by hilzoy
An addendum to publius’ post: yesterday, I was eating dinner, and flipped on CNN. There was Jeremiah Wright, just starting his speech before the NAACP. I watched it, and thought it was very, very funny, but intellectually sort of vapid, in an unexceptionable kind of way. (Repeated theme: “Different does not mean deficient.” True enough, but not exactly startling.) There was nothing angry about it, except for a couple of little digs at the media, which were more funny than angry anyways.
I hadn’t planned to write about this, since I didn’t think it was all that interesting. But this morning I fired up Memeorandum, and what was at the top? Michelle Malkin, with a post on “Jeremiah Wright, racial phrenologist”. Wtf, I think, and click over: there I learn that Wright is today’s Leonard Jeffries. (Ice people, Sun people; remember that idiocy?) I wonder: Did he make some other speech? Apparently not: the same speech that struck me as blah with humorous bits seems to have sent people on the right round the bend. Ed Morrissey:
“One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the differences between whites and blacks. Wright claims that the very structure of the brains of Africans differ from that of European-descent brains, which creates differences rooted in physiology and not culture:
““Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality,” he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” And so on.”
This sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, a book that created a firestorm of controversy with claims that race made a difference in IQ scores, among other claims.”
I don’t know what Morrissey is quoting (he doesn’t say), but it’s a reasonably accurate summary of the relevant part of Wright’s speech. Note, though, that it provides precisely no support for Morrissey’s claim that Wright was talking about neurological differences. None. Wright did note that Africans and Europeans have different musical scales, and use different rhythms. This is obviously a claim about their musical traditions, not the structure of their brains; it’s no more a “neurological” claim than noting that Europeans tend to render perspective differently than African artists.
Likewise, Wright claimed that black and white children tend to have different learning styles. I have no idea whether this is true or not, as a generalization, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is: it would not begin to imply any differences in brain structure. By the time kids arrive at school (and Wright was talking about school kids), they have, obviously, absorbed a lot from the people around them. In particular, they have gotten used to learning from the people around them in different ways, to paying attention to different sorts of cues, and to different kinds of activities. These are the sorts of things that go into a “learning style”: are you a kid who learns best by silently reading? by talking things through with other people? by trial and error? by putting things in your mouth, taking them apart, turning them over so you can see what you can do with them?
There is no earthly reason to think either (a) that kids from different cultures might not have very different learning styles, or (b) that if they did, this would reflect some sort of neurological difference. None at all. In a culture in which children are taught that they should be seen but not heard, they are probably less likely to learn by talking things through, at least with adults. In a culture in which children are expected to be very quiet and not cause trouble, they are less likely to learn by seeing what they can do with things. This is obvious. And it’s what Rev. Wright was talking about.
I suppose that what sent Ed Morrissey off on this tangent was this: “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” If you just focus on the adjective “right-brained”, and leave out what that phrase is supposed to modify (“learning style”), I suppose it can sound neurological. But a right-brained learning style doesn’t have to involve any neurological difference; it’s just a learning style that tends to draw more on right-brain capacities than on left-brain ones. There’s no reason that I can see to assume that the reason someone ends up with a given learning style has to be the structure of that person’s brain, as opposed to the ways in which the people around them act. Likewise, I suppose you could call computer programming a left-brain career — linear, symbolic, logical — and architecture a right-brained one — spatial, heavy on seeing things as wholes rather than as collections of parts, etc. But that would be completely different from claiming that what makes someone decide to be a programmer or an architect is the structure of their brain, as opposed to, say, parental pressure, financial reward, getting to know an inspirational person in one or the other profession, etc.
This was a pretty anodyne speech. It had a lot of funny moments, and a few little digs at the media, but nothing that could even remotely be construed as politically controversial.* Or so I thought, before I found out that Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed had decided to construe a relatively minor point about learning styles as a claim about neurological difference, one that (Morrissey) “sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve.” Other people take it even further: Sister Toldjah thinks he made “remarks about white brains versus black brains”, and Rachel Lucas says that his point was “that black people and white people are, in fact, genetically different.” (So it’s not just neurological; it’s a neurological difference explained by genetics!)
It’s almost as though they were trying to make him sound strange and scary…
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