Columnist Bernie Hayes
Some key stages in cultural development address issues of racism, and social influence. We should know the truth about our art, music, history and religion, and how they shape cultural beliefs and values.
In 1926, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history, he noticed that history books largely ignored the black American population, and when blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time.
In his book Black Athena, Prof. Martin Bernal realistically accuse some 19th-century scholars for constructing a racist “cult of Greece” based upon a purely Aryan origin for Western culture. He accuses some academics of suppressing the numerous connections between African and Near Eastern cultures and early Greek myth and art.
He disagrees with some researchers of the last two centuries for their whitewashing of classical Greece, and alleges that, assuming the racial superiority of Europeans, they ignored the darker races of the Western Mediterranean, and looked only at Northern barbarians as originators of Greek culture.
According to Bernal, ancient Greek civilization had its origin in Africa and the Near East. This suggestion has promoted debates involving classicists, archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, linguists, Afrocentrists, multiculturalists and others.
Dr. Leonard Jeffries of City College of New York has seized upon Bernal’s book as proof of what they have been contending all along: Western civilization owes a great deal to Egyptian civilization and thus to Africa.
Professor Molefi Kete Asante is the author of 38 books, including The Afrocentric Idea; Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. He concludes most white scholars have ignored the writings of Martin Bernal, George James, Chancellor Williams, Leo Hansberry, Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga. According to Bernal, it seems that racism is at the root of much of this debate. In Black Athena, Martin Bernal agrees that the Greek language came with invaders from the North. However, he argues that classical Greek culture does not spring from the arrival of these Northerners, but rather from the subsequent imposition upon them of Semitic and Egyptian culture.
Black Athena attempted to present clear proof of racial and cultural bias in some history books and writings against Black and Semitic people. It suggested this bias had buried those peoples’ valuable contributions to the rise of what has been called Greek civilization. That excluded the Phoenicians and Egyptians from many parts of history.
Was the concept that the Greeks were the “fountainhead” of European civilization developed in the 19th century by “racist” European scholars who refused to admit the cultural contributions and achievements of non-white and non-Christian peoples? Were the distinguishing elements of ancient Greek civilization in language, religion, philosophy, technology, and politics derived from African and Semitic cultures?
Have we been duped and lied to again?
I can be reached at: berhay@swbell.net.