Afrocentrism and the True Color of an Influential Civilization

Afrocentrism and the True Color of an Influential Civilization

There is a need experienced by people of all races and ethnicities to directly claim their origins, their tradition, and their past. This innate human desire sends people of all racial backgrounds barreling through history, grasping straws and shreds of the past to stand united with their racially similar brothers and sisters. America is a melting pot of so many different cultures and ethnicities that it becomes a breeding ground for multiracial families and produces many new races of its own. The United States is extremely racially diverse not only geographically, but within states, counties, and even cities. When a large group of people of the same racial background join together, they create a sect of the population that shares not only a common history, but a desire to learn more about that history and to become empowered in their separatism.

This bonding leads to racial movements such as one that is currently gaining popularity and momentum in the African American community, Afrocentrism. According to Stephen Howe, author of Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, “Afrocentrism may, in its looser sense or more moderate forms, mean little more than an emphasis on shared African origins among all �black’ people, taking a pride in those origins and an interest in African history and culture and a belief that Eurocentric bias has blocked or distorted knowledge of Africans and their cultures” (Howe 1). While in its moderate forms this is true, when taken to an extreme Afrocentrism can cause an even greater gap in the racial divide, promoting hatred between races and sending the United States backwards in the fight for unity. There are many aspects of the Afrocentric argument that can be analyzed in depth, but I would like to focus on one particular aspect: the color of ancient Egypt and the lost identity of the mixed-race in African and specifically Egyptian history.

In order to answer fundamental questions that plague Afrocentrists and people studying not only Afrocentrism but the ancient past as well, it is helpful to understand the fundamentals of the Afrocentric argument, which is essentially about race. “The arguments of Afrocentrism…are about race, and are conducted in the language of a race. They invoke – sometimes overtly, sometimes in a kind of code – beliefs and theories about racial or ethnic identities” (Howe 19). The basic belief of Afrocentrism is that the magnificent civilizations of the past such as Greece and Rome were all founded as a result of a direct influence by the allegedly extremely advanced African civilization. The very obvious bridge that connects Africa to these European lands would be the country of Egypt and the great Egyptian civilization that existed in ancient times. However, determining the race of these people is not simply a matter of black or white. Howe cites D’Souza, who quoted Chicago University Egyptologist Frank Yurko as saying:

When you talk about Egypt, it’s just not right to talk about black or white. That’s all just American terminology and it serves American purposes. I can understand and sympathize with the desires of Afro-Americans to affiliate themselves with Egypt. (QTD in Howe 21)

It is difficult to dispute that a huge part of our modern world must be credited to the Egyptian race. Observing the spectacular pyramids that still exist today gives one an appreciation for how highly developed their civilization really was. Much of modern mathematics, science, medicine, social structure and philosophies can be directly traced back to this part of the globe. These large contributors to the world as we know it today would be the desired ancestors of any race, particularly one that has faced as much oppression as Black Africans and more specifically, descendents of Black Africa, African Americans.

Afrocentrism can be essentially derived from just that, a yearning to connect the African American race to a civilization with a large amount of historical value. Having a strong connection and therefore being able to keep the past alive through tradition is extremely important, mainly because the African Americans have had so much taken away from them in the past through oppression, slavery, and lack of civil rights. As a non-African American it is difficult to appreciate just how severe the racism experienced by this race was. As Molefi Kete Asante says in his book on Afrocentrism, The Afrocentric Idea: Revised and Expanded Edition, “The racism experienced by the African American community probably does not become fully meaningful to others until those others experience the same kind of oppression; no written or spoken description can substitute for the basic empiricism that occurs when our bodies and minds are put to the test of degradation”