[Vision2020] Wright 101

[No Weatherman]

Ms. Hovey,

It's simply a consistency test.

I do not know where you stand politically though I know where you
stood during the Weitz debacle.

I know you have dedicated much of your life to the betterment of the
MSD and our community, and I am really curious how you would have
reacted if someone locally had misused such large sums of money in the
name of education.

It's really not personal.


On 10/14/08, Sue Hovey <suehovey at moscow.com> wrote:
>
>
> I can't imagine why my opinion would matter to you.
>
> Sue Hovey
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: keely emerinemix
> To: No Weatherman ; vision2020 at moscow.com
> Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:45 PM
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Wright 101
>
> As one of the regular contributors to this forum who was on the MSD Board of
> Trustees, guess what?  I still have nothing to say to you.   Perhaps I've
> been unclear.  You're a bigoted, lying coward.  I have enough decent people
> in my life with whom I'm pleased to engage.
>
> Keely
> http://keely-prevailingwinds.blogspot.com/
>
>
> > Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:48:51 -0800
> > From: no.weatherman at gmail.com
> > To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> > Subject: [Vision2020] Wright 101
> >
> > 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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