[Vision2020] Wright 101

No Weatherman no.weatherman at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 09:48:51 PDT 2008


At least two contributors to this forum were at one time active
members of the MSD, whether on the board or in the faculty.

I'm curious to get their opinion, or anyone else's, of CAC investing
$150,000,000 into the education system of Chicago and not improving it
one bit.

Wright 101
Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright's anti-Americanism
By Stanley Kurtz

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not
only did Barack Obama savor Wright's sermons, Obama gave legitimacy —
and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same
extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And
guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly
anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting
a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with
a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the
education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama's tie to Wright is no longer a purely
personal question (if it ever was one) about one man's choice of his
pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared
Wright's anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public
policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

African Village
In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in
[Chicago's] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a
$200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS
an "external partner," i.e. a community organization linked to a
network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network,
named the "South Shore African Village Collaborative" was thoroughly
"Afrocentric" in orientation. CIESS's job was to use a combination of
teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to
improve academic performance in the schools it worked with. CIESS
would continue to receive large Annenberg grants throughout the 1990s.

The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) was very much a
part of the Afrocentric "rites of passage movement," a fringe
education crusade of the 1990s. SSAVC schools featured
"African-Centered" curricula built around "rites of passage"
ceremonies inspired by the puberty rites found in many African
societies. In and of themselves, these ceremonies were harmless. Yet
the philosophy that accompanied them was not. On the contrary, it was
a carbon-copy of Jeremiah Wright's worldview.

Rites of Passage
To learn what the rites of passage movement was all about, we can turn
to a sympathetic 1992 study published in the Journal of Negro
Education by Nsenga Warfield-Coppock. In that article,
Warfield-Coppock bemoans the fact that public education in the United
States is shaped by "capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and
oppression." According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values
"have confused African American people and oriented them toward
American definitions of achievement and success and away from
traditional African values." American socialization has "proven to be
dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community,"
Warfield-Coppock tells us. The answer is the adolescent rites of
passage movement, designed "to provide African American youth with the
cultural information and values they would need to counter the
potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented
society."

The adolescent rites of passage movement that flowered in the 1990s
grew out of the "cultural nationalist" or "Pan-African" thinking
popular in radical black circles of the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt
to create a virtually separate and intensely anti-American black
social world began to take hold in the mid-1980s in small private
schools, which carefully guarded the contents of their controversial
curricula. Gradually, through external partners like CIESS, the
movement spread to a few public schools. Supporters view these
programs as "a social and cultural 'inoculation' process that
facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African
American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist,
sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society."

We know that SSAVC was part of this movement, not only because their
Annenberg proposals were filled with Afrocentric themes and references
to "rites of passage," but also because SSAVC's faculty set up its
African-centered curriculum in consultation with some of the most
prominent leaders of the "rites of passage movement." For example, a
CIESS teacher conference sponsored a presentation on African-centered
curricula by Jacob Carruthers, a particularly controversial
Afrocentrist.

Jacob Carruthers
Like other leaders of the rites of passage movement, Carruthers
teaches that the true birthplace of world civilization was ancient
"Kemet" (Egypt), from which Kemetic philosophy supposedly spread to
Africa as a whole. Carruthers and his colleagues believe that the
values of Kemetic civilization are far superior to the isolating and
oppressive, ancient Greek-based values of European and American
civilization. Although academic Egyptologists and anthropologists
strongly reject these historical claims, Carruthers dismisses critics
as part of a white supremacist conspiracy to hide the truth of African
superiority.

Carruthers's key writings are collected in his book, Intellectual
Warfare. Reading it is a wild, anti-American ride. In his book, we
learn that Carruthers and his like-minded colleagues have formed an
organization called the Association for the Study of Classical African
Civilizations (ASCAC), which takes as its mission the need to
"dismantle the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide
against African peoples." Carruthers includes "African-Americans"
within a group he would define as simply "African." When forced to
describe a black person as "American," Carruthers uses quotation
marks, thus indicating that no black person can be American in any
authentic sense. According to Carruthers, "The submission to Western
civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American
civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy."

Carruthers's goal is to use African-centered education to recreate a
separatist universe within America, a kind of state-within-a-state.
The rites of passage movement is central to the plan. Carruthers sees
enemies on every part of the political spectrum, from conservatives,
to liberals, to academic leftists, all of whom reject advocates of
Kemetic civilization, like himself, as dangerous and academically
irresponsible extremists. Carruthers sees all these groups as deluded
captives of white supremacist Eurocentric culture. Therefore the only
safe place for Africans living in the United States (i.e. American
blacks) is outside the mental boundaries of our ineradicably racist
Eurocentric civilization. As Carruthers puts it: ". . . some of us
have chosen to reject the culture of our oppressors and recover our
disrupted ancestral culture." The rites of passage movement is a way
to teach young Africans in the United States how to reject America and
recover their authentic African heritage.

America as Rape
Carruthers admits that Africans living in America have already been
shaped by Western culture, yet compares this Americanization process
to rape: "We may not be able to get our virginity back after the rape,
but we do not have to marry the rapist. . . ." In other words,
American blacks (i.e. Africans) may have been forcibly exposed to
American culture, but that doesn't mean they need to accept it. The
better option, says Carruthers, is to separate out and relearn the
wisdom of Africa's original Kemetic culture, embodied in the teachings
of the ancient wise man, Ptahhotep (an historical figure traditionally
identified as the author of a Fifth Dynasty wisdom book). Anything
less than re-Africanization threatens the mental, and even physical,
genocide of Africans living in an ineradicably white supremacist
United States.

Carruthers is a defender of Leonard Jeffries, professor in the
department of black studies at City College in Harlem, infamous for
his black supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Jeffries sees whites as
oppressive and violent "ice people," in contrast to peaceful and
mutually supportive black "sun people." The divergence says Jeffries,
is attributable to differing levels of melanin in the skin. Jeffries
also blames Jews for financing the slave trade. Carruthers defends
Jeffries and excoriates the prestigious black academics Carruthers
views as traitorous for denouncing their African brother, Jeffries.
Carruthers's vision of the superior and peaceful Kemetic philosophy of
Ptahhotep triumphing over Greco-Euro-American-white culture obviously
parallels Jeffries' opposition between ice people and sun people.

More of Carruthers's education philosophy can be found in his
newsletter, The Kemetic Voice. In 1997, for example, at the same time
Carruthers was advising SSAVC on how to set up an African-centered
curriculum, he praised the decision of New Orleans' School Board to
remove the name of George Washington from an elementary school.
Apparently, some officials in New Orleans had decided that nobody who
held slaves should have a school named after him. Carruthers touted
the name-change as proof that his African-centered perspective was
finally having an effect on public policy. At the demise of George
Washington School, Carruthers crowed: "These events remind us of how
vast the gulf is that separates the Defenders of Western Civilization
from the Champions of African Civilization."

According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers's
training session on African-centered curricula for SSAVC teachers was
a huge hit: "As a consciousness raising session, it received rave
reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey.
. . ." These teacher-training workshops were directly funded by the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Another sure sign of the ideological cast
of SSAVC's curriculum can be found in Annenberg documents noting that
SSAVC students are taught the wisdom of Ptahhotep. Carruthers's
concerns about "menticide" and "genocide" at the hand of America's
white supremacist system seem to be echoed in an SSAVC document that
says: "Our children need to understand the historical context of our
struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us."

When Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the
late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright's
African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member), many
prominent thinkers from Carruthers's Association for the Study of
Classical African Civilizations were invited to speak at Trinity
United Church of Christ, Carruthers himself included. We hear echoes
of Carruthers's work in Wright's distinction between "right brained"
Africans and "left brained" Europeans, in Wright's fears of U.S.
government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright's
embittered attacks on America's indelibly white-supremacist history.
In Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine, as in Carruthers's own writings,
blacks are often referred to as "Africans living in the diaspora"
rather than as Americans.

Asa Hilliard
Chicago Annenberg Challenge records also indicate that SSAVC educators
invited Asa Hilliard, a pioneer of African-centered curricula and a
close colleague of Carruthers, to offer a keynote address at yet
another Annenberg-funded teacher training session. Hilliard's ties to
Wright run still deeper than Carruthers's. A close Wright mentor and
friend, Hilliard died in 2007 while on a trip to Kemet (Egypt) with
Wright and members of Wright's congregation. Hillard was scheduled to
deliver several lectures to the congregants, and to speak at a meeting
of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization,
which he co-founded with Carruthers and other "African-centered"
scholars. On that last trip, Hilliard accepted an appointment to the
board of Wright's new elementary school, Kwame Nkrumah Academy.
Speaking of the need for such a school, Wright had earlier said, "We
need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy." (For
more on Wright's Afrocentric school, see "Jeremiah Wright's
'Trumpet.'")

Wright delivered the eulogy at Hilliard's memorial service, with
prominent members of ASCAC in the audience. To commemorate Hilliard, a
special, two-cover double issue of Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine was
published, with a picture of Hilliard on one side, and a picture of
Louis Farrakhan on the other (in celebration of a 2007 award Farrakhan
received from Wright). In short, the ties between Wright and Hilliard
could hardly have been closer. Clearly, then, Wright's own educational
philosophy was mirrored at the Annenberg-funded SSAVC, which sought
out Hilliard's and Carruthers's counsel to construct its curriculum.

Perhaps inadvertently, Wright's eulogy for Hilliard actually
established the fringe nature of his favorite African-centered
scholars. In his tribute, Wright stressed how intensely "white
Egyptologists recoiled at the very notion of everything Asa taught."
As Wright himself made plain, it seems virtually impossible to find
respectable scholars of any political stripe who approve of the
extremist anti-American version of Afrocentrism promoted by Hilliard
and Carruthers.

Ayers's Pals
An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only
worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge, but who is still "palling around" with the same folks.
Discretely waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife,
and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book
in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy. The book will be
published by Third World Press, a press set up by Carruthers and other
members of the ASCAC. Representatives of that press were prominently
present for Wright's eulogy at Asa Hilliard's memorial service. Less
than a decade ago, therefore, when it came to education issues, Barack
Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were pretty much on the same
page.

Obama's Knowledge
Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright,
Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational
philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be
convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same
year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he
publicly rejected "the unrealistic politics of integrationist
assimilation," a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and
Carruthers. (See "No Liberation.")

And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded
thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off
his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama
would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC's Annenberg
proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And
if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard's or Carruthers's names,
SSAVC's proposals are filled with references to "rites of passage" and
"Ptahhotep," dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist
ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show
him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when
concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the
Ayers-headed "Collaborative" to distance itself from monetary issues,
all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly,
there was dissent within the board. One business leader and
experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg
proposals as "awful." (See "The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First
Three Years," p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board
kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the
South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations
focused on traditional educational achievement.

As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn't warning enough, their
proposals consistently misspelled "rites of passage" as "rights of
passage," hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve
children's reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge's own
evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no
improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure,
in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg's "external partners" had
little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into
Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill,
and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to
waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that,
from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge,
Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project
that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah
Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It's time for McCain to say
so.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YTQ0YjhlOGVhYjQ0OWRhZjI2MmM4NTQ4NGM5Mjg0MzU=



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