“Unfortunately for you, the fact you can’t bother to actually look into the history of “Afrocentrism”…”
Afrocentricism refers to the belief that in order to compensate for European racism, the members of the ‘pan-African community’ (however the writer defines it) must meet it with racism of thier own, claiming not merely to be the equal of Europeans, but to be better. Supposedly, once equality is achieved, the ‘prop’ of Afro-centricism is to be discarded.
The problem of course is that racism once adopted into your culture is not so lightly discarded again. Additionally, afro-centricism has led (as racism often does) to alot of mythic contructs to justify its belief systems, eventing cultural achievements, cultural identities, and civilizations where convienent even if those aren’t really part of the historical record. Personally, I don’t find historic bad European scholarship promoting race to justify modern bad scholarship promoting race.
I know abit about Afrocentricism both as a theoretical matter and by practical experience. If I might ask, just what do you think is the history of Afrocentrocism? I find it to be a fairly ugly doctrine with an even uglier legacy of psuedo-science, psuedo-history, and racism. For example, I once had a fellow Christian from one of these Afrocentric congregations tell me without irony that the reason that white people were (his words) “inherently evil” was that they had “no souls” and hense where not eligible for salvation. Now I’m not saying Obama’s congregation is that extreme, but they do espouse the same general class of racist philosophy.
