Debunking Afrocentrism
“Things that may not be true can be made if you repeat them long and often enough, therefore, always repeat statements that will give your race a status and an advantage. That is how the White man has built up his system of superiority. He is always telling you he is superior and he has written history and literature to prove it. You must do the same.”
– Marcus Garvey
In the early 1990s, The New Republic asked Mary Lefkowitz—a classics professor at Wellesley College—to review Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Bernal, argued that Greece stole the collective knowledge and wisdom of Africa (specifically, Egypt) and claimed it as their own—a theory that originated from George G. M. James’ 1954 book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy. Lefkowitz was shocked to discover “a whole literature that denied that the ancient Greeks were the inventors of democracy, philosophy, and science.” She was even more surprised to discover that such literature was being taught at Wellesley.
During a lecture by visiting professor Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, author of Africa: Mother of Western Civilization, Lefkowitz asked how could Aristotle have stolen his philosophy from the Library at Alexandria, when that library had only been built after his death. “Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the question, and said that he resented the tone of the inquiry,” wrote Lefkowitz. “Several students came up to me after the lecture and accused me of racism, suggesting that I had been brainwashed by White historians.” She went on to characterize the lecture as more of a “political rally than an academic event.” But she was most troubled by the silence of her colleagues. “One of them said later that she found the lecture so ‘hopeless’ that she decided to say nothing.”
So-called Afrocentrists believe Moses, Cicero, Cleopatra, and Beethoven (among others) belong in the realm of Black history. Afrocentrists are able to make these kinds of claims by invoking the one drop of blood rule; expanding Blackness beyond sub-Sahara Africa; using vague descriptions in historical texts (“he had a flat nose and dark skin”); and scrutinizing the skull shape and size of ancient Egyptian remains for confirmation of Negroid qualities…so that anyone with so much as a tan can fall under the umbrella of Black people.
More radical Afrocentrists have attempted to assert Black superiority through pseudo-science that casts Whites as “ice people” whose lack of melanin not only affects skin pigmentation but also mental and physical development (or lack thereof). The veracity of such claims is almost beside the point—rendering truth nothing more than a perspective to be shaped and wielded for achieving social agendas.
Dr. Geroge J. Sefa Dei is one of the Canada’s most ardent supporters of Afrocentrism. He is a former professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and an immigrant from Ghana. Dei, like most Canadian Afrocentrists, ignores the troublesome rhetoric concerning Greece, “ice people,” etc. in favour of a more ecumenical vision. In 1995, he wrote an influential paper titled The Role of Afrocentricity in the Inclusive Curriculum in Canadian Schools. He argued that the system was failing Black students despite claims of multiculturalism and egalitarianism.
He called for the end of “the current dominance of Eurocentricity” with its “deep-rooted tendency” to consider minority students inferior. He wrote about growing up in Ghana, where it was more important to learn about Canada’s Niagara Falls than the rivers in his own village. He quoted Lee-Ferdinand: “Eurocentrism has been insidious in its universality.” He interviewed Black youths who declared the education system left them feeling as if “all those who have done something worth mentioning in the school books are White men” and “Blacks can’t make it that far so why am I bothering.” Dei concluded: Black youths need to “to re-invent their Africanness within a Diasporic context, and to create a way of being and thinking congruent with positive African traditions and values.”
A typical example of faulty Eurocentrism is the oft-used phrase “Christopher Columbus discovered America”—A ridiculous statement since people were already living in America before Columbus discovered it. A good teacher knows well enough not to make this mistake and would even take the time to point out this error.
Surely, all of the biases and lazy thought-processes taking place in public schools are worth correcting, rather than creating a parallel school system that corrects knowledge for some while leaving others to toil in ignorance. In North America, public schools are failing all students not just Black kids. Consider the Toronto District School Board: 39 percent of East Africans are at risk of dropping out of high school, followed by 24 percent of South Asians, 23 percent of Eastern Europeans, and 16 percent of East Asians. Overall, 25 percent of students are in danger of dropping out.
If 1 in 4 Eastern European high school students are at risk of dropping out, the tenets of Afrocentrism paradoxically suggest that these White students are not getting an education that is Eurocentric enough.
Afrocentrists, including Dei, also argue that increased parental involvement in school and community life are intrinsic benefits of an Afrocentric education, as if these are practices that Black parents could not pursue otherwise. In regards to the teaching of African spiritualism, Dei uses wordplay to secularize religious indoctrination. “African spiritual values,” he writes, “teach about unity between the individual and the group or community, harmony with nature and society and the connection between rights and social responsibility. These spiritual values may enter everyday school discourse not as ‘religious tenets’ but as issues of every day life.”
The notion of instructing students to embrace the principles of African spiritualism—no matter, how innocuous, and virtuous it may appear to be—is akin to mandating that students be indoctrinated in Buddhism.
But, ultimately, the biggest failure of Afrocentrism is its refusal to acknowledge the role of Black communities in creating better Black communities.
In 2004, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) commemorated the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated American schools (Brown vs. Board of Education). During the televised ceremony, Bill Cosby delivered a scathing diatribe on the plight of poor Black families. “What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?” said Cosby. He went on to admonish absentee-fathers and parents who no longer command respect from their children. Naturally, his comments proved to be divisive, irrespective of race. But, Cosby wasn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said before. Instead, he broke an unspoken rule: Don’t let White folks hear you speaking ill of Black people.
Michael Eric Dyson, self proclaimed “hip-hop intellectual,” explains, in his book, Is Bill Cosby Right?, that blaming Black people lets White people “off the hook” for their responsibility to rectify institutional racism. “Cosby’s overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering—and by implication its remedy—in the lives of the poor.” Dyson calls for more “compassionate, lovingly and enabling” discourse. But his diplomatic rhetoric is essentially a call for censorship.
In his book, and various interviews, Dyson has attempted to justify—and even celebrate—many of the qualities Cosby, and his supporters, deem deleterious to the Black community. This is essentially the mantra of Afrocentrists: If it’s Black, it has to be good (and, more radically, if it’s good, it has to be Black). But in his attempt to tow the party line, Dyson makes a series of bizarre arguments.
He believes rich Black people—“Afristocrats”—hate poor Black people. He deems Cosby a “Johnny-come-lately” racial critic who has “flatly refused over the years to deal with blackness and color in his comedy.” He argues Ebonics is the “linguistic creativity that derives from the black language styles and patters of our culture.” And when asked why Cosby has support from the very people he’s scrutinizing, Dyson replied, “…the poor watch more TV than anybody else. They buy into the vicious stereotypes about them more than anybody else” and “…taken in one sense, a lot of what he said we can agree with. None of us want our children to be murderers or thieves. But Cosby never acknowledges that most poor blacks don’t have a choice about things.”
Firstly, Cosby has repeatedly explained he wanted to teach through art—instead of making a didactic, sanctimonious TV show about race in America. (He saved that for A Different World.) Cosby wanted to show what a loving, successful Black family looks like (The Cosby Show). Incidentally, he has been, and continues to be, criticized by Black intellectuals/malcontents/whatever for presenting an idealized Black family rather than something more authentic—impoverished, dysfunctional, etc.
Secondly, one would think that being able to write and speak English might be useful for passing a standardized English test and, subsequently, getting a job in an English-speaking country.
Thirdly, saying that poor Black people only agree with Cosby because they watch too much TV is a sentiment much more demeaning and condescending than anything said during that NAACP ceremony. And lastly, saying that poor Blacks “don’t have a choice” in becoming “murderers or thieves” implies Black people are mindless, childlike beings—a strangely antebellum notion of the kind used to justify The Slave Trade—that are incapable of making good or bad decisions; they’re successes and failures left up to God or The White Man or dumb luck. Such notions trivialize the achievements of those who have succeeded through hard work, self-determination, positive role models and nurturing families.
Every Black first was invariably preceded by someone telling a Black child, “you can never be…” A little over a year ago the only remaining you can never be was President of the United States and now that is gone too. Yet, the Afrocentrist would have us believe that an identity based on victimhood and fatalism is more useful than ambition and self-determination; that all of our hopes and prayers rest on claiming ownership of dead people’s accomplishments; and any Black child who succeeds without the empowering, self-aggrandizing rhetoric of Afrocentrism is nothing more than an inexplicable outlier rather than an example for us all.
Inquiries concerning Africa and its possibly stolen legacy are not without merit. It is true that many facets of African history have been distorted, diminished or ignored due to racism. Unfortunately, Afrocentrists are not, by definition, primarily concerned with the truth, but rather the self-esteem and well being of Black people. No historical inquiry can be conducted, in earnest, until it is divorced from the tortured, angst-ridden, existential crisis of the Black Diaspora—a crisis that can only be resolved through honest, uncensored discourse of the kind opposed by Afrocentrists.
