The wrongness of Wright

By KEN WIBECAN

May 03, 2008 08:34 am

— If the stakes weren't so high, Dr. Jeremiah Wright's clownish performance at the NAACP's annual dinner last week might have found its way into the annals of America's Funniest Comedy bits. But he meant it to be serious, and to use the opportunity to nail shut the coffin of his former parishioner, Barack Obama. But, far from being a scholarly effort, it was full of half-truths, innuendo and just plain lies delivered by a man who has three earned degrees, a couple of honorary ones, and professes to "work for Jesus." I kept waiting for the lightning to strike.
There was much in Wright's speech with which to take issue. From the U.S. inventing the AIDS virus to kill blacks and gays, to the "greatness" of Louis Farrakhan, to attacks on Wright's angry statements being attacks against the Black church he was wrong and wronger. Unfortunately, it was so easy to enjoy his entertaining delivery that listeners often let the words glide by like polluted water cascading down a cliff to become a beautiful waterfall.
Wright's reflections on race bothered me. The scientific community has long ago decided that there is no such scientific or biological concept as race and humans are all one species that look different depending on which part of the globe we inhabit. That we are called African-American, or Black, or White are human constructs and serve social and political masters; it certainly is not science.
If it is not scientific, then, how can race be used to bolster scientific theories? Wright stated, "It was in Dr. Janice Hale's first book, Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style.' 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 ... Dr. Hale's research led her to ... compare 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 '7Os ... was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style ... African and African-American children have a different way of learning."
It sounds good, doesn't it? But if African-Americans use different parts of their brains to learn, which part does Barack Obama use? His father was African and his mother a white woman from Kansas. Was it Tiger Woods's left or right brain that taught him to play golf so well? And my own family has some Caribbean, English, Irish, and African roots; plus we are registered members of the Turtle Clan of the Montauket Tribe. According to Wright, which side of my brain do I use?
The indisputable facts are that the majority of African-Americans have some European ancestors, and an estimated one-third of White Americans have some Black ancestry. Which makes for a crazy, mixed-up people, but hardly good subjects for a scientific study that requires ethnic purity. Therefore, Wright is not right on this and most other examples he used in his rant. He even tries to speak about the memorization techniques of rap (hip-hop) lyrics as if they belong exclusively to African-Americans when it is common knowledge that most rap records are purchased (and memorized) by white youth. (Otherwise record companies would go broke.)
In America, an African-American is defined as any person with any provable African ancestry, or the one-drop of blood theory as it is commonly called. This is hardly scientific, but the fact that it exists at all and has been upheld in some courts is a good reason for that national dialogue on race that Obama has called for. Academic degrees notwithstanding, Wright has shown that he is a petty, angry, vindictive man and needs to recede into the darkness from whence he came. Win or lose, Barack Obama is one of the most interesting and creative minds that has come along during these trying times.