Ice People and Sun People
seeking a global warming...
It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg.
Stanley Kurtz has been doing “a bit of digging” and “careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.” The results are startling. And volatile.
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. ...The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) ...[whose] Annenberg proposals were filled with Afrocentric themes and references to “rites of passage,” [and whose] faculty set up its African-centered curriculum...
Here’s a little taste; the article is much more thorough.
American values “have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success ["capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression"] and away from traditional African values.”
Like spinners, grills and bling?
I know there is a place where one can live by “traditional African Values” quite freely. My only question might be, which “traditional” African Values? Egyptian? Somali? Lybian? The Values of the Congo? of Angola? of Darfur or Khartoum? of Kenya? of Odinga or Kibaki?
I think those who actually live on the continent of Africa might have a great deal of trouble recognizing these “Pan-African” Values.
American socialization has “proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community,” Warfield-Coppock tells us.
“Genocidal?” Then why are there many, many thriving African American communities in every city in America? Maybe that word does not mean what one of us thinks it means.
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"
OR *clicky*clicky*
Like other leaders of the rites of passage movement, [Jacob] 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.
Isn’t that ...well, “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.?” Just “asking questions,” here…
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.
So there we have it. A young man, uncertain- by his own admission in his two autobiographies - of his place in the world encounters some folks who are very certain of theirs yet who reflect back to him his own feelings of displacement. Understandably, a very attractive group; a very comforting set of Values. The issue is, where did the current candidate for POTUS take this comforting alliance?
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.
What any person - from any culture - seeks to teach the young are his most closely held Values and his perception of how the world really works. These are the foundations for which Obama voluntarily worked and the Values he sought to spread. Are we now supposed to believe that his Values have changed? In less than ten years?
I can understand why McCain et al are extremely reluctant to bring this to light. It is dangerous stuff. The thing is, would it be better for America to find this out now, *fwoomp* all at once? Or to discover it piecemeal, as it’s being put into curriculums through the federal education system?
This is the real “discussion of race” we have yet to have.
I know there is a place where one can live by “traditional African Values” quite freely.
Not only that, but we might reasonably expect that people who live in Country A - and have for some generations - could live by “Country A Values”.
I have a few relatives who have Cherokee ancestry - and they’re proud of that, but they don’t try to recreate the Cherokee lifestyle.
I’m Austrian - way back - but I don’t go around singing “Edelweiss” and wearning leather britches.
“... Carruthers teaches that the true birthplace of world civilization was ancient Egypt, ...”
Yeah, and the Egyptians built the pyramids using anti-gravity forklifts, and they all had personal flying machines they used to cruise up and down the Nile.
Posted by ZZMike on 10/14/08 at 04:24 PM
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