Future historians will write that no intellectual idea has been so maligned in the 20th century as Afrocentric theory, the idea that African people are agents and actors in history.
The recent book by Wellesley professor Mary Lefkowitz, “Not Out of Africa,” continues the unfortunate tradition of failing to question the dominant mythologies of race in the intellectual history of the West by diverting attention to marginal issues.
Rather than a serious discussion of the ideas circulating in the Afrocentric literature or in the classrooms, Lefkowitz has offered the public a pablum history which ignores the substantial evidence of African influence on Europe.
Conservative writers have felt a tremendous need to respond in the most vigorous fashion with their applause to shore up their racial mythologies. And now columnists George Will and Roger Kimball have seen fit to bless Lefkowitz’ book as a sort of definitive moment in intellectual history. It is no such moment.
Anti-African Bias
It is a racial argument clearly fast backpedaling. What it indicates is that we have gone full circle from the Hegelian “Let us forget Africa” to a late 20th-century attack on African scholarship by declaring that major influences on Greece were not out of Africa. And as such, it will simply confirm the inability of some scholars to get beyond the imposition of their particularism of Europe. No one can remove the gifts of Europe, nor should that ever be the aim of scholarship. But Europe cannot impose itself as some universal culture that developed full-blown out of nothing.
The fanfare given “Not Out of Africa” demonstrates a glee, although misinformed, of those who feel some sense of relief that a white scholar has taken on the Afrocentrists — a kind of “white hope” idea. This stems, as I believe George Will has shown in his “Newsweek” essay on the subject, from what is viewed as white salvation from the irrationality of Afrocentrists. It originates in a historical anti-African bias. Roger Kimball nearly gloated in the “Wall St. Journal” that readers would “savor Lefkowitz’ definitive dissection of Afrocentrism.” Contrary to any definitive dissection of Afrocentrism, what Lefkowitz has offered is a definitive exposure of the principal assumptions of a racial structure of classical knowledge.
