The Wright stuff

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has become famous after some of his sermons, offered for sale by the church as a “Best of…” series, were played on national TV. The resulting uproar has focused attention on “Black Liberation theology.” This church is attended by middle class people in spite of the admonition on the church web site to “Avoid Middleclassness.” That admonition has since disappeared but, by the magic of the internet, here it is. What does the statement about “middleclassness” mean ? Here is a suggestion.

Remember the fuss about “Ebonics” in Oakland school ? Well, that is only part of it.

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.

Leo High School seal

This is ugly stuff. Fortunately, I don’t think this is the mainstream of thought in black educational circles. For the past ten years, I have contributed to my former high school in Chicago. It isn’t too far from Rev Wright’s church, as the crow flies, but, hopefully, it is light years away in concept. When I look at the web site, I don’t see Ebonics or anything about rap music learning. I do see a 96% graduation rate and a college acceptance rate of over 90%. Note the process of application. The school interviews the parents.

This is not a prep school for wealthy black families like the Obamas. This is a blue collar neighborhood and the kids who attend Leo today are working to better themselves. The tuition isn’t cheap for a working family but the school tells me that over 95% of parents are current on tuition at any given time. This is the American dream in action. The last reunion I attended, my 50th, was two years ago. At the first one, in 1996, I saw only one table of black alumni. Two years ago, there were a least three. The white alumni turn out and contribute in hopes that the younger graduates will take over as we die off. It looks like that will happen.

In the meantime, I think a toast to “middleclassness” is in order, no matter what the black liberation theorists say.

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7 Responses to “The Wright stuff”

  1. Dana says:

    Me thinks Charles Murray is owed a seriously Big apology.

  2. Eric Blair says:

    Ah, but Dana! It’s different when an Officially Oppressed Person says something racist and hateful. And attempts to be balanced and fair make up censorship and are the work of right wing racist crazies who aren’t even aware of their overwhelming white privilege.

    And the idea that family is vital to the success of young people? Retro and emotionally imperialistic. It takes a village, after all.

    Oh my aching head.

    We have a victicrat/ethnocrat culture. It seems to push the concept that who your ancestors were is much more important than who you are, and what you have done.

    As for Charles Murray, yup. Ditto Patrick Moynihan.

  3. Eric Blair says:

    And perhaps we should page Larry Summers over at Harvard, while we are at it?

  4. cassandra says:

    This all makes me vomit. The right brain dominates in general in primitives…until the left is trained to assume equality or even dominance.
    It’s called – education!

    In general I think our whole society is sliding back into right-brain primitivism after a left-brain peak around 1960. Oh, but we’re so creative now. Right.

  5. Eric Blair says:

    True, Cassandra. The sad situation is how all sides in the political debate want to put people into boxes—all conservatives think this, all Blacks think that, and so on. Sloppy thinking, and collectivist in the extreme.

    I am amused by the mental limbo that my leftish neighbors make regarding this kind of thing: it’s horrific when Larry Summers suggests that women and men possess differently wired brains (thinking that might be involved with disparity in women in science, with an eye to remedying that issue if it exists), but Reverend Wrong can basically say that Blacks think differently than whites because of a different nervous system?

    If a white person wrote that whites excelled in, say, finance because of the ways their brains are constructed, and that Blacks cannot because of their brain structure, such people would be rightly called racist. Wright gets a pass.

    Why is that?

  6. He’s black. Blacks get a pass. Ask Michael Moore

  7. Eric Blair says:

    Wait a minute. That’s…that’s….judging a person differently because of the color of their skin!

    I dream of the day where we start thinking about the content of their character, instead.