Mary Lefkowitz vs. the Afrocentrists
In recent years, the traditional notion of Western Culture has received a great deal of scrutiny. Women, African-Americans, and other marginalized groups have argued that the cultural hegemony has been at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to their experiences and ideas. While these charges are not without substance, they are accompanied in some instances by assertions that the members of the group in question are the “real” heroes of the culture’s history.
Perhaps the most noteworthy efforts to revise or completely disrupt the traditional/canonical notion of intellectual history (and by extension, that of Western Culture) come from a segment of the intelligentsia known as the Afrocentric scholars. In its most radical form (such as that practiced by such scholars as Leonard Jeffries), Afrocentric scholarship argues that virtually all of the Western intellectual tradition was lifted (without credit) from African thinkers. The radical Afrocentrist contends that the West is the beneficiary of what George G.M. James dubbed a “stolen legacy.”
Specifically, Afrocentrist history is remarkable for such contentions as the claim that various significant historical figures (e.g., Socrates, Hannibal, and Cleopatra) were African and the claim that Egypt is the “real” source of the ideas commonly associated with the Greek philosophers (either because of an Egyptian migration to Greece or because the Greeks plagiarized Egyptian thought.) As we have noted, these claims are remarkable. They would be even more remarkable if they could be substantiated.
Enter Mary Lefkowitz. A classical historian, she discovered the Afrocentric movement in the early 1990s. In 1996, she published Not...
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...oses to tolerate the deceit of Afrocentrism “for a good cause,” it opens the door to deceits of more dubious provenance.
The path to relativism is an easy one to tread, and the rise of such pseudodisciplines as extreme Afrocentrism is a warning of the distance we have already traveled along it. Fortunately, there are those scholars (such as Lefkowitz) who are prepared to (in the words of William F. Buckley) “stand athwart history yelling stop.” As John Adams noted, “facts are stubborn things,” and they are useful tools to block what appears to be a headlong rush into relativism for esteem’s sake. For that reason, Not Out of Africa is both a cautionary tale and a reminder of the value of genuine, fact-based scholarship.
Work Cited
Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach
Myth as History. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
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Dorsey, A. (2007). Black History Is American History: Teaching African American History in the Twenty-first Century. Journal of American History, 93(4): 1171-1177
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RNA Interference has been successfully applied in many fields of medicines used to treat issues such as, Parkinson’s and Lung Cancer. One study, sponsored by Alnylam Phar...
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...cy." Western Journal Of Black Studies 28.1 (2004): 327-331. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Sept. 2013.
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Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: a Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003. Print.
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