06-28-2005, 11:20 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Out of Africa: the dilemmas of Afrocentricity. </b>
by Jr. William Cobb
Imposed in bold print over the cover of the September 22, 1991 issue of Newsweek was the question: "Was Cleopatra Black?" In the background was a picture of an elaborate Egyptian Glyph bedecked in 1990s style Afrocentric garb. The issue at hand was far more complex than the ethnicity of monarchs in antiquity. At the heart of the question was the issue of Afrocentrism and the debate over its "facts or fantasies." At its best, Afrocentrism is an attempt to redefine ourselves as subjects rather than objects of history; to view the world from a perspective that is grounded in Blackness. At its worst, it is an eclectic blend of fact, fiction, and pop metaphysics. From the stoic halls of academia to the lyrical polemics of hip-hop funk-orishas such as X-Clan, Afrocentrism has quickly proven to be one of the dominant "isms" of the 90s. The movement transformed legions of committed b-boys to beaded, braided urban oracles.
The central theme is to be in step with a sometimes nebulous concept of Blackness. On one level, Afrocentrism could more accurately be termed Egypt-centrism; on another, it incorporates cut-and-paste soundbites of numerous African cultures into a hyperblack mosaic of ideas, rites, and practices.
Among Afrocentricity's countless forebearers, it is most directly related to Karenga's Kawaida theory. In some ways Molefi Asante, who is credited with coining the term, provided an updated Kawaida remix for the hip-hop generation and beyond. The noble alms of Afrocentrism include a reconstruction of vital values, institutions, and history to end our cultural amnesia and collective identity crisis. One of the most fundamental elements of the well-being of a group is the ability to define itself. As long as one was identified as an African, she or he could never be made into a spook, coon, or any other fanciful creation of warped white minds. By this matter, the destruction of Black Civilization (or at least our recollection of it) was a dire necessity for the southern slavocracy. As many have noted, we grew to view ourselves through the eyes of those who hated us. The theft of our names, languages, gods, etc. left us culturally schizoid, haunted by what Du Bois eloquently termed the "double consciousness." In 1897 he defined it as:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->'this sense of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warning ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.'(1) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is precisely this schism which creates the need for a cultural base such as Afrocentrism.
In this context the African and American represent two juxtaposed identities struggling for control of the collective psyche of the black community. They are two "warring ideals" refereed by a hyphen. Just as some blacks fled from the stigma of Africanity and plunged wholeheartedly into an acceptance fantasy of Americanism, many Afrocentrics constructed alternate identities as descendants of feudal African monarchs. While this quest for self-identification is laudable, it can veer into a type of blacker-than-thou orthodoxy. But even with its flaws, Afrocentrism is more than "a way to rediscover a lost cultural identity - or invent one that never quite existed," as Henry Louis Gates dismissed it.(2) There exists within the movement a substantial amount of critical pedagogy as well as chauvinist demagoguery. Nonetheless, the movement, like its ideological cousin, multiculturalism, remains critical of the hegemony of "Western" culture. In his iconoclastic poem "I am," Amiri Baraka challenges the notion of western cultural supremacy. In his trademark acidic polemics Baraka notes: "If you leave Greece headed west/you arrive in Newark." The poem goes on to pay proper disrespect to Greeks who "Vanilla Iced" the accomplishments of Egypt, and to list a millenia-long rap sheet of transgressions of the west from murder of Spartacus to the colonization of Africa and extermination of Native Americans. These criticisms have drawn the attention of a squad of establishment intellectuals, including historian Arthur Schlesinger, former Assistant Secretary of Education Dianne Ravitch, and former Education Secretary & Bush's failed drug czar William Bennnett. Their standard line of argument declared that multiculturalism would "balkanize" America leading inevitably to a fragmented, schizoid American identity. This pro-western sentiment was best exemplified in an essay apocalyptically titled "The Fraying of America," in Time magazine. Essayist Robert Hughes prefaces his crusade against Afrocentrism/multiculturalism saying "When a nation's diversity breaks into factions, demagogues rush in, false issues cloud debate, and everybody has a grievance."(3) In Hughes' perspective, Afrocentrism is a culturally separatist movement which is symptomatic of the current vogue or cult of catharsis in which everyone and anyone is encouraged to air his or her grievances against the Establishment. Finally Hughes dismisses the movement with a paternalistic insouciance by saying:
Cultural separatism within this republic is more a fad than a serious proposal; it is not likely to hold. If it did, it would be a disaster for those it claims to help: the young, the poor, and the black.(4)
Afrocentrism can best be understood by exploring its roots, the factors that catapulted it into the consciousness of a young generation of blacks, and its demagogue/pedagogue dichotomy. Afrocentrism has colored in the urban landscape and infused itself into black pop culture. It exists as the philosophical nemesis of urban "gangsta" culture, particularly within hip-hop music.
<b>Back to Africa </b>
In 1963, Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, wrote in his classic text Blues People, "The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the stepculture produced the American Negro. A new race."(5) Twenty-two years earlier Melville J. Herskovits' Myth of the Negro Past provided a brilliant refutation to the thesis that all aspects of African culture had been removed from New World Africans through the deculturalizing institution of slavery. E. Franklin Frazier, and later Daniel Patrick Moynihan took issue with Herskovits' theories. Nonetheless, the issue of cultural identity in the Black community remains a complex undertaking to this day. But what caused the ideology of Afrocentrism to take root so firmly at this juncture in our history?
Throughout its history, Black America has vacillated between a more liberal, open ethos and one in which the community becomes more insular, as is most easily seen in the various permutations of Black Nationalism in this century alone. The prominence of either school at a given time is usually a barometer of that politico-social moment. These moments serve to heighten the group identity of individuals and drive home the point that America functions as a teeming pool of competing interest groups, held together by a thinly veiled facade of common culture - Eurocentrism. Harold Cruse noted this phenomena in his massive study of black leadership Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Cruse notes:
Hence the individual Negro has proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic, or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield. Thus it can be seen that those Negroes, and there are very many of them, who have accepted the full essence of the Great American Ideal of individualism are in serious trouble trying to function in America.(6)
Afrocentrism came of age in the spiritual wreckage of the eighties, the golden age of cowboy capitalism and race-card politics. The public grew to understand that the economy was being plundered by Reaganesque welfare queens, and Willie Horton existed as a gruesome male spectre on the horizon, bent upon defiling sacrosanct white virtue. The macabre ethos of the era is captured in poet Asha Bandele's "1980 to 1990."
<b>1980s </b>
that decade fell on us like napalm & we traded love & humanity for porkbellies on the stock exchange floor while policemen renewed their vows as klansmen . . . the 1980s yeah it was "the decade of excess" the media said but they never did get past donald trump long enuf to tell the truth excess of racism excess of sexism excess of dollarism excess of white privilege excess of black poverty vomiting the american dream on homeless streets men, women & children . . . laid out like yesterday's garbage. . .(7)
More specifically, the polarizing politics of a legion of neoconservatives served as the catalyst for the black community's swing toward the insular politics of nationalism.
Secondly, the ruins of post-industrial urban America have become increasingly associated with the failures of integration. The conspicuous absence of the black middle class left the die-hard ghettocentric black youth contemptuous of the middle class and its assimilationist tendencies. By far, the most popular black leader of the late eighties and early nineties was Malcolm X. Malcolm represented uncompromising strength and an overt rejection of white society to an entire generation. The iconography of young urban America in the late eighties was largely a soundbite mosaic of retro-sixties cultural relics. One of the most vivid aspects of the sixties was the dashiki-clad cultural nationalists who typified the antithesis of the suit-and-tie integrationists. Afrocentrism is, perhaps, an updated version of the cultural nationalist movement and its intellectual backbone, the Kawaida Theory.
Inevitably, these retro-icons would be wed to hip-hop, which provided the soundtrack for the chaotic coming of age of a generation. With the benefit of technology, the raspy voice of Malcolm X was resurrected, digitized, and sampled, first by rage prophets Public Enemy, then by a slew of followers. Note the ascendancy of rappers X-Clan, hyperblack rap-orishas with a dress code that spanned 4,000 years in black aesthetics. Speaking of the connection of social upheaval and proto-Afrocentric rap, James Spady notes:
We must be cognizant that this is the generation born into political upheaval, both domestically & internationally. As they breathed their first breath of life, young panthers were having their lives snuffed out. . . . Martin Luther King was murdered in cold blood. . . .It is within this context that one observes a generation of young blacks in quest of their history & identity.(8)
This is not to say that the ideas of Afrocentrism are peculiar to this generation, but these are some of the reasons that the movement has captured the imagination of a new set of adherents.
<b>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</b>
Afrocentrism represents (literally) a type of Black Reconstruction. The objective is to counter the Eurocentric mythology which has been passed off as the history of the West. Similarly, the multicultural movement, and its accompanying historical revisionism, seeks to present a more balanced perspective of history and culture. But this critique of European cultural hegemony in America is not new. Sociologist Milton Gordon noticed in Assimilation in America that American institutions:
'have as a central assumption the desirability of maintaining English institutions, (as modified by the American Revolution), the English language, and English-oriented cultural patterns as dominant and standard in American life.'(9)
Thus the melting pot is more accurately seen as a cultural oligarchy in which everyone is given equal opportunity to become Anglophiles.
The Afrcocentrist critique of this history has as its underlying assumption that these false assumptions have deified white/western contributions to the evolution of human civilization while vilifying those of Africans. This has resulted in tremendous damage to the self-perception of African-Americans, and the first goal of Afrocentric pedagogy is a reconstruction of a historical memory which will allow Blacks to view themselves as "subjects rather than objects" of history. While the West finds its intellectual/political/cultural matrix in Greece, Afrocentrists find their origins in Eqyptian civilization. The tenets of the Afrocentric perspective on antiquity include:
* Egypt was a Black/African civilization
* Ancient Greece was a poor imitator of the Egyptians
* All art, philosophy, etc. find their origins in Egypt - not Greece.
* Christianity and its ideas were actually vulgar reductions of ancient Egyptian philosophy.
There is an impressive array of work to support the Afrocentrist revisionism. The writings of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, of George G.M. James, Asa Hilliard, and Martin Bernal all point to a significant influence made by black Africans on civilization in antiquity.
Stolen Legacy by Dr. George G.M. James is probably the definitive work on black antiquity within the Afrocentric canon. Written in 1954, James' work is a treatise claiming Greek philosophy is plagiarized Eqyptian philosophy. The cover to the original edition reads, "The Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but the people of North Africa commonly called the Eqyptians." The cover of the most recent publication of the book reads simply "Greek philosophy is stolen Egyptian philosophy." James' thesis is based upon several premises. First, he asserts that Egyptian teachings reached other lands before they reached Greece; therefore, so-called Greek philosophy pre-dates its "originators." Secondly, "the period of Greek philosophy (640-322 B.C.) was a period of internal and external wars and was unsuitable for producing philosophers." Third, and most importantly, James asserts that the Greeks were educated by the Egyptians, thereby bringing Greeks into direct contact with the teachings which they would later usurp and claim as their own. As proof of Greek contempt for philosophy and "dubious authorship," James reminds his readers that it was the "Athenians who in 399 B.C. sentenced Socrates to death and subsequently caused Plato and Aristotle to flee for their lives from Athens because philosophy was something foreign and unknown to them."(10)
His second contention is based upon the chronology of Greek warfare and its coincidence with the origins of philosophy. James makes the dubious argument that this strife made Greece an unlikely home to intellectual pursuits. He writes:
History supports the fact that from the time of Thales to the time of Aristotle, the Greeks were victims of internal disunion, on one hand, while on the other, they lived in constant fear of invasion from the Persians who were a common enemy to the city states.(11)
The most crucial of these conflicts were the Persian Conquests, the Leagues, and the Peloponnesian wars. These issues were "the obstacles against the origin and development of Greek philosophy."(12) James' most important (and substantial) argument for Egyptian influence in antiquity is seen in his analysis of Egyptian "mystery schools" in which Greeks were educated. James sees Alexander the Great's defeat of Luxor in 332 B.C. as the crucial watershed in which Greeks began to co-opt Egyptian learning. However, while James' book goes a long way in raising questions about the origins and influences of Greek philosophy, it does not conclusively show an Egyptian origin.
Diop's African Origins of Civilization argues more conclusively for the African matrix theory. To his credit, Diop's melanin analysis of mummified Egyptian remains is one of the strongest indicators that Egypt was indeed a Black Civilization. In Origins he argues that Europeans were cognizant of the tremendous accomplishments of the "negroid" peoples of North Africa but chose to disguise these facts in order to further the philosophy of white supremacy and justify the "civilizing" mission of the slave trade. As evidence he offers the testimony of Count Constantin De Volney, a European scholar who visited Egypt in 1783. De Volney wrote:
(the Sphinx) all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of a mulatto. . . . On seeing that head, typically negro in all its features, I remembered the remarkable passage where Herodotus says: 'As for me, I judge the Colchians to be a colony of the Egyptians because, like them, they are black with woolly hair. . .' In other words, the ancient Egyptians were trite Negroes.(12)
He goes on to add that by 1833:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Egyptologists were dumbfounded with admiration for the past grandeur and perfection they discovered. They gradually recognized it as the most ancient civilization that had engendered all others. But imperialism being what it is, it became increasingly inadmissible to continue to accept the theory - evident until then - of a Negro Egypt. The birth of Egyptology was thus marked by the need to destroy the memory of a Negro Egypt at any cost. . . (13) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In a chapter titled "The Modern Falsification of History" in Origins, Diop argues that the historical mythology surrounding Egypt began with the racist archeologist Jean Francois Champollion. According to Champollion, "The first tribes to inhabit Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley . . . came from Abyssinia. The ancient Egyptians belonged to a race quite similar to the Kennous or Barabras."(14) While he accepts Herodotus' description of the Egyptians, he takes the curious line of reasoning that:
Herodotus recalls that the Egyptians had black skin and woolly hair . . . Yet these two physical qualities do not suffice to characterize the Negro race . . . Volney's conclusion as to the Negro origin of ancient Egyptian civilization is forced and inadmissible.(15) For good measure, Champollion divides Africa into three distinct races, Negroes Proper, found in central Africa; Kaffirs, of Eastern Africa; and Moors, who are "similar in stature and hair to the best formed nations of Europe."
The pioneering work of Diop and James influenced generations of revisionist scholars who sought to uncover the truth about African history and culture. But these viewpoints were destined to remain cloaked in obscurity without a cultural movement which made them relevant to a non-scholastic audience. This is where Molefi Asante of Temple University and his concept of Afrocentricity come into play.
The ideas of these scholars were given a voice by cultural nationalists during the 1960s and early 70s. But when that movement collapsed (from a potent cocktail of its own contradictions and the covert activities of the F.B.I.), the voice was effectively silenced. Asante's Afrocentricity (1980) became the text that reincarnated the movement. Though Asante jacked his predecessors for their ideas and his book is a mosaic of concepts espoused by other thinkers, it pushed Asante and the ill-defined "ism" into the forefront of the intellectual warfare of the 80s. Afrocentricity prescribed a regimen to effectively center one's perspective in Africa. Using Egypt rather than Greece as the cultural matrix, Afrocentrists constructed an alternate perspective on the evolution of civilization. This pedagogy was tailored for black people because, in Asante's view, the experiences of black people are the best examples for black people to learn from.
Afrocentricity is both theory and practice. In its theoretical aspect it consists of interpretation and analysis from the perspective of African people as subjects rather than as objects on the fringe of European experience . . . In its practical implications, Afrocentricity aims to locate African American children in the center of the information being presented in classrooms across the nation.
Asante proposes a type of pedagogy for the oppressed, one that is predicated upon the centrality of the diasporan Black Experience.(16) Across the nation, the issue sparked debate over curriculum reform and the validity of Afrocentrists' assumptions that the well-being of Black children was being jeopardized by the homogeneity of the current curricula.
Afrocentricity's detractors are numerous. While one important issue that Afrocentrism brought to the floor was how to make curricula reflective of the experiences of groups other than WASPs, many view the ideology as fantastic and divisive. Henry Louis Gates' criticisms that the movement is romantic and chauvinistic have struck a chord with white and Black intellectuals. Isaac Julien, a black, gay, cultural critic, attacked the movement for its parochialism and intolerance of black homosexuality, saying, "Even Afrocentrism's privileging of a new black aesthetic is not dialogic enough to think through the 'hybridity of ethnicity,' let alone liberated enough to include queerness in its blackness."(17) Julien's essay appeared in the cult manifesto Black Pop Culture, a collection of essays compiled mainly from "talented tenthers" on issues relating to Black Culture. With a few notable exceptions (Manning Marable, Angela Davis), there is a distinctly anti-nationalist/Afrocentrist theme permeating the collection. Gates observed "a curious, subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism," and uses his essay as a pulpit to demand that the Black Arts Writers seek penance for their excessive racialism.(18)
But the most vociferous (and myopic) denunciations of Afrocentrism have come from the intellectual mercenaries of the establishment. The Schlesingers and Ravitches, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the sanctity of the West and the way of white folk, have launched. oversimplified psuedo-critiques of the movement. In their eyes the nation would be balkanized by merely admitting and exploring the diversity of experience in America. In an article in the New Republic entitled "The Afrocentric Myth," Wellesly professor Mary Lefkowitz sought to destroy the fundamental assumptions of Afrocentric worldview. In a peculiar mix of paternalism and scorn, Lefkowitz dismissed the work of James and Diop and points to the propagandistic uses of history by Marcus Garvey as the motive for such untenable scholarship. She questions whether or not Herodotus' descriptions are to "be taken literally." Her attacks also focus upon Martin Bernal's Black Athena, a relatively new work in which a white scholar corroborates the claim to African origins of classical culture. She dismisses Bernal's work as tenuous because the era of which he writes has left relatively few artifacts upon which to base his assumptions. While she dismisses James and Diop out of hand, she goes on to say of Bernal:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To the extent that he has helped to provide an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held accountable, even if his intentions are sincere or honorable and his motives sincere. His standards are higher than most of his fellow Afrocentrists . . .(19) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
While Lefkowitz penned an assault on the underpinnings of Afrocentrism, Ravitch challenged the value of its role in reinterpreting the way in which we view the past and contemporary American culture. Her essay, suggestively entitled, "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures," deliberately misplaces historical revisionism in the same arena as parochial-minded zealots who have tried to subjugate the academy to their ideological whims (creationism vs evolution, etc.) She notes: "The secularization of the schools during the past century had prompted attacks on the curricula and textbooks and library books by fundamentalist Christians." She traces the current controversy to the "ethnic revival of the 60s," which brought the "teaching of history under fire, because the history of the national leaders, virtually all of whom were white Anglo-Saxon, and male, ignored the place in American history of those who were none of the above."(20) In a show of gross conjecture she posits that "As a result of the political and social changes of recent decades, cultural pluralism is now generally recognized as the organizing principle of this society." Afrocentrism, in her perspective, assumes that only black heroes can act as role models for black children. She questions whether or not esteem is developed in relation to the perception of one's group and, in perhaps the most telling segment of the essay, she highlights the story of a black woman track runner who found her inspiration in the fluid mobility of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Ravitch finds this story particularly gratifying because it seems to fly in the face of Afrocentric theory because the black woman crosses race, gender, and even genre classifications to find inspiration. Nonetheless, her example leaves her in the comfortable position of whites acting as aesthetic/cultural lords to their black vassals.
But the criticisms of Afro-centric theory are not wholly incorrect. Reactionary critics have conveniently overlooked the positive possibilities of Afrocentrism as a corrective tool. Afro-centrists have overlooked the aspects of their movement which actually have lapsed into a self-indulgent demagoguery.
<b>Demogoguery of the Oppressed </b>
The clearest antecedent of Afro-centrism is Kawaida theory which provided the intellectual backbone of the 60s cultural nationalism. Just as Kawaida theory was subverted into a blacker-than-thou orthodoxy, many aspects of Afro-centric thought have slipped into mildly untenable idealism and wildly irrational absurdity. This strand does not invalidate the entire movement, but it does provide constant ammunition to its many detractors. Baraka, who began as one of the chief proponents of Kawaida, later denounced it, stating in his autobiography that he had frantically claimed a blackness that was kind of bogus, a kind of black bohemianism that once again put the middle class in the position of being unintelligible to the masses. . . The idea that we had to go back to pre-capitalist Africa and extract some unchanging black values from historical feudalist Africans and impose them on a twentieth century world was simple idealism.(21)
In July 1991, Leonard Jeffries, chair of the African-American Studies program at the City College of New York, delivered a speech before the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in which he proclaimed that:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies. . . and the Mafia put together a financial system of destruction of black people, and rich Jews financed the African slave trade." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Jeffries' incendiary comments caused a firestorm of controversy during which he effectively lost his position as chair of the department (he later regained it by court order). But Jeffries' comments represent a chauvinistic tendency among some Afrocentrists. Rather than use the ideology as a perspective from which to critique and accept information, it is used as an excuse for provincialism and a host of other onerous "isms." But Jeffries is not alone. Psychologist Frances Cress Welsing establishes an elaborate and bizarre perspective on European history/culture. Her book provides and easy-to-learn dichotomy by which European culture can be understood. "Ice" people (Europeans) are warlike and individualistic. "Sun" people are communal and peaceful. The existence, of war-like African gods like Shango and peaceful European gods like Aphrodite is not discussed. Welsing goes on to construct an elaborate paradigm in which sports become a metaphor for racial/genetic conflict. She notes "Ball games = war of the balls = war of the testicles = war of the genes = race war."(22) In her analysis, the interaction between blacks and whites is always colored by the subjacent theme of white fear of genetic annihilation at the hands of Black men.
Some Afrocentrists, including Welsing, have promoted a brand of melanin-based biological determinism which is shockingly similar to the nineteenth century psuedo-science constructed to prove white superiority. Welsing states, "I theorized that the presence of melanin in high concentrations in blacks accounted for observable differences in behavior between black people and white people."(23) Welsing's fellow melanist, Tony Browder, writes in From the Browder Files, a collection of Afrocentric essays:
We witness the power of melanin whenever we see African Americans performing on the football field, basketball court, city hall, on television, or in the theater. It's been said that Blacks have to be twice as good as whites in order to compete with them. For Blacks, melanin is the equalizer.(24)
Neither author offers empirical data to support the profound abilities of melanin. The most vivid elaborations upon the ice/sun dichotomy and melanin are to be found in Michael Bradley's Iceman Inheritance. The book, which is subtitled "Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression," was penned by a white Canadian. Bradley posits that the influence of the "ice" permanently shaped the western culture and psyche into aggressive, non-communal beings. The binary logic of sun-ice analysis ignores a tremendously complex set of socio-political and economic dynamics which are central to the rise of the European nation state, capitalism, colonialism, and "modernity."
Within this strain of Afro-centric thought, a romantically ideal version of African history is used to supplant the historical mythology of Europeans. In seeking to destroy Euro-centrism, many Afro-centrists have actually emulated it.
Ultimately, Afro-centrism is neither the panacea which will cure the cultural dilemmas of Black America, nor the virus which will destroy it. It is, however, an important exercise in self-naming. The American canon has remained firmly entrenched in a myopically elite perspective which denies the achievements of many peoples of color. Both the Afro-centric and multicultural movements are essential tools for marginalized peoples working to break the hegemony of white/western culture. Clearly, the failure to recognize the important contributions of non-white groups to the onward march of civilization, at the very least, contributes to ethnocentric arrogance. Further, the failure to view critically the tendency to write European history as a five-hundred year resume, undercuts the ethical considerations of history and hinders the development of true multicultural democracy. At the same time, Afro-centric scholars must be ever vigilant so they may avoid chauvinistic feel-goodism and thereby continue the internecine wars to contruct cultural hierarchies. Lastly, Afro-centrism, like much of Black Religion, is deeply ancestral. It reverberates with traditions (reconstructed though they may be) and strengthens the continuum of cultural development which has accompanied the black community throughout its sojourn toward a truer equality in America.
<b>NOTES </b>
1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Library of America. 1984).
2 Henry Louis Gates, "Beware of the New Pharaohs,"Newsweek, 23 September 1991, 47.
3 Robert Hughes, "The Fraying of America" Time 3 February, 1992, 44.
3 Ibid., 46.
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Leroi Jones, Blues People. (New York: Morrow-Quill 1963), 7.
6 Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1967), 8.
7 Asha Bandele, "1980 to 1990" Chap. in In The Tradition (New York: Harlem River Press, 1993), 67.
8 James Spady, Nation Conscious Rap (New York: PC International Press, 1991), 161.
9 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in America.
10 George, G.M. James, Stolen Legacy (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992), 22.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Cheikh Anta Diop, African Origins of Civilization (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974).
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Molefi Asante, "Multiculturalism: An Exchange" Chap. in Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1993), 308.
17 Isaac Julien, "Black Is, Black Ain't" Black Pop Culture Chap. in (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 255.
18 Mary Lefkowitz, "Not Out of Africa," New Republic 10 February, 1992), 33.
19 Dianne Ravitch, "E Pluribus Plures," Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1992).
20 Amiri Baraka, Autobiography of Leroi Jones (New York: Freudlich Press, 1984), 323.
21 Frances Welsing, Cress Isis Papers (Chicago: Third World Press, 1992), 144.
22 Ibid, 232.
23 Anthony Browder, From the Browder Files (Washington, D.C.: Karmic Institute. 1989).
24 Ibid.
William Cobb, Jr. is a student at Howard University, Washington, D.C. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
by Jr. William Cobb
Imposed in bold print over the cover of the September 22, 1991 issue of Newsweek was the question: "Was Cleopatra Black?" In the background was a picture of an elaborate Egyptian Glyph bedecked in 1990s style Afrocentric garb. The issue at hand was far more complex than the ethnicity of monarchs in antiquity. At the heart of the question was the issue of Afrocentrism and the debate over its "facts or fantasies." At its best, Afrocentrism is an attempt to redefine ourselves as subjects rather than objects of history; to view the world from a perspective that is grounded in Blackness. At its worst, it is an eclectic blend of fact, fiction, and pop metaphysics. From the stoic halls of academia to the lyrical polemics of hip-hop funk-orishas such as X-Clan, Afrocentrism has quickly proven to be one of the dominant "isms" of the 90s. The movement transformed legions of committed b-boys to beaded, braided urban oracles.
The central theme is to be in step with a sometimes nebulous concept of Blackness. On one level, Afrocentrism could more accurately be termed Egypt-centrism; on another, it incorporates cut-and-paste soundbites of numerous African cultures into a hyperblack mosaic of ideas, rites, and practices.
Among Afrocentricity's countless forebearers, it is most directly related to Karenga's Kawaida theory. In some ways Molefi Asante, who is credited with coining the term, provided an updated Kawaida remix for the hip-hop generation and beyond. The noble alms of Afrocentrism include a reconstruction of vital values, institutions, and history to end our cultural amnesia and collective identity crisis. One of the most fundamental elements of the well-being of a group is the ability to define itself. As long as one was identified as an African, she or he could never be made into a spook, coon, or any other fanciful creation of warped white minds. By this matter, the destruction of Black Civilization (or at least our recollection of it) was a dire necessity for the southern slavocracy. As many have noted, we grew to view ourselves through the eyes of those who hated us. The theft of our names, languages, gods, etc. left us culturally schizoid, haunted by what Du Bois eloquently termed the "double consciousness." In 1897 he defined it as:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->'this sense of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warning ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.'(1) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is precisely this schism which creates the need for a cultural base such as Afrocentrism.
In this context the African and American represent two juxtaposed identities struggling for control of the collective psyche of the black community. They are two "warring ideals" refereed by a hyphen. Just as some blacks fled from the stigma of Africanity and plunged wholeheartedly into an acceptance fantasy of Americanism, many Afrocentrics constructed alternate identities as descendants of feudal African monarchs. While this quest for self-identification is laudable, it can veer into a type of blacker-than-thou orthodoxy. But even with its flaws, Afrocentrism is more than "a way to rediscover a lost cultural identity - or invent one that never quite existed," as Henry Louis Gates dismissed it.(2) There exists within the movement a substantial amount of critical pedagogy as well as chauvinist demagoguery. Nonetheless, the movement, like its ideological cousin, multiculturalism, remains critical of the hegemony of "Western" culture. In his iconoclastic poem "I am," Amiri Baraka challenges the notion of western cultural supremacy. In his trademark acidic polemics Baraka notes: "If you leave Greece headed west/you arrive in Newark." The poem goes on to pay proper disrespect to Greeks who "Vanilla Iced" the accomplishments of Egypt, and to list a millenia-long rap sheet of transgressions of the west from murder of Spartacus to the colonization of Africa and extermination of Native Americans. These criticisms have drawn the attention of a squad of establishment intellectuals, including historian Arthur Schlesinger, former Assistant Secretary of Education Dianne Ravitch, and former Education Secretary & Bush's failed drug czar William Bennnett. Their standard line of argument declared that multiculturalism would "balkanize" America leading inevitably to a fragmented, schizoid American identity. This pro-western sentiment was best exemplified in an essay apocalyptically titled "The Fraying of America," in Time magazine. Essayist Robert Hughes prefaces his crusade against Afrocentrism/multiculturalism saying "When a nation's diversity breaks into factions, demagogues rush in, false issues cloud debate, and everybody has a grievance."(3) In Hughes' perspective, Afrocentrism is a culturally separatist movement which is symptomatic of the current vogue or cult of catharsis in which everyone and anyone is encouraged to air his or her grievances against the Establishment. Finally Hughes dismisses the movement with a paternalistic insouciance by saying:
Cultural separatism within this republic is more a fad than a serious proposal; it is not likely to hold. If it did, it would be a disaster for those it claims to help: the young, the poor, and the black.(4)
Afrocentrism can best be understood by exploring its roots, the factors that catapulted it into the consciousness of a young generation of blacks, and its demagogue/pedagogue dichotomy. Afrocentrism has colored in the urban landscape and infused itself into black pop culture. It exists as the philosophical nemesis of urban "gangsta" culture, particularly within hip-hop music.
<b>Back to Africa </b>
In 1963, Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, wrote in his classic text Blues People, "The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the stepculture produced the American Negro. A new race."(5) Twenty-two years earlier Melville J. Herskovits' Myth of the Negro Past provided a brilliant refutation to the thesis that all aspects of African culture had been removed from New World Africans through the deculturalizing institution of slavery. E. Franklin Frazier, and later Daniel Patrick Moynihan took issue with Herskovits' theories. Nonetheless, the issue of cultural identity in the Black community remains a complex undertaking to this day. But what caused the ideology of Afrocentrism to take root so firmly at this juncture in our history?
Throughout its history, Black America has vacillated between a more liberal, open ethos and one in which the community becomes more insular, as is most easily seen in the various permutations of Black Nationalism in this century alone. The prominence of either school at a given time is usually a barometer of that politico-social moment. These moments serve to heighten the group identity of individuals and drive home the point that America functions as a teeming pool of competing interest groups, held together by a thinly veiled facade of common culture - Eurocentrism. Harold Cruse noted this phenomena in his massive study of black leadership Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Cruse notes:
Hence the individual Negro has proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic, or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield. Thus it can be seen that those Negroes, and there are very many of them, who have accepted the full essence of the Great American Ideal of individualism are in serious trouble trying to function in America.(6)
Afrocentrism came of age in the spiritual wreckage of the eighties, the golden age of cowboy capitalism and race-card politics. The public grew to understand that the economy was being plundered by Reaganesque welfare queens, and Willie Horton existed as a gruesome male spectre on the horizon, bent upon defiling sacrosanct white virtue. The macabre ethos of the era is captured in poet Asha Bandele's "1980 to 1990."
<b>1980s </b>
that decade fell on us like napalm & we traded love & humanity for porkbellies on the stock exchange floor while policemen renewed their vows as klansmen . . . the 1980s yeah it was "the decade of excess" the media said but they never did get past donald trump long enuf to tell the truth excess of racism excess of sexism excess of dollarism excess of white privilege excess of black poverty vomiting the american dream on homeless streets men, women & children . . . laid out like yesterday's garbage. . .(7)
More specifically, the polarizing politics of a legion of neoconservatives served as the catalyst for the black community's swing toward the insular politics of nationalism.
Secondly, the ruins of post-industrial urban America have become increasingly associated with the failures of integration. The conspicuous absence of the black middle class left the die-hard ghettocentric black youth contemptuous of the middle class and its assimilationist tendencies. By far, the most popular black leader of the late eighties and early nineties was Malcolm X. Malcolm represented uncompromising strength and an overt rejection of white society to an entire generation. The iconography of young urban America in the late eighties was largely a soundbite mosaic of retro-sixties cultural relics. One of the most vivid aspects of the sixties was the dashiki-clad cultural nationalists who typified the antithesis of the suit-and-tie integrationists. Afrocentrism is, perhaps, an updated version of the cultural nationalist movement and its intellectual backbone, the Kawaida Theory.
Inevitably, these retro-icons would be wed to hip-hop, which provided the soundtrack for the chaotic coming of age of a generation. With the benefit of technology, the raspy voice of Malcolm X was resurrected, digitized, and sampled, first by rage prophets Public Enemy, then by a slew of followers. Note the ascendancy of rappers X-Clan, hyperblack rap-orishas with a dress code that spanned 4,000 years in black aesthetics. Speaking of the connection of social upheaval and proto-Afrocentric rap, James Spady notes:
We must be cognizant that this is the generation born into political upheaval, both domestically & internationally. As they breathed their first breath of life, young panthers were having their lives snuffed out. . . . Martin Luther King was murdered in cold blood. . . .It is within this context that one observes a generation of young blacks in quest of their history & identity.(8)
This is not to say that the ideas of Afrocentrism are peculiar to this generation, but these are some of the reasons that the movement has captured the imagination of a new set of adherents.
<b>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</b>
Afrocentrism represents (literally) a type of Black Reconstruction. The objective is to counter the Eurocentric mythology which has been passed off as the history of the West. Similarly, the multicultural movement, and its accompanying historical revisionism, seeks to present a more balanced perspective of history and culture. But this critique of European cultural hegemony in America is not new. Sociologist Milton Gordon noticed in Assimilation in America that American institutions:
'have as a central assumption the desirability of maintaining English institutions, (as modified by the American Revolution), the English language, and English-oriented cultural patterns as dominant and standard in American life.'(9)
Thus the melting pot is more accurately seen as a cultural oligarchy in which everyone is given equal opportunity to become Anglophiles.
The Afrcocentrist critique of this history has as its underlying assumption that these false assumptions have deified white/western contributions to the evolution of human civilization while vilifying those of Africans. This has resulted in tremendous damage to the self-perception of African-Americans, and the first goal of Afrocentric pedagogy is a reconstruction of a historical memory which will allow Blacks to view themselves as "subjects rather than objects" of history. While the West finds its intellectual/political/cultural matrix in Greece, Afrocentrists find their origins in Eqyptian civilization. The tenets of the Afrocentric perspective on antiquity include:
* Egypt was a Black/African civilization
* Ancient Greece was a poor imitator of the Egyptians
* All art, philosophy, etc. find their origins in Egypt - not Greece.
* Christianity and its ideas were actually vulgar reductions of ancient Egyptian philosophy.
There is an impressive array of work to support the Afrocentrist revisionism. The writings of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, of George G.M. James, Asa Hilliard, and Martin Bernal all point to a significant influence made by black Africans on civilization in antiquity.
Stolen Legacy by Dr. George G.M. James is probably the definitive work on black antiquity within the Afrocentric canon. Written in 1954, James' work is a treatise claiming Greek philosophy is plagiarized Eqyptian philosophy. The cover to the original edition reads, "The Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but the people of North Africa commonly called the Eqyptians." The cover of the most recent publication of the book reads simply "Greek philosophy is stolen Egyptian philosophy." James' thesis is based upon several premises. First, he asserts that Egyptian teachings reached other lands before they reached Greece; therefore, so-called Greek philosophy pre-dates its "originators." Secondly, "the period of Greek philosophy (640-322 B.C.) was a period of internal and external wars and was unsuitable for producing philosophers." Third, and most importantly, James asserts that the Greeks were educated by the Egyptians, thereby bringing Greeks into direct contact with the teachings which they would later usurp and claim as their own. As proof of Greek contempt for philosophy and "dubious authorship," James reminds his readers that it was the "Athenians who in 399 B.C. sentenced Socrates to death and subsequently caused Plato and Aristotle to flee for their lives from Athens because philosophy was something foreign and unknown to them."(10)
His second contention is based upon the chronology of Greek warfare and its coincidence with the origins of philosophy. James makes the dubious argument that this strife made Greece an unlikely home to intellectual pursuits. He writes:
History supports the fact that from the time of Thales to the time of Aristotle, the Greeks were victims of internal disunion, on one hand, while on the other, they lived in constant fear of invasion from the Persians who were a common enemy to the city states.(11)
The most crucial of these conflicts were the Persian Conquests, the Leagues, and the Peloponnesian wars. These issues were "the obstacles against the origin and development of Greek philosophy."(12) James' most important (and substantial) argument for Egyptian influence in antiquity is seen in his analysis of Egyptian "mystery schools" in which Greeks were educated. James sees Alexander the Great's defeat of Luxor in 332 B.C. as the crucial watershed in which Greeks began to co-opt Egyptian learning. However, while James' book goes a long way in raising questions about the origins and influences of Greek philosophy, it does not conclusively show an Egyptian origin.
Diop's African Origins of Civilization argues more conclusively for the African matrix theory. To his credit, Diop's melanin analysis of mummified Egyptian remains is one of the strongest indicators that Egypt was indeed a Black Civilization. In Origins he argues that Europeans were cognizant of the tremendous accomplishments of the "negroid" peoples of North Africa but chose to disguise these facts in order to further the philosophy of white supremacy and justify the "civilizing" mission of the slave trade. As evidence he offers the testimony of Count Constantin De Volney, a European scholar who visited Egypt in 1783. De Volney wrote:
(the Sphinx) all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of a mulatto. . . . On seeing that head, typically negro in all its features, I remembered the remarkable passage where Herodotus says: 'As for me, I judge the Colchians to be a colony of the Egyptians because, like them, they are black with woolly hair. . .' In other words, the ancient Egyptians were trite Negroes.(12)
He goes on to add that by 1833:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Egyptologists were dumbfounded with admiration for the past grandeur and perfection they discovered. They gradually recognized it as the most ancient civilization that had engendered all others. But imperialism being what it is, it became increasingly inadmissible to continue to accept the theory - evident until then - of a Negro Egypt. The birth of Egyptology was thus marked by the need to destroy the memory of a Negro Egypt at any cost. . . (13) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In a chapter titled "The Modern Falsification of History" in Origins, Diop argues that the historical mythology surrounding Egypt began with the racist archeologist Jean Francois Champollion. According to Champollion, "The first tribes to inhabit Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley . . . came from Abyssinia. The ancient Egyptians belonged to a race quite similar to the Kennous or Barabras."(14) While he accepts Herodotus' description of the Egyptians, he takes the curious line of reasoning that:
Herodotus recalls that the Egyptians had black skin and woolly hair . . . Yet these two physical qualities do not suffice to characterize the Negro race . . . Volney's conclusion as to the Negro origin of ancient Egyptian civilization is forced and inadmissible.(15) For good measure, Champollion divides Africa into three distinct races, Negroes Proper, found in central Africa; Kaffirs, of Eastern Africa; and Moors, who are "similar in stature and hair to the best formed nations of Europe."
The pioneering work of Diop and James influenced generations of revisionist scholars who sought to uncover the truth about African history and culture. But these viewpoints were destined to remain cloaked in obscurity without a cultural movement which made them relevant to a non-scholastic audience. This is where Molefi Asante of Temple University and his concept of Afrocentricity come into play.
The ideas of these scholars were given a voice by cultural nationalists during the 1960s and early 70s. But when that movement collapsed (from a potent cocktail of its own contradictions and the covert activities of the F.B.I.), the voice was effectively silenced. Asante's Afrocentricity (1980) became the text that reincarnated the movement. Though Asante jacked his predecessors for their ideas and his book is a mosaic of concepts espoused by other thinkers, it pushed Asante and the ill-defined "ism" into the forefront of the intellectual warfare of the 80s. Afrocentricity prescribed a regimen to effectively center one's perspective in Africa. Using Egypt rather than Greece as the cultural matrix, Afrocentrists constructed an alternate perspective on the evolution of civilization. This pedagogy was tailored for black people because, in Asante's view, the experiences of black people are the best examples for black people to learn from.
Afrocentricity is both theory and practice. In its theoretical aspect it consists of interpretation and analysis from the perspective of African people as subjects rather than as objects on the fringe of European experience . . . In its practical implications, Afrocentricity aims to locate African American children in the center of the information being presented in classrooms across the nation.
Asante proposes a type of pedagogy for the oppressed, one that is predicated upon the centrality of the diasporan Black Experience.(16) Across the nation, the issue sparked debate over curriculum reform and the validity of Afrocentrists' assumptions that the well-being of Black children was being jeopardized by the homogeneity of the current curricula.
Afrocentricity's detractors are numerous. While one important issue that Afrocentrism brought to the floor was how to make curricula reflective of the experiences of groups other than WASPs, many view the ideology as fantastic and divisive. Henry Louis Gates' criticisms that the movement is romantic and chauvinistic have struck a chord with white and Black intellectuals. Isaac Julien, a black, gay, cultural critic, attacked the movement for its parochialism and intolerance of black homosexuality, saying, "Even Afrocentrism's privileging of a new black aesthetic is not dialogic enough to think through the 'hybridity of ethnicity,' let alone liberated enough to include queerness in its blackness."(17) Julien's essay appeared in the cult manifesto Black Pop Culture, a collection of essays compiled mainly from "talented tenthers" on issues relating to Black Culture. With a few notable exceptions (Manning Marable, Angela Davis), there is a distinctly anti-nationalist/Afrocentrist theme permeating the collection. Gates observed "a curious, subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism," and uses his essay as a pulpit to demand that the Black Arts Writers seek penance for their excessive racialism.(18)
But the most vociferous (and myopic) denunciations of Afrocentrism have come from the intellectual mercenaries of the establishment. The Schlesingers and Ravitches, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the sanctity of the West and the way of white folk, have launched. oversimplified psuedo-critiques of the movement. In their eyes the nation would be balkanized by merely admitting and exploring the diversity of experience in America. In an article in the New Republic entitled "The Afrocentric Myth," Wellesly professor Mary Lefkowitz sought to destroy the fundamental assumptions of Afrocentric worldview. In a peculiar mix of paternalism and scorn, Lefkowitz dismissed the work of James and Diop and points to the propagandistic uses of history by Marcus Garvey as the motive for such untenable scholarship. She questions whether or not Herodotus' descriptions are to "be taken literally." Her attacks also focus upon Martin Bernal's Black Athena, a relatively new work in which a white scholar corroborates the claim to African origins of classical culture. She dismisses Bernal's work as tenuous because the era of which he writes has left relatively few artifacts upon which to base his assumptions. While she dismisses James and Diop out of hand, she goes on to say of Bernal:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To the extent that he has helped to provide an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held accountable, even if his intentions are sincere or honorable and his motives sincere. His standards are higher than most of his fellow Afrocentrists . . .(19) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
While Lefkowitz penned an assault on the underpinnings of Afrocentrism, Ravitch challenged the value of its role in reinterpreting the way in which we view the past and contemporary American culture. Her essay, suggestively entitled, "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures," deliberately misplaces historical revisionism in the same arena as parochial-minded zealots who have tried to subjugate the academy to their ideological whims (creationism vs evolution, etc.) She notes: "The secularization of the schools during the past century had prompted attacks on the curricula and textbooks and library books by fundamentalist Christians." She traces the current controversy to the "ethnic revival of the 60s," which brought the "teaching of history under fire, because the history of the national leaders, virtually all of whom were white Anglo-Saxon, and male, ignored the place in American history of those who were none of the above."(20) In a show of gross conjecture she posits that "As a result of the political and social changes of recent decades, cultural pluralism is now generally recognized as the organizing principle of this society." Afrocentrism, in her perspective, assumes that only black heroes can act as role models for black children. She questions whether or not esteem is developed in relation to the perception of one's group and, in perhaps the most telling segment of the essay, she highlights the story of a black woman track runner who found her inspiration in the fluid mobility of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Ravitch finds this story particularly gratifying because it seems to fly in the face of Afrocentric theory because the black woman crosses race, gender, and even genre classifications to find inspiration. Nonetheless, her example leaves her in the comfortable position of whites acting as aesthetic/cultural lords to their black vassals.
But the criticisms of Afro-centric theory are not wholly incorrect. Reactionary critics have conveniently overlooked the positive possibilities of Afrocentrism as a corrective tool. Afro-centrists have overlooked the aspects of their movement which actually have lapsed into a self-indulgent demagoguery.
<b>Demogoguery of the Oppressed </b>
The clearest antecedent of Afro-centrism is Kawaida theory which provided the intellectual backbone of the 60s cultural nationalism. Just as Kawaida theory was subverted into a blacker-than-thou orthodoxy, many aspects of Afro-centric thought have slipped into mildly untenable idealism and wildly irrational absurdity. This strand does not invalidate the entire movement, but it does provide constant ammunition to its many detractors. Baraka, who began as one of the chief proponents of Kawaida, later denounced it, stating in his autobiography that he had frantically claimed a blackness that was kind of bogus, a kind of black bohemianism that once again put the middle class in the position of being unintelligible to the masses. . . The idea that we had to go back to pre-capitalist Africa and extract some unchanging black values from historical feudalist Africans and impose them on a twentieth century world was simple idealism.(21)
In July 1991, Leonard Jeffries, chair of the African-American Studies program at the City College of New York, delivered a speech before the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in which he proclaimed that:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies. . . and the Mafia put together a financial system of destruction of black people, and rich Jews financed the African slave trade." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Jeffries' incendiary comments caused a firestorm of controversy during which he effectively lost his position as chair of the department (he later regained it by court order). But Jeffries' comments represent a chauvinistic tendency among some Afrocentrists. Rather than use the ideology as a perspective from which to critique and accept information, it is used as an excuse for provincialism and a host of other onerous "isms." But Jeffries is not alone. Psychologist Frances Cress Welsing establishes an elaborate and bizarre perspective on European history/culture. Her book provides and easy-to-learn dichotomy by which European culture can be understood. "Ice" people (Europeans) are warlike and individualistic. "Sun" people are communal and peaceful. The existence, of war-like African gods like Shango and peaceful European gods like Aphrodite is not discussed. Welsing goes on to construct an elaborate paradigm in which sports become a metaphor for racial/genetic conflict. She notes "Ball games = war of the balls = war of the testicles = war of the genes = race war."(22) In her analysis, the interaction between blacks and whites is always colored by the subjacent theme of white fear of genetic annihilation at the hands of Black men.
Some Afrocentrists, including Welsing, have promoted a brand of melanin-based biological determinism which is shockingly similar to the nineteenth century psuedo-science constructed to prove white superiority. Welsing states, "I theorized that the presence of melanin in high concentrations in blacks accounted for observable differences in behavior between black people and white people."(23) Welsing's fellow melanist, Tony Browder, writes in From the Browder Files, a collection of Afrocentric essays:
We witness the power of melanin whenever we see African Americans performing on the football field, basketball court, city hall, on television, or in the theater. It's been said that Blacks have to be twice as good as whites in order to compete with them. For Blacks, melanin is the equalizer.(24)
Neither author offers empirical data to support the profound abilities of melanin. The most vivid elaborations upon the ice/sun dichotomy and melanin are to be found in Michael Bradley's Iceman Inheritance. The book, which is subtitled "Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression," was penned by a white Canadian. Bradley posits that the influence of the "ice" permanently shaped the western culture and psyche into aggressive, non-communal beings. The binary logic of sun-ice analysis ignores a tremendously complex set of socio-political and economic dynamics which are central to the rise of the European nation state, capitalism, colonialism, and "modernity."
Within this strain of Afro-centric thought, a romantically ideal version of African history is used to supplant the historical mythology of Europeans. In seeking to destroy Euro-centrism, many Afro-centrists have actually emulated it.
Ultimately, Afro-centrism is neither the panacea which will cure the cultural dilemmas of Black America, nor the virus which will destroy it. It is, however, an important exercise in self-naming. The American canon has remained firmly entrenched in a myopically elite perspective which denies the achievements of many peoples of color. Both the Afro-centric and multicultural movements are essential tools for marginalized peoples working to break the hegemony of white/western culture. Clearly, the failure to recognize the important contributions of non-white groups to the onward march of civilization, at the very least, contributes to ethnocentric arrogance. Further, the failure to view critically the tendency to write European history as a five-hundred year resume, undercuts the ethical considerations of history and hinders the development of true multicultural democracy. At the same time, Afro-centric scholars must be ever vigilant so they may avoid chauvinistic feel-goodism and thereby continue the internecine wars to contruct cultural hierarchies. Lastly, Afro-centrism, like much of Black Religion, is deeply ancestral. It reverberates with traditions (reconstructed though they may be) and strengthens the continuum of cultural development which has accompanied the black community throughout its sojourn toward a truer equality in America.
<b>NOTES </b>
1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Library of America. 1984).
2 Henry Louis Gates, "Beware of the New Pharaohs,"Newsweek, 23 September 1991, 47.
3 Robert Hughes, "The Fraying of America" Time 3 February, 1992, 44.
3 Ibid., 46.
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Leroi Jones, Blues People. (New York: Morrow-Quill 1963), 7.
6 Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1967), 8.
7 Asha Bandele, "1980 to 1990" Chap. in In The Tradition (New York: Harlem River Press, 1993), 67.
8 James Spady, Nation Conscious Rap (New York: PC International Press, 1991), 161.
9 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in America.
10 George, G.M. James, Stolen Legacy (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992), 22.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Cheikh Anta Diop, African Origins of Civilization (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974).
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Molefi Asante, "Multiculturalism: An Exchange" Chap. in Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1993), 308.
17 Isaac Julien, "Black Is, Black Ain't" Black Pop Culture Chap. in (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 255.
18 Mary Lefkowitz, "Not Out of Africa," New Republic 10 February, 1992), 33.
19 Dianne Ravitch, "E Pluribus Plures," Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1992).
20 Amiri Baraka, Autobiography of Leroi Jones (New York: Freudlich Press, 1984), 323.
21 Frances Welsing, Cress Isis Papers (Chicago: Third World Press, 1992), 144.
22 Ibid, 232.
23 Anthony Browder, From the Browder Files (Washington, D.C.: Karmic Institute. 1989).
24 Ibid.
William Cobb, Jr. is a student at Howard University, Washington, D.C. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->