Calling for more Black role models in the schools and for investment in Black communities, Jawanza Kunjufu, president of African American Images Communications Company, stressed that Black Americans must show more "commitment to the race" in a speech last night kicking off a weekend conference.

Kunjufu told an audience of about 50 at Gutman Conference Center that the main reason 42 percent of Black Americans cannot read past the sixth-grade level and 23 percent of Black Americans do not graduate from high school is because of the "design purpose machine."

"Schools have a purpose like a machine: to destroy you or make you white," Kunjufu said.

His speech on re-educating the Black community to opened the three-day Inter-Collegiate Conference, sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe African American Cultural Center. Students from Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia and other colleges attended.

Cites Leonard Jeffries

Kunjufu said Biblical history is based in white myths and that Christianity originated in Egypt. He also cited City University of New York professor Leonard Jeffries in saying that "our genes dominate" with respect to melanin, a skin pigment.

Kunjufu said whites who are racist are "psychopaths" whose prejudiced sentiments stem from an insecurity about their recessive genes for skin color, the fact that they are a minority in the world and the colder climate from which they originate.

The focus of Kunjufu's speech, however, was education and the Black community.

For Black Americans to improve in education, Kunjufu said, students need more Black teachers. He said myths persist in education that "Black and gifted can't go together" and that Black Americans need only the same facilities as whites, not role models and teachers.

He said many Black students have never seen a Black person read a book, thus strengthening the myth that intelligence and wealth are related to whites only.

Black Americans must defeat the "design purpose machine," Kunjufu said, by showing an awareness of the Black culture to establish a "clearer identity" for themselves, and by taking and learning from outside the Black community.

Black Americans must also invest in their own communities, he said.

"Black consumers won't support Black businesses," he said. "We believe in their [whites'] dream more than we believe in ourselves."

Black Americans have jobs, but they can't pass jobs on to their sons and daughters as they could pass on family businesses.

"We have to begin to put ourselves to work," Kunjufu said. "I may respect drug dealers more than the Black middle class."

Need for Black Unity

Most of all, though, Kunjufu stressed that Black Americans must strive for unity, that inactive members of the community must become involved, and that leadership should be more collective.

"Don't embarrass yourself and say Bill Clinton is the leader of this country," Kunjufu said. Good leadership is "collective, invisible and diversified," he said.

The Black community relies too much on the church and politics for its leaders, he said. These leaders are too individualistic and should reform their leadership and unite in order to create a more effective union, Kunjufu said.