Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in the World
> 
> by Molefi Kete Asante
> 
> Africa has been betrayed by international commerce and trade.
> 
> Africa has been often betrayed by the new science of the genetics of food, 
> and the unequal distribution of resources.
> 
> Africa has been betrayed by missionaries and imams who have called our own 
> priests and priestesses false while holding up Africa's enemies as our 
> saviors.
> 
> Africa has been betrayed by education, the Academy, and the structure of 
> knowledge imposed by the Western world
> 
> Africa has often been betrayed by its own leaders who have shown a talent 
> for imitating the worst habits and behaviors of Europe.
> 
> Africa has often been betrayed by the ignorance of its own people of its 
> past. Africans are, consequently, the most betrayed of contemporary humans.
> 
> People so often betrayed must take a serious look at their own approach to 
> phenomena, to life, to existence, to knowledge. The betrayals do not have to 
> continue, nor must we resign Africa to the trash heaps of history as some 
> contemporary Africanists and non Africanists have claimed.
> 
> A continent and a people with such incredible potential can rise to meet any 
> challenge, but our thoughts must become truly our own thoughts, separated 
> from the enslaving thoughts of those who have sought racial domination. Of 
> course, when I speak like this, I am speaking of Africa in the context and 
> spirit of Marcus Garvey. I accept that the African world is not merely a 
> geographical entity but a world entity whether by our own making or as is 
> most probable by the making of the assaults and attacks and aggressions 
> against African people. We are found in every continent and we occupy 
> positions of influence in countries as widely separated as Brazil and the 
> United Kingdom.
> 
> My aim is to help lay out a plan for the recovery of African place, 
> respectability, accountability, and leadership.
> 
> The theme of this conference takes us to the very core of the future of 
> human interaction by seeking to examine Western knowledge, its structure, 
> its relationship to conquest and domination, and its prosecution as an 
> instrument to retain a white racial hierarchy in the world.
> 
> We know that Africans have thought about the universe longer than any other 
> people. The people of the world have been black longer than any other color.
> 
> In fact philosophy itself originated in Africa and the first philosophers in 
> the world were Africans.
> 
> The African tradition is intertwined with the earliest thought.
> 
> Yet from the beginning of Europe's interest in Africa the European writers 
> referred to ancient African works as "Wisdom Literature," in an effort to 
> negatively distinguish African thinking from European thinking. They could 
> not conceive of Africans as having philosophy.
> 
> Philosophy was meant, in their minds, to indicate a kind of reflection that 
> was possible only with the Greeks. They constructed a Greece that was 
> miraculous, built on the foundation of a racial imagination that established 
> a white European superiority in everything.
> 
> Since philosophy was seen during the neo-classical period of European 
> history as the source of all other arts and sciences, philosophy was the 
> chief discipline. They saw it in the context of Darwinism where even 
> knowledge was structured hierarchically. Indeed, I still remember how in the 
> southern United States, during my childhood, the whites prohibited Africans 
> from operating large machinery because it was considered much too 
> intellectual for blacks.
> 
> Numerous European writers glorified the achievements of the mind of the 
> Greeks. A Greek stood at the door of every science in the European mind. 
> There were no secrets that had not been discovered by the Greeks. They owed 
> allegiances to no one. They were immaculate, without blemish, isolated from 
> every other people as the standard by which the world was to be judged.
> 
> Whether in art or science, in sculptor or mathematics, in astronomy or 
> literature, they had no equal and were without antecedents.
> 
> However, according to the tradition of Western thought, it was in philosophy 
> that the Greeks excelled. As Theophile Obenga says, others may have had 
> religion, stories, wise sayings, and wisdom literature but the Greeks had 
> philosophy. This was the highest of all disciplines and it was only through 
> the minds of whites that philosophy came to the world.
> 
> Yet we know that the word philosophy is not Greek, although it came through 
> the Greeks to English and other European languages. Seba, wisdom, the 
> ancient Mdw Ntr word is the earliest example of reflective thinking. In 
> fact, on the tomb of Antef I, 2052 B.C. we see the first mention of wisdom.
> 
> The word sophia, wisdom in Greek, is derived from the more ancient word 
> seba, the African word. To say in Greek "philo" is to say brother or lover. 
> One normally says that a philosopher is "a lover of wisdom." But the ancient 
> Africans had come to this understanding long before there was even a nation 
> of Greeks.
> 
> Indeed the first serious thinkers or philosophers were not Greeks. This 
> means that not only is the word philosophy not Greek, the practice of 
> philosophy is not Greek, but African.
> 
> Thales who lived around 600 BC is usually thought of as the first Greek 
> philosopher. Some claim that it was Pythagoras, who was a younger 
> contemporary of Thales, but I claim, with most Greek scholars that it was 
> Thales since he is said to have told a young Pythagoras "You must do as I 
> have done and go to Egypt to learn philosophy from the Egyptians." Advice 
> which Pythagoras followed and went to Egypt, spending twenty three years at 
> the feet of such venerable African teachers as Wennofer.
> 
> There were several select places where various aspects of philosophy such as 
> social ethics, natural laws, metaphysics, and medicine were taught. One 
> could study at the Temple of Ptah at Men-nefer, at the Temple of Bast at 
> Bubastis, at the Temple of Hatheru at Dendera, at the Ausarion at Abydos, at 
> the Temple of Amen at Waset, at the Temple of Heru at Edfu, at the Temple of 
> Ra at On, and the Temple of Auset at Philae. Indeed, scholars and others 
> could assemble at scores of other sites from Siwa to Esna for intellectual 
> discussion and discourse. No city,however, was as rich in temples and 
> schools as Waset where the temples of Amenhotep III, Seti I, Nefertari, 
> Hatshepsut, Tuthmoses III, Mentuhotep, and the Ramesseum were in full 
> flourishing from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom period. Kemet, the 
> ancient name of Egypt, was not without a considerable body of thought that 
> had been amassed over many centuries. By the time the Greeks starting coming 
> to Egypt as students in the 7th and 8th centuries the philosophers of Egypt 
> had already created vast libraries of histories, science, politics, and 
> religion.
> 
> Here along the Nile River Africans thought about the nature of the universe, 
> the condition of good and evil, human relations, the administration of 
> society, the character of the afterlife, the idea of beauty and the nature 
> of the divine with intense reflection. I am not here interested on the 
> impact Africa had on Europe or the influence that Kemet had on Greece. In 
> fact I believe that it is time we wrest the study of early Africa from any 
> comparison with Europe because Europe is not in the same league with its 
> antiquity. We will become far more insightful about our own cultures as we 
> gain deeper knowledge of our own societies in relationship to continuities, 
> migrations, land tenure philosophy, family relationships, governance, 
> writing styles and techniques, and the nature of morality in African terms.
> 
> Perhaps one day the names of the earliest philosophers will be as familiar 
> to us as the names of the Greek philosophers are to us today. Why shouldn't 
> the world know the names of the philosophers who set the stage for human 
> civilization?
> 
> Imhotep, 2700 BC, earliest personality recorded in history. Like the later 
> personalities of Socrates and Jesus nothing of his writing remains, but we 
> know that he understood volume and space, because he was the builder of the 
> first pyramid, the Sakkara pyramid. He was the first philosopher, the first 
> physician, the first architect, and the first counselor to a king recorded 
> in history. The reports of his life and his work on the walls of temples and 
> in papyri indicate the esteem in which he was held.
> 
> Ptahhotep, 2414 BC, first ethical philosopher. He believed that life 
> consisted of making harmony and peace with nature. All discourse on the 
> relationship between humans and nature must give credit to the life of 
> Ptahhotep.
> Kagemni, 2300 BC, the first teacher of right action for the sake of goodness 
> rather than personal advantage, came upon the human scene as an African 
> philosopher nearly eighteen hundred years before Buddha.
> Merikare, 1990 BC, valued the art of good speech. His classical teachings on 
> good speech were recorded and passed down from generation to generation.
> Sehotepibre, 1991 BC, the first philosopher who espoused a sort of 
> nationalism based in allegiance and loyalty to a political leader.
> Amenemhat, 19991 BC, the world's first cynic. He expressed a cynical view of 
> intimates and friends, warning that one must not trust those who are close 
> to you.
> Amenhotep, son of Hapu, 1400 BC, was the most revered of the ancient Kemetic 
> philosophers. Next to Imhotep, he was the epitome of the philosopher. They 
> people deified him as a god, as they had deified Imhotep, long before Jesus. 
> He was called the most knowledgeable thinker of his day.
> Duauf, 1340 BC, was seen as the master of protocols. He is concerned with 
> reading books for wisdom, the first intellectual in philosophical history. 
> Reading he said was the best way to train the mind.
> Amenemope 1290 BC promoted the philosophy of manners, etiquette, and 
> success.
> Akhenaten, 1300 BC, promoted Aton as the Almighty One God.
> All these philosophers were hundreds of years before any Greek philosopher. 
> Indeed, Homer, the first Greek to write something that was intelligible 
> lived around 800 BC. But he was not a philosopher. He traveled and studied 
> in Africa.
> 
> Kung Fu Tzu, 551 BC, the great Chinese philosopher, who believed that humans 
> could make the Way great, lived much later than the African philosophers. 
> But Kung Fu Tzu was a contemporary of
> Siddartha Buddha, 563 BC, the Indian philosopher lived about the same time 
> and Isocrates who lived around 550 BC.
> Now as an Afrocentrist I approach the construction of knowledge from the 
> standpoint of Africans as agents in the world, actors, not simply the 
> spectators to Europe. Since Afrocentricity constitutes a new way of 
> examining data, a novel orientation to data, it carries with it assumptions 
> about the current state of the African world. One assumes for example that 
> Africans are frequently operating intellectually, philosophically, and 
> culturally off of African terms and therefore are dislocated, detached, 
> isolated, decentered, or disoriented. One assumes also that this state is 
> useful economically and politically for the West and not so useful for 
> Africa and Africans. There is, consequently, a difference in opinions about 
> the value of Afrocentricity. Those who have kept us off center seek to 
> improve their position on our intellectual and philosophical grounds by 
> cutting the ground from under any movement that teaches Africans to view 
> themselves as centered agents in the world, not marginals to Europe.
> 
> What are the issues that are so hotly debated by Stephen Howe in his book 
> Afrocentrism or by the French reactionaries Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, 
> Jean-Pierre Chretien and Claude-Helene Perrot in their attacks in the 
> recently published Afrocentrismes. Of course, already I have responded to 
> quite a lot of critics in my book, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism. But 
> what is it that scares so many white scholars and many black white scholars? 
> As a cultural configuration the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five 
> characteristics:
> 
> (1) an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, 
> motifs, rituals, and signs.
> 
> A few weeks ago I was driving down a lone country road deep into the 
> interior of Ghana and came across a small village of six or seven houses and 
> a church. The church was the most beautifully cared for structure in the 
> little settlement and right over the front door was a large picture of a 
> white Jesus. Nothing illustrates for me more than this the intractable 
> problem of misapplied agency, of deep dislocation. There is no referent for 
> this situation except the domination of Europe in the mind of Africa. 
> Nothing else can be said or ought to be said about it. It cannot and should 
> not be gainsaid, argued, or debated, but it must be eradicated.
> 
> I believe that signs, symbols, rituals and ceremonies are useful for 
> societies, and furthermore, I accept that societies are held together or 
> disintegrated on the basis of symbols. We go to war over symbols, we fight 
> over proper rituals of respect, and we find our lives enriched by the 
> memories of those who have achieved heroic stature by standing for what we 
> stand for. In the United States we have fought a battle with the State of 
> South Carolina, the first state to declare itself independent of the United 
> States during the Civil War during the last century, now it has become one 
> of the last states to give up the Confederate Flag which stood for slavery, 
> injustice, bigotry, and white racial domination of Africans. Many white 
> South Carolinians have argued that the flag is a symbol of their ancestors' 
> fight against the government and they believe that it should stand on the 
> grounds of the state capitol. Of course, we Africans, descendants of the 
> enslaved, see it as a symbol of vicious racism. The debate is over the 
> symbol as an engender of hatred and bigotry for a united society or as a 
> particular instrument to encourage repression of a minority. We are clear 
> that the aim of the symbol of the Confederate flag is not community unity, 
> it is divisive, intentionally divisive. Here in the United Kingdom, you know 
> too well the tyranny of racial and religious hegemony and the forcing of 
> particular symbols and rituals of power down the throats of others.
> 
> But my aim, back to my point, is to show that the very intense concern the 
> Afrocentrist has with psychological dislocation, that is, where a person's 
> psyche is out of sorts with his or her own historical reality, is a 
> legitimate issue for any African corrective. You cannot have an African 
> building a church in the heart of Ivory Coast that is larger than St. 
> Peter's in Rome without wondering what do we Africans think of our own 
> ancestors? A one hundred or two hundred million dollar shrine to an African 
> deity might have changed forever the religious respect for Africa. But a 
> people who do not respect their own gods should not ever expect respect from 
> anyone. I am saying this as one who is not religious. I am talking pure 
> symbolism here, pure rationalism, not irrationality, but common sense. If 
> you are not going to use the money as you should to improve the health 
> conditions of African people, the educational standards, and the economic 
> circumstances, then by God, use it to showcase your own ancestors, not to 
> compete with Rome for who can build the largest European building in Africa.
> 
> Europe has had no problem asserting its hegemony over everything on earth. 
> Huntington claimed (p. 81) that the West
> 
> Owned the international banking system
> Controlled all hard currencies
> Provided the majority of the world's finished products
> Exerted moral authority over other leaders
> Was capable of massive military intervention
> Controlled the sea lanes
> Conducted most advanced technical research
> Dominated access to space
> Dominated aerospace
> Dominated international communications
> Dominated high tech weapons production
> We seek neither hegemony nor domination of others, we abhor the idea that 
> one group should impose its will on others against their wills. Yet it is 
> just this deliberate insistence on the part of whites to hold hegemony over 
> Africans that has caused so much racial friction and unrest. Not only has 
> the time run out on this type of domination, there is no longer a willing 
> audience for it. But the lingering effects of more than three hundred years 
> of psychological and cultural domination have left us off of economic and 
> political terms.
> 
> (2) a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, 
> political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions 
> of sex, gender, and class.
> 
> The Afrocentrist is committed to the idea that Africans are agents in the 
> world and therefore should not be viewed as spectators. But even more, I 
> recognize that people can be seen as agents, but can have misdirected 
> agency, a problem of immense proportions. You do not have to be white to 
> serve those interests in the United States, you can be black and serve 
> hegemonic interests against blacks. Today, a black ultra conservative serves 
> as vice presidential candidate on the Reform Party ticket with Pat Buchanan, 
> one of the most threatening throwbacks to the Neanderthalian age in American 
> politics. There are always a few wobbly ducks who cackle on command from 
> those who seek hegemony.
> 
> So the problem of Africans being moved off of terms is a world wide issue. 
> It is not simply an American or a British issue, it plagues Africans in 
> Canada as well as those in Australia. It raises its head everyday in South 
> Africa and Nigeria, in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Everywhere we are confronted 
> with the possibilities of being moved to the margins, yet the task of our 
> generation is to resist hegemony from morning till night. We can only do it, 
> however, by seeking the subject place in everything. We remain one of the 
> few people who have allowed others to become experts on our history and our 
> ancestors; this is the source of our confusion. The Ghanaian often refers 
> you to Rattray for information on Asante customs and some Nigerians still 
> believe that Lady Lugard's A Tropical Dependency says everything about 
> Nigeria.
> 
> Afrocentrists take a strong view that racial, sexual, gender, and class 
> discrimination and exploitation must be condemned outright and forthrightly. 
> All Afrocentric analysis is a critique on domination. Furthermore, all 
> Afrocentric analysis is a critique on hierarchy and patriarchy because the 
> analysis stems from all forms of oppression.
> 
> (3) a defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the 
> context of art, music, and literature.
> 
> Since Europe has asserted Greece as the standard by which it judges and 
> evaluates all things cultural, Africa finds it difficult, within this 
> context, to speak of its own classical art, music, and literature. To say 
> beautiful and mean only a European conception is to distort reality. It is 
> only one conception. Michelangelo's David is one way to look at a man, it is 
> not the only way. The ritual dances of hegemony are often dazzling in their 
> portrayal of Europe as the standard by which all others should be judged. 
> The rhythms, however, are jagged, and imprecise.
> 
> To say classical art, classical music, or classical dance, cannot mean only 
> European art, music, and dance, and be meaningful in the world context. Any 
> cultural form worthy of emulation is classical for a particular history. 
> There is every reason to speak of classical Akan or classical Yoruba or 
> classical African American forms of art, dance, or literature as there is to 
> speak of any European form. The problem here with our understanding is the 
> deafening tones of white insistence on its own values as universal when in 
> fact they are regional, particular, though exported internationally. As King 
> Lobenguela puzzled over the Scottish missionaries interest in bringing their 
> god to the Ndebele, he said to Moffat, "we have our own god, Nkulunkulu, and 
> you have yours. Why do you want us to have yours?" Of course, Samuel 
> Huntington said that the European world was not smartest or brightest but 
> the most "willing to use violence to bring about its political will." King 
> Lobenguela's time was short; soon he had a flood of whites in his kingdom 
> teaching "servants to be obedient to your masters."
> 
> (4) a celebration of "centeredness" and agency and a commitment to lexical 
> refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people.
> 
> There is an Australian poem that was taught in successive editions to 
> primary school children in that country which reminded white Australians 
> that
> 
> "We won our land from a nerveless race,
> Too mean for their land to fight;
> If we mean to hold it we too must face
> The adage that might makes right."
> 
> This is how people are uprooted against their wills. But Europe makes no 
> apologies to these peoples and whites have made no apologies in the United 
> States for robbing the indigenous nations of their lands. In Africa, they 
> sought to rob the land but found it overpowering and the people resilient on 
> the land of their ancestors, yet Europe left an entire continent moved off 
> of center, off of its own terms, and has repeatedly spoken of a failed 
> Africa, a tired Africa, a HIV-infected Africa, a sick Africa, a despised 
> Africa, and an Africa that cannot get its act together. Of course, for us, 
> Africa must be convinced to do three things: (1) return to a strong sense of 
> cultural identity, (2) create international networks of Africans on the 
> continent and trans-continentally to cooperate on a global level, and (3) 
> place emphasis on teaching children to leap-frog old technologies and 
> finding ways to exploit the new information possibilities with vigor.
> 
> In this way we will celebrate centeredness and agency and not dismiss our 
> own ethnicities, histories, and lessons to embrace others. All Africans, 
> wherever in the world, have made valuable contributions to their countries, 
> whether in the West or in Africa, and must be viewed and must view 
> themselves as accountable, responsible agents in the world, not to be acted 
> upon, but to act. Thus, it means that we must build institutions everywhere 
> in our image and in our interests. One thing that happens to a people who 
> lose their god, is that they lose their institutions, their reasons for 
> being, and their language, and you cannot find the proper strength to build 
> institutions until you rediscover your cultural center. Of course, we have 
> many infusions into the African cultural stream and those infusions must be 
> recognized, given voice, and seen as a part of creating a new African 
> reality. Nothing remains exactly the same, but over time changes are often 
> cosmetic, external, not core changing. Wood may remain in water for ten 
> years, but wood will never become a crocodile.
> 
> We have been condemned for seeking lexical refinement, but that is exactly 
> the role of any philosophy, to clarify issues, to discover the hidden 
> pitfalls, and to steer people around dangers. You cannot refer to Black 
> Africa and White Africa, you must not speak of Africa South of the Sahara, 
> you should not talk of issues in the West and East as if there is no South, 
> you will encounter an Afrocentrist if you speak of pygmies, Hottentots, and 
> Bushmen. You cannot allow African agency to be assumed by Europe in the 
> construction of science, history, or art. Why should a Nigerian write that 
> Mungo Park discovered the Niger River? Did Livingstone really discover 
> Victoria Falls or did someone bring him to Musi wa Tunya and he declared out 
> of his own arrogance that he would rename it Victoria Falls? We have a big 
> job, but it will be done this millennium.
> 
> (5) a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective 
> text of African people.
> 
> Whether we are on this side or the other side of the Atlantic we are an 
> African people. There is no real reason to posit some hypothetical Black 
> Atlantic. The Atlantic is neither black nor white, it is a deep blue. It is 
> an ocean, and an ocean is neither a barrier to human interaction nor is it 
> necessarily a consolidater of the human experience. We remain African though 
> we become Jamaicans, African British, Haitians, African Americans or African 
> Costa Ricans.
> 
> We must learn from each others experiences. It is the imposed isolation that 
> has kept us from our true undestanding of ourselves. When the Haitian 
> intellectual Antenor Firmin in 1895 wrote his famous book, The Equality of 
> the Human Races, he was defending all black people, those in the United 
> States, Brazil, United Kingdom, and Nigeria, against racist assaults and 
> bias commentary.
> 
> I am convinced that the constituent elements for our recentering are rooted 
> in four general areas of inquiry:
> 
> Cosmology-- nature of beingness, Ontology, Mythology;
> Axiology--nature of ethical values;
> Epistemology--nature of knowledge, proofs, methods; and
> Aesthetics--nature of creative and economic motifs.
> But what are we up against in promoting a mature understanding of how 
> knowledge is constructed in the West to encourage racism? Often we are up 
> against strange and bleak careerists who are writing as if they are writing 
> out of our experiences when, in fact, their aims are totally distinct from 
> the recentering of Africans in a human place.
> 
> Periodically there appears a book that runs counter to the wisdom of 
> experience in the African American community. Against Race by the 
> sociologist Paul Gilroy is just such a book. Gilroy, a British scholar, who 
> teaches at Yale University, made a reputation in the states with the 
> postmodern work, The Black Atlantic. I see this book as a continuation of 
> that work's attempt to deconstruct the notion of African identity in the 
> United States and elsewhere. Of course it runs squarely against the lived 
> experiences of the African Americans. The history of discrimination against 
> us in the West, whether the United States or the United Kingdom or other 
> parts of the western world, is a history of assaulting our dignity because 
> we are Africans or the descendants of Africans. This has little to do with 
> whether or not we are on one side of the ocean or the other. Such false 
> separations, particularly in the context of white racial hierarchy and 
> domination, are nothing more than an acceptance of a white definition of 
> blackness. I reject such a notion as an attempt to isolate Africans in the 
> Americas from their brothers and sisters on the continent, and of course, to 
> continue the separations of Africans in Britain from each other. It is as 
> serious an assault and as misguided as the 1817 Philadelphia conference that 
> argued that the blacks in the United States were not Africans but "colored 
> Americans" and therefore should not return to Africa. To argue as Gilroy 
> does that Africans in Britain and the United States are part of a "Black 
> Atlantic" is to argue the "colored American" thesis all over again. It took 
> us one hundred and fifty years to defeat the notion of the "colored 
> American" in the United States and I will not stand idly by and see such 
> misguided notion accepted as fact at this late date in our struggle to 
> liberate our minds. We are victimized in the West by systems of thinking, 
> structures of knowledge, ways of being, that take our Africanity as an 
> indication of inferiority, something to be overcome. I see this position as 
> questioning the humanity and the dignity of African people. Despite what 
> looks like acceptance of Africans on a political level, it is racist at the 
> core, because it is an acceptance of what whites find acceptable, that is, 
> the idea that certain blacks are no longer Africans. The easiest and 
> quickest way in the United States to assume that position is to say that 
> "you never left anything in Africa" or "you are not an African nor a black 
> but an American" or to say "Africa never did anything for me." You become 
> immediately accepted as an honorary white.
> 
> It should be clear that Gilroy's new book, Against Race is not a book 
> against racism or racialism, as perhaps it ought to be, but a book against 
> the idea of race as an organizing theme in human relations. It is somewhat 
> like the idea offered a decade or more ago by the conservative critic, Anne 
> Wortham in her reactionary work, The Other Side of Racism. Like Wortham, 
> Gilroy argues that the African American spends too much time on collective 
> events that constitute "race" consciousness and therefore participates in 
> "militaristic" marches typified by the Million Man March and the Million 
> Woman March, both of which were useless in his mind. The only person who 
> could make such a statement had to be one who did not attend. Unable to see 
> the awesome power of the collective construction of umoja within the context 
> of a degenerate racist society, Gilroy prefers to stand on the sidelines and 
> cast stones at the authentic players in the arena. This is a reactionary 
> posture. So Against Race cannot be called an anti-racism book although it is 
> anti-race, especially against the idea of black cultural identity whether 
> constructed as race or as a collective national identity.
> 
> Let us be clear here, Against Race is not a book against all collective 
> identities. There is no assault on Jewish identity, as a religious or 
> cultural identity, nor is there an attack on French identity or Chinese 
> identity as collective historical realities. There is no assault on the 
> historically constructed identity of the Hindu Indian, nor on the white 
> British. Nor should there be any such assault. But Gilroy, like others of 
> this school, see the principal culprits as Afrocentrists who retain a 
> complex love of African culture, consciousness of African ancestry, and 
> belief in Pan Africanism. In Gilroy's construction or lack of construction, 
> there must be something wrong with African Americans because Africa remains 
> in their minds as a place, a continent, a symbol, a reality of origin and 
> source of the first step across the ocean when they are really not African. 
> But Gilroy does not know what he is talking about here. This leads him to 
> the wrong conclusions about the African American community. The relationship 
> Africans in the Americas have with Africa is not of some mythical or a 
> mystical place. We do not worship unabashedly at the doorsteps of the 
> continent although we have an active engagement with all that it means. Are 
> we always conscious of it? Of course not! You will not find all African 
> Americans walking around the streets of Philadelphia or Chicago or Los 
> Angeles thinking about engaging Africa, yet we know almost instantly that 
> when we are assaulted by police, denied venture capital or criticized for 
> insisting on keeping Europe out of our consciousness without permission that 
> Africa is at the center of our existential reality. We are most definitely 
> African, though modern, contemporary, Africans domiciled in the West.
> 
> Actually Gilroy spends a considerable amount of time in this book explaining 
> how race, a false concept, "is understood." He writes "Awareness of the 
> indissoluble unity of all life at the level of genetic materials leads to a 
> stronger sense of the particularity of our species as a whole, as well as to 
> new anxieties that the character is being fundamentally and irrevocably 
> altered" (p. 20). I do not know how Gilroy can move from this position to 
> indict the African people as the carriers of this anxiety about "race," 
> clearly a concept that was never promoted by African people in this country 
> or on the continent. It is essentially an Anglo-Germanic notion, 
> manufactured and disseminated to promote the distinctions between peoples 
> and to establish a European hierarchy, as well as a hierarchy among 
> Europeans themselves. We have no business with any kind of hierarchy; our 
> business for this millennium is the recentering and reordering of the 
> African world's priorities based on a firm acceptance of Africa's on role in 
> securing the mutuality of the human destiny.
> 
> When a new generation looks upon us, may they look upon this generation of 
> Africans with the pride that comes from knowing that there have been those 
> who stood for truth and right when it was easier to melt into the crowd of 
> turncoats. May that new generation take up the same battles and go from 
> victory to victory until we wipe all forms of human degradation from the 
> face of the earth.
> 
> 
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