Having had my say on Jeremiah Wright's rhetorical excesses, as I see them, I am now prepared to defend him against recent criticism coming from conservatives. Powerline links to Michelle Malkin on Wright's recent speech before the NAACP. You can get a transcript of the talk at CNN. Here is the passage that Malkin and others have found objectionable:
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 carol 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.
Malkin likens this argument to phrenology, and compares to Leonard Jeffries theory of "sun people vs. ice people." In other words she thinks it is both junk science and racist.
Neither charge is fair. I do not know Janice Hale's work, and I confess that I am somewhat skeptical regarding the view that Black Africans are, on the whole, predominantly "right-brained". Moreover, I see some problems with Wright's defense of this argument.
[African-American children] 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 (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning.
The problem here is that every culture descends from a people who practiced memorizing long stories, because that was the only way to preserve long stories before the advent of writing. Someone had to remember the Iliad and the Odyssey before Homer (or someone) wrote them down. Yet the Greeks look to be about as left-brained as anyone.
But whether or not the hypothesis can be supported, there is nothing inherently racist about it. The phenomenon that deserves the name of racism is the identification of someone as morally inferior and/or one's enemy merely on the basis of racial identification. Simply recognizing certain biological differences between racial groups, such as the prevalence of difference diseases, in no way implies racism.
As to whether the theory described by Wright is junk science or not, for that we would have to see Dr. Hale's evidence. But the difference between left and right brain functions is very well supported in the literature, and there is considerable reason to suppose that some people are naturally oriented toward one side or the other. There is no reason I can think of why African-Americans might not differ from European and Asian Americans on this count in some statistically significant way.
Wright's defenders will complain that, once again, his critics have taken his words out of context. Once again they will be off the mark. At least in this case, his critics are merely wrong.
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