Stanley Kurtz writes in a new article that Wright was just the tip of the iceberg for Obama. Oh sure, he attended his sermons but he also sent a lot of money to education programs and schools that taught almost exclusively the anti-American, Afrocentric, ideology preached by Wright.
John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.
Stanley Kurtz then goes on to detail his findings from the Annenberg documents. Findings such as the fact that the group funded the “South Shore African Village Collaborative.” A thoroughly “Afrocentric” institution that used teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to improve academic performance in the schools it worked with.
The South Shore African Village Collaborative was deeply involved in the “rites of passage movement,” which started in the 90’s. They set up whole curriculum’s centered around the the “rites of passage” ceremonies.
What exactly is the “rites of passage movement?” Kurtz:
To learn what the rites of passage movement was all about, we can turn to a sympathetic 1992 study published in the Journal of Negro Education by Nsenga Warfield-Coppock. In that article, Warfield-Coppock bemoans the fact that public education in the United States is shaped by “capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression.” According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values “have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values.” American socialization has “proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community,” Warfield-Coppock tells us. 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.”
The adolescent rites of passage movement that flowered in the 1990s grew out of the “cultural nationalist” or “Pan-African” thinking popular in radical black circles of the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt to create a virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world began to take hold in the mid-1980s in small private schools, which carefully guarded the contents of their controversial curricula. Gradually, through external partners like CIESS, the movement spread to a few public schools. Supporters view these programs as “a social and cultural ‘inoculation’ process that facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist, sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society.”
We know that SSAVC was part of this movement, not only because their Annenberg proposals were filled with Afrocentric themes and references to “rites of passage,” but also because SSAVC’s faculty set up its African-centered curriculum in consultation with some of the most prominent leaders of the “rites of passage movement.” For example, a CIESS teacher conference sponsored a presentation on African-centered curricula by Jacob Carruthers, a particularly controversial Afrocentrist.
Google Carruthers and you will find that the guy is a fanatic who believes the true birthplace of our civilization is ancient Kemet in Egypt.
Carruthers’s key writings are collected in his book, Intellectual Warfare. Reading it is a wild, anti-American ride. In his book, we learn that Carruthers and his like-minded colleagues have formed an organization called the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), which takes as its mission the need to “dismantle the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide against African peoples.” Carruthers includes “African-Americans” within a group he would define as simply “African.” When forced to describe a black person as “American,” Carruthers uses quotation marks, thus indicating that no black person can be American in any authentic sense. According to Carruthers, “The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy.”
Carruthers’s goal is to use African-centered education to recreate a separatist universe within America, a kind of state-within-a-state. The rites of passage movement is central to the plan.
Even nuttier, Carruthers believes that blacks who have become Americanized were actually raped. They may have been forcibly exposed to American culture but do not need to accept it.
The better option, says Carruthers, is to separate out and relearn the wisdom of Africa’s original Kemetic culture, embodied in the teachings of the ancient wise man, Ptahhotep (an historical figure traditionally identified as the author of a Fifth Dynasty wisdom book). Anything less than re-Africanization threatens the mental, and even physical, genocide of Africans living in an ineradicably white supremacist United States.
Check out the kind of training Carruther’s gave to teachers at his schools:
According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers’s training session on African-centered curricula for SSAVC teachers was a huge hit: “As a consciousness raising session, it received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey….” These teacher-training workshops were directly funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Another sure sign of the ideological cast of SSAVC’s curriculum can be found in Annenberg documents noting that SSAVC students are taught the wisdom of Ptahhotep. Carruthers’s concerns about “menticide” and “genocide” at the hand of America’s white supremacist system seem to be echoed in an SSAVC document that says: “Our children need to understand the historical context of our struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us.”
So now we know the types of schools and teaching that was funded by Annenberg. But how does this tie into Wright and Obama? Well, take a guess who was given the opportunity to speak at the Trinity Church:
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.
When Asa Hillard died, speaker and writer of such books as “Teachings of Ptahhotep: The Oldest Book in the World,” “The Maroon Within Us,” “SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind,” and “African Power”, Wright delivered the eulogy to a crowd of prominent members of the Carruthers group “Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.” He put her picture on the front of his Church’s magazine and a picture of Farrakhan on the back.
Perhaps inadvertently, Wright’s eulogy for Hilliard actually established the fringe nature of his favorite African-centered scholars. In his tribute, Wright stressed how intensely “white Egyptologists recoiled at the very notion of everything Asa taught.” As Wright himself made plain, it seems virtually impossible to find respectable scholars of any political stripe who approve of the extremist anti-American version of Afrocentrism promoted by Hilliard and Carruthers.
To top it all off we have Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn planning to release a book in 2009 called the “Race Course Against White Supremacy.” It will be published by Third World Press which was set up by Carruthers and “Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.”
So now we know that the Annenberg Challenge funded fringe schools that taught blacks to fear the white man, to fear being Americanized, and embrace being anything but an American. We know that these Afrocentric ideas went from Carruthers schools to the lips of Wright at his church attended by Obama AND we know the terrorist pal of Obama, Bill Ayers, is writing a book about race to be published by the nut Carruthers.
But does Obama buy into this Afrocentric way of thinking?
…in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers.
And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC’s Annenberg proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard’s or Carruthers’s names, SSAVC’s proposals are filled with references to “rites of passage” and “Ptahhotep,” dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.
We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality.
Kurtz concludes:
However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.
Obama has dismissed any allegation that he buys into these teachings but we now have evidence that he not only attended the church that centered around this stuff, he helped fund them also.
And this man is just a breath away from the White House…..
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