DocZ's Blog

There is something paradoxical about the current notoriety that has been foisted on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright by ignoramuses on both the right and the left whose blindered viewpoints have eventuated in a perniciously unfair tainting of the candidacy of Barack Obama through the most unjustly insidious guilt-by-association reasoning that we have seen in many a decade in what passes for our political discourse nowadays.

Of course Pastor Wright has the right—perhaps he would say, with some justice, the prophetic duty—to speak his mind. Furthermore, much of what he speaks is informed by a kind of rough erudition whose major defect is that it is more ideological than one would prefer. In addition, when he speaks of national policy, the scattered bizarre opinions should not obscure the fact that many of his observations are incisive and cogent, and there is an experiential competence that lends them some credence.

However, the attacks against him have given him a wider platform and credence than is appropriate. When he steps outside spirituality and broad national and international policy into specific and concrete social and political issues, he goes awry.

This is where the paradox becomes manifest. I have in mind, most especially, his sojourning into the territory of educational theory and so-called learning styles. He rightly has excoriated the “separate but equal” principle enunciated in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, when he declares that blacks, say, are “different, not deficient” and when he presents the questionable right brain/left brain educational theories as secular gospel, he is unknowingly defending what is nothing more than a cosmetically camouflaged—and equally insidious—“separate, but equal” doctrine of his own.

“Different, not deficient” sounds nicer than “separate, but equal,” but its sound is hollow when one recognizes underneath it the old Jim Crow wine in a new bottle.

The result is that his myopic critics—through their very criticism—have lent his comments here a credence that they do not deserve. His supporters, whose reaction to the criticism is to defend whatever he said as uncritically as those who misinterpreted him in the first place lashed out at him with a broad whip, may be more sympathetic—for historical reasons—than his detractors. Unfortunately, they are unknowingly in collusion to contribute, from a different side, to the lack of intelligent discourse that continues to poison our political universe.

The upshot of this is to perpetuate the larger paradox that since the civil rights movement, since desegregation, blacks at large have been worse educated than many blacks were who were educated prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Those well-educated blacks were educated by black teachers in segregated schools who held their students to rigorous standards and whose educating was not compromised by bogus educational theories that are no less racist for being articulated by a black pastor than they would be if articulated—in different words—by a white bigot. Furthermore, in the last half century, when our public schools experienced the steepest decline in quality of any time since their inception, all students have been worse educated, but those from disadvantaged ethnic minorities have suffered more damage than others because they have had greater obstacles to overcome.

Let us not forget—when all is said and done—that none of this has anything to do with Barack Obama, who is his own person. Because Neptune orbits the sun, we do not accuse it of being hot.