Afrocentrism - Criticism of Afrocentrism

Criticism of Afrocentrism

Within Afrocentrism, claims were forwarded involving the contention that African civilizations were founding influences on such distant civilizations as the American Olmec and the Chinese Xia cultures.

Yaacov Shavit, a critic of the movement, summarises its goals in the preface to his book History in Black, in which he states:

Other critics contend that some Afrocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship. In The Skeptic's Dictionary, philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll labeled Afrocentrism "pseudohistorical". He argued that Afrocentrism's prime goal was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride in order to effectively combat the destructive consequences of cultural and universal racism. Similarly, African-American professor Clarence E. Walker, who teaches history at the University of California, Davis, has described Afrocentrism as "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face."

"Afrocentrism offers little more than a psychological and therapeutic feel-good-together philosophy."~ Tunde Adeleke, The Case against Afrocentrism

Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has rejected George James's theories about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship. She notes that he used sources that predated the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. He failed to acknowledge that many of his theories were overturned by the evidence of later findings. She contends that ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz also pointed out that Aristotle could not have stolen his ideas from the great Library at Alexandria as James suggested, because the library was founded after Aristotle's death. Because of such fundamental errors of fact, Lefkowitz has criticized Afrocentrism as "an excuse to teach myth as history."

In 1994 the Manhattan Institute, a public policy forum, published Alternatives to Afrocentrism, a collection of highly critical essays by, among others, Lefkowitz, Gerald Early, Stanley Crouch, Wilson Moses, and Frank Yurco. Early, an African American, has been especially critical and dismisses Afrocentrism as just another North American experiment in "group therapy," a kind of "intellectual fast food".

In 2002 Ibrahim Sundiata noted in the American Historical Review that

Cain Hope Felder, a Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Howard University and supporter of Afrocentric ideas, has warned Afrocentrists to avoid certain pitfalls, including:

• Demonizing categorically all white people, without careful differentiation between persons of goodwill and those who consciously perpetuate racism.
• Adopting multiculturalism as a curricular alternative that eliminates, marginalizes, or vilifies European heritage to the point that Europe epitomizes all the evil in the world.
• Gross over-generalizations and using factually or incorrect material is bad history and bad scholarship.

Nathan Glazer writes that although Afrocentricity can mean many things, the popular press has generally given most attention to its most outlandish theories. Glazer agrees with many of the findings and conclusions presented in Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa. Yet he also argues that Afrocentrism often presents legitimate and relevant scholarship. Similarly, Owen Alik Shahadah defends the historical need for the Afrocentric world view while also warning that "Continually viewing history through a modern racial lens distorts the historical timeline and creates academic anachronism." The late Manning Marable was also a critic of Afrocentrism. He wrote:

Populist Afrocentrism was the perfect social theory for the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie. It gave them a sense of ethnic superiority and cultural originality, without requiring the hard, critical study of historical realities. It provided a philosophical blueprint to avoid concrete struggle within the real world.... It was, in short, only the latest theoretical construct of a politics of racial identity, a world-view designed to discuss the world but never really to change it.

— Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American Politics

Some Afrocentrists agree in rejecting those works which critics have characterized as examples of bad scholarship. Adisa A. Alkebulan notes that the work of Afrocentric scholars is not fully appreciated because critics use the claims of "a few non-Afrocentrists" as "an indictment against Afrocentricity."

In 1996 the historian August Meier critically reviewed the new work of Mary Lefkowitz on Afrocentrism as "Eurocentric". He criticized her book Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History for what he saw as her neglect of the African-American historic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Meier believes she fails to take the African-American experiences into account, to the extent that she "fails to answer the question raised in this book's subtitle".

Maghan Keita describes the controversy over Afrocentrism as a cultural war. He believes certain "epistemologies" are warring with each other: the "epistemology of blackness" argues for the "responsibilities and potential of black peoples to function in and contribute to the progress of civilization."

Eugene D. Genovese, in his work The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, states that the decadence within American society is not only the consequence of modern liberalism but its actual agenda, and that the cultural elites who control American campuses mean to destroy Western civilization (p. 132). Genovese attempts to demonstrate mistreatment of things and thoughts Southern by America’s cultural elite, and he links this to a concerted culture war.