Soledad's Prism: O'Brien Called Jeremiah Wright's Oddball April 2008 NAACP Speech a 'Home Run'

In her syndicated column today (at NewsBusters; at her home blog), Michelle Malkin runs down how CNN news anchor Soledad O'Brien has an affinity for the work of the late Harvard Professor Derrick Bell, particularly his "critical race theory" (CRT) that she has to this point not disclosed to her CNN viewers.

O'Brien also had a guest professor on her program who told the audience that CRT has nothing to do with, in Michelle's words, "bashing America as a white supremacy-ruled government." Trouble is, the professor has written that CRT “highlight(s) the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color.” As Michelle wrote: "Oops." An NB tipster noted that O'Brien's O'Babbling should not have surprised anyone given her supportive reaction, noted at the time at Media Bistro, to a particularly odd and pathetic speech (transcript here) the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (y'know, the guy whose inflammatory, anti-American sermons Barack Obama never heard despite almost two decades as a TUCC member) gave at an NAACP dinner in Detroit on April 26, 2008 (internal link was in original):

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CNN’s Soledad O’Brien attended the NAACP dinner (she was a guest announcer as well), and discussed the reaction to the speech on CNN’s American Morning.

Her take? “It was an illuminating speech. It was a really funny, not angry, interesting, dynamic speech. So, certainly a home run for him from that perspective,” she said.

Quoting from the transcript (also noted here from a post I did at my home blog at the time), here are some of the things O'Bried in effect endorsed as "Wright-on":

• “African and African-American children have a different way of learning. They are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive.”
• “Nobody in here speaks English, but only black children 50 years ago were singled out as speaking bad English.”
• “Africans have a different meter and Africans have a different tonality.”

Here is one other: "Dr. (Janice) Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks." Various Google searches would seem to indicate that Wright himself came up with "apples and rocks," not Ms. Hale in any of her works. In any event, the statement sure looks like a pretty obvious gratuitous "clever" insult directed at whites.

This differentiation between characteristics allegedly unique to certain races and ethnicities is part of what got the late Reggie White into all kinds of hot water with doctrinaire leftists in 1998.

Yet all of this coming from Wright was a Soledad O'Brien "home run." Based on two posts Ed Driscoll wrote up at PJ Media at the time (here and here), her reaction seems, well, almost "Jouno-listic."

We should not at all be surprised that O'Brien is Derrick Bell's BFF, or that she continues to obfuscate, conceal, and falsely present the inherent racism in Bell's CRT and Wright's preaching both at TUCC and since his departure. We should also not be surprised that her obvious lack of objectivity does not seem to trouble CNN in the least.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.