Update 5/7/08 - John J. Miller posts an audio interview with Mary Lefkowitz.
- At a local college some years ago, I heard a guest lecture by Mary Lefkowitz, classicist at Wellesley College (now retired). I recognized that she grounded her lecture in established fact and that she was a woman of uncommon courage in her willingness to confront Afrocentric nonsense. What is Afrocentrism? John Leo's column explains and at the same time spotlights Lefkowitz's most recent book, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, "a personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates. She has advanced the intellectual case against Afrocentrism before, in "Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1997); here she takes a more personal approach..."
I am so glad I came across John Leo's article, published today in the Wall Street Journal. Read it for background into the controversy and weep over the "kind of affirmative action program for the re-writing of history" that is Afrocentrism. (continued on page 2)
Leo describes Afrocentrism as
"a movement that had begun in the academy in the 1980s and gained astonishing momentum with the publication of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" (1989). According to various Afrocentric books and popular assertions, ancient Egypt invaded ancient Greece, Plato and Herodotus somehow picked up their ideas in travels along the Nile, and Aristotle stole his philosophy from the library at Alexandria. Though the arguments were contradictory and scattered, the point was that Western civilization had been founded on materials and discoveries borrowed or stolen from black Egyptians."
Lefkowitz blew the whistle on the nonsense and had to endure personal suffering because of it. Read Leo's article.