Below The Beltway

And the boys from Italy aren’t going to be happy:

(CNSNews.com) - Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago where Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has been a member for two decades, slurred Italians in a piece published in the most recent issue of Trumpet Newsmagazine.

(Jesus’) enemies had their opinion about Him,” Wright wrote in a eulogy of the late scholar Asa Hilliard in the November/December 2007 issue. “The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans.”

Wright continued, “From the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth (in a barn in a township that was under the Apartheid Roman government that said his daddy had to be in), up to and including the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ death on a cross, a Roman cross, public lynching Italian style. …

“He refused to be defined by others and Dr. Asa Hilliard also refused to be defined by others. The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge, but Asa, like Jesus, refused to be defined by an oppressive government because Asa got his identity from an Omnipotent God.”

Leaving aside the fact that the connection between the Romans and modern day Italians is tenuous at best, Wright’s diatribe is consistent with what we’ve heard before.

What’s interesting is what you find when you google the guy he was eulogizing:

Dr. Hilliard became a consultant to Atlanta schools during the implementation of training guides known as the “African-American Baseline Essays.” The essays, developed by educators in Portland, Ore., view ancient black Egypt as the birthplace of the philosophical, mathematical and scientific theories that formed civilization.

Afrocentrism attracted much debate and a range of scholars, including polarizing figures such as Leonard Jeffries. Among its detractors were Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Frank M. Snowden Jr., a Howard University classicist, both of whom wrote that the effort to highlight the roots of black culture often came at the expense of white European civilization.

(…)

He consulted on perceived cultural biases in history textbooks and wrote hundreds of scholarly articles on topics including African history and public policy. He spoke frequently on child development and teacher-training matters.

Dr. Hilliard advocated the elimination of standardized admissions tests as a key criterion for college admission, saying they had “a disproportionate impact on those children who need school the most, the minority children.”

Because, you know, actually demanding competence from someone seeking to enter a university is so 1950s.