A Case of Eurocentrism or Reason Over Passion? --
    Academics: In her new book, a Wellesley classics professor
    prods Afrocentrics for evidence.

   Publication Date: Wednesday July 3, 1996   Page E-4
   The Los Angeles Times (Electronic Edition)
   Copyright 1996 Times Mirror Company
 [fair use reprint for nonprofit academic use only]
 By KEN RINGLE   THE WASHINGTON POST

   WELLESLEY, Mass. - It's a sun-dappled spring day on the leafy
   campus of Wellesley College, the sort of day that calls forth
   thoughts of commencement speeches and academic processions and the
   heady wine of intellect and purpose. Mary Lefkowitz, the
   philosophical scourge of Afrocentrism, is talking about truth. The
   real issue in her ongoing war with those who challenge the primacy
   of traditional Western culture in America's classrooms is not, she
   says, such spurious distractions as whether Aristotle ripped off
   the library of ancient Egypt or whether Cleopatra was black. "The
   larger issue is what such outlandish claims convey about the
   process of analytic thinking. If we encourage students to believe
   things for which there is no supporting evidence--and, in fact, a
   great deal of evidence the other way--are we really helping them to
   'feel better about themselves'? Or are we encouraging them to
   discard the very process of deductive reasoning through which every
   individual in every society determines what is true?" For the past
   few years Lefkowitz has been a central figure in a noisy academic
   battle over how much, if anything, the civilizations of ancient
   Greece and Rome--and all Western thought--owe to the cultures of
   Africa, and particularly Egypt.  Her latest book, "Not Out of
   Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History"
   (Basic Books, 1996), has become a lightning rod for racial
   conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, black nationalists and academic
   leftists. They accuse her of everything from right-wing pedagogy
   and racist discourse to being part of what black studies professor
   Tony Martin calls a "Jewish onslaught (that) has draped itself in
   the swaddling garments of European civilization and white
   supremacy."

   Lefkowitz, 61, is an improbable boogeyperson. With her short, dark
   hair, slight frame and granny glasses she looks exactly like what
   she is: a tenured classicist who fell in love with ancient
   languages as a girl and has spent her life exploring the worlds and
   ideas they reveal. She came to Wellesley as a student from her
   native Manhattan in the "silent '50s" and has been here teaching
   and writing ever since, largely ignoring or rising above the
   conflicts roiling campuses and society. She comes from an ivory-
   tower academic tradition that is pointedly apolitical, and
   maintains a philosopher's impatience with every sort of ideology
   except the employment of the rational mind.  "I never had--in grade
   school, high school or college--a course in which I didn't find
   something exciting," she says. "What I find mystifying today is
   this increasing notion that the primary function of education is to
   teach a student about his or her self . . . and about people of
   exactly the same background. To me the most exciting thing about
   learning was the exposure to the world outside the self . . . the
   more different the better. The ancient world for me was just the
   most fascinating of all."  Though people have accused her of
   opposing black studies programs and courses about Africa, "I am
   very supportive," she says, "of learning more about Africa and
   about African cultures, as I am of learning more about everything.
   I think there's no doubt we haven't paid enough attention in the
   past to these remarkable civilizations and such influence as they
   may have had on the better-known Mediterranean world. "What I
   object to is Afrocentric ancient history as it is often taught,
   which seems to me to be a political agenda imposed upon the past--
   an agenda that doesn't have much to do with factual reality."

   Devotees of the concept of Afrocentrism, who range from Temple
   University professor Molefi K. Asante to Nation of Islam leader
   Louis Farrakhan, assert that African Americans suffer from a
   "stolen legacy" of cultural riches, of which white European racists
   have conspired over the centuries to keep them unaware. Writers
   from Carter G. Woodson ("The Mis-Education of the Negro," Winston-
   Derek, 1990) to Chancellor Williams ("The Destruction of Black
   Civilization," Third World Press, 1987) have called for an African-
   based view of world history to bolster black self-esteem and foster
   black political unity. Perhaps the most extreme of the
   Afrocentrists are "melanin theorists"--blacks who say darker-
   skinned people process information differently. Many melanists
   reject arguments based on logic and evidence as tools of Western
   white imperialist manipulation, and prefer instead what they see as
   a pigmental pipeline to truth via intuition and emotion.
   Afrocentrism, says Wellesley's director of African Studies, Tony
   Martin, "asserts that African people must interpret their own
   reality and see the world from their own perspective" in order to
   achieve a political end. Although Afrocentric theories have fueled
   the agendas of black nationalists at least since the time of Marcus
   Garvey, few academic scholars until recently considered them based
   on enough evidence to warrant serious discussion.

   The major exception has been Martin Bernal, a white professor of
   government at Cornell, whose 1988 book "Black Athena" (Rutgers)
   endorses much of the racial-conspiracy argument, charging that
   ancient links between Greece and Egypt were obscured by 19th
   century German scholars seeking to justify colonialism in Africa.
   It was a New Republic assignment to review Bernal's book, she says,
   that "changed my life. Until then I really had no notion how much
   craziness was out there." Bernal argues his case in a generally
   scholarly way. But his book, Lefkowitz says, has been "seized on by
   more extreme Afrocentric voices to legitimize the teaching as fact
   of things for which there is no evidence at all. That Cleopatra was
   black, for example. We know a great deal about Cleopatra's family,
   and every bit of evidence shows conclusively that she was almost
   pure Macedonian Greek" in origin. While one of Cleopatra's
   grandmothers was an unknown concubine of Ptolemy IX, she says,
   "Egypt's rulers in those days usually married within their families
   and there is no suggestion anywhere--indeed it is highly
   improbable--that a black African would have been part of the mix."
   The tragic thing about such claims, which are being taught
   increasingly in the nation's secondary schools, is not that
   classics scholars care one way or another about Cleopatra's race,
   Lefkowitz says. "What we care about is evidence." The system the
   Greeks devised, based on logic and the evaluation of evidence, was
   one that anyone could use. "And anyone still can," she says.

   In most ancient societies, she says, including Egypt, truth "was
   not what you determined yourself but what you were told by some
   authority. It was the province of mysticism, oracles and priests."
   Obviously the Greeks had those, too, "but Socrates wasn't into
   reading pigeon entrails. What he and the philosophers evolved was a
   process that liberated people from that sort of authoritarianism."
   Lefkowitz readily acknowledges the fascination of the ancient
   Greeks with Egypt. "They were impressed by the scale of things like
   the pyramids, by the piety of the people and the sophistication of
   the society. They loved to identify themselves with Egypt." And
   there is no doubt, she says, that the Egyptians were far ahead of
   the Greeks in certain things. The Egyptians, for example, used
   their careful observation of the heavens to perfect a genuine
   system of astronomy, she says, while the Greeks got sidetracked
   into astrology. The Egyptians were also ahead of the Greeks in
   basic mathematics. Those who read the ancients in translation, or
   out of the larger context of their literature, frequently miss
   major truths about the ancient world, she says. Among those are
   that Greek historians--as opposed to philosophers--often made up as
   much as they actually heard or observed about Egypt.

   Scholars today have learned to be skeptical of such Greek reports
   in part because they often disagree with modern translations of
   Egyptian hieroglyphics, which the ancient Greeks could not read. No
   myth is more widespread, says Lefkowitz, than the mystical picture
   of ancient Egypt incorporated in the lore of Freemasonry, most
   recently made famous by Farrakhan last fall in his speech at the
   Million Man March. The symbolism and numerology of Freemasonry
   tends to be looked on as gospel by the strongest adherents of
   Afrocentrism. But it has little or no foundation, Lefkowitz says,
   in the vast literature that Egyptologists have uncovered since they
   began reading hieroglyphics in the last century.

   The real source of the Masonic portrait of Egypt, she says, is a
   three-volume French novel, "Sethos," published in 1713 by the Abbe
   Jean Terrasson, who thought hieroglyphics were mystic symbols.
   Terrasson's novel was widely read during the 18th century, and was
   so influential that it became the source for the libretto of
   Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute." Thus, Lefkowitz says, one of the
   many ironies of Afrocentrism is that it seeks to replace
   "Eurocentric" culture with a concept of Egypt that is demonstrably
   a product of 18th century France. "Not Out of Africa" amounts to
   222 pages of such scholarly detective work by an academic who has
   been reading Greek, Latin, German and "a little" Sanskrit and
   marinating in ancient texts for more than 40 years.

   Yet she shies away in her book from some of the larger questions
   about Afrocentrism that trouble many other critics of the movement.
   Was ancient Egypt, for example, really a black nation? How much
   contact was there between Egypt and sub-Saharan west Africa, from
   which the ancestors of most black Americans came? Why do some
   Afrocentrists urge the teaching of Arabic and Swahili as the
   cultural heritage of American blacks when Arabs were the earliest
   and most persistent enslavers of black Africans, and when Swahili
   evolved as a language almost entirely to facilitate the slavers'
   business among Africa's myriad languages and tribes?

   Lefkowitz says those questions don't interest her very much. But
   she said there are some general truths. "The first is that race had
   little significance to ancient peoples--a fact from which I think
   we all might profit. Culture and nationality were far more
   important." Second, from the many tomb paintings and other art,
   it's clear Egyptians in the ancient world "came in all colors, much
   as they do today." Third, though there are "some distinctly African
   aspects to the religion" of ancient Egypt, the country itself is
   geographically far closer to the Middle East and the other
   Mediterranean countries, and "cultural influences flowed back and
   forth far more easily between Egypt and those regions, than between
   Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Africa was and remains a very large
   and extremely diverse continent. Talking about pan-Africanism, from
   a cultural point of view, is even less defensible than talking
   about Pan-Europeanism."

   "Not Out of Africa" has been praised for its scholarship by
   everyone from historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and columnist George
   Will to reviewers for the New York Times and the Village Voice.
   Last month Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., presented her an
   honorary doctorate in humane letters, citing her "deep concern for
   intellectual integrity." Yet Lefkowitz, who has written or edited
   nine other books, ruefully acknowledges being as targeted now as
   she once was obscure. A World Wide Web site on the Internet, set up
   by her publisher, HarperCollins, has logged more than 2,000
   combative essays for and against her in the past few months. And an
   ugly current of anti-Semitism has been unleashed against her, most
   notably by Wellesley's Martin, in a paperback called "The Jewish
   Onslaught" (Majority Press, 1993.)
     [see   http://www.harpercollins.com]

   "The fanfare given 'Not Out of Africa,' " Temple University's
   Asante has written, "represents a glee . . . (over) what is viewed
   as white salvation from the irrationality of Afrocentrists. It
   originates in a historical anti-African bias. 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." While there are clearly
   different perspectives over which people of goodwill can argue,
   Lefkowitz says, "some things are clearly not true." To state, as
   many Afrocentrists have, that Aristotle stole his theories from the
   library at Alexandria is simply wrong, Lefkowitz says: There is
   enormous and irrefutable evidence that the city--not to mention the
   library--wasn't even founded until after Aristotle's death. "That
   Afrocentrists should make so many mistakes is understandable,"
   replies Bernal in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
   "Theirs is a sense of being embattled in a hostile world and of
   possessing an absolute truth that makes for less concern about
   factual details."

   To encourage students, as many Afrocentrists do, to disregard such
   evidence, Lefkowitz says, is to start them down a slippery slope at
   the bottom of which lie those who believe the Earth is flat, who
   deny the Holocaust, who believe that blacks are less intelligent
   than whites. Standing against such myths, Lefkowitz says, has
   proven "the most constructive use for my education." But she
   remains troubled by the silence of so many of her academic
   colleagues. Years ago, she says, she faced a similar lonely debate
   when she found "radical feminists asserting there were all these
   matriarchal societies in the ancient world. It was total fantasy,
   of course, and I crossed swords with them. But then I decided the
   feminists weren't all wrong--we really didn't know much about women
   in those times. So I got busy and co-edited 'Women's Life in Greece
   and Rome,' which is now a standard text in many courses."
--30--

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