The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since 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 Barack Obama’s worldview as well.
Some in Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Ms. Hale and Mr. Wright: Whites use what Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120952079425155103.html
Tags: afrocentric, authentically black, ebonics, hillary, Wright
May 3, 2008 at 1:32 am |
Mr. 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. Mr. Wright gave another shout-out to the late Asa Hilliard of Georgia State University, who told us, Mr. Wright said, “how to fix the schools.” Like Ms. Hale, Mr. 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. Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 did; 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 Mr. Hilliard’s book of 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 Mr. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of crime — as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Ms. Austin and Mr. 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 yesterday’s New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Mr. Wright “went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics,” Ms. Stanley effuses. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous.”
One might think that Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Mr. Wright’s speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Mr. Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Mr. Wright, was under attack.
Mr. 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 Mr. Obama’s affiliation with Mr. Wright. By now, Mr. Wright’s 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn — and Mr. Obama’s repudiation of them a no-brainer.
It is imperative that someone ask Mr. 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.
Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120952079425155103.html
May 10, 2008 at 10:08 pm |
Saint Sabina Raises the Roof on Obama’s Den of Political Tricks and Corruption
Email: susanunpc@gmail.com
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About: See Authors Posts (8) on May 8, 2008 at 6:58 PM
So Mayor Richard Daley and Reverend Michael Pfleger decided it was time for everyone to begin “Raising the Roof for St. Sabina.” Too bad their little fundraising scheme also raises the roof on the Barack Obama campaign’s den of political tricks and corruption. Just view some of the names on this list of fundraisers (enlarged in the image to the right):
* Richard Daley, the corrupt Obama backer behind Free Image Hosting at http://www.ImageShack.us….the Hired Truck Scandal, an elaborate network of cronyism and corruption that rocked Chicago City Hall in 2004, 2005 and 2006;
* David Axelrod, Lead Strategist of the Obama campaign and Political Consultant to Richard “Hired Truck” Daley who also served as Consultant for Exelon, the Illinois nuclear giant whose lobbyists convinced Obama not to regulate companies that contaminated groundwater with radioactive toxic waste; and
* Illinois state Treasurer Alexei Giannoulias, whose bank, the Broadway Bank, granted loans to known mobsters and to indicted political fixer and Obama patron Antoin “Tony” Rezko.
Mobster banker Giannoulias also moonlights as one of the Obama campaign’s top bundlers. Dirty money, it seems, does not travel far in the city of Chicago.
But this is not a story of the circulation of funds in an elaborate labyrinth of cronyism and corruption; this is also a narrative of the circulation of words in a coordinated network of events and characters who desire to elect Barack Obama President of the United States.
You recall Father Michael Pfleger, the quack cum Catholic priest on Chicago’s south side who exhorted parishioners during a rally to “snuff out” legislators who defended the right to bear arms. Although Pfleger was admonished by the Chicago Archdiocese for his incendiary rhetoric, he remained a close affiliate of Daley, Giannoulias and Axelrod, all of whom are close associates of Barack Obama.
Pfleger is also a close associate of Obama’s pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, who spoke at St. Sabina Church on May 25, 2007.
In fact, Pfleger is so close to Wright, he has served as an intermediary between Wright and Obama after the two reached an impasse after Obama denounced Wright during the latter’s series of entertaining press conferences. Here is the report of CBS News Chicago:
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> CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine reports Obama felt betrayed and Wright felt sand-bagged. Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Church said he has been speaking to both men as the events of the past 24 hours unfolded. He counseled Obama Tuesday morning, and while CBS 2 talked to him Tuesday evening, Rev. Wright called his cell phone.
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> “I don’t think he had any intention to hurt Barack. He loves Barack,” Pfleger said. “I think the pain and the moment took over.” That moment was in a place Pfleger called “a lion’s den” – The National Press Club. “The people who were close to him pleaded with him not to do it,” said WVON radio host Roland Martin. “We knew what the questions were gonna be, but it really was the antics, the looks the dismissive tone, the strut. It was being flippant, some say being pompous and arrogant.”
That appearance Monday was far from a pastor’s comfort zone, like St. Sabina on the South Side, the site of Wright’s first appearance after his words drove a wedge between him and Obama.
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> Fr. Pfleger says Wright’s first instinct Monday was to defend his reputation. “Sometimes you get caught up in the emotional response because you’re hurt, because you’re injured,” Pfleger said.
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> Mayor Richard M. Daley called the current flap a dangerous distraction.
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> “You better believe it; you cannot have distractions in any campaign,” Daley said.
So Pfleger had to serve as mediator between Wright and Obama during the Wright spectacle last week, and Daley felt obliged to assess the whole affair. Not mentioned in this article is David Axelrod, the same Axelrod who simultaneously serves as Chief Strategist of the Obama Campaign and as a member of the “Raising the Roof for St. Sabina” board, the board that ensures that Pfleger’s house of worship and source of income will remain intact.
This fiduciary relationship between Pfleger, Obama, Wright, Axelrod and Daley raises a few questions:
* Did Axelrod coordinate the impasse between Wright and Obama?;
* Did Axelrod ask Wright to humiliate himself on national television in order to mobilize the African-American base while Obama placated white voters with his sanctimonious repudiations of Reverend Wright?; and
* Did Pfleger, an outspoken Obama supporter and Obama contributor who is the beneficiary of Obama’s state legislative activity and of Axelrod’s fundraising prowess, serve as intermediary between Obama and Wright as Axelrod coordinated their bifurcated strategy to mobilize African-American supporters while pandering to white voters who were abandoning Obama en masse after seeing Wright once again on their television screens?
And what is one to think of the membership of Axelrod, Daley and Giannoulias on the “Raising of the Roof for St. Sabina” fund when one learns that Pfleger donated to Obama’s various political campaigns after that church received state grants Obama announced?
Not only is money circulated within a tightly knit but complicated network of corruption and cronyism in Chicago; the actions of all those involved appear to be staged and coordinated by David Axelrod.
Just raise the roof of Pfleger’s St. Sabina Church. What one sees below is a snake pit of corruption starring Axelrod, Daley, Farrakhan, Obama, Pfleger and Wright. The chickens, I guess, come home to roost in Pfleger’s radicalized and marginalized St. Sabina Catholic Church.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/08/saint-sabina-raises-the-roof-on-obamas-den-of-political-tricks-and-corruption/#more-2439
“It’s being chronicled at noquarter and taylormarsh, and it doesn’t really need further documenting. Recent attempts by the punditocracy to nominate our Party’s Presidential Candidate, are instances of the “grassroots” Fat-Cats in the Media and Political elite, to destroy Clinton once and for all.
Obama doesn’t stand a chance of winning the nomination, and as the Primary rolls to a close, this becomes too painfully apparent to Messrs. Axelrod, Plouff, and Penny Pritzker. He can’t get the delegates, or popular vote. Upcoming primaries will vindicate Clinton, and the Obama scoundrels last resort, is to apply overwhelming Media pressure to our morale, to beat us into submission and take us out of the voter calculus.
They’ve done this incessantly throughout the Race, and now it appears, they are reaching Critical Mass.
Critical Mass means making the contest a foregone conclusion, and minimizing Clinton turnout in the next six contests. Clinton supporters are supposedly to be licking our wounds, instead of showing up in West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico.
Optimally, this demoralization is best accomplished by henceforth altogether ignoring Clinton. To take her out of the media circuit, and marginalize her to the degree of a Mike Gravel and Ron Paul, the level of court jesters, or gadflies. For this media strategy to succeed, however, Clinton supporters must buy into the “we have lost” logic.
Don’t count on it. We wont. It’s what the Axis Powers tried on us during the War, and its what brought them endless humiliation, when Democracy stood towering over their defeated cause.
The Critical Mass in the media, has been reached. There is consensus, unanimous and monolithic to a truly debilitating degree, that Clinton has been taken out. Our counterstrategy- don’t buy into it. Don’t buy into it and redouble your efforts for phoning, donating, blogging, and whatever it takes to reach out to voters in the five and a half states.
Your efforts will not go to waste. Victory is around the corner. The reason we are seeing Critical Mass, is precisely because Obama is about to be destroyed. They are attacking your morale, because their own resolve and morale, are dissipating. Critical Mass, is the counteroffensive to our D-Day.
Obama is too tired, too exhausted, too reluctant, to carry on the fight beyond July 8th. He knows he will be devastated by Puerto Rico. For all their yapping, the Obama camp cannot afford to disenfranchise Florida and Michigan, and once the Primary is over, this will become painfully clear to his supporters, who are in for a giant let down.
The DNC is the big collaborationist here, as it is praying to escape the humiliation of being busted with backtracking on its three months of anti-FL/MI rhetoric, by seeing Clinton outed before the show is over.
Clinton loyalists and Clinton voters, have the trump cards, and the DNC may not be in direct cahoots with Axelrod, but they are trying to save their reputation, while fearing Clinton’s ability to take tear it down.
Obama feels the same. Repeatedly, he has expressed dismay at having to continue the struggle against our Roosevelt. It’s pure fear on Obama’s part. The fear of being humiliated in front of voters, having to backtrack on Florida and Michigan, being exposed as divisive, arrogant, and self-serving. Obama knows too well, that he lacks the gamesmanship, the skill, or discipline and resolve, to take this all the way to Denver. Obviously, Obama’s supporters’ enthusiasm, is not reflecting on his own flagging morale.”