African Centered, Afrocentricity.

Afrocentrism holds that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect or denial of the contributions of Africa's original peoples and focused instead on a generally European-centered model of world civilization and history. Therefore, Afrocentrism aims to shift the focus from a European-centered history to an Africa-centered history. More broadly, Afrocentrism is concerned with distinguishing the influence of Arab, European, and Asian peoples from indigenous African achievements. Many Afrocentrists consider the African identity of African-Americans to be more important than their American nationality.

Afrocentrism is also a scholarly, historiographical approach to the study of world history, with connections to black civil rights movements and anti-imperialist ideologies in the United States and the Caribbean.

Afrocentrists typically focus on black Africa and black contributions and posit black, Nilotic origins for Western civilization. Philosophically, Afrocentrism is often compared to Eurocentrism; the validity of this comparison is heavily debated.

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The origins of Afrocentrism can be found in the work of African-American and Caribbean intellectuals early in the twentieth century. Publications such as The Crisis and the Journal of Negro History sought to counter the prevailing view in the West that Africa had contributed nothing of value to human history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs. These journals asserted the fundamental blackness of ancient Egypt and investigated the history of black Africa. Editor of The Crisis W.E.B. DuBois researched West African culture and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. DuBois later envisioned and received funding from then Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana that would chronicle the history and cultures of black Africa, but he died before the work could be completed. Some aspects of DuBois's approach are evident in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, who claimed to have identified a pan-African protolanguage and to have proven that ancient Egyptians were, indeed, black Africans.

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The relationship among racial, cultural and continental identities is one of the more difficult problems in Afrocentic thought. In other instances, the concept of black racial identity has been used to include among "African" peoples populations generally thought of as non-Africans, such as the Australoid (sometimes called "Veddoid") peoples of Australia and New Guinea and the Tamils (also called Dravidians) of India and the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Also included in the African diaspora are the "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia); the "Africoid," aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; and the Olmecs of what is now Mexico.[2] Afrocentrics who adopt this approach contend that such peoples are African in a racial sense, just as the white inhabitants of Australia may be said to be European. Critics would argue that such peoples were not recent emigrants from Africa, and the entire population of the world might just as reasonably be considered part of an African race according to the Out of Africa model of human migration. Studies show that some members of these darker-skinned ethnic groups— with the exception, of course, of the Olmecs— and "Mongoloid" East Asians are genetically closer to one another than they are to indigenous Africans. However, Afrocentrists point out that such genetic similarities are due to the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Asia were "Africoid" Negritos and Australoid types, who later miscegenated and developed in isolation with populations of the eventually more dominant Mongoloid phenotype over time. This fact, they contend, does not change the fundamental black racial identity of these peoples based on the traditional metrics of the classic "Negroid" phenotype, physical similarities with other peoples classified as Negroid, presumptive patterns of prehistoric migrations and, in some cases, what they contend are cultural similarities. Arguments advancing the notion of racial similarities between a Nubian and a Dravidian, both classified as Negroid, Afrocentrists contend, are far more credible than those of between, say, a Swede and a modern-day Turk, both classified as Caucasian. Traditional racial classifications, after all, are not based on genetics, but on phenotype. In such matters, Afrocentrists adopt the pan-Africanist perspective that such people of color are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans." As Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes, they are all part of the "global African community."


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 Afrocentrists contend that the denial and denigration, as well as what they view as the attendant appropriation of, black historical achievement make the study of world history with new eyes an important undertaking. It is in this sense that the Afrocentrist paradigm legitimately may be considered to be "therapeutic."

Despite the controversy often associated with it, Afrocentrism is a critical historiographical approach to history, based on a weltanschauung which is fundamentally and radically different from that of many of their relatively recent, Eurocentric predecessors; but which harkens back to an earlier view of the history of world civilizations. It is the examination and analysis of existing scholarship, as well as the study of the original historical record itself, grounded in scholarly inquiry and rigorous research.

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List of notable Afrocentric historians

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, professor, author: Afrocentricity: The theory of Social Change; The Afrocentric Idea; The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten

Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango, college professor and lecturer; founder, Temple of the Black Messiah, School of History and Religion; co-founder and creative director, Fourth Dynasty Publishing Company, Silver Spring, Maryland

Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Egyptologist; founding director of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization; founder and director of the Kemetic Institute, Chicago

Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop[4],[5], author: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology; Precolonial Black Africa; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity; The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script

Dr. H.B. ("Barry") Fell, Harvard professor, linguist, author: Saga America, 1980 [6]

Drusilla Dunjee Houston, lecturer, syndicated columnist, author: Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, 1926.

Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, author: African Origins of Major "Western Religions"; Black Man of the Nile and His Family; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; New Dimensions in African History; The Myth of Exodus and Genesis and the Exclusion of Their African Origins; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; Abu Simbel to Ghizeh: A Guide Book and Manual

Dr. Runoko Rashidi[7], author: Introduction to African Civilizations; The global African community: The African presence in Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific

J.A. Rogers, author: Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands : The Old World; Nature Knows No Color Line; Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas : The New World; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro

Dr. Ivan van Sertima, author: They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, African Presence in Early Europe; Blacks in Science Ancient and Modern; African Presence in Early Asia; African Presence in Early America; Early America Revisited; Egypt Revisited: Journal of African Civilizations; Nile Valley Civilizations; Egypt: Child of Africa (Journal of African Civilizations, V. 12); The Golden Age of the Moor (Journal of African Civilizations, Vol. 11, Fall 1991); Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern; Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop[8]

Dr. Chancellor Williams, author: The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

Dr. Théophile Obenga, author: Ancient Egypt and Black Africa : a student's handbook for the study of Ancient Egypt in philosophy, linguistics, and gender relations

Dr. Asa Hilliard, III, author: SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind; The Teachings of Ptahhotep

Drusilla,

I don't want to be rude,but you don't have to reply to your own posts
I'll have a good read,think about it before I reply.

Cheers

Afrocentricity is retrogressive.  I am progress-centric and human-centric.

Bump