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A bit old but still interesting article. The question is: Is he right?
Someone who read his book?
quote: Clarence E. Walker. We Can't Go Home Again: an Argument about Afrocentrism
By Fred R. van Hartesveldt Teaching History: A Journal of Methods Fall, 2003
The factual flaws in much of the writing about Afrocentrism have been exposed in the past. Clarence Walker does so again in We Can't Go Home Again, and does so effectively. In this regard he focuses particularly on the Afrocentric assertion that Egyptians were black and the wellspring of Western civilization. He makes very clear that the modern concept of race as identity simply does not apply to the variegated population of Egypt and would not have been understood there. The importance of his book, however, does not lie in renewing and expanding the critique of the factual and analytical content of Afrocentric literature.
Walker refers to Afrocentrism as "therapeutic mythology" asserted as a way to promote the self-esteem of African Americans (a term he does not like) "by creating a past that never was." He understands it as black nationalism; in fact he argues that the origins of Afrocentrism lay in black nationalism of the Romantic era, but rejects it as history. Were Afrocentrism a means of creating African American community and thus empowering a minority, it would be comparable to such mythologies used by other minorities. Such mythologies, however, have been grounded in historical thought, while Afrocentrism is factually errant and theoretically flawed.
By urging black Americans to seek empowerment in a misconstructed Egyptian history, Afrocentrists not only mislead, opening their students to ridicule, but they also assert that culture is "transhistoric" — that is, it can be transferred through time and space intact. Culture, Walker asserts, is always changing and will be different as a result of any transfer, willing or unwilling, on the part of those living it. African Americans have created a culture of their own — a culture of which to be proud, but not an Egyptian or African culture. To Walker's way of thinking, Afrocentrism turns African Americans into helpless victims whose ancestors created a glorious culture and then for thousands of years accomplished little. They became the dupes and victims of Europeans, enslaved and exploited, and now their descendants must look to a mythical African past for purpose and meaning. Such a denigration of the African-American struggle, which Walker regards as a triumph, clearly angers him.
Given the popularity of Afrocentrism and its spread through the academic community and popular culture, anyone teaching history or otherwise interested in the nature of historical methodology should read Walker. The manipulation of history to create a particular attitude or support a political point of view is, as Walker acknowledges, sometimes a way of creating unity and gaining power. To deny a people the heritage they and their forefathers built is not acceptable. Walker shows that historians should help African-American students to appreciate their own real history and not pursue distortions of the past in the name of identity, especially since their actual past offers them an identity worthy of enormous pride.
Walker's prose conveys his ideas and passions effectively, despite a painful tendency to fall into the jargon of social science. His arguments are clear, thoughtful, and easy to read. His concern for the discipline and its practitioners comes through forcefully. Even those who disagree with his conclusions will be engaged and will find much to think about if they are sincerely interested in historical scholarship and how it influences those who study it.
The value of this book for courses in historiography and methodology is obvious. It offers useful examples of how historians analyze material, and historical knowledge can shape our understanding of contemporary culture. Its applications go beyond metahistory, however. Students of modern American society and education will find much to explore in its pages, and anyone investigating African-American history should examine Walker's conclusions. Walker will help such students understand not only one way African Americans have come to view themselves but also an element in their contemporary efforts at gaining a sense of identity within American culture. Thus, although the title might not suggest it, this book can be a valuable part of a variety of courses.
quote: Afrocentrism has been a controversial but popular movement in schools and universities across America, as well as in black communities. But in We Can't Go Home Again, historian Clarence E. Walker puts Afrocentrism to the acid test, in a thoughtful, passionate, and often blisteringly funny analysis that melts away the pretensions of this "therapeutic mythology."As expounded by Molefi Kete Asante, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and others, Afrocentrism encourages black Americans to discard their recent history, with its inescapable white presence, and to embrace instead an empowering vision of their African (specifically Egyptian) ancestors as the source of western civilization. Walker marshals a phalanx of serious scholarship to rout these ideas. He shows, for instance, that ancient Egyptian society was not black but a melange of ethnic groups, and questions whether, in any case, the pharaonic regime offers a model for blacks today, asking "if everybody was a King, who built the pyramids?" But for Walker, Afrocentrism is more than simply bad history--it substitutes a feel-good myth of the past for an attempt to grapple with the problems that still confront blacks in a racist society. The modern American black identity is the product of centuries of real history, as Africans and their descendants created new, hybrid cultures--mixing many African ethnic influences with native and European elements. Afrocentrism replaces this complex history with a dubious claim to distant glory."Afrocentrism offers not an empowering understanding of black Americans' past," Walker concludes, "but a pastiche of 'alien traditions' held together by simplistic fantasies." More to the point, this specious history denies to black Americans the dignity, and power, that springs from an honest understanding of their real history.
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Surely a more interesting question, is why or how has culturalism (or the politicization of culture) come to be a dominant analytical framework, and whats to be gained from it.
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posted
Outside of this book, what do you know about Afrocentrism and African centered scholarship in the USA? Just curious.
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posted
A couple of interesting videos reminding about the great Black Athena debate
A lecture and discussion with Mary Lefkowitz where she among other things talks about her book . Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
quote: Author/Professor Mary Lefkowitz spoke about multiculturalism in the ancient world. Her recent book, “Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History,” deals with the cultural cross-pollination between ancient Egypt and Greece. She argued that scholars need to study and teach about African history, but not to the exclusion of European or other civilizations to implement true multiculturalism. After her remarks, she took questions from the audience.
A classical discussion with Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Martin Gardiner Bernal, Professor Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers. From 1996
quote: Legendary discussion between Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Martin Gardiner Bernal (Black Athena), Professor Mary Lefkowitz (Not Out Of Africa) and Guy MacLean Rogers (Black Athena Revisited), moderated by Utrice Leid, They debate the Origins and Foundations of Western Civilization. Does Africa, Asia or Ancient Greece supply the foundation of the world we live in today?
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As I thought no reference to any actual scholars who call themselves Afrocentic and defined the term.
So all of these books are basically promoting half truths and pseudo science of their own so lets just go through the facts.
In the 1500s, the Spanish and Portuguese are given authority by the church to go out and take anything of value from any pagans under something called the Papal Bull Dum Diversas.
quote: Papal Bull Dum Diversas 18 June, 1452Permalink
Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas on 18 June, 1452. It authorised Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any “Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers” to perpetual slavery. This facilitated the Portuguese slave trade from West Africa. The same pope wrote the bull Romanus Pontifex on January 5, 1455 to the same Alfonso. As a follow-up to the Dum diversas, it extended to the Catholic nations of Europe dominion over discovered lands during the Age of Discovery. Along with sanctifying the seizure of non-Christian lands, it encouraged the enslavement of native, non-Christian peoples in Africa and the New World.
From this blueprint came the model of European colonization and conquest that followed all over the world. But specifically it allowed the Spanish and Portuguese to become the first slave traders between Africa, Europe and the Americas. And as part of this model, they came up with the first racial caste system called "casta" (for caste system based on race):
quote: Beginning in 1492, conquistadors from the Iberian peninsula arrived in Latin America. They encountered the indigenous peoples who had been living on the land for centuries and deemed them barbaric and uncivilized and themselves as superior and god-like. They then colonized the region, forcing all to convert to Catholicism, taking control of the land and generally exploiting the people and the region. The Spanish and Portuguese forced indigenous peoples to acculturate to their own beliefs, they taught them Spanish, implemented the laws that were present in Spain and made Catholicism the ultimate belief system. Overtime, they passed laws creating a social hierarchy to maintain power known as the Casta System. This system ensured European superiority in all sections of life. They remained in control of the region until the 1820s, when countries began to fight and gain their independence. Despite gaining independence and no longer being under colonial rule, a social hierarchy remained in place leaving those of indigenous and African descent on the bottom. The Casta System was created in colonial times to explain mixed race families to those back in Spain but this racial hierarchy remained in place long after the Spanish had left Latin America. The Casta System was created by the Spanish to maintain their power and superiority to other racial groups in the colonies. This system was used throughout their rule and continued to be unofficially in place after independence.
And other Europeans adopted this model as they expanded their colonies, with the main difference between he Spanish and Portuguese colonies being that they recognized and identified mixture as different races or racial castes. The other European colonies did not do this and for example in North America, the Anglo/French colonies actively sought to exterminate the native Americans and thereby leaving only two main races: white (Europeans) and Negroes(Africans/slaves), with strict rules forbidding mixture to protect the purity of whiteness under a one drop rule. Note that the anglo colonies also adopted the term "negro" from the Spanish casta system to refer to its African slave populations.
quote: Within the context of colonial enslavement, Blackness—prototypical and phenotypical African features such as dark skin, a broad nose, tightly coiled hair—were the undeniable markers of inferiority. These features served to immediately communicate one’s position within the social power structure, and in the context of enslavement, whether one was free or enslaved.
In all of these systems, the African slaves were mostly stripped of their language and identity associated with whatever ethnic group they came from, while it varied from North America to South America in how extensive. And in so doing, the only identity for the African was to be a slave and therefore not to have any history or identity outside of that status.
This system of colonization that promoted a racial hierarchies was propped up by the newly created fields of anthropology and archaeology. These so-called disciplines at the time were mostly nothing but pseudo-science, trying to find some way to justify and explain European global conquest. And in their made up fabricated history of humanity, it was the inferiority of the other "races" that was the basis of the colonial world order. And these disciplines put a priority on using ancient civilizations as 'proof' of racial superiority based on skin color. These ideas were very popular in the 1800s and early 1900s and can be widely found in libraries and online archives.
It was only decades later after years of development among African scholars in America to promote the true history of Africa that you got the beginnings of Afrocentrism in the black power movement of the late 1960s. It was in this period that African American civil rights activists began to challenge the control of the study and discussion of history on university campuses by exclusively white scholars and "authorities". And from that movement came the first African American Studies departments on university campuses along with scholars dedicated to telling the true history of Africa. The purpose of this was to change the history of civilization as told by Europeans claiming that civilization originated in Greece and Rome. That led to notable scholars like Dr John Henrike Clark and Dr Ben Jochannon teaching at various universities. And ultimately it led to scholars like Dr Molefi Asante creating the term "Afrocentricity" to refer to a curriculum and world view centered on Africa in teaching people of African descent. And this curriculum covered all of Africa, as there is a tremendous amount of history that had been "lost" due to colonization and slavery.
But contrary to what most people think, the debate over ancient Egypt is not what defines "Afrocentric" scholarship, as can be seen in the person of Martin Bernal. Martin Bernal was a white European scholar who wrote a book in the 1980s called "Black Athena" and because of his legacy as a child of a famous Egyptologist, it caught the attention of many Europeans in the scholarly community. This book became the focus of the so-called debate over Afrocentrism in the 90s, even though the book and its author were not Afrocentrics. Yet in the eyes of the scholarly community, "Afrocentrism" was primarily about ancient Egypt, when in reality that is not what "Afrocentricity" and actual African scholarship is about. So when you see a lot of these books claiming to critique Afrocentric theories, they are picking specific scholars or individuals who have ideas that they can claim define what Afrocentrism is, but they aren't addressing the ideas of Molefi Asante and the curriculum in academia where the term originated.
Since that time, other things such as books like "They Came Before Columbus", by Ivan Van Sertima have also been used to define "Afrocentrism" but again, that idea of black Olmecs came from European scholars not Africans. The fundamental point here was to try and claim that African scholars were the problem and not the European colonists and their pseudo science of race which was created and promoted by them all over the world. And the core of the issue is about who controls the telling of history and how people see the history of the planet. The African scholars see Eurocentric colonial scholarship as fundamentally historically racist, with built in explicit bias which makes them unable to tell the history of the world in its proper context, especially when it comes to the role of populations with black skin as not simply being inferior savages who received the light from white skinned people.
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After criticism against Afrocentric ideas Mary Lefkowitz was attacked by some scholars. She tells about it in her book History Lesson
quote: In 2008, Lefkowitz published History Lesson, which The Wall Street Journal described as a "personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates." She was attacked in newsletters from the Wellesley Africana Studies Department by her colleague Tony Martin, which turned into a rancorous, personal conflict with anti-Semitic elements. Martin stated in May 1994 at Cornell University that "Black people should interpret their own reality. . . . Jews have been in the forefront of efforts to thwart the interpretation of our own history." In another incident described in her book, Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan, the author of Africa: The Mother of Western Civilization, gave the Martin Luther King lecture at Wellesley in 1993. Lefkowitz attended this lecture with her husband, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones. In that lecture, Ben-Jochannan stated that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the Library of Alexandria, Egypt. During the question and answer session following the lecture, Lefkowitz asked Ben-Jochannan, "How would that have been possible, when the library was not built until after his death?" Ben-Jochannan replied that the dates were uncertain. Sir Hugh responded, "Rubbish!" Lefkowitz writes that Ben-Jochannan proceeded to tell those present that "they could and should believe what black instructors told them" and "that although they might think that Jews were all 'hook-nosed and sallow faced,' there were other Jews who looked like himself
Then one must of course remember that there is an academic debate about Afrocentric ideas which is rather reasonable. Then we have a debate among amateurs mostly on Internet where rather hilarious claims sometimes are made, and many times forwarded in a rather aggressive manner.
-------------------- Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist Posts: 2683 | From: Sweden | Registered: Mar 2020
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