Soccer Dad

I have a nightmare

I heard about these arguments from Rev. Wright's speech at the NAACP dinner this week, but I had a hard time understanding them.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who's words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning. It's not deficient, it is just different. Somebody say different. I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing how we see other people who are different.

Imagine a white public figure got up and said something similar. Would that person be applauded? At an NAACP function?

Think about what he's saying. He's saying that African-Americans don't have the makeup to learn the way Caucasians do. And even if you take it as being non-judgmental he's effectively arguing that Brown vs. the Board of Education was incorrect and that the doctrine of "separate but equal" was correct.

Years ago there was a Doonsbury cartoon in which the black students at Walden College were arguing for equality. They wanted whatever the white students had. In the final panel one of the characters delivers the punchline: the black students want separate water fountains.

Imagine that. While it was satire, Garry Trudeau was observing that to some what was once the symbol of discrimination had become, in the 1980's a symbol of equality. Here too, Rev. Wright seemingly wishes to go back to our country's shameful past. In the name of equality.

Once upon a time the NAACP would fight such talk. Now it invites it and applauds it.

It is a racist's fondest dream.

jeremiah wright,