Afrocentric Movement

Intellectual movement that challenges the traditional Eurocentric view of world history and culture. The Afrocentric, or black-centered, movement was founded in the 1980s by Molefi Asante, a professor of African American studies at Temple University. In Asante's view, the traditional anthropological view of the world has been overly and unfairly Eurocentric, for centuries viewing Europe as the center of civilization. This Eurocentric worldview relegates non-European contributions to minor status or denies them altogether. Because the Eurocentric view diminished and alienated African Americans and denied them entry into what was given as the legitimate culture, Asante rejected this European emphasis, instead demanding a broader, more inclusive definition of the world. Afrocentrism proclaims Africa as the legitimate source of African American society, civilization, and culture.

According to Asante, African Americans have been plagued historically with disorientation, isolation, and confusion since the initial displacement through the African Diaspora into slavery. The system of slavery and the Eurocentric culture that accepted it denied African Americans their heritage, the basis for their identity and self-respect. Because the Eurocentric indoctrination occurs first in the schools, Afrocentrism attempts to correct the imbalance by incorporating an African emphasis in the classroom, replacing or, on occasion, complementing the Eurocentric curriculum that has been imposed on African American students for decades. The attempt is to give African American students a curriculum that reflects their own heritage, not that of Europeans.

The curricular changes associated with Afrocentrism are across the spectrum—science, mathematics, languages, history, religion, and the arts. Afrocentrists argue that the reestablishment (or initial establishment) of understanding from an Afrocentric perspective will better enable students to understand the multicultural society in which they live.

Critics of Afrocentrism include Stephen Howe, author of Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (1998); Mary Lefkowitz, author of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996); and Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of the award-winning In My Father's House (1993). In general, critics argue that Afrocentrism is a “feel-good” self-enhancement program, therapy instead of scholarship. Defenders, on the other hand, claim that any therapeutic effect is only the by-product of an examination of the historical influence that ancient African civilizations have had on world development. Even some defenders, though, note that the Afrocentric literature does contain strong elements promoting the image of blackness, instilling pride in African Americans.

A major controversy of Afrocentrism lies in disagreement over the skin color of Egyptians and the influence of Egyptian culture over ancient Greek culture, which both critics and defenders acknowledge as pivotal in the development of Western, if not world, civilization. The most accessible counter to the claims for an African origin of Western civilization is found in the book Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz. Some Afrocentrists dismiss Lefkowitz's work as lacking in a sufficient grasp of world history, especially its treatment of the Greek historians and Egyptian ties to sub-Saharan Africa. Some Afrocentrists, however, take the position that because of its supposed African roots, Western civilization is part of the Afrocentric heritage as well, and it should be part of the Afrocentric curriculum.

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