Posted on 03/29/2008 2:51:48 AM PDT by ethics
Very appropriate Scripture!
Maya Angelou! How appropriate!
Mr. August xxxxxxxx, PrincipalML/NJ
xxxxxxxxxx Junior High School
xxxxxxxx, NJ
Dear Gus,
First, thank you for the invitation to the "brown bag" luncheon on Thursday, October 21. I look forward to attending.
I would like to restate my objection here to the assignment of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings as mandatory reading for my daughter (and others in 9-H) this past summer. I choose to do this in writing because it affords me an opportunity to organize my thoughts and it will allow you to consider what I say before we meet. I would hope that this can be a topic for discussion next week.
xxxxxxx had to read Angelou's book along with Cather's My Antonia; and she selected Twain's Prince and the Pauper from a list of titles as her third summer reading book. No objective educated person would include Angelou with Twain and Cather on a list of books which ninth graders should be assigned, except perhaps if it were in connection with a political science course. But this was not for political science. It was for English.
After we spoke at Open House, I had an opportunity to discuss this with Mrs. xxxxxxx whom you indicated was responsible for the summer reading selections. She told me how widely respected Angelou was and did not seem interested in my objections.
My objections did not grow out of dislike for the poem Angelou read at the Presidential inauguration, though I admit to being turned off by her praise of every ethnic group save those which were primarily responsible for building this country and its institutions. Rather the objections arise from reading selections from her book on three pairs of facing pages I opened to at random.
This is a book of black hate. Read the passages with me and see if you do not agree. (Page references are to the Bantam Books paperback edition of 1971.)I laughed, too, but not at the hateful jokes made on my people. I laughed because, except that she was white, the big movie star [Kay Francis] looked just like my mother. Except that she lived in a big mansion with a thousand servants, she lived just like my mother. And it was funny to think of the whitefolks' not knowing that the woman they were adoring could be my mother's twin, except that she was white and my mother was prettier. Much prettier. [p. 99]" ... jokes made on ... " This is English? But the substance is more important. Only a bitter, ignorant person would assume that a person's appearance was the key to being a movie star. Talent probably has something to do with it, as well as persistence, and the other things that bring success in any field. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." This is from material I read and remember from my high school days, but the Angelous of the world have a different message which is not the one we should be teaching our children. We also read about the seven deadly sins. As I remember it, envy was one of them. Angelou's logic is not very good either. If one person looks like another to the point of being a virtual twin then it does not make sense to describe one of the two as "prettier; much prettier." Does it? Also, I looked up "whitefolk" in my Webster's Ninth and did not find it. I think I know what it means though but I am not sure about the s' that follows. Will my daughter learn to write like this in her English class?Then I wished that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all whitefolks in their beds and that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Harriet Tubman had been killed by that blow on her head and Christopher Columbus had drowned in the Santa Maria. [p. 152]Nice! These were Angelou's thoughts while listening to a Commencement address at her high school graduation ceremony.The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. [p. 231]I have never heard any white male refer to a black female as a "Ho." But, of course it would be indelicate of Angelou to look to her own people for the causes of, and the solutions to, their problems. Maybe some of the problems that black females face are due to being seduced and abandoned by black males. Does this have to do with a lack of power? I think not. Blacks had much less economic and political power 50 years ago but as a group they had a strong family structure. Now after listening to the Angelous their collective family structure is in disarray. (It is cute, too, that the egalitarian Angelou chooses to capitalize black but not white.)
I am sorry I have gone on for so long. But I find these excerpts so absurd that I guess I get carried away. I wonder if a white woman brought a similar manuscript to Random House (the original publisher) whether they have spent more than half an hour with it. I doubt it.
What was the point of assigning this autobiography? Was it to demonstrate the artful use of the English language? Was it to serve as an example to my daughter of how to confront the problems she might face later in her own life? Or was it to bring Political Correctness to xxxxxxxxxx?
Alas, I know the answer. And as citizen, father, and taxpayer, I do not like it. I ask you to review the titles that students at xxxxxxxxxx are required to read with Mrs. xxxxxxx, and ask her to remove those that are there for political rather than literary reasons.
Very truly yours,
OBAMA/WRIGHT 08
And a ten million dollar line of credit....
His parishoners (some) live in poverty, he lives in a mansion.
“..people who wear soft clothes live in king’s palaces”
J. Wright, and more sadly, this RCC Priest, are part of the same cabal, they enrich themselves or their reputations at the expense of the very people they claim they wish to help.
2Pet.2
[1] But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.
[2] And many will follow their licentiousness, and because of them the way of truth will be reviled.
[3] And in their greed they will exploit you with false words; from of old their condemnation has not been idle, and their destruction has not been asleep.
[4]For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment;
[5] if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven other persons, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;
[6] if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomor’rah to ashes he condemned them to extinction and made them an example to those who were to be ungodly;
[7] and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the wicked
[8] (for by what that righteous man saw and heard as he lived among them, he was vexed in his righteous soul day after day with their lawless deeds),
[9] then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment,
[10] and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
Bold and wilful, they are not afraid to revile the glorious ones,
[11] whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a reviling judgment upon them before the Lord.
[12] But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed, reviling in matters of which they are ignorant, will be destroyed in the same destruction with them,
[13] suffering wrong for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their dissipation, carousing with you.
[14] They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children!
[15] Forsaking the right way they have gone astray; they have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Be’or, who loved gain from wrongdoing,
[16] but was rebuked for his own transgression; a dumb ass spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.
[17] These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm; for them the nether gloom of darkness has been reserved.
[18] For, uttering loud boasts of folly, they entice with licentious passions of the flesh men who have barely escaped from those who live in error.
[19] They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved.
[20] For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first.
[21] For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
[22] It has happened to them according to the true proverb, The dog turns back to his own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mire.
Father “flakey” as he is referred to in Chicago, is a big time lib.
You can listen online to Chicago hate radio here:
I hear ya, the only thing I can figure is that the priest was giving it at the same time to make it official.
Cardinal George your phone is ringing.
OBAMA IS WRIGHT
Now I understand, he is the priest who was the subject to quite a few threads here at FR.
Anti-Gun Chicago Priest Calls for Death of Gun Shop Owner - Media Silent
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1842547/posts
Down the memory hole: Wright’s testimonial deleted from Obama’s website
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1986634/posts?page=96;q=1
Flakey Terrorism
http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2007/06/flakey_terroris.html
Cardinal (George) rebukes (Flaky Father Mike) Pfleger for ‘threat’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1993521/posts?page=1
The time is here to start a democrat party holocaust museum. The racist wing of the museum would be one of the largest.
Why indeed.
LLS
Darn tootin’!
LLS
Here is the video of father flakey and Obama’s racist reverend.
http://cbs2chicago.com/
The "rev" wright would probably be accepted and allowed to preach his hate in any ROP mosque as well, and many people would praise him for trying to "understand" the plight the muSLIMES are facing here.
That’s pretty good. I bet it remainded on the summer reading list, though. We wouldn’t want to “’dis a ho” now would we?
I hope America is prepared for the backlash - IF OBAMA DOESN’T GET THE NOMINATION .. OR IF HE DOES GET IT AND THEN LOSES THE ELECTION .. ALL HELL COULD BREAK LOOSE.
In case nobody remembers the Watts’ riots - look it up - and I wonder if the new riot will be 10 times worse.
The Clintons don’t care if they cause a race riot (by cheating to get the nomination) .. they are mad with power.
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