Many people have complained in recent days and weeks that they are getting tired of ‘guilt by association,’ as they call it. According to these individuals, it is unjust to spend time and attention to Obama’s friends, allies and mentors because they would not tell us anything about the man himself. No, in order to truly know who Obama was and is, we should look at his own actions.

Now, a problem with that approach has always been that his record isn’t very long. And if there are things he did, jobs he held, articles he wrote, etc., information about them is virtually impossible to retrieve. One would almost go so far as to say that there has been a concerted effort to delete those records from databases of organizations and magazines, but such a remark would probably result in one being called a “conspiracy theorist,” so I won’t make it.

Lucky for us, however, there are individuals who are willing to get their hands dirty, and do the research required to find out what Obama actually did in the 1990s. One of those people is NRO author, Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz has done a tremendous job for NRO uncovering not just Obama’s associations but his deeds.

His latest dispatch deserves attention, for it does not try to make Obama look bad by focusing on his associations. Rather, Kurtz found records and evidence of Obama’s own actions, that do not speak very well of the man. Those who used the complaint I used in the first paragraph of this post, would be wise to read Kurtz’s entire column.

In it, Kurz writes:

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a $200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS an “external partner,” i.e. a community organization linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network, named the “South Shore African Village Collaborative” was thoroughly “Afrocentric” in orientation. CIESS’s job was to use a combination of teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to improve academic performance in the schools it worked with. CIESS would continue to receive large Annenberg grants throughout the 1990s.

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. In and of themselves, these ceremonies were harmless. Yet the philosophy that accompanied them was not. On the contrary, it was a carbon-copy of Jeremiah Wright’s worldview.

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 bemoans the fact that 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. The answer is the adolescent rites of passage movement, designed “to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.”

But that’s not all:

Carruthers admits that Africans living in America have already been shaped by Western culture, yet compares this Americanization process to rape: “We may not be able to get our virginity back after the rape, but we do not have to marry the rapist….” In other words, American blacks (i.e. Africans) may have been forcibly exposed to American culture, but that doesn’t mean they need to accept it. The better option, says Carruthers, is to separate out and relearn the wisdom of Africa’s original Kemetic culture, embodied in the teachings of the ancient wise man, Ptahhotep (an historical figure traditionally identified as the author of a Fifth Dynasty wisdom book). Anything less than re-Africanization threatens the mental, and even physical, genocide of Africans living in an ineradicably white supremacist United States…

According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers’s training session on African-centered curricula for SSAVC teachers was a huge hit: “As a consciousness raising session, it received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey….” These teacher-training workshops were directly funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Another sure sign of the ideological cast of SSAVC’s curriculum can be found in Annenberg documents noting that SSAVC students are taught the wisdom of Ptahhotep. Carruthers’s concerns about “menticide” and “genocide” at the hand of America’s white supremacist system seem to be echoed in an SSAVC document that says: “Our children need to understand the historical context of our struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us.”

When Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright’s African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member), many prominent thinkers from Carruthers’s Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations were invited to speak at Trinity United Church of Christ, Carruthers himself included. We hear echoes of Carruthers’s work in Wright’s distinction between “right brained” Africans and “left brained” Europeans, in Wright’s fears of U.S. government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright’s embittered attacks on America’s indelibly white-supremacist history. In Wright’s Trumpet Newsmagazine, as in Carruthers’s own writings, blacks are often referred to as “Africans living in the diaspora” rather than as Americans.

Again, read the column in its entirety. Kurtz’s point is not that you should condemn Obama because he was friends with radicals, rather, it is that he knowingly joined an organization whose goal it was to radically transform the education system in the suburbs of Chicago (and elsewhere), by radicalizing young, black students. He sat on the board of this organization, and then deliberately funded other radical organizations that were also trying to indoctrinate the youth.

Now, Obama apologists will probably jump up, saying he probably did not know what these organizations were doing. To that, Kurtz answers:

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)…

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.

This is the main problem with Obama: his ties to radicals are no fluke. He has worked for radical organizations, he funded others, and he has written articles that show that his beautiful speech on ‘race’ (which was content-wise quite empty) came out of the blue considering Obama’s past words, actions, and professions.

As Kurtz wrote: “Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright.”

Will the above help McCain to win? Of course not, even if it would be read by a large group of voters, it could very well have no effect. But it is interesting material for those who wish to understand the man who is likely to be America’s next, and its first African American, president. He is unwilling to share a lot of details about the work he did in the 1990s; it is up to others to do research, and to find out what he exactly did.

As with most autobiographies, it can be safely said that his autobiographies were not meant to tell the truth, but to further his political career. That is unsurprising in so far that, again, most autobiographies serve a similar purpose, but it is interesting that a lot of people - even those who should know better, with academic degrees, meaning they will most certainly have been taught that autobiographies are seldom a reliable source of information and will have discovered so themselves simply by doing research - seem to be unwilling to find out what Obama did not tell them, and refuses to tell them today.

In the end, I am sure, a very complex picture of the man will surface. Years from now, perhaps even decades, everyone will have concluded that Obama was one of the most complex individuals in U.S. politics. It could very well be the case that his radicalism in the 1990s, and his support for radicals back then, are weighed against his actual presidency (which could very well be not radical at all), the way he presented himself, the way he also thought and spoke (moderate, deliberate, informed, reasonable), and the actions he undertook later in life.

As far as I am concerned, the ‘radical’ picture isn’t (completely) accurate; it seems to me that there’s more to the man. He may have been influenced by radicals, and he may have supported their cause, but it seems likely to me that he is also someone who believes revolutions, etc. aren’t very productive, and who may very well turn out to be a liberal, but not radical president, who gives opponents the impression he takes them seriously, and who does take them seriously. In other words, a man who may have supported Wright, Ayers and others, but who does not truly agree with them; a man torn between two worlds, one of radicals, and one of pragmatism, and moderation.

I think future biographers are likely to conclude that Obama hung around radicals, even supported their cause to a large degree, but could never fully identify with them and their worldview. He may have felt attracted to them and their message, because they had a strong view of who they were, where they came from. A strong sense of identity, in other words, something Obama lacked for most of his life, possibly still.

At the same time, precisely because he missed that and because he had such a multinational background, and due to his inherent reasonable nature, he could never ’sign up’ to the radical ideologies. They may have influenced him, but he never truly became an adherent, simply because he could not agree with their views.

That’s all speculation on my part of course.

But speculation is fun and… I’m guessing my view will prove to be pretty reasonably correct.

Meanwhile, I’ll run to the library and get me a copy of his books. It seems to me that this man is fascinating to study, precisely because he appears to be such a complex person.