Posted on 04/30/2008 1:29:12 AM PDT by a_chronic_whiner
The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom Reverend Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since this Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered presidential candidate Barack Obama’s worldview as well.
Some in Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins—and at every moment thereafter.
At the NAACP meeting, Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Wright announced, is “white.” Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects”—books, for example—but instead learn from “subjects,” such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Hale and Wright: whites use what Wright referred to as the “left-wing, logical, and analytical” side of their brains, whereas blacks use their “right brain,” which is “creative and intuitive.” When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Wright said, his white teachers “freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk.” Instead, the students “climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a ‘subject,’ not an ‘object.’” How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object”—by listening to her words—is a mystery.
One would hope that Wright’s audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black—it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.
Wright also praised the work of Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, who has called for the selective incorporation of Ebonics into the curriculum in order to validate the black experience. Wright gave another shout-out to the late Asa Hilliard of Georgia State University, who told us, Wright said, “how to fix the schools.” Like Hale, Hilliard argued that disrupting the classroom through “impulsive interrupting and loud talking” is inherently black. His bogus Afrocentrism, propounded in his “African-American Baseline Essays,” metastasized in educational circles during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hilliard argued that Western civilization was at once stolen from black Africa and crippling to black identity. As the late Arthur M. Schlesinger recounted in his 1991 alarum about multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America, Hilliard urged schools to teach black students that Egypt was a black country; that Africans invented birth control and carbon steel; that they discovered America long before Columbus; that Robert Browning and Ludwig von Beethoven were “Afro-European”; and that the Atlantic Ocean was originally named the Ethiopian Ocean. (City College of New York laughingstock Leonard Jeffries—he of the infamous distinction between materialistic, aggressive European “ice people” and superior African “sun people”—contributed to Hilliard’s Essays, asserting therein that slavery was undertaken as “part of a conspiracy to prevent us from having a unified experience.”)
Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of “those of us who never got caught” to treat “those of us who are incarcerated” with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.
This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Examples of hustling include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” It never occurs to Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of black crime—as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Austin and Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization.
To understand how such ideas become mainstream, one need only read the front page of today’s New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Wright “went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics,” Stanley effuses. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous.” One might think that Wright’s promotion of the idea that black kids can’t sit still in class would raise some worries, even in a television critic. Surely Stanley would expect her own children to listen to their teachers. But the white elite’s desire to avoid charges of racism cancels out all reasonable reactions to dangerous nonsense when such nonsense comes out of black mouths. The coverage of Wright’s speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Wright, was under attack.
Wright’s speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House. The mainstream media have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into questioning Obama’s affiliation with Wright. By now, Wright’s 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn—and Obama’s repudiation of them a no-brainer. It is imperative that someone at CNN or the New York Times ask Obama whether he, too, believes that the way to “fix the schools” is through Afrocentric curricula and double standards in student discipline, and whether he, too, believes that blacks only think with the “right side” of their brains.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
All one has to do is observe the academically successful college students that are here directly from Africa to prove that Wright is Wrong (besides being a racist demagogue).
I notice in his rant, The good Reverend didn’t mention why other people of color, notably Asian Americans, outperform whites on standardized tests? So everyone is left-brained but African Americans?
And what about Obama’s own wayward father who went to Harvard to study economics and did it before affirmative action was instituted. Right or left-brained?
I have a copy of the Portland Base Line Essays, referenced in this article. I keep it on the shelf next to Steve Allen’s History of Comedy
Wright is a race-baiting demgogue full of himself whose statements, if uttered by any white person, would bring forth calls for censure and shunning.
That's #571 on the list of questions the media will never ask Obama.
There's another reason OB would prefer not to talk about education, since his unapologetic terrorist friend Bill Ayers has gained quite a bit of influence in K-12 teacher education, or, as he puts it "bringing the revolution into the classroom." Obama was associated with Ayers not only through the Woods Foundation and various seminars at the U. of Chicago, but also through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund.
Just another "distraction" from the real issues of hope and change and hope and change....
This article is right on, but could have been stronger. Mentioning that the intellectual black looniness (in justifying black school failures and inabilities to learn)may get into the White House (via Braack!)is a meaningful
comment, because Obama will bring that and a lot more.
Reparations becomes a possibility, until he clearly states that he will not support reparation legislation. (Will someone please ask him to answer this question?)
Obama sat for 20 years bathing in Black Liberation Theology.
Denouncing Rev. Wright does not separate him from the ideologic/religious 20-year’s worth of indoctrination.
I have a theory, based on my cynicism, mostly: Obama’s people knew that the church could do damage to his campaign
if it ever came out. When it did come out via the You Tube tapes, they were ready for it, and Obama made his famous “race” speech.
After that didn’t get the media off his back about the church (Rev Wright was just a symbol of the church. The issue, to me, anyway,was never Wright-the-person, but the Black Liberation Theology Obama had enjoyed absorbing for so long.)
So, since the Wright-BLT issue would not go away from Obama, he and Wright concocted this latest scenario....outrageous speeches by Wright and Obama’s supposed complete denunciation of Wright....for the purpose of allowing Obama to dismiss Wright, and thus give him a clean slate as far as Wright, BLT, and the church.
Those of us around here know that you can’t dump 20 years’ of ideology with one speech. There are a few skeptical media folks, but not many so far.
The key question is: Does Rev. Wright want Braak! to be elected president? Yes, he does. Duh. Braak! will bring BLT and it’s political aspirations into the supreme position of power. That’s the reason for the staged break-up.
I have looked and listened carefully to a lot of this campaign, and Obama has never said anything to deny his fealty to Black Liberation. He has felt this way since he was a child, according to his books.
I heard this on TV today: The next president will appoint three judges to the US Supreme Court.
C’mon Operation Chaos!!
wonder if mrs. b. HUSSEIN is proud of America today????
About the only good thing about this episode is that it calls attention to poisonous thought that has been out there circulating in the black community, unchallenged, for years. A lot of the black newspapers (papers published in certain major cities for a black readership) routinely carry ravings about “the white man” putting the AIDS virus into the drinking water in black neighborhoods or some such thing. I was always amazed in New York when I saw seemingly intelligent, normal black co-workers reading this garbage and actually appearing to believe it. And there was really no way of discussing it with them, because it all part of a kind of paranoid parallel universe that the separatist leaders had developed and gotten help from - ta da - the (leftist) “white man” in incorporating into the educational and social services system.
I worked for a literacy organization once that was supposed to deal with a multi-racial clientele, but that particular branch of it had been taken over by a black woman who was a professor at one of the education schools. All of the materials were nothing but one big black separatist rant, varied only by the introduction of occasional Marxist concepts, and full of black victimization and hate-the-man stuff. Most of our clientele was referred from prison, and the whites usually lasted about one month, until we had our monthly consciousness raising meeting, where the black students were encouraged to verbally attack the whites. This was supposed to “empower” them.
Interestingly, one of the black students, a young man who actually did show up for class regularly and really wanted to learn how to read, told me that he hadn’t come there to hear “all this political stuff” and he asked his parole officer to get him assigned to some other program. Others just disappeared. And of course, if some little old lady showed up, wanting to learn how to read so that she could actually read the Bible she had basically known through memory all these decades, we were supposed to discourage her from the Bible and give her some black radical nonsense to read!
I only lasted there a few months myself. I kept hoping it would get better, because it was a well-funded program and had materials and space, something lacking in many literacy programs, but it got progressively worse. They wouldn’t have had any white teachers, I’m sure, except that they couldn’t find enough black teachers to run the program.
Perhaps the Wright episode could reveal how widespread this poisonous thought has become in the educational system, and how horribly destructive it is. But that would mean that the left and the press would have to reject it, and that’s just not going to happen.
If I were a black parent I would want to publicly spit in Wright’s face and then redouble my efforts to assist and encourage my children to study hard and excel academically.
If I were a black student I would want to publicly spit in Wright’s face and then redouble my efforts to study hard and excel academically.
As it is, being merely a “typical white person”, I can only shake my head in sadness that the vast majority of black people aren’t deeply and angrily offended by this lousy stinking racist scumbag.
Wow, livius, that’s a very interesting story and I hope you’re right that the public light shining on this pustule Wright might in some way end up helping teachers who actually want to teach students to read, study and excel academically.
When your audience is comprised of high school dropouts... angry at their status in life and totally ignorant of history... their soft skulls are a sponge for this type of mumbo-jumbo.
The Cult of Personality aspects of the Obama candidacy are perhaps its most disquieting aspects.
An acquaitance has a black, educated Afro-Centrist BIL. He is quite successful in Midwestern academia and married to an independently wealthy Caucasian. Even though the woman I knew was very far left and full of liberal guilt, she snickered when discussing her sister and BIL.
All this idiocy is apparently embedded in the PC elite and is passed on to clueless students of all colors within the university. So, while the skulls-full-of-mush part is probably correct, the part about drop outs and anger over low status is not necessarily so. I believe that the lack of true historical knowledge is and was purposeful, perpetrated just so students of all sorts could be more easily inculcated into various forms of whatever-centric lies. The anger, IMO, comes from the disconnect between what they have been taught is truth not meshing with what they see/experience in reality. It is the outcome of severe cognitive dissonance. This anger and confusion feeds all the other conspiracy theories.
that is *acquaintance*. Apologies for not using spell check sooner.
I see the same mentality when discussing 9-11 with co-workers from the Middle East. They are rational, intelligent people, but have no doubt that the Jews brought down the World Trade Center as a power grab.
This is an excellent article with comments that are spot on. It’s too bad that the people who really need to read it probably won’t.
BTW, I also enjoyed the correct manner of posting, i.e. including links, italics, etc. It’s not so hard, especially when a printer friendly version is offered.
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