Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“Dr.” Michael Sharpe, the CEO of the Family Urban School of Excellence (FUSE), padded his credentials; it turned out he was not a “Dr.” at all. Moreover, a cautiously concealed stint in prison further marred Mr. Sharpe’s record, which was, before journalists began snooping into his past, fairly substantial. It is said that the FBI is now examining FUSE with jeweler’s loops screwed into its many eyes. FUSE, according to its mission statement, is “an education management organization formed in 2012 to continue, guide and expand the work of Jumoke Academy, a high-performing urban charter school in Hartford’s north end.” In an earlier time, Mr. Sharpe’s Pilgrim’s Progress through adversity in the direction of a shining light might have served young urban African Americans struggling with their own demons as a positive object lesson: Here was a man who had pulled himself up from the mire by his own bootstraps. Both Malcom X and Martin Luther King spent some time in jail. Mr. Kin...

Some sensible people who labeled Sen. Barack Obama very early on in his campaign a “post-racial” candidate are beginning to have second thoughts. At the beginning of Obama’s carefully crafted campaign, George Will, the conservative commentator, was not yet among them, but the influence on Obama’s campaign of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Mr. Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is giving rise to profound doubts. Back in December, Will and Shelby Steele , touched lances on the question of race transcendence in the Obama campaign. Will summarized a short book by Steele of Stanford's Hoover Institution on Obama, "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," and then disagreed with Steele's major premise that Obama had embraced the social determinism and identity politics of post-'60s black dogmas. “Since the 1960s,” Will wrote, “the prevailing dogma of black identity has, Steele believes, required blacks ...