. 11, 2020

Casey Chalk is a contributor for Crisis Magazine, The American Conservative, and New Oxford Review. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College.

“Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination,” says Ibram X. Kendi, author of best-selling How to Be an Antiracist, which now informs various public school curriculums and government and corporate HR offices eager to burnish their anti-racist credentials. “White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions,” writes popular diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

St. Augustine was apparently wrong when he wrote in City of God that pride, the “craving for undue exaltation,” is the “beginning of sin.” In 2020, the greatest and most original sin, we’re told, is racism. And Americans, especially white Americans, are its greatest perpetrators. If this is true – and far be it from me to call it erroneous, reductionist, and patently absurd and thus risk being labeled a racist myself! – we Catholics require a revised examination of conscience. It should be based on the Ten Commandments of Woke, brought down from the heights of wokedom by prophets like Kendi and DiAngelo.  …