Link to TRANSCRIPT of Wright's NAACP speech. (And what I find SO WRONG with it.)

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Mon Apr-28-08 12:36 PM
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Link to TRANSCRIPT of Wright's NAACP speech. (And what I find SO WRONG with it.)

Here's the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/wright.transcript/index.html

Here's the part I find really troubling: In this section, Wright is speaking pernicious, essentialist nonsense. What he does here (as unfortunately a lot of African-American studies types do) is to accept racist slurs on black people and then to try to make a positive out of it. And contrary to another OP here, Wright is clearly not talking about cultural differences, he IS trying to claim a genetic, essentialist, racist difference between the learning styles of blacks and whites (particularly because he makes his claims not only about white and black Americans, but also to extend them to "Europeans" and "Africans.")

Wright is basically saying here that Africans are less educatable than Europeans. In America, in Europe, in ancient Greece, classical China, or any other civilization you could name, education has (and really has to be) dominated by left-brain processes. It is about books, and it is about individual study.

Are some people more right-brained, do some people have different learning styles? Of course! But I contend that this is NOT a difference that is racial. Go where Wright is going, and the idea of the fundamental equality and commonality of human beings disappears: humanism itself disappears.

Finally, while Wright, in his sermons, condemns the ignorant, violent "gang-banger" mentality that holds down too many inner-city African Americans, rhetoric like the following only bolsters that mentality, and gives a seemingly scholarly gloss to the taunts and accusations that bedevil young African-Americans who try to succeed in education: are they getting good grades? are they writing good papers? doing their homework? passing tests, acing the SAT? Guess what -- "They're acting white!"

Here it is:

European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style ...

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 carrel 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 (griots) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history ..."