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Originally Posted by kovert
For quite a while, I have been trying to expose the wider Anglophone world to recent works relating to the past of the African continent. I have focused on northern Africa (the Horn, Nile River, the Sahel, the Tell of the Maghreb & the Sahara desert as a whole) and the exciting progress Africana Studies, Egyptology, the growing field of Saharan Studies along with many other fields that have enhanced understanding and respect for the area's past cultures and civilizations.
I am well aware of colonialism and I have often remarked on its legacy which still exists among scholars and academics to this day, despite all the progress that has been made in recent decades. I am also aware that unlike the Romance speaking world (in particular the French), the Anglophone world has not expressed much interest in Africa as a whole outside of Egypt or the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thus its easy to understand how the 2 areas of study have become confused & convoluted in the deranged minds of new black panther groupies; apostles of Diop; crack heads who believe they're nubian olmecs and various other freaks that have been spawned out of afrocentrism.
I have had to repeatedly come back to the issue of afrocentrism, so because of that I might as well make a thread dedicated to investigating the origins of afrocentrism. I don't think it is coincidental that afrocentrism, really afro-nazism, gained popularity during the 1980s-90s. This was the same time period the crack cocaine epidemic ravaged many Afro-American communities and (as I have often stated) creating and normalizing certain behaviors & value systems, thus a major cultural shift occurred.
Now I am not saying everything was idealic and edenlike before the crack cocaine epidemic, but I hold that it did produce a major cultural shift, specifically a culture that is in many ways unlike anything neither Martin nor Malik would approve of.
So therefore I don't see how one can understand afrocentrism without also looking at the issues with welfare, noted at least as early as the Moyinham Report; and the crack cocaine epidemic which I feel was a major contributor to welfare rolls and incarceration being a norm in too many communities.
There was even a shift noticable in the music, one MUST NOT associate old school hip hop with promoting gang banging and savagery. KRS 1 in particular has long spoken out against senseless violence.
"The Stop the Violence Movement was begun by rapper KRS-One in 1989 in response to violence in the hip hop and African American communities."
Afrocentrism, also has strands of afro-nazism, which quite frankly in neo-nazism in black face.
By looking at this thread, specifically the posters who claim to be continental Africans, one can see the mentality behind some of the recent genocides that have happened on the continent & why warlordism is so prevalent. Afro-nazism, its enablers and sympathesizers ( as can be seen here), can originate in any area and come in all forms.
The Anglophone world must be able to distinguish Africana & Saharan Studies, Egyptology and other reputable fields of study from afro-nazism and thus the reason for this thread. This may not be a PC topic but at least one that might pique the interest of some ambitious sociology/political science grad student out there. So stay tuned . |
So many problems with this post.
First, let us take a look at the definition of the word Afrocentrism:
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, Afrocentric means:
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1: centered on or derived from Africa or the Africans
2: emphasizing or promoting emphasis on African culture and the contributions of Africans to the development of Western civilization
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Source
By defining the word and using it in its proper context, we can now start to have a look at your other assertions.
So now, you claim afrocentrism was brought about in the 90s as a result of the crack era
Now, the "crack" era was in the mid 80s and early 90s. Read this info from the U.S. gov website concerning the time period
link However, Afrocentrism came about in the 1960s per Merriam Webster dictionary. To be clear, Afrocentrism came about as a reaction to eurocentrism.
Eurocentrism is defined as such by Merriam Webster dictionary:
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centered on Europe or the Europeans; especially : reflecting a tendency to interpret the world in terms of western and especially European or Anglo-American values and experiences.
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source
Now just to be thorough, lets look at the suffix -ism
Again, according to Merriam Webster dictionary:
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1: act, practice, or process <hypnotism>
2
a : state, condition, or property <heterothallism>
b : abnormal state or condition resulting from excess of a (specified) thing or marked by resemblance to a (specified) person or thing <alcoholism> <morphinism> <mongolism>
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Definition 1 and 2a best describe how the suffix -ism relates here. But for the sake of being thorough, it designates the act or process of a thing. So afrocentrism is the act, process, or practice of afrocentric or from the other end of the spectrum eurocentric ideologies.
So truthfully, we can't really move forward with the rest of your statement. The reason being, it is your thesis, which lacks a academic foundation. It is a idea borne of conjecture, and that conjecture is based on non factual assumptions.
As for me not being a African, that's rather comical. Believe me when I tell you and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. You nor anyone else on this site means anything to me. You live, you die, it wont change my life and I am sure the same goes for others in relation to myself. This is the internet, and outside of it, I have a life, a rather meaningful one. So I don't have the need to make up fake personas and lie about who I am on the net, to make myself feel good.
With that out of the way, I should add, by the PROPER definition of Afrocentric, there are a number of white authors who would fall under this category. Some that come to mind are Professor Bernal, Robert Bauval, Herodotus, Strabo and a number of others I am too lazy to type up right now. You should get your hands on Herodotus' book called "the histories". He clearly says that the Greeks and the world for that matter owed most or all to Egypt and he defined the Egyptians as appearing like Ethiopians (in appearance). In one part he even says Egypt was a colony of "Ethiopia", which in that time meant the kingdom of Kush. Let me also add, don't rely on websites to find out what his book says. Go get the book yourself, you can get it for free on google books if you have a tablet. If not, it is VERY cheap in Barnes and Noble. I think I got it for $5 or so, some years back.
In order to have these types of discussions, one must do proper research, divorced of any preconceived notions. You must also be willing to admit you know nothing and you are a student. Once you do that, you will allow the information to take you where ever it wants to lead you.
Lastly, your attempting to smear the name of Diop is weird to me. The man had more credentials than I am sure you do. He also wrote for UNESCO along with his partner in crime Theopholis Obenga, another world renowned lecturer. Diop was the first to come up with and propose taking samples of the Pharaohs' skin to determine melanin levels, to put to rest if they were black in appearance or not. He was also the first to find the depiction of the different types of people the Egyptians classified on the earth, in the tomb of Ramses, if I remember right. The man was fluent in French, Mtu Ntr (the ancient kemetic language), a physicist and contributor to many of UNESCO's projects and the list goes on and on. He also successfully debated a host of eurocentric "Egyptologist" at the UNESCO conference in 1974, when the trend was to deny that the ancient Egyptians were Africans. This man was a pioneer in his time, because he used the scientific method to further the traditional view of who the Egyptians were and the African contribution to civilization. I know it is easy to try and think you know more than someone, because your armed with Google, but that's not going to cut it. This man studied for YEARS and his credentials are beyond reproach. But I seem to see a pattern here. You don't like what someone is saying, you attempt to attack them personally, by trying to discredit who they are or what they have done. Which in my view is extremely sophomoric.
Anyway
cheers
P.S.
No one who is seriously a student of history quotes from Wikipedia. The reason being is, any know-nothing can post on that site. You might as well quote some homeless man on the street, its the same thing essentially.
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