Basically, Jeremiah Wright is advancing the case for segregation in education, and he is practically justifying the segregation of the past, when he says that black children have different learning styles and cannot observe the decorum of a quiet classroom.
Mac Donald outlines the academic sources of Wright’s demented and racially obsessed views, but it is worthwhile to emphasize that these harmful ideas were advanced in an academy full of white liberals who indulged and coddled black extremism. The more extreme the ideas, the keener the insult to society at large and the more satisfying to the tenured radicals. This is also why Obama has come this far without having to confront what Wright is really all about. Because no friendly white fellow Democrat ever said to him, “This is an outrage and you should distance yourself from it ASAP.”
But even-more-reasonable people helped create this state of affairs. Nathan Glazer wrote a book proclaiming “we are all multiculturalists now,” conceding that many falsehoods would be taught in the schools under the guise of multiculturalism, but that we would have to tolerate it because we have failed to integrate blacks successfully into our society. (Whether this failure arose from society’s unwillingness to integrate blacks or from sheer inability to do so, he would not say. Nor did he consider that the black successes attained through multiculturalism might in the long run be worse for society than continuing to muddle through with single standards, honest principles, and a curriculum based on valid scholarship.)
Recently President Bush honored Al Sharpton with an invitation to the White House for a celebration of Black History Month, thus whitewashing a racial hustler and arsonist, an inciter of violence that resulted in the deaths of several people, a purveyor of a hoax that smeared the reputations of innocent men and falsely intensified the experience of black victimization, and more.
Such gestures by well-meaning people are intended to show respect and a spirit of inclusivity and generosity toward the black experience and to help assuage the anger and resentment many blacks feel. On the contrary, these gestures only affirm black extremists in the rightness of what they are doing and whets their appetite for more concessions, while telling more moderate blacks that they are fools and patsies to play by the rules that white society no longer has the courage to uphold.