Obama, race, and Chicago's schools (Added notes by G)

I'm very proud to have published "The ultimate guide to the Ayers controversy," a post I did not write. Some have sneered at this work: "Okay, so Bill Ayers and Barack Obama worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. What does that matter?"

The short answer is this: Truth and falsehood matter. Obama claimed that he barely knew terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama lied. NPR and other major media sources insist that McCain lies in his ads, which link Obama and Ayers. Those ads tell the truth; NPR does not.

But there's more to the story; our "ultimate guide" was incomplete. As noted earlier, the CAC -- the only program that Obama ever actually ran -- was, by its own admission, what the hipsters now call an "epic FAIL." The (mostly black) youngsters involved with this educational improvement program actually fared worse than did their counterparts outside the program.

But the CAC story is not just about failure. It is about race and pseudoscience.

Stanley Kurtz of the National Review has been nosing through the CAC's documents and has uncovered some of the turth of what Obama and Ayers foisted on Chicago's schools. Yes, I know: The National Reivew is a right-wing publication -- and no, I do not share its ideology. But documentation is documentation.

The CAC tossed a ton of money at a pseudoscientific program called the South Shore African Village Collaborative.

The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) was very much a part of the Afrocentric "rites of passage movement," a fringe education crusade of the 1990s. SSAVC schools featured "African-Centered" curricula built around "rites of passage" ceremonies inspired by the puberty rites found in many African societies.

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 claims 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.

We know that SSAVC was part of this movement, not only because its 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.

Like other leaders of the rites of passage movement, 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 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.

In other words, "history" is whatever imaginary past makes one feel good about oneself. Lots of white people have played the game that way, and so have lots of people within other cultures. Americans of my generation were taught nonsense about Columbus and Custer, while Japanese students learn malarky about the Rape of Nanking. One shouldn't be surprised to see Carruthers fall into the same trap. One should be surprised, however, to see this inanity funded by a foundation run, in no small part, by the man who will probably become our next president.

Carruthers is a defender of Leonard Jeffries, professor in the department of black studies at City College in Harlem, infamous for his black supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Jeffries sees whites as oppressive and violent "ice people," in contrast to peaceful and mutually supportive black "sun people."

The divergence says Jeffries, is attributable to differing levels of melanin in the skin. Jeffries also blames Jews for financing the slave trade. Carruthers defends Jeffries and excoriates the prestigious black academics Carruthers views as traitorous for denouncing their African brother, Jeffries. Carruthers's vision of the superior and peaceful Kemetic philosophy of Ptahhotep triumphing over Greco-Euro-American-white culture obviously parallels Jeffries's opposition between ice people and sun people.

All of this nonsense about "ice people" reminds me of Horbinger's "world ice theory," which had a vogue in pre-Nazi Germany.

Chicago Annenberg Challenge records also indicate that SSAVC educators invited Asa Hilliard, a pioneer of African-centered curricula and a close colleague of Carruthers, to offer a keynote address at yet another Annenberg-funded teacher training session. Hilliard's ties to Wright run still deeper than Carruthers's.

Wright delivered the eulogy at Hilliard's memorial service, with prominent members of ASCAC in the audience. To commemorate Hilliard, a special, two-cover double issue of Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine was published, with a picture of Hilliard on one side and a picture of Louis Farrakhan on the other (in celebration of a 2007 award Farrakhan received from Wright).

In short, we are dealing with the black separatist movement, which has its own mythology. Some of you may be familiar with the insidious Dr. Yacub and all that rot.

How and why did Annenberg money fall into this morass? Walter Annenberg was rather obnoxiously conservative. He was both friend to and funder of Ronald Reagan, who achieved power through thinly-disguised appeals to racism.

Perhaps the CAC was meant to fail. Perhaps it was intended all along to keep African American youngsters from mastering the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics.

In my opinion, the black separatist movement was always a deception operation designed to gull black people into accepting segregation and fascism. Never forget that the Nation of Islam, now headed by Louis Farrakhan, was founded in Detroit by a white guy named Ford. Wallace Ford (or Fard, as he styled himself) forbade his followers from engaging in union activity, a stance sure to please another well-known Detroit resident named Ford. Never forget that Henry Ford funded Adolf Hitler -- who was also quite fond of Carruthers-esque pseudohistorical malarky. Never forget that the NOI was pro-Axis during the war. Never forget that the NOI went on to form an alliance with George Lincoln Rockwell during the 1960s. (This -- not Elijah Muhammed's extramarital dalliances -- was the major cause of Malcolm X's falling out with the organization.)

And now you know my long-held conspiracy theory of black separatism.

Added notes: G, the reader who has done such outstanding research into Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was prompted by the above to add his own observations. His words follow the asterisks.

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I don't think that the CAC was meant to fail (perhaps destined to fail - given what it was being used for - but not intended to fail). Two core points:

1. Ayers can 'sound good'. He can write in a compelling fashion - analytical thought will poke gaping holes in much of his reasoning - but it sounds good. And most human decision-making, including decisions on grant funding, is based on impression. I myself spend a great deal of my time writing grant applications (in the biological sciences). Much of it is about constructing an appealing advertisement. I myself am not that great at it - I'm too fact and detail oriented, and I tend to be averse to flamboyant language. But I work with a collaborator who's really good at it. Whether a scientific grant gets funded depends as much if not more on spin='quality of the ad' than on its scientific merit. Ayers is great at self-promoting/advertising, and he would not have been fully explicit about some of his more radical objectives in the proposal to Annenberg. So Annenberg might have liked how the grant proposal sounded. Also, Annenberg was being advised (on whom to give funds to) by Vartan Gregorian, and Ayers was communicating with Gregorian about how to sculpt the grant application.

As a side note - the CAC was much more Ayers' baby than most people realize. I'm not going to go through all the details here (it would be too long a post), but I'll just point out a couple of things:

http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/p0b06.pdf page 11. Ayers:

'When Annenberg announced that he was gonna give out half a billion dollars, I heard it on the radio at six in the morning. At seven in the morning, I had talked to Anne and Warren, and the three of us met for lunch that day. We began to plot a strategy. The strategy was to pull together the old Chicago school reform coalition, and to try to figure out what we could do at this juncture, [whether] we could get some of that money to Chicago, which we assumed we could.'

http://sonatabio.com/CAC/CAC-application.pdf
The grant was submitted to Annenberg under the names of William Ayers and Anne Hallett ('on behalf of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative').

Ayers remained the dominant figure - throughout the drafting of the grant, the formalization of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (the CAC operations arm, which Ayers co-chaired 1995-2000), etc.

Ayers' office was also the location of the official CAC office.

http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907

Basically, the whole thing was his baby (not that he had complete control - there were many others involved - but it was his brainchild and he was apparently the dominant influence).

2. The 'local school control' agenda that the CAC was intended to fund is backed by a curious mixture of people. Specifically, it's backed by the political Right, and by only very particular elements of the Left (e.g. Ayers).

It's generally opposed by most of the Left (as being undemocratic and anti-union). In the case of Chicago, it was opposed by Jessie Jackson's Operation PUSH, etc. I believe that the only predominantly African-American organization supporting 'local school control' (at least in the late 1980's in Chicago, when it was initially being promoted) was the Developing Communities Project (of which Obama was director).

For the political Right, the embrace of 'local school control' fits with their general ideological desire for states rights, local control, less government, etc., as well as their anti-union sentiment. So it's not too surprising that Annenberg would have funded a proposal designed to promote such a system.

For Ayers - the 'local school control' model is embraced because of its analogies with the 'local councils' found Cuba and other such Autocratic Left regimes.
[Think caucuses versus primaries, with caucuses as examplars of what Ayers extolls as 'participatory democracy'].

One additional thing I'll mention (given the 7:55 PM comment someone posted) - Walter Annenberg didn't die until 2002 (e.g. see Wikipedia), and the CAC grant was initiated in 1995.