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Below you will find a video, a transcript, and the original email sent from G-Prep.

G-Prep originally indicated they would post their own recording, but it has not been forthcoming.  Here's a recording, which cuts off at the 20-minute mark.

 

Transcript:

 

Michael Dougherty:
Good evening and welcome.  I want to thank everyone for being present with us tonight.  This is Michael Dougherty; I'm the President of Gonzaga Prep, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this webinar.  The purpose of our gathering tonight is to provide us an opportunity to share with you some additional information regarding Gonzaga Prep's recent commitment to anti-racism.  We're looking forward to sharing with you a little bit more about the background and context, and call to action that had motivated the development of this statement. We're also going to share with you a little bit about how we introduced this statement to our students today in their Theology classes, some of our next steps, and address the questions that you've already shared with us.  Again, I want to thank you for being with us; I think this is an important moment for us to be together, and I'm grateful for the chance to welcome Fr. J.K. Adams, the chaplain of Gonzaga Prep, who will lead us in prayer.

 

Fr. J.K. Adams:
Good evening, everyone.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In a recent interview, Fr. Arturo Sosa, who was our Superior General in Rome, said this:  Religions are only true to themselves if they promote peace and reconciliation.  With that in mind, O Lord, Jesus, we come to you on a day when we seek your peace, and whenever there has been hurt or fracture, we seek reconciliation of all kinds.  Please hear our desire always and everywhere to choose your way and not our way or the way of our human instincts that so often seek only for their own sake.  May our gathering this evening provide the nourishment we need in order for us to love all.  Love them the way that you love them.  That we might love and respect human life in all its diversity, from the conception till natural death.  May this evening provide a moment of calm in the storm, peace in the midst of disquiet, that we might be one with our fellow earthbound journiers on this path of human living.  Oh Lord, our God, grant that we may ever grow more faithful to our Catholic and our Jesuit mission, whichever champions the cause of love and justice for all.  We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord, Amen.  In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

Michael Dougherty:
Amen. Thank you Fr. Adams.  So, again, just to give you a brief overview of our agenda for this evening.  We're going to go through the call to action, a little bit of more information regarding this statement, student discussion, and the questions.  It's my pleasure to hand it over to our Principal, Ms. Cindy Reopelle, who will describe to us our context and call to action.

 

Cindy Reopelle:
Thank you so much for joining us this evening.  And I'd like to welcome you, along with Michael.  So, what started [mumbles] maybe, it's hard to know, I guess, where the beginning is.  There's lots of places we can start where this conversation begin, but probably most recently the call to action came in June of 2020, when a group of our alumni, primarily students of color, but not all, came to us and wanted to share with us what their experience at Gonzaga Prep had been, what their experience with racism had been, and what it had been like to be a student of color.  Since that conversation, has taken place among our current students, among our faculty and staff, our parents who shared their insights and their perspective, and we've kind've journeyed along together.  At the same time that our students came to us with concerns, or just wanting us to really to listen to what their experience had been, we found that the Jesuit, the Jesuits, really the globally, but also in the Jesuits West, the Province that Gonzaga Prep belongs to, were calling all of us to action, all of us to respond to racism, and to come out strongly, to come out with anti-racist statements.  Our Provincial at the time was Fr. Scott Santarosa, and his letter can be found on our website.  That letter came out on the Feast of the Pentecost.  And then Pope Francis came out with a letter to all Catholics in June, 2020, and this is a quote from his letter:  "My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life."  Our faculty took this call of action and did spend time reflecting on what the bishops had taught us, what the Provincial was calling us to, and what the Pope was calling us to.  The Jesuits Schools Network came out with a new statement, and actually their statement, which is in a document about Our Way of Proceeding as Jesuit schools, and it calls every Jesuit school to have an anti-racist/racism statement.  And that also can be found on our website and we'll list it in the resources and you can go and read that, Domain 5 of the Benchmarks - Our Way of Proceeding as Jesuit schools.  So for that, I think I will pause now; we'll come back to some of these as we go along.  I'm going to pass it on to our Director of Equity and Inclusion, Tefi Ma'ake.

 

Tefi Ma'Ake:
Thank you, Ms. Reopelle, for sharing a little bit about the call to action that has kind've undergirded our commitment to anti-racism over the past 18-months.  In light of this call to action, it was clear that we had a need for greater clarity; and so as Ms. Reopelle shared, our faculty, our staff did a lot of discrenment, and in that discerning, we came to a moment of clarity that we really needed to be clear about our commitment to actively opposing racism in all its forms, [mumbles] the work of anti-racism.  So while our Catholic tradition and general education has always principled the work for Justice, Justice born out of love for all people, and an acknowledgement of the inherent God-given dignity of all persons, an evolving understanding of racism has {?} ministries to actively and intentionally work for racial equity.  Racism has long [been] understood as a direct act of hatred, discrimination, or bigotry directed at someone based on race, it doesn't fully encapsulate the reality of racism.  Jesuit Bishop George Murray defines racism as race prejudice plus power, a conscious or unconscious assumption that one race is superior to another, which is then reinformed by political, social, economic, or societal power.  With this in mind, racism is embedded in our history in a context that surrounds us, and therefore we are...it's impossible not to be touched by it.  The USCCB states that the evil of racism "manifests itself in our individual thoughts and in the workings of society itself.  Today's continuing inequalities in education, housing, employment, wealth, and representation in leadership positions are rooted in our country's shameful history of slavery and systemic racism."  As such, it is self-perpetuating, and it is only by conscious, intentional effort, can we actively work to challenge racism in our perceptions, our attitudes, as well as institutions, structures, and systems.  Thus our final commitment to anti-racism.  Over the course of the 2020-2021 school year, the faculty and staff intentionally prayed with the bishops' document Open Wide Our Hearts, participated in Implicit Bias training, and in the Spring of 2021, the Equity and Inclusion School Life Committee worked to draft our commitment to anti-racism.  The faculty and staff offerred feedback, the statement went through revisions, and was presented to the board.  At the heart of this commitment is our Catholic tradition, the prophetic call to the Society of Jesus, and our Mission, Vision, and Values of this school institution.  Now I know this was sent home and this is on our website, but here is our statement, our Commitment to Antiracism [pause for those on the webinar to read].  And on our website are the sources that I think you can click on the links to for all the information that is referenced in our statement.  Thank you, and at this time we will turn it over to Vanessa Mudd, our Theology Department Chair.

 

Vanessa Mudd:
Good evening.  As Mrs. Ma'ake said my name is Vanessa Mudd and I am the Director of the Department of Theology this year.  I am very happy to have this opportunity to speak with you as a fellow parent of a Gonzaga Prep student.  So, why Theology?  Today your students were presented with the anti-racism statement and I am going to speak to why we presented this in our Theology classes.  Our Theology classes, from their first year to their final, provide a foundational understanding of the teachings of the Catholic Church, Sacred Scripture, and the role of our students towards building the kingdom of God.  During this time our students examine their relationship with God and how that relation calls them to action, both sacrementally and relationally.  The curriculum, which is posted regularly on Schoology, so you can take a look at your child's page to see what those lessons are and how they are being presented, provides a basis as a point of growth for the profile of the graduate, so when your student graduates from Prep, they can walk into the world as a religiously alive, loving, intellectually engaged, open to growth, and a person who is committed to doing Justice.  In today's presentation of this statement, an activity surrounding the experience of marginalization really engages our community's edification [sp?] to this essential element of the curriculum.  And, through great praise that we received from the students on their feedback at the form that was provided following the activities.  Why this year?  So, this year marks our 500th anniversary of the of the conversion experience of St. Ignatius, founder of the Society, and to mark the anniversary, as Fr. JK mentioned, we've been called by Fr. Arturo Sosa, the Father General of the Society, to act as witnesses of/to the passage of God's will through our lives in building the kingdom of God.  And in doing so, we have been called by the Apostolic Prefences of the Society to Show the Way to God, Walk with the Excluded, Journey with the Youth, and Care for Creation.  These are all calls to action.  So that our students acknowledge and explore the great reality of the world in our lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, and respond to the suffering while engaging in it constructively.  Finally our curriculum and our teachings engage the dignity of the human person.  From their very first lesson in scripture, which I just did with my class 2 weeks ago, our students learn the dignity of the human person, as creations of God, made in His image.  And this lesson is modeled to a respectful and diverse class conversation, exploration of myriad perspectives, both in textual material and student discussion, all approved by the bishop.  We hope that when they graduate, they learn to perceive, think, judge, and choose to act for the right of others, especially those who are disadvantaged and oppressed, just as our suffering Christ Jesus presented for us.  At this point, I'm going to pass it on, back to our President, Mr. Dougherty.

 

Michael Dougherty:
Thank you, Ms. Mudd.  So, now we're going to address some of the questions that we received through the form when you signed up for the webinar.  We received several questions, you know, almost 40, and so we don't have time to answer them all.  But what we've done is organized the questions into themes, or questions that were related to each other.  Our hope is that we're going to be able to answer the questions that have been most frequently asked.  So, let's get started.  Just want to let you know, also, the webinar is being recorded and will be available on our website after, so that will be there for people who want to go back or perhaps didn't have a chance to watch it first time around.

Q:  What does it mean when we state that racism is "systemic?"  Is Gonzaga Prep systemically racist?
First, what does it mean when we state that racism is systemic, and the followup question here is are we saying that Gonzaga Prep is systemically racist.  This comes back to the last line of the first paragraph of our commitment to anti-racism, which states that we recognize the sin of racism as a historic, systemic, and persistent reality.  These 3 words really stand out prominently in the USCCB's letter Open Wide Our Hearts; they call us to recognize that racism is historic, systemic, and persistent.  When they say systemic, further documents define that as stating that racism can be both individual, when a person holds beliefs of superiority, and they can also be structural, when policies or practices persist in the manner that creates inequalities in our society.  So a synonym here is structural, and I think the idea is an acknowledgement that racism is part of our context, and that was really our goal in that sentence, was to articulate that Gonzaga Prep is part of a context that is much bigger than itself, an historic context as well, and that racism is a part of that historic context, it's part of the environment that surrounds us.  Our understanding of racism is that it's self-perpetuating and it's persistent, and therefore we've got to recognize that racism is present in even our current lived reality, and that's part of the commitment to anti-racism, is that we are standing actively opposed to the racism.  And so do I believe that Gonzaga Prep is systemically racist?  What we're saying is that we believe that racism is persistent at Gonzaga Prep and it's part of our context, and because of that we've got to be aware and on-guard and ready to stand against it.  That's really the heart of our commitment to anti-racism.

 

Tefi Ma'ake:
Q:  How does Gonzga Prep's curriculum regarding antiracism differ from critical race theory?
This next question is how does Gonzaga Prep's curriculum regarding antiracism differ from critical race theory?  Uh, Critical Race Theory, as I understand it, is a complex, legal, academic kinda [sp?] word, often taught as one theory in law school or on a graduate level, uh, I am not a lawyer and I am not an expert in critical race theory.  So our commitment to antiracism and our curriculum is not this; it is, however, rooted in our Catholic Social Teaching and in the Mission of Jesuit Education.  Catholic Social Teaching is not a new course, it has been taught over 40 years here I have heard.  The core belief of CST is that all human life, created in God's image is sacred, imbued with inherent dignity, deserving of respect, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.  So our faith calls us to protect human life at all times and to actively work against any injustice that denies human dignity or degrades human life.  One example of this kind of injustice is racism.  In our Social Justice class, on the senior level in Theology, there is a unit on "Racial Justice" called "Understanding Racism" put out by St. Mary's Press.  This unit is rooted in scripture, Catholic Social Teaching, and the bishops' statement Open Wide Our Hearts.  Students are asked to critically examine racism, and what it means to actively and intentionally work to deconstruct racism.  And that is part of the curriculum that students on the Senior level have been getting, it is not replacing anything.  There is a link on our website to this scope and sequence of the St. Mary's Press unit.

 

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