The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Title: Toward a Usable Black History

“Since most black Americans cannot know exactly what parts of Africa they trace to, perhaps pan-Africanism is the best we can do. But the artificiality remains. Culture sits in the heart; a holiday made up at someone’s desk a few decades ago cannot help but sit in the head. Kwanzaa asks the black car salesman in Chicago to celebrate the first fruits of the harvest in a Ugandan village. Obviously, we—as a people so deeply American—need something beyond this.

Then there is the Afrocentric history school, founded on the idea that the ancient Egyptians were black, that the ancient Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt, and that the Western intellectual heritage was therefore a black creation. Advocates cherish this idea as giving black students a sense of historical importance, but Afrocentric history is false, based on laughably sloppy scholarship. Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa has refuted all of its tenets, and, despite the predictable cries of racism and right-wing backlash, no Afrocentric historian has presented a factual rebuttal. The facts are simply too clear to refute.” (Read entire article)