The Reverend Jeremiah Wright addressed the NACCP in Detroit today.  It was carried on CNN and I just happened to come in on the middle of it.  The guy is impressive. 

  

Some of what he said resonated with my major interest in college: psycholinguistics.  His theme was that being different does not mean being deficient.  His emphasis understandably was the difference in races. 

  

He postulates that while those of us of European extraction are left brain dominant and therefore “object oriented”, i.e. learn most readily from objects.  Those of us of African extraction are right brain dominant and therefore learn most readily from process. 

  

Another way of putting it, perhaps in more traditional academic terms, is that Euro-Americans are detail oriented and are at home with discrete unit processing (i.e., accounting, math) while Afro-Americans are more comfortable with the spatial, or holistic,  concepts (i.e., music, sports).  

 

Because the dominant culture gets to formulate the institutions of society, the schools are set up to accommodate the Euro-American style of learning.  Because the Afro-American style of learning is different, it is not as well served by our institutions of learning. 

  

As a result, Afro-American kids don’t do as well in school.  It is the old square peg in a round hole conundrum.  Unfortunately, that is not recognized, and the difference in racial performance in these schools is interpreted as resulting from deficiency in the children rather than a mismatch of learning style and institutional approach to teaching. 

  

I am not sure that he is completely correct in his paradigm, but it certainly resonates with my understanding of our system.  About twenty percent of the population (whites?) is left handed in a culture that accommodates right-handedness, and that does present some roadblocks that must be overcome by those left-handed people, roadblocks such as teachers that try to force right–handedness in young students, writing left-to-right, archery, military marksmanship, scissors and various tools, and a host of other minor things that are not show stoppers but that have to be dealt with.  In the aggregate, they are hurdles that the other eighty-percent of the population is not even aware of and certainly does not have to overcome to gain an even playing field. 

  

If the reverend is correct in his understanding of the difference between the learning style of those of us from Africa and those of us from Europe, he is has made the point with me. 

  

Note: Right or left brain dominant does not mean left or right brain exclusion.  We all have two main Central Processing Units (CPUs), or dual processors if you will.  

 

 

  • The right processor is intuitive.  It approaches a problem holistically (the parts of a concept in relation to the whole of the concept).  It is more like a rule-based expert system that can look at a large volume of data (discrete units) and come up with patterns, or even discover conclusions that it was not specifically programmed to do (classic case: SRA International’s Prospector TM oil and mineral exploration model that told its creators exactly where to look for a rich vein of molybdenum in an area they had been exploring for decades without success).  In other words, it has inference capability.  It can come to conclusions that it has not been told how to arrive at.  It can create its own algorithm, thus it is object oriented and developes processes from its knowledge base. 

  

  • The left processor is the number cruncher – it likes lists and discrete units (objects) such as numbers to perform processes on.  It will take discrete units fed to it and process them with algorithms that it has learned (i.e., multiplication, tax returns).  It is a super clerk, doing exactly what it is told to do, however complicated that might be.  It is process oriented, performing known detailed processes (i.e., recipes, formulae) on objects.

  

Now these parallel processors, each with a different style of processing, do not work in isolation of course.  They are connected by a super bus, the corpus coliseum, over the top of the brain.  They can hand off packets to each other for complementary processing in accordance with their different styles when that is required to solve the problem at hand.    

  

The whoe is greater than the sum of the parts.  One is not superior to the other.  One is not deficient.  They are just different and they each have their forte.  If they did not cooperate and complement each other so well, we would all be half wits. 

  

The various races of the Human species complement each other.  Together in a complimentary way we are greater than sum of us individually.  

  

But don’t get me started …