The Washington Post today suggests a “thought experiment.
Conduct a thought experiment: Imagine that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor to presidential candidate Barack Obama and preacher with controversial views, was not an outspoken black man but a white woman who penned her controversial ideas in a scholarly journal. If Wright’s views were the only thing that mattered, his race, sex and public style ought to make no difference.
Let’s try this. The “white woman” would have suggested the following:
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.”
Does anyone imagine she would have gotten away with that ? Imagine this :
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
Had enough ? No ?
There is
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.
So, our mythical white female professor would suggest that
Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects” — books.
They should embrace thievery as a cultural norm.
People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.
And,
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.
That should certainly prove the thought experiment’s point.
a white female scholar ought to damage Obama’s popularity in the same way the pastor has done recently.
Well, she would have to suggest that he sat for 20 years listening to these theories and exposing his children to them.
Having established that as a fact, yes, I think it would hurt him just as much.