Is Afrocentrism Legitimate Scholasticism?

Great Debates
41

Well, if the horizons are actually narrow but they’re being falsely extended to suggest that they really reach much further than they do, and there are much lower standards of authenticity supporting them, and any scholarly questioning of the broadening methods is met by cries of “racist oppression”, then yeah, I’d say that broadening horizons could be characterized as bad.

I agree that redefining the canon is a good thing, when done for the right reason–that we’re fairly sure that some text is authentic and that we are characterizing its importance accurately, but not because some marginalized readers are so badly in need of self-esteem boosting that we’ll cut some serious corners to admit this dubious text into the canon.

42

Oh that was supposed to be an intro / throwaway to my actual question: what did the Cornell Classics department say about Bernal?

43

outlandish, if you are going to attempt humor, at least keep it on topic. No one in this thread has argued that nothing has ever happened in Africa, so pretending to think that Africa is a country or that there is one language (rather than ten or more) that employs Click sounds is not ironic, but simply lame.

44

Just as the Choctow, Aztec and Blackfeet are distinct ethnic tribes lumped together under the broad ethnic identity “Indian”, so to are Xhosa, Zulu, Ife, Yoruba, etc. can be seen as “Bantu.” Maybe not a perfect analogy, but useful.
For the record, I think my use of “ethnic” is just a bit broader than most, but still observably similar to how others increasingly use it.

It’s been a busy week IRL. I’ve been overly optimistic about my goofing-off-on-the-internet time.

No, tom. I believe much of the way history is taught is frequently on the level of propaganda. Not just afrocentrism suffers from this tendency.

Afrocentrism is just now arriving at a point where more critical analysis is happening and some of the bizarre claims of the fringe are being exposed for the entertaining delusions they are. I think the more critical efforts of some afrocentrists has bolstered the credibility of the discipline, and its a bit much to characterize the 80 year old discipline as a whole as “tenuous”, especially (as I suspect) if the only thing you’ve expose yourself to or allowed yourself to criticize is the loudmouthed lunatic fringe. There’s plenty of books to read, and several television series you could watch that help cast afrocentric claims/POVs in a far more methodical light.

45

The problem I have with your statements, Askia, is that (a) I see you making claims without real evidence, because you wish it to be so. Which is the problem of many the Afrocentrists’ approach. Even “serious scholars” have done truly awful work in Afrocentrist history, abandoning not only reason but plain common sense.

Let’s take a look at your list, there. Marcus Garvey? W. E. B DuBois? Why in the world would either man know the first thing about ancient Africa or especially Egypt? No reason. Nor did they. The fact that you posted them implies very strongly that you just dropped names of “favous” Afrocentrists, as if this was some kind of argument.

The Egyptians were the Egyptians, pure and simple. It’s a stupid modern obsession to bother asking “what color are they,” and it’s high time people reciognized that fact.

Talking about Eurocentrism is rather a non-sequiter. Outside of the natural interest we have in ourselves more than foreigners, history today is not and has not in a long time been particularly Eurocentric. Heck, today we’re so un-Europcentric that sane people demand that we teach our children about people and places culturally and historically unrelated to them, despite the difficulty in teaching them anything about those people who were related to them culturally and historically. Of course, one can make the argument that this is neccesary because of increased immigration and so on, and one may have a point. My point is that isuch curricula is extremely unusual and has few repcedents in history. The Romans didn’t include much foreign history as a standard part of education, becuse they recognized that they were more interested in themselves. Same for the Egyptians, Chinese, etc.

46

I have not atttacked the scholarship as tenuous. I have noted that the loud lunatic fringe has made such an issue of stupid statements that the credibility among the population at large is tenuous and that a failure to address that situation with supportable facts will further harm the credibility of actual scholarship.
I have paid a fair amount of attention to studies of the Malenke and related societies. (I’ve even posted on those topics on this board.) However, when I encounter someone claiming that all of pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas originated with a visit from Africa (with no evidence of a shipbuilding or seafaring nation on the African coasts, no evidence of the transmission of diseases as occurred with the (“later”) European visits, and the dates for the claimed visit in direct conflict with known dates of both the African and American societies), I see a re-enactment of the old “everything was invented in Russia” nonsense in which some guy claims that the peoples of the Americas were too stupid to create their own culture (sound familiar?) presented in a way to make the proponents look foolish. THAT makes credibility tenuous.

47

I should probably note that historical revisionism (a.k.a., shouting openly ridiculous or completely unsupported arguments) is a real sore spot for me. I rolled my eyes at crazy people having wet dreams over Chinese fleets blowing away Vasco de Gama or colonizing South America.

Problematically, there’re too many people out there who think that a nifty theory and a handful of evidence which maybe supports their position is enough to ignore all other evidence. Sure, the Chinese could have reached the New World. But it’s highly unlikely and mostly unsupported. For that mater, anyone with a coracle could have reached the New World.

48

That’s the nub of my problems with the Afrocentrists I’ve been exposed to (probably more of the nutbar variety than the legitimate scholars)–they tend go straight from “X is not impossible” to “Therefore, X happened” without troubling themselves to demonstrating that there’s any evidence to support X’s existence. And getting kind of pissy when asked to provide that evidence, as if I’m trying to persecute them by applying special racist standards to their theorizing.

49

To be fair, most of them have some evidence to support their views. The problem is that they pick and choose whatever supports their view, and ignore the rest. Often, this amounts to dismissing entire categories of evidence as irrelevnt while picking on just one or two odd and mostly unimportant facts. It’s the same methodology as used by even less savory revisionists, like Holocaust deniers. And they use many of the same arguments. They point directly toward the few pieces of evidence that support their views, but ignore everything which does not. That’s not acceptable scholarship.

Remember Black Athena? The writer of the book was no dummy. Yet, he let himself believe what suited him rather than what the evidence showed. Even historians who may have been sympathetic savaged the book. It was a piece of sheer idiocy, stocked with absolute drivel. The linguistic crap found within was so absurd it sounded like Søren Kierkegaard writing plays with Bertolt Brecht.

50

smiling bandit. I frequently make claims without evidence. Most of the time I KNOW the information is correct and a Google search is just as available to you as it is me. Occassionally I will deign to provide links, as I have in this thread.

Your definition of Afrocentrism is incomplete. Afrocentrism includes ancient, precolonial and postcolonial African history, as well as the population movements of the black diaspora in general. Both Garvey’s and DuBois’ interests in those areas are well documented. Afrocentrism is not just about ancient African societies, the colonial period, or exclusively about Egypt— which I already stated in a link in this thread.

“The Egyptians were the Egyptians,” is perfectly true. They just happened to have been black, too. The modern obsession with race, and racist claims like those espoused by Arnold J. Toynbee that asserted that the black race has had never produced civilization, has plenty of black people going, “Wait… the ancient Egyptians were black, right? That’s why Napoleon blew off the Sphinx’s nose. The ancient Hebrews were black, right? Those Olmec stone heads look like black people to me, man. Maybe black people visited America.” Consider also, that from the perspective of a black people who grew up with the one-drop rule (a belief system instituted and reinforced by racist whites, ironically) to them, even a minute black heritage makes a whole lot of people who wouldn’t ordinarily be considered so black. We can start with the Indian subcontinent and aboriginal Austrailia.

Seriously: if you have identified a people that have demonstrably higher melanin content than the global norm, often on par with peoples in equatorial Africa, you either have George Hamilton or somebody black.

The evidence for some of this is more persuasive and conclusive than some, and some of these leaps in logic make more sense than others, and some of the evidence for some of these claims isn’t as strong as one would like. What I like about the current afrocentric movement is that many are increasingly interested in finding the evidence that would support such claims. However, I believe it unlikely that a great many people will be willing to provide the funding and time to find such evidence when

I mean, leaving behind old world diseases is great as “proof” of a people’s visits to a new world, but IIRC those European mariners during the age of exploration just happened to be some nasty motherfuckers, man. What happens if the pre-colonial West African seafarers were relatively disease-free? What if their efforts never rose to the level of national shipbuilding industry as it occurred in Europe because they never had the built-in societal pressure to conquer and expand? That the dates would contradict “known” dates for prior contact shouldn’t surprise anyone. I appreciate your skepticism, but there are those who don’t believe the theories are done just yet.

51

But these are examples of lunacy and, when black people buy into them, they are less likely to be accepted as serious and more likely to be treated as nutjobs. The Sphinx’s nose was gone long before Napolean was born. The ancient Hebrews were no more likely to have been black than the ancient Celts. You can get a tiny bit of leverage with some interpretations of the visages of Olmec statues, but you immediately lose ground when you try to claim that a “Zingh” empire existed 15,000 years ago–9,000 years before any other civilization leaving behind no record of their passing–or claiming that there was a “black” culture that settled the Mississippi Valley when the DNA evidence places all of Africa and all of the Americas as the most distantly related groups on Earth. Appealing to “nasty” Europeans to explain a lack of disease ignores he fact that disease is passed through normal trade conduct and that all societies of the Old World have pretty much the same diseases. (We are not talking plague, here, or even smallpox, but measles and chicken pox.)

These are the points made by smiling bandit and pseudotriton ruber ruber: picking something that looks nice and ignoring all the counter evidence is self defeating. If someone wants to claim that there was a major African society prior to the third century C.E., they need to dig up some evidence. If they wish to make the astounding claim that there were major civilizations in Africa earlier than in Asia, they need to explain what those societies ate. We know from converging information (seeds and stored tubers found in burial sites vs horticultural analyses of apparent changes in plants from wild to domesticated varieties) that sorghum, millet, cowpeas, manioc, and other staples of the African diet were domesticated no earlier than 3000 B.C.E. and then had to spread to different locations in Africa to actually become staples. To feed an empire prior to 3000 B.C.E (to say nothing of 15,000 ya), we need to pretend that they ate some crop that has utterly disappeared from the earth or that every shred of evidence concerning the crops we know of are wrong.

Inventing fantasies simply does not help your cause.

52

tomndebb. I have not invented any fantasies and I’m annoyed you characterize them as such. I’m repeating common theories and assumptions that have been around for decades. Some are more credulous than others. A fully accountable and supported afrocentric rigor and study can lay to rest which are simply popular myths (and, I’ll grant you, possibly lunacy), which ones are urban myths, which ones have some merit, and which ones are true.

As for my interpretation of “nasty” Europeans, that judgment was based entirely on my erroneous assumption you were obliquely referring to sexually transmitted diseases, which are NOT passed on through normal trade conduct.

While I’ll hold off judgement surrounding the Zingh Empire. I have to say, I personally don’t find it all that puzzling that organic evidence of such a civilization, if it existed, might be hard to come by and may well have disappeared completely in a tropical climate, with plenty of scavengers, high heat and low humidity, over the course of 8,000 years or so, particularly if the food found in deliberately created burial sites is the only reason you have to limit the earliest domestication of food in that region at 3,000 BCE. Besides, weren’t the Zingh fishermen and hunter/gatherers? Who says a civilization has to farm?

53

With THAT I will agree.

As to the archeology of crops: there is far more to it than “just” finding burial mounds (of which we have found none, anyway). It is a matter of tracing the development of crops from the wild to the domesticated based on numerous types of analyses (gene shifts, feral strains, etc.)–which leaves us with a 5,000 year old (not 15,000 year old) terminus ab quo. (And if it disappeared 8,000 years ago instead of continuing up to the period where we know plants were domesticated, then it is irrelevant, anyway. A society that grew, thrived, and totally disappeared is a curiosity, not an indication of the greatness of some potential descendants who never inherited the knowledge or culture from the original group. Mycenae is not considered a society that spawned the greatness of greece, but a dead end that simply left us puzzles regarding the people who failed to maintain their society. (It is not a huge puzzle, given volcanoes and barbarian invasions, of course.)

As to an entire society surviving on nothing but animal protein: the closest we have is found in the Arctic with nothing resembling an empire. Even the Polynesians and other Pacific peoples died out when they could not maintain agriculture on various islands. Someone has proposed a loony idea with no basis in evidence of any kind and the best that you can do to defend it is to ask whether I can be sure that something might not have happened.

I’m not accusing you, personally, of having created fantasies; my comment was directed toward the authors of “Zingh” and the Sphinx’s nose. However, you seem to be buying into the fantasies of others with a truly remarkable lack of curiosity as to how they could make their speculation work. (And, when you repeat the utter nonsense about the nose of the Sphinx, you demonstrate a credulity that is painful to watch.)

54

Sorry - by “a people” that have a melanin content on par with equatorial Africa, who are you referring to? As far as I can see, the maps shows the skin tone in the area of Egypt to be much lighter than equatorial Africa, except perhaps a tad in the very southwest corner of Egypt (I can’t be exactly sure, as the skin tone map doesn’t have nation borders on it, and I had to compare it with a political map by eyeball).

Similarly, the skins tones in South America are also much lighter.’’

55

There is a lot of great work being done on African history nowadays, including the study of Egypt as an African civilization. It’s sure isn’t being done, though, by people using Cheikh Anta Diop’s widely discredited work as the basis of their study. Diop and the like may have a legitimate claim about Eurocentric bias and outright racism from many historians towards African history, but the majority of work coming from Afrocentric historians has been shoddy and ideological and could hardly be considered corrective.

Christopher Ehret is one of the historians studying Africa that I respect the most. Ehret’s work starts from linguistics (his expertise) and expanding to include archaeology and genetics. He wrote what I think is a great textbook The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. Another fine work is African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective by Graham Connah. Ehret has worked with people like S.O.Y. Keita and Paul Newman. Archaeologist C. Loring Brace is another relevant figure (mainly for his work on craniofacial relationships in Northeast Africa).

These folks are covering some of the areas that Afrocentrists covered, but are undoubtedly part of the “mainstream” and actually do and use respected original research. I wish more people cared to learn about and discuss their work, both the out-there Afrocentrists and some of the more virulent critics of Afrocentrists (who seem to me to just be mirror-images of their targets).

By the way, here is a nice interview with Ehret.

56

It wasn’t humor, but satire on how the VAST majority of our understanding of Africans comes from cute little movies like “The gods must be crazy” or news of famine victims; rather then any formal education on the subject of African culture or history.

The people on this board might be the exception. However, to pretend that westerners have anything but a small and very warped understanding of Africa is outright crazy. We know nothing, and quite frankly we never bothered. “African history” is pretty much an oxymoron in western society.

57

Thanks for naming some of it. I’ll be sure to pass your info along to the occasional student who wants to write a research paper (for Freshman English) on Afrocentric subjects, but who gets dismayed (at the very least) when I insist on sources other than the certified nutbars I’ve encountered in previous students’ work. Since this is way out of my field (I teach FE, and sometimes assign research papers on a subject of the student’s choice, which I’ll vet and approve), I don’t know the good research material that’s out there, I just know that it must be out there. Now I know some names to recommend, so thanks.

The name “C. Loring Brace” does ring a bell. I have vague memories of coming across his name when researching some other field–maybe New York City history? Philanthropy of some kind? I’ll have to Google him, unless you know why his name looks familiar to someone outside of anthropology.

On the issue of academic politics, do any of these scholars catch flak from the hard-core Afrocentrists pushing a political/ideological agenda? I would think that the polemicists would be trying to discredit, somehow, the serious scholars’ work if its conclusions would serve to highlight the weakness in their own “research.” Do they just ignore what these scholars are working on? Do they accept it, but pick and choose among the parts of the serious research for the parts they agree with? Are they actually beginning to concede that serious Afrocentric research demands more rigor and open-mindedness than they’ve been willing to invest so far? IOW, is the phenomenon of unsubstantiated speculation passing for Afrocentricism becoming more and more discredited? If this is becoming more exclusively the domain of the guys in dashikis I see on the streetcorners of Manhattan peddling books for African Americans, and less in the university classrooms, then I’m relieved. I’m bookmarking this thread for future use. Thanks again.

58

And I apologize in advance if my term “nutbars” offends anyone. I was trying for funny, which may not be appropriate in GD, and to characterize Afrocentrists with primarily ideological/polemical/racial agendas (as opposed to scientific/historical/anthropological ones). But aside from my attempt at humor, I’m not saying I think these people are necessarily insane, nor do I think the people who find their work interesting are crazy–in both cases I would hope (and believe) that there’s far more naivete than craziness at work, and I hope I haven’t hijacked this useful thread with my quip.

If I could edit my previous post, I would, to show more respect for sincere polemical Afrocentrists, but since I can’t I hope this apology will suffice.

59

Diop “may have a legitimate claim about Eurocentric bias and outright racism?” “Diop’s widely discredited work” can’t be used the basis of further Egyptological studies? The same decades-old body of work that barely gets 400 hits on a Google search of the terms "Cheikh Anta Dip + discredited? and most of those reference discredited Eurocentric claims about African civilization?

Also, near the end of your “nice interview” Ehret cites Martin Bernal’s Black Athena as a solid scholarly work that’s shouldn’t be dismissed as another “out there” afrocentrist. If there were ever an opportunity to slam Diop, this was it, and Ehret passes.

Diop may be controversial but I am unaware of any critical deconstruction of his work or theories as discredited.

pseudotriton ruber ruber. The “guys in dashikis I see on the streetcorners” are not, as a rule, afrocentric scholars, but vendors who push a product both indiscriminately and often foolishly. Don’t confuse the sales department with the work of researchers.

And no, you haven’t hijacked the thread.

60

I just read the Wiki article on Ancient Egypt that Askia cited early in the thread. I got this: By the standards of forensic anthropology, an Ancient Egyptian skull is black. The banks of the Nile were forested then, so travel from Sub-Saharan Africa wouldn’t have involved passing through hundreds of miles of desert, which makes it plausible that significant numbers of people did come from there. Once in Egypt, they and any white Ancient Egyptians would have exchanged genes like bunnies on Ecstasy–that’s how our species is. Their children would be considered black by contemporary standards; as black as Redd Foxx. So, we have an explanation how it could have happened, and physical evidence, good enough for a murder trial, that it did happen. Doper historians, what’s wrong (or right) with my analysis?