Jeremiah Wright’s Stupid Views on Black and White Learning

I can pretty much stand by what I’ve said before: a Jeremiah Wright in context is nothing but an even more racist, more hateful, more anti-American Jeremiah Wright than a Jeremiah Wright out of context. Now – in living, glowing context – Jermemiah Wright is saying things that would make even a self-respecting fascist blush.

You have simply GOT to hear these words from Wright, spoken before a cheering crowd of 10,000 at the 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner sponsored by the NAACP on April 27.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been.

Miseducation. Miseducation incidentally is not a Jeremiah Wright term. It’s a word coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson over 80 years ago. Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn’t it? Now, analyze that. Two brilliant scholars and two beautiful sisters, both of whom hail from Detroit in the fields of education and linguistics, Dr. Janice Hale right here at Wayne State University, founder of the Institute for the study of the African-American child. and Dr. Geneva Smitherman formerly of Wayne State University now at Michigan State University in Lansing. Hail in education and Smitherman in linguistics. Both demonstrated 40 years ago that different does not mean deficient. Somebody is going to miss that.

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, “Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style.” Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale’s research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early ’70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

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.

Reverend Wright believes that white children and black children learn differently. White children are left-brain object oriented; and black children are right-brain subject oriented. White children are “logical and analytical.” Black children are “creative and intuitive.”

Imagine if a white man had said that. Imagine, furthermore, if the pastor of John McCain’s church had presented such a pet theory to a national audience. There would be a firestorm of unimaginable proportions. As it is, not so much as a peep from the elite media. They are too busy hoping that they can either whitewash Wright’s views as “an acceptable form of culturally-black expression” or at least distance Barack Obama from any damage if plan A fails.

Jeremiah Wright says, “Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different.” The problem is that different actually very often DOES mean deficient. Pol Pot was different from the Dalai Llama. Adolf Hitler was different from Winston Churchill. Ice cream is different from colon cancer. Saying “different is not deficient” over and over again don’t make it so.

Do you see the can of worms Jeremiah Wright’s views open? should we now re-segregate our schools, so that black right-brain children can learn “their kind’s” way? The answer is ‘absolutely yes,’ according to Barack Obama’s mentor. And decades of hard-earned integration go right down the drain. Different classrooms come first. Different water fountains and bathrooms, of course, presumably come later. Do you see how completely radical these views are?

And, if there truly is a biological difference between black and white intelligence, as Wright claims, how does that not mean that one might very well be superior to the other? The record of history comparing the success of white European society to that of black African society now comes into play as a rather powerful prima facia argument that “logical and analytical” biologically trumps “creative and intuitive.” Racists have been making the very point that Wright embraces for generations. And from that understanding of difference, they argue to the deficiency: Prior to and during the Civil War, southern white elites professed to be taking care of blacks through the institution of slavery. “Blacks can’t think like whites. They are like monkey-children, and we have to use our superior white intellect to take care of them,” they claimed. We got the phrase, “That’s mighty white of you” from that sort of attitude. Jeremiah Wright himself now opens the door to a return to some of the darkest racial times this country – and the world – has ever seen.

You simply must understand that the kinds of “differences” Wright points to have been – and are to this very day – viewed very much as “deficiencies” by many others who have dreams about solving such “deficiencies.” Jeremiah Wright, who argues that he is “descriptive,” not “divisive,” is indeed extremely divisive – and this particular brand of divissiveness has led humanity down dark and terrifying pathways.

Genuine Christianity – unlike Wright’s racist brand – does not fixate on such “differences,” but instead fixates on the image of God that all humanity shares in common. It’s not about what separates us, but what we share in common.

“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said rather famously. But let us instead follow the thought of Jeremiah Wright and separate those children on his perceived difference in learning ability?

Let me take you down that dark path, from the idea to the consequences:

Out of Darwinism comes social darwinism. If the former theory is true, the latter is a necessary corolary. And Darwin’s subtitle for The Origin of Species was “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” Darwin described the development of life-forms in terms of an ongoing struggle for existence. The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races who were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish.

In his Descent of Man, Darwin wrote:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

People have argued about Darwin’s racial views, but don’t think for a nanosecond that a vast array of intellectuals did not pick up on the clear implications of Darwinian thought – or that the consequences of that thought brought us horror on a scale that humanity had never dreamed of in its worst nightmares.

Francis Galton ackowledged that he was greatly influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species. In his book Hereditary Genius he extended Darwin’s theory of natural selection into a concept of deliberate social intervention in his work, which he held to be the logical application of evolution to the human race. Galton was by no means satisfied to let evolution take its course freely. Having decided to improve the human race through selective breeding, brought about through social intervention, he developed a subject which he called “Eugenics”, the principle of which was that by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.

Darwin congratulated Galton on the publication of Hereditary Genius, telling his younger cousin in a letter that, “I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.”

In his essay, Eugenics as a Factor in Religion, Galton laid out arguments that would one day lead to Nazi death camps. He left no doubt about the link between evolution and eugenics: “The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution; not on a passive form of it, but on one that can to some extent direct its own course….”
http://www.coralridge.org/darwin/legacy.asp?ID=crm&ec=I1301
http://www.galton.org/books/memories/chapter-XXI.html

A quote from Tom DeRosa’s “From Darwin’s Theory to Hitler’s Holocaust” fills in the picture:

When Hitler came to power in 1933, he installed a dictatorship with one agenda: enactment of his radical Nazi racial philosophy built on Darwinian evolution. He sought, in Darwin’s terms, to preserve the “favoured” race in the struggle for survival. Brute strength and [superior white Aryan] intelligence would be the driving force of the Nazi plan.

The first task was to eliminate the weak and those with impure blood that would corrupt the race. These included the disabled, ill, Jews, and Gypsies. Second, the Nazis sought to expand Germany’s borders in order to achieve more living space, or “Lebensraum,” to make room for the expansion of the “favoured” race. Third, the Nazis set about to eliminate communism because of its threat to the Aryan race and because, according to Hitler, communism was the work of Bolshevik Jews.

The plan quickly unfolded. An order to sterilize some 400,000 Germans was issued within five months of Hitler’s rise to power. The order, set to take effect on January 1, 1934, listed nine categories of the unfit to be sterilized: feebleminded, schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington’s chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness, hereditary blindness, and alcoholism. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 to prohibit marriage between Jews and Germans and to strip Jews of their German citizenship.

The Nazis established eugenic courts to ensure that the eugenic laws were enforced. To identify the unfit, German eugenicists compared the individual health files of millions of Germans with medical records from hospitals and the National Health Service. The American firm, IBM, aided the effort by automating a national card file system that cross-indexed the defective.

American eugenicists celebrated the German sterilization program. A leading U.S. eugenics publication, Eugenical News, published an admiring article on a German eugenics institute and extended “best wishes” to its director “for the success of his work in his new and favorable environment.” The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized in 1934 that “Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit.”

Eugenics in America was not a fringe movement. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark 1927 ruling that authorized the sterilization of a “feeble minded” Virginia woman. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

DeRosa points out that “Today when evolutionists are questioned as to how Darwinian evolution gave birth to Hitler’s Nazism, they immediately want to beg the question, answering that racism has nothing to do with science. They are correct! Racism has nothing to do with science, but it has everything to do with evolution—a fact that is unavoidable.”

It might be worth mentioning at this point that Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in order to put her philosophy of eugenics to life. And blacks were near the top of her list of “deficients.”

Eugenics is back in the news today. Recently, a UCLA pro-life student group conducted a “sting” that exposed the fact that the organization created by racist-eugenicist Margaret Sanger may well be as racist as ever. An overwhelming number of “Family Planning clinics” are located in predominantly black neighborhoods, helping black women terminate half their pregnancies.

Pro-abortionists call it “exercising a woman’s right to choose.” Francis Galton called it “discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock.” Should I again mention Jeremiah Wright’s mantra, “Different does not mean deficient” here? I argue that such views are morally deficient.

Black pastors are coming out in force to condemn the genocide of black babies in Planned Parenthood clinics. Unfortunately, Jeremiah Wright is not among their number; he supports abortion. I don’t know how he feels about the fact that half of all black babies are killed before they can see the faces of the mothers who don’t want them.

Now, I have no doubt that Jeremiah Wright would immediately disassociate himself from Nazis, from eugenics, from the genocide of black babies, and maybe even from Darwinism.

The problem is that there is a world of unintended consequences. Liberals once added a luxury tax on items such as yachts to collect more revenue. They were very quickly forced to suspend the tax because wealthy people quit buying yachts resulting in the layoff of thousands of workers. In this case, Wright wants to pursue an agenda of black racial separatism, but I am arguing that the consequences for blacks will be anything other than good.

The problem is that, for all of his intelligence, Jeremiah Wright is a moral idiot who does not understand that Adolf Hitler, Margaret Sanger, and every other racist social Darwinist would listen to the comments I’ve quoted from Jeremiah Wright and completely agree with them.

The problem is that ideas have consequences, and Jeremiah Wright has a head crammed full of vile ideas.

The problem is that the more the American people hear these vile ideas, the more they will legitimately question whether a man who sat under such teaching for twenty years is fit to be president.

Tags: African, analytical, Barack Obama, biological difference, Christianity, Civil War, consequences, context, creative, Darwin, deficient, different, eugenics, European, genocide, Hitler, integrate, intelligence, intuitive, Jeremiah Wright, John McCain's pastor, left brain, logical, Margaret Sanger, Martin Luther King, miseducation, NAACP, Nazi, object, perish, Planned Parenthood, races, re-segregate, right brain, schools, segregation, share in common, slavery, social darwinism, subject, weaker