Exploring Afrocentricity with Dr. Asante

Good morning. My name is Rafael Carmona, Vice President of the Grand Campus African People's Association Club. I had the pleasure of hearing today's Black History Month keynote speaker, Dr. Malefi Kete-Isante, when I attended... my first DIAAP conference in October of 2016. The DIAAP conference is a conference that is committed to the education and upliftment of African people through Afrocentric scholarship. This conference made me feel like I was in a different world. An escape from harsh reality. I witnessed a utopia of beautiful, educated African people united with pride in their heritage and knowledge of self. Dr. Asante and his peers had made me think about the idea of Sankofa. Sankofa means to go back and get it. If we don't go back and reclaim our history to teach the next generation, then our history will be rewritten and gone forever. Dr. Asante is an activist, intellectual, who is the president of the Malafi Kete Asante. Institute for Afrocentric Studies, professor and chair of the Department of Afroecology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is one of the most prolific African scholars that has published 83 books, more than 500 articles, and is one of the most quoted living African authors as well as one of the most distinguished thinkers in the African world. His works on African African history, multiculturalism, human culture, and philosophy have been cited and reviewed by many journals. Dr. Asante has been recognized as one of the most ten most widely widely cited African scholars. He has been recognized as one of the most influential leaders in education. He received his PhD from UCLA at the age of 26 and was appointed a full professor position by SUNY Buffalo at the age of 30. At Temple University, he created the first PhD program in African-American studies in 1988. He is the founder of the Theory of Afrocentricity, and he will share his knowledge of this theory with us. It is a pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. Dr. Asante to Suffolk County Community College. Good morning. HOTAP. I know a lot of people now, these days, on social media have a different understanding of HOTAP than the classical understanding. But we'll talk about that, too. But I just want to say to Christy and to all of you who have made this possible on this Black History Month celebration, that I'm very happy to be at Suffolk for this occasion. I'm always happy to come to colleges, to universities, and places where people think and reflect and open their minds to the possibility of a new world in which we have understanding, full understanding, as much as we can. can of all of human realities. So it's good. And I want to just thank you. I want to thank Raphael for his introduction and also for citing the Sheikanta Jope conference, D-I-O-P. He is the greatest African intellectual of the 20th century. And yet, if you go to universities or colleges and you ask them, To name five African intellectuals, you will find that most people cannot name five African intellectuals. Sheikh Hassan Job was a Senegalese. He was a person who actually, in 1973, took on the established historical order regarding the peopling of the continent of Africa. He's a major, major person, honored by UNESCO, by the United Nations during his time in the United States. lifetime. And I was fortunate as a young man to meet him and to learn from him. And so I have tried in my own life to carry out his mission of trying to teach African and African diasporan history and culture. And I just want to say a few words about that and then I'll go directly into my PowerPoint. And I just also want to point out that my wife is here with me. And I'm so happy that she came up with me to Long Island. Alan to start this Black History Month celebration. Let me tell you something, tell you a story. I was born in Georgia. I grew up in Valdosta, Georgia and in Nashville, Tennessee. And then I moved to Oklahoma, Texas. California, and then back east, beginning in Indiana, and then New York State, and now in Pennsylvania. And in between, I've spent time on the continent of Africa. I taught in Zimbabwe. and I did many other things. But all along the way, I thought always of the Native peoples, the Native Americans, and I was thinking of them because... as you travel throughout this country and you see how vast and beautiful it is, it always occurs to me there were people living here before the Europeans came and before the Africans came. Where is their history? Who are these people upon whose graves we walk? This was the, these are the things that struck me, I mean, and they still strike me. I mean, who looked at this river before I looked at it? 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, they saw this stream, they saw the sea. Who are these people? And then it always brings me back to what I always say is a Sort of a personal, collective story. It goes back and forth, personal and collective. Who are the Africans who are here? Where do they come from? What are their ethnic backgrounds? There were more than 100 different African nations that were brought to this country. Who are these people? And then when you ask students at all the universities, I did this at Harvard, I've done it at Yale, name me five African ethnic groups that were brought to America, and they could hardly name one. And then if you ask, name me five European ethnic groups that came to America, they could name 35. Why is that? How could that be? That if you ask this question, I can tell you right off the immigrants that came from Europe. Italian, Polish, English, French, German, Norwegian. But if I ask that question about Africans, I say, well, where do these people come from? And rarely do you get people who are able to say Wolof, Mandinka, Yoruba, Ibo, Asante, Fante, Ga, Eve. That's who Africans in the diaspora are. But even Africans do not know that. So what's the problem? It's education. It's how you educate it, what you acculturate it to, what you hear every day. The African people who came to America, to the slave trade, and even if we came here before the slave trade, we came from nations that had their own language, their concepts of the divine and the sacred, their doctrines of knowledge and metallurgy. These were nations. So when you ask that question, and then you think of all the Africans in the diaspora, because the diaspora is large. It is a diaspora that starts, I mean, you can say from Canada, to the Africans came to Canada, to the U.S. to the more than 400 villages in Mexico that are African villages. Most people forget about Mexico's African heritage, but after all, Mexico is in the Americas. The slave trade was through all the Americas. You think about what they call Central America, Nicaragua, Bluefields area, Costa Rica, the Limon area, Panama, all of it. Guyana in South America, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and the largest of them all, Brazil, with 100 million Africans. That's twice as many as are in this country. So you ask yourself, what happened? You see? Why is it that the people among whom we live don't know and we don't know? We're educated. But if our education doesn't at least let us know our current realities, we are really miseducated. And our orientations are wrong. So when I developed Afrocentricity, I was teaching at the State University of New York in Buffalo. And it was the winter of 1977, one of the worst winters in Buffalo. we had a blizzard, a major blizzard that lasted for about five days in Buffalo. And I started reflecting and thinking about the condition of African people and about the knowledge about African people in America. And it occurred to me that one of the things that is fundamental is that when we were taken from the continent of Africa as a result of the war, and brought here on the slave ships, we were taken off of all of our terms. Here's what I mean. To a large extent, we lost our religion. We lost much of our language. We lost much of the knowledge that had accrued on the continent of Africa for thousands of years. We lost our connection with ancestry. We were taken totally off. We even lost our concept of what was beautiful and what was good. Because we saw so much that was not good and not beautiful. And we could not really understand what had happened to us. That's the reality of the African experience. Not just in the United States, in the Americas. And I've traveled throughout all these countries. It's the same situation. I gave a speech like this last year, or two years ago in Medellin, Colombia. It's the same with the black people in Medellin. Or with black people in Cali, or Buenaventura, in Colombia. Colombia is 30% black, African. And you have the same issue that I'm talking about. The moving of African people off of their terms and replacing us fundamentally, almost without a voice, on European terms. And then you ask me, what's wrong with black students, or what's wrong with black people sometimes, or what's wrong with the way other people see us? It's disorientation, misorientation, being out of place. dispossessed, dispossessed of knowledge, of contact with information and so forth. So what I proposed that came out in the book in 1980, I proposed that African people in America and throughout the world, because I later discovered that on the African continent Many of the people have the same problem we have. Dislocation. Psychological, cultural dislocation. Spiritual dislocation. Aesthetic dislocation. But here's the solution to that. It is... The acceptance of Africans as African people who are centered in their own historical narratives. Do we put ourselves in our own narrative? We're not marginals to the European experience or anybody else's experience. We are ourselves a historical people. And our agency may be unrevealed to a lot of people, concealed from some others. It's profound. And yet... We fight against agency reduction formations all the time. It's a term I get from the scholar Michael Tillotson. Agency reduction formations that always confront African people who... try to get off of the plantation and to be independent or liberated. You always have people to stop you, to push you back. If you say, look, we should have a black studies program at this college. Someone say, we don't need a black studies program. Agency reduction, always, because the idea is to maintain African people in a position of dislocation. So Afrocentricity. Now Afrocentricity is the idea that African people must view themselves and must be viewed in a historical context as centered within the frame of the Framework of their own realities and experiences. That is all it is. It's a simple idea. It's not against anybody. There are a lot of people against Afrocentricity, but I'll tell you about that in a minute. But it's not against anybody. It is for an understanding of African people just as we would want an understanding of all people. It doesn't deny anybody anything. So... I start with the pyramids. Now, why do I start with the pyramids? If I were to ask you about American education, I would say, how does American education form its curriculum? How do we start? Where do we start? Most people will say Greece. And it's true. Almost every subject harks back to the Greeks. or there's some Greek at the entrance to everything, even the theater. You see? I mean, all that. We say, well, the Greeks did this and the Greeks did that. But it's always people who do not truly and fully understand history that would give us these answers, you see? And I'm not going to contest them now, but I will talk about them a little. bit later. But here's the problem. We start with a discussion of Homer, the Greek writer, and the Iliad, the Odyssey. We start with Homer. That's almost the beginning of Western education. You start with Homer. But when did Homer live? This is a chronological question. What is the period of Homer's existence? When did Homer write? And if you think about it, been in some of the classes of your professors, these professors who were here and studied at great universities, they would tell you that Homer lived around 800 years before the Christian era. That's 800 years before Christ. This is the period of Homer. 800 years before Homer, before Christ. But when were the pyramids built? The pyramid age starts 2,000 years before Homer. You think about that. We start our education, our curriculum, with a discussion of Homer and the Greeks and the Iliad, Troy and Helen, Achilles. Why don't we start with the pyramids? The pyramids have far more value in terms of human knowledge and human exploration and capability than the Iliad. So Africans have been moved off of terms completely. In fact, the whole world has been moved off of terms by Western exclusive ideologies. 2,800 years before Christ, 2,000 years before Homer, black people built the pyramids in Africa. No pyramids built anywhere else at that time. A hundred and six pyramids built in Kemet, that the Greeks later called Egypt. Two hundred pyramids built in Sudan, in Nubia. This is a historical fact. It's a fact. But it doesn't figure in my elementary education. It didn't figure in my high school education. And when I went to community college in Texas, it didn't figure in my community college education. And when I finished UCLA, it didn't figure in my graduate education. So how did I get this information? I had to be a guerrilla. I had to find the information wherever I could. And then I had to organize it and put it together. And that's why I write so much. There's so much to say that has not been said, and there's so much to refute that has been said. You can't claim that Africa is a continent of darkness when Africa gave the world its first light. But all humanity is from the continent of Africa. The origin of the human race is Africa. All 7 billion people in the world today can trace their ancestry to the continent through DNA. That's a fact. That's a scientific fact. Early civilizations are now valley civilizations. It's a historical fact. The origin of writing in Kemet. And this is long before the Arabs came to Egypt. The Arabs got to Egypt in the 7th century AD, this era, Christian era, 639 AD. It's when General El Az came from Arabia into Egypt, into Africa. And then we get, of course. The occupation of the army and of course the invasion of Arabs into Africa. That's not 700 B.C. That's not 2700 B.C. That's 7th century Christian era. Africa is a black continent. It's always been a black continent. The ancient black people still live in Libya. It's always been. In Egypt, it's the same way. I see them when I go there. I'm going there again this year. I've been there about 16 times. You see? So when you raise these questions and you look at this, you ask yourself, so what do they teach us, the pyramids? They taught us a lot about astronomy. They taught us a lot about construction, masonry. They taught us a lot about biology, because the mummification... of the kings that went into the pyramids was an extensive laboratory, you see, of knowledge. So Afrocentricity, I start there. That's my fundamental side. So this paradigm seeks to locate or relocate African phenomena, things that Africans do, all African experiences, within the The context of African agency, that we're not just observers to history, we do things, we have done things. And so that's the beginning of that. And I raise a question that... some of you may have known, know this name, York. But I asked the question, who was York? Just as an example, right? Who was York? And when you ask that question, people say, which York? What York, right? You say, the York that would, you know, traveled across the continent with Lewis and Clark. So I didn't know there was a York. York figures big in this exploration of the North American continent with Lewis and Clark. He was an African who went with him. Two white guys, this black guy, York. The Afro-centrist asked a question, why has York been lost? See, this is an Afrocentric question. For me, as an African intellectual and scholar, when I read the story of Lewis and Clark, and I read all those exploits of York, who obviously either could not write or did not write, but Lewis and Clark, they wrote. They wrote about how York saved them from a bear, how York was an intermediary with the native peoples, how York learned the language. of the natives as he traveled throughout North America. And so as an Afrocentric intellectual, my question is, where is the agency of York? But the only way I find his agency, since he did not write, is through what the white people wrote about him. But if they wrote about him, I want to see that emerge. Do you see? So in our Ph.D. program at Temple University, which is the first Ph.D. program in Africology and African American Studies, these are the kind of questions that we ask our students to explore. What did York do? What's his response to his reality? What did African people say when the founders met in Philadelphia? for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention. You know what I'm talking about. You hear this group of white guys sitting in this room in Constitutional Hall or Independence Hall, and they are having these discussions. But the people who were cooking for them, The people who were driving the wagons, the buggies for them, the black people who were the enslaved people that Jefferson held in bondage, or that Washington held in bondage, what were they thinking? About what was going on. What did they say to themselves about Mr. Jefferson? Or the brutality of George Washington? That's an Afrocentric question. You see? You see how we explore? That's the meaning of this notion of Afrocentric inquiry. We have students from all over the world come to attend. just to study the Afrocentric technique. They come from Bangladesh, they come from Germany, they come from Holland, they come from China, Japan. And many African countries. Because we don't want to study African American history from a European point of view. We want to understand what African people thought. And what did they write. did they say? How do you get to their experiences? That's Afrocentric. So why should people be scared of that? It's a funny question. Wait a minute. Why? What's the problem here? And remember, they're not just white people who are scared of it. They're black people who are scared of it. They say, oh, Oh, that Malefia Asante is an Afro-Centrist, and I'm not that. I go to church on Sundays, and my parents told me not to even listen to that black stuff. There are black people like that. And you wonder... why? It's education. It's a lack of education. It's miseducation. How many American athletes are at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang? There are 244. Why did the Fox News executive vice president, executive vice president, John Moody say that the U.S. Olympics committee seemed to want a team that was darker, gayer, and different? And then I asked myself, how many black people on the team? There are 244. You know how many black people on the team? Ten. You know how many expressly gay people on the team? Two. What's his problem? How does he come to see this as a big problem that the American team at the Winter Olympics is, you know, and I guess it's different, I didn't even ask. what he meant by different unless he just meant the Asians. But it's a crazy, crazy world because there are people who have this tunnel vision about human reality. that's John Moody the executive from Fox now there's another term as I'm talking about Afrocentricity let me just mention this term Africanity Africanity is different from Afrocentricity Africanity would be fashions I'm wearing an African shirt for example that's an Africanity where am I my hair may be African style. That's Africanity. Africanity does not mean that you are conscious. Sometimes you're not conscious. Sometimes people wear African clothes and stuff. That doesn't mean they're conscious of anything about their history or culture. Sometimes it is an expression of it, right? So how do you separate it? Afrocentricity is a conscious understanding of the role that African people play now and have played in history. It's a conscious thing. Because people can live on the continent of Africa itself and not be Afrocentric. Just by living in Africa doesn't make you Afrocentric. You can be a colonized African living in Nigeria. You can be a disoriented African living in Kenya. And I taught in Zimbabwe and I met many disoriented people. Africans living in Zimbabwe. So that place has, in terms of location, geographical, has nothing to do with it. Eurocentricity is a perspective that asserts a particular idea as universal. This is seen in many cultural and political and scientific developments. It creates insanity in Africans who seek to join this model. People like Clarence Thomas, Marina da Silva, Clarence Walker, and so on. Now, let me just tell you what I mean by this. There should be nothing wrong with Eurocentricity because European people should have ideas, examples, concepts that come out of the European experience. And they do. They should. That's normal. It's a cultural thing. It's a way we develop and so forth. However, what has happened to Eurocentricity is that it has become, in many respects, an imposition on everybody else as if it is the only way to look at the world. This imposition is an ethnocentric idea. It's an idea that valorizes the European experience above all other experiences and claims... maybe not overtly, but in its actions, that it is universal. That the way white people do things right, the way other people do things wrong, that is taking all the space to cover all areas. This is the way it should be done. Why do you do it that way in China? This is the way it should be done. Why do you do it that way in India? This is the way it should be done. Why do you do it that way in Africa? This is the way it should be done. You see? What has happened is that many people, particularly who have been dominated, who live in a society where they don't have control or power, they accept that as reality. That is a universal thing. European experience is universal. However the Europeans said, then that is what should be done. This is seen in almost everything. Let me just raise this question with you. Do you imagine that the Africans who built the civilizations along the Nile River never named the stars? Then you ask the question, why are all the names now given by Europeans? Then the Africans... have a way of naming the days of the week? Then why don't we get them European, you see? So the Afrocentric says, wait a minute. There were Chinese scientists who did fireworks long before Europe. Who elevates the Chinese? At least in this notion of Western universalism, it is that that is our fundamental issue and problem, you see. So how do you grapple with that? in an intellectual way. This is what the Afrocentric is about. Our main assumptions are these, and I'll be quick. I don't know what time I have. I'm sure, Christy, you would tell me what time. Give me about five or ten minutes to wind up. down. African cultures have certain common elements, and I'll just do this quickly. Ancestral reverence, burial of the dead, extensive greeting behavior, xenophilia, loving of strangers. This is an African cultural form. Wherever you go on the continent, it's the same. Whether you're white, black, Arab, Asian, you go on the continent, we greet you. That is the African continental value. It is a value that if a person has been traveling, you give them water. That is an African, all over the continent, no difference. Throughout the continent of Africa, you have the same sense of humanity, that we are, in fact, all of human society. African origin of humanity and civilization, that's another assumption we make. All economic events are related to culture and location. That's another assumption we make. And Afrocentricity is itself a fundamental critique of domination. That's what it is. And I think that the element of it as a critique of Eurocentricity and any other imposition on African people is itself a contribution to human knowledge. Classical cultures are always examples. I always tell people... tell people that for Europe, Greece and Rome are key civilizations. For Asia, China and India are key civilizations. These civilizations opened the door to other civilizations in that region. And for Africa, Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia opened the door to all African civilizations. If you ask anything, whether you ask about language or greetings or whatever, ever. If I, you know, just, you know, I introduce you to this notion of hotep, which is a word that comes from those of us who teach the ancient language of Kemet. We teach the language of Kemet, and hotep is a greeting. It's just a formal greeting. And it's just like you would say shalom or assalamu alaikum. We say hotep. It's a fundamental African greeting. It's an old greeting. And it means to be at peace or to be satisfied. It comes in a variation of names of the deities like Amenhotep, which was the name of a king, you see, or Potahotep, which was the name of an ancient philosopher. So all these are, so this is a part of that culture that in a sense we have recovered by digging deeper than what we were taught when we were students. And we, and now we have have students getting PhDs who understand this. And it's a very powerful, liberating force. So Egypt and Nubia and Ethiopia are to Africa as Greece and Rome are to Europe. That is a way to sort of structure this in your mind and to ask questions about classical Africa, which is a cradle of African and world civilization. Orientation to data and age. Let me just tell you basically what this means. This means that facts and information and data, that's important, but that's not so much what I'm talking about. I'm talking about... how do we orient ourselves toward these facts, toward that information, toward that data. Let me give you just one fact. We know that there is an ocean on the eastern side of the continent of Africa. It's called the Indian Ocean. We know that there is an ocean on the western side of Africa. It's called the Atlantic Ocean. The question is, how do we get those names? Africa is the largest continent facing both ocean and ocean. oceans. The one on the east used to be called the Ethiopian Ocean. That was what it was called. There's some old maps that still have that. But the Africans always understood the one on the west as the ocean of Abibaman. So how do we get these different realities? How is it that Africans are moved off of of their terms. They can't speak from their terms. You see? So that is the question. So what is the African agency in any situation? What is our condition now and so forth? The meaning of this is discovering the centered place of the African in literature and history and psychology, which we call Saku in religion. Location is the metaphor of analysis. So for example, someone asks asked me, can a white person teach African American history? I said, it depends on where the white person is coming from. Where is he located? If you're located in a place where you understand that African people ought to be given primacy in their own historical narrative, then yes, a white person can teach it. But if you're going to try to teach African American history from a Eurocentric standpoint, then what's going to happen is that you're going to valorize most often European history. history, and that's not what African history ought to be. I should not pick up a book on African history and read, for example, that David Livingstone was the greatest person who ever lived in Southern Africa. That doesn't make sense. But there are history books that do that. So that's the problem. So how do you change that? You change that by demonstrating the tremendous heroism of African history. heroics and values and activities of the people who lived in that region, you see? How we can be trapped by language and symbols. When you hear someone say universal man, that's a problem. It's not just a problem Afro-centrically, but it's a problem of gender, but it's a big problem. When someone talks about the foundations of the Middle Ages, and this is one of the things that struck me sitting in my classes in college, people talk about the Middle Ages as if nothing was ever going to change. was going on in Africa. Can you imagine? You're hearing these discussions as an African student about the knights and all this stuff and you're saying, wait, this is the 1400s. What's going on in Africa? Absolutely, right, of course. We know that, right? So that means I don't know whether you got that at the Suffolks. You may have got it somewhere else, but you got it right. It's true. You say, wait a minute. I'm sitting in this class and this European oriented professor, maybe black or white, is teaching me about the Middle Ages as if there are no other Middle Ages. That is crazy. You have to ask yourself, and that's where the insanity comes up. Black people say, wait a minute. I know there's something going on in Africa. I don't know what it is, but there must be something. going on somewhere else in the world, right? That's where the Afrocentric idea comes in. It says, wait a minute. There are things going on in Asia in the 1400s. I mean, China is not just sitting over there doing nothing. So what we ask, and this is why, you know, in a sense, I see this as a... A powerful way to try to understand reality is to open up our minds to knowledge so that we all understand that we all bring things to the table of humanity. There's not just one. plate on the table. There are many plates that can be put, but we must allow them. So when we say modern language departments, what do we mean by that? Every modern language department that I know of has never had an African language in it. They don't teach Zulu, they don't teach Yoruba, they don't teach Swahili, they don't teach Wolof, Hausa. I said, why do you call this the Modern Language Department? Password question. to me. And I raise this question to deans, to professors, they can't explain it. Well, we just don't have, we don't teach that, but you know, we just teach German, Spanish, French. modern language, you see. So, this is the issue. World great books. I'm not going to go through that. You know the whole notion of canons. Ballet, the classical dance. Ballet is European classical dance. There are other classical dances. The Kete, my middle name, Kete is a classical dance of the Asante people of Ghana. Kete. So, now here's the situation. So, So Europe takes all the space by saying, well, we got classical dance. Everybody else, we got folk dances. That's not correct. All people have dances and art forms that they feel could be emulated by other people. That's what classical means. But it is not for people to assume that... that what we call ballet is the only classical dance and that the Japanese don't have classical dance or the Chinese don't have classical dance. How can you assume that? How can you make that kind of statement? This is the grabbing of everything. The obligatory point of entry for whites in movies, with the exception, perhaps, of the Black Panther, but we'll see that when it comes out. Okay, now, location and position. We can never be sure that our place is secure enough. We are self-choosing. This is for African people. African people must be able to, at least, in a class, take... Take a class on mathematics. The first calculator in the world was an African calculator. 48,000 years ago, the Africans and Swazi, the Swazi people created the Limbombo bone calculator. 28,000 years ago, another African people, the Ishungi people of Congo created the Ishungo bone calculator. This is mathematical history. But I'm sitting in the class as an African student. I don't know. know Ishongi, I don't know Swazi, my teacher obviously doesn't know it. So I'm sitting up in there as if I have to go get something which is already a part of my heritage. That's great, that's where you get insanity. You see? That's crazy. Because we don't know. That's why we have been, you've been shut out away from that, okay? But knowing the concept of place helps us to determine argument logic and so forth. so forth. Elements of place, I don't have time to go through these. History, mythology, ethos, and motif. Afrocentricity is an orientation to data, like Marxist theory, deconstruction theory, development theory, or post-colonial theory. It is not data itself. It is an orientation to data, how you look at it. It's a perspective on it, you see. And I always say this, who criticizes Afrocentricity? Some white scholar. scholars, they say, well, it's anti-white. Some black scholars, they say it's all about Africa, not about America. Some liberals, they say it's too collective, it's not individual enough. Most Marxists, they say it's about culture and it's not about class. All conservatives, they say it's radical, it's going to destroy our value system. All reactionaries, they say it's too progressive because we need to go back to the status quo. quote anti. And they're all black conservatives. They say it's separatist. And they say it's separatist because their location most often is inside the Eurocentric framework and they cannot imagine that African people could be off of the plantation. So it's normally criticized because it's a new departure in analysis. It is at the intersection of race, sex, class, and culture. contemporary American society, and it insists that human values must not be neutral, but vigorously anti-racist and anti-sexist. It insists on putting the African interest in the center of the narrative. All language reflects the ruling classes in America. Good English is never that spoken by African Americans or Korean Americans. This is not a matter of ethnicity, but of cultural origin. African language is the root of all of this. language is the creativity of American speech. And I always say this, that I believe that the most fundamental contribution that African Americans have made to this society, well there are two really, music and speech. Because it's in those categories that you see the creativity of all these hundred different African ethnic groups coming together and being able to speak with each other. Because of Igbo and the Yoruba and the Wolof and the And the Asante do not speak the same languages. And yet when we came together in America, we had to learn to understand each other. And then we had to learn to speak to the European overseer. That's just like if you had French, Swedish, Polish, German, and Italians on a plantation and their overseer was a Chinese. And they have to learn to speak with each other. and then they have to learn to speak with the Chinese. That was what confronted Africans when we came to this continent. Power determines the condition for interpretation of reality. Buffalo Soldiers and the American West, I always talk about the Buffalo Soldiers because even though they were important for the Civil War, they were used for purposes of fighting with the native peoples. Christmas Addicts, who was a... the first person to die in the Boston Massacre. This black man, Christmas Addicts, was supporting the Americans, but there were black people, more than 3,000, who fought on the side of the British, who fought as loyalists to the government of Britain against the American colonists. And those black people were rescued in New York City and taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia. They're still up there, some of the descendants. And then... the Alamo, this is talking about history and power. The Alamo, when it was seized in 1835 by the Texans, it was Mexico. That was Mexico property. It was not American property they seized. And then, of course, then it was retaken by the Mexicans under Santa Ana. And then, of course, in 1836, you get the settlers under Sam Houston fighting to take it back. But Mexico, I mean, Can you imagine Mexico lost in the war with the U.S.? It lost almost half of its territory. I mean, Texas was Mexico. New Mexico was Mexico. Arizona was Mexico. California was Mexico. All this was Mexican territory, which was lost to the United States. And the United States, of course, invaded and took over their territory. Until the lion learns to write, the hunter will always be the hunter. always be a hero. That is the lesson of Afrocentricity. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I understand there are time for questions. or comments? Greetings. Greetings. I'm over here. There you are. First, I'd like to welcome you and your wife to Long Island Suffolk County Community College. Actually, you've been in our discussions for probably over 20 years. I would like to say hello to your wife because I know we used to talk a lot. Thank you. I want to say in Suffolk County Community College language, hotel. Hotel. My question to you is how can you spend a little bit of time, I think you did, but I want to ask you in terms of education. The education that we're teaching our kids is a model education. But yet the students are multicultural. Can a mono-education actually work for a multicultural population? No. I'm sorry to be so sharp on that, but you cannot have a mono-cultural education. system when you've got a multicultural educational body. But it does not make any sense. It is domination. It is hegemony. It is an imposition on other people. And I think that the best way to have... have to contemplate any kind of educational experience in this country, which is multicultural and will be multicultural for the foreseeable future, regardless of what Trump does or what he thinks. It's a multicultural country. And if you've got a multicultural country, you've got to figure out how to teach in a way that does not negate the cultural experiences of the other person sitting in the classroom. You've got to do that. that. It's fundamental. Thank you. Thank you, Malefia Asante, for coming to Suffolk to speak. I had two questions. Well, I had. The first one was about language and education. You answered the first one. My second question is how do I engage my peers in political thought that's more Afrocentric and not the Eurocentric? Thank you very much for asking that question. I know him. He He's the guy who walked me over to the building. Thank you, Victor. Here's how you do it. I think at least one of the ways that you can do it in terms of engaging your peers. I had a good friend. He is a historical personality, Kwame Tore, who used to give one answer to that question over and over again. He says, you must. organize. Organize, organize. That is the solution to working with your peers. Now there are a number of organizations that I would certainly hope you would be interested in, and I can share that with you later, but the Afrocentricity International is an organization that has chapters around the world. It's based on the principles that were established by Marcus Garvey of having chapters in every city or town or community of people who are engaged in the process of having some Afrocentric understanding. They study books and articles that are written by people who want to bring about what is called an African renaissance, a renaissance of thinking on the part of African people. Renaissance is not the African word, but it was a word that was used in 1948 by Cheikh Anta Jope, and people... use it, but a reawakening of African intellectuals and activists toward a conscious approach to science, to math, to culture, and so forth. And we see some good steps already. Internationally things are happening. The African nations, for example, have just decided to have a common market throughout the continent, where they're going to lower tariffs for all the nations. They're going to try to get rid of visas. You're traveling between South Africa and Ghana. Why should you need a visa and so forth? Yeah, like the African passports? Pardon? Just one passport, Africa. It would be Africa. You have a passport for Africa. That's a continent where you can put the U.S., the 48... states of the U.S. can go inside Africa four times. That's how big it is. It's a massive continent. And so people are finally getting, and the biggest intellectual movement is Afrocentricity by the way, in Africa. I mean, I'm a university professor at the University of South Africa as a professor extraordinarius, where I read dissertations and do work for them. And South Africa is probably the leading Afrocentric thinking. And nation in Africa because they're thinking after so many years of apartheid, you know, what do we, what have our ancestors said? Because the white minority government gave them the impression black people never thought of anything. So now they're recovering all this information and knowledge and so on. And I think in black American, African American community, it's happening. It's happening in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. It's an awakening because people are asking Afro- Centrocentric questions. And we should have. I asked these questions a long time ago, but we're now doing it. But I like the fact that the young people are asking it. If you listen to some of the rap music, you know, they're cautious. There's a lot of cautious people. So this is... you know they could be maybe they could be a little more conscious in some ways but but Lamar is trying to do his best and some other people are trying to do some things alright thank you Hi. Thank you for coming and thank you for speaking and dispelling knowledge. It's always appreciated. So my question is one of practicality, so to speak. How do we take Afrocentricity from a perspective in which we look at scholarly data, like you were saying, to something that we can apply to our current condition as African Americans? You mentioned Africa a lot. Whether it be the advancements that we brought forth to the world or what we've done for culture all these really interesting and meaningful facts but what do we do with those as young African American, black American whatever we want to classify ourselves as especially in an academic sense yeah and in a more practical sense. Yes so like when we were bringing forth a suggestion to bring African or black studies to campus like yeah Last year, it wasn't received well because people didn't see the practical use for such an education. Like, if you cannot be a skilled worker with this education, why is it needed? So maybe if you can speak on that. That's a good question. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you very much for that question. Well, to me... And I've been in education a long time. I was thinking yesterday, I've been teaching at universities for 45 years. So I have some views on this, and very clearly... The most practical education at the undergraduate level is an education that you are passionate about. That's number one. Number two, if a person asks that question, what can you do with it, it could be asked of any subject that is not a vocation. In other words, so I'm taking... political science. So what can I do with it? So I'm taking English. So what can I do with it? Anything anyone can do with any degree that is not a vocation where you actually learn a skill like speech therapy or engineering you can do with African American studies. There's no difference. Any job they can get, if you are studying sociology, if you're studying sociology, it doesn't make you a better employee than a person who is studying African American studies. They can both get the same job when they get the BA. It's the same. There's no... No, always... what I've seen, the agency reduction for not having black studies is most often a resource allocation problem. They don't want to take resources from other departments to create a black studies program. But there's no reason why a college like this should not have three or four people who are dedicated to African American studies. What is the problem? I don't understand the problem. It's not a problem. It is a will. to do it. If a university has a will, one of the most beautiful things, let me just tell you this is a true story. When I first went to Temple to create the Ph.D. program, I was head of the communication department at Buffalo. It was a large department. I was the first African-American ever running that department. I ran that department until I got the offer to come to Temple. And the president was Peter Leo Koros. He was a second generation Greek. He said, I want you to come to Temple, and I want you to build the best department of African-American studies in the nation. Because at a university like this, which we're a big urban university, 35,000 students, at that time 19% African-American. He said, we should have the best. So let's build the best. So his will, the will of your president, I don't know, Mr. President, Sister President, Mr. President, if you were here, I'm not talking about you, I just don't know. It is the will of the administration, working with the deans and working with the faculty, to make this happen. It could happen anytime. So I'm sorry it takes so long to answer your question. No, that's fine. I like it. Thank you. I have another question. more so agree or disagree type of situation. So from the little studies I've done, I'm not like a scholar or anything yet, but speaking into existence, right? The way I view this, and definitely in an academic sense, that our education from K through practically now, when it comes to perspective and theory-based education, it has a purpose of building an individual from the inside out. So what we learn and what we digest in these books, and if it comes from a perspective that does not include our greatness, we are then not great because we're kind of invisible and behind the eight ball in every sense of that phrase. So when you're speaking of the importance. of Afrocentricity, I just want everyone to leave with that. But do you agree with that? I agree with that, sure. Absolutely, you should be planning to go to Temple. Any other questions? Thank you all very much. Thank you everybody so much. Thank you Dr. Asante for speaking with us today about Afrocentricity. Please leave the surveys with the person that's standing by the door on your way out.

An escape from harsh reality. I witnessed a utopia of beautiful, educated African people united with pride in their heritage and knowledge of self. Dr. Asante and his peers had made me think about the idea of Sankofa. Sankofa means to go back and get it. If we don't go back and reclaim our history to teach the next generation, then our history will be rewritten and gone forever.

Dr. Asante is an activist, intellectual, who is the president of the Malafi Kete Asante. Institute for Afrocentric Studies, professor and chair of the Department of Afroecology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is one of the most prolific African scholars that has published 83 books, more than 500 articles, and is one of the most quoted living African authors as well as one of the most distinguished thinkers in the African world. His works on African African history, multiculturalism, human culture, and philosophy have been cited and reviewed by many journals.

Dr. Asante has been recognized as one of the most ten most widely widely cited African scholars. He has been recognized as one of the most influential leaders in education. He received his PhD from UCLA at the age of 26 and was appointed a full professor position by SUNY Buffalo at the age of 30. At Temple University, he created the first PhD program in African-American studies in 1988. He is the founder of the Theory of Afrocentricity, and he will share his knowledge of this theory with us. It is a pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. Dr. Asante to Suffolk County Community College.

Good morning. HOTAP. I know a lot of people now, these days, on social media have a different understanding of HOTAP than the classical understanding. But we'll talk about that, too. But I just want to say to Christy and to all of you who have made this possible on this Black History Month celebration, that I'm very happy to be at Suffolk for this occasion.

I'm always happy to come to colleges, to universities, and places where people think and reflect and open their minds to the possibility of a new world in which we have understanding, full understanding, as much as we can. can of all of human realities. So it's good.

And I want to just thank you. I want to thank Raphael for his introduction and also for citing the Sheikanta Jope conference, D-I-O-P. He is the greatest African intellectual of the 20th century.

And yet, if you go to universities or colleges and you ask them, To name five African intellectuals, you will find that most people cannot name five African intellectuals. Sheikh Hassan Job was a Senegalese. He was a person who actually, in 1973, took on the established historical order regarding the peopling of the continent of Africa. He's a major, major person, honored by UNESCO, by the United Nations during his time in the United States.

lifetime. And I was fortunate as a young man to meet him and to learn from him. And so I have tried in my own life to carry out his mission of trying to teach African and African diasporan history and culture. And I just want to say a few words about that and then I'll go directly into my PowerPoint.

And I just also want to point out that my wife is here with me. And I'm so happy that she came up with me to Long Island. Alan to start this Black History Month celebration.

Let me tell you something, tell you a story. I was born in Georgia. I grew up in Valdosta, Georgia and in Nashville, Tennessee. And then I moved to Oklahoma, Texas. California, and then back east, beginning in Indiana, and then New York State, and now in Pennsylvania.

And in between, I've spent time on the continent of Africa. I taught in Zimbabwe. and I did many other things. But all along the way, I thought always of the Native peoples, the Native Americans, and I was thinking of them because... as you travel throughout this country and you see how vast and beautiful it is, it always occurs to me there were people living here before the Europeans came and before the Africans came.

Where is their history? Who are these people upon whose graves we walk? This was the, these are the things that struck me, I mean, and they still strike me. I mean, who looked at this river before I looked at it? 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, they saw this stream, they saw the sea.

Who are these people? And then it always brings me back to what I always say is a Sort of a personal, collective story. It goes back and forth, personal and collective. Who are the Africans who are here?

Where do they come from? What are their ethnic backgrounds? There were more than 100 different African nations that were brought to this country. Who are these people?

And then when you ask students at all the universities, I did this at Harvard, I've done it at Yale, name me five African ethnic groups that were brought to America, and they could hardly name one. And then if you ask, name me five European ethnic groups that came to America, they could name 35. Why is that? How could that be? That if you ask this question, I can tell you right off the immigrants that came from Europe. Italian, Polish, English, French, German, Norwegian.

But if I ask that question about Africans, I say, well, where do these people come from? And rarely do you get people who are able to say Wolof, Mandinka, Yoruba, Ibo, Asante, Fante, Ga, Eve. That's who Africans in the diaspora are.

But even Africans do not know that. So what's the problem? It's education. It's how you educate it, what you acculturate it to, what you hear every day. The African people who came to America, to the slave trade, and even if we came here before the slave trade, we came from nations that had their own language, their concepts of the divine and the sacred, their doctrines of knowledge and metallurgy.

These were nations. So when you ask that question, and then you think of all the Africans in the diaspora, because the diaspora is large. It is a diaspora that starts, I mean, you can say from Canada, to the Africans came to Canada, to the U.S. to the more than 400 villages in Mexico that are African villages.

Most people forget about Mexico's African heritage, but after all, Mexico is in the Americas. The slave trade was through all the Americas. You think about what they call Central America, Nicaragua, Bluefields area, Costa Rica, the Limon area, Panama, all of it. Guyana in South America, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and the largest of them all, Brazil, with 100 million Africans.

That's twice as many as are in this country. So you ask yourself, what happened? You see?

Why is it that the people among whom we live don't know and we don't know? We're educated. But if our education doesn't at least let us know our current realities, we are really miseducated. And our orientations are wrong. So when I developed Afrocentricity, I was teaching at the State University of New York in Buffalo.

And it was the winter of 1977, one of the worst winters in Buffalo. we had a blizzard, a major blizzard that lasted for about five days in Buffalo. And I started reflecting and thinking about the condition of African people and about the knowledge about African people in America. And it occurred to me that one of the things that is fundamental is that when we were taken from the continent of Africa as a result of the war, and brought here on the slave ships, we were taken off of all of our terms. Here's what I mean.

To a large extent, we lost our religion. We lost much of our language. We lost much of the knowledge that had accrued on the continent of Africa for thousands of years. We lost our connection with ancestry. We were taken totally off.

We even lost our concept of what was beautiful and what was good. Because we saw so much that was not good and not beautiful. And we could not really understand what had happened to us.

That's the reality of the African experience. Not just in the United States, in the Americas. And I've traveled throughout all these countries. It's the same situation. I gave a speech like this last year, or two years ago in Medellin, Colombia.

It's the same with the black people in Medellin. Or with black people in Cali, or Buenaventura, in Colombia. Colombia is 30% black, African. And you have the same issue that I'm talking about.

The moving of African people off of their terms and replacing us fundamentally, almost without a voice, on European terms. And then you ask me, what's wrong with black students, or what's wrong with black people sometimes, or what's wrong with the way other people see us? It's disorientation, misorientation, being out of place.

dispossessed, dispossessed of knowledge, of contact with information and so forth. So what I proposed that came out in the book in 1980, I proposed that African people in America and throughout the world, because I later discovered that on the African continent Many of the people have the same problem we have. Dislocation.

Psychological, cultural dislocation. Spiritual dislocation. Aesthetic dislocation. But here's the solution to that.

It is... The acceptance of Africans as African people who are centered in their own historical narratives. Do we put ourselves in our own narrative? We're not marginals to the European experience or anybody else's experience. We are ourselves a historical people.

And our agency may be unrevealed to a lot of people, concealed from some others. It's profound. And yet... We fight against agency reduction formations all the time. It's a term I get from the scholar Michael Tillotson.

Agency reduction formations that always confront African people who... try to get off of the plantation and to be independent or liberated. You always have people to stop you, to push you back.

If you say, look, we should have a black studies program at this college. Someone say, we don't need a black studies program. Agency reduction, always, because the idea is to maintain African people in a position of dislocation. So Afrocentricity. Now Afrocentricity is the idea that African people must view themselves and must be viewed in a historical context as centered within the frame of the Framework of their own realities and experiences.

That is all it is. It's a simple idea. It's not against anybody.

There are a lot of people against Afrocentricity, but I'll tell you about that in a minute. But it's not against anybody. It is for an understanding of African people just as we would want an understanding of all people. It doesn't deny anybody anything.

So... I start with the pyramids. Now, why do I start with the pyramids? If I were to ask you about American education, I would say, how does American education form its curriculum?

How do we start? Where do we start? Most people will say Greece. And it's true. Almost every subject harks back to the Greeks.

or there's some Greek at the entrance to everything, even the theater. You see? I mean, all that. We say, well, the Greeks did this and the Greeks did that. But it's always people who do not truly and fully understand history that would give us these answers, you see?

And I'm not going to contest them now, but I will talk about them a little. bit later. But here's the problem.

We start with a discussion of Homer, the Greek writer, and the Iliad, the Odyssey. We start with Homer. That's almost the beginning of Western education.

You start with Homer. But when did Homer live? This is a chronological question.

What is the period of Homer's existence? When did Homer write? And if you think about it, been in some of the classes of your professors, these professors who were here and studied at great universities, they would tell you that Homer lived around 800 years before the Christian era.

That's 800 years before Christ. This is the period of Homer. 800 years before Homer, before Christ. But when were the pyramids built?

The pyramid age starts 2,000 years before Homer. You think about that. We start our education, our curriculum, with a discussion of Homer and the Greeks and the Iliad, Troy and Helen, Achilles.

Why don't we start with the pyramids? The pyramids have far more value in terms of human knowledge and human exploration and capability than the Iliad. So Africans have been moved off of terms completely. In fact, the whole world has been moved off of terms by Western exclusive ideologies. 2,800 years before Christ, 2,000 years before Homer, black people built the pyramids in Africa.

No pyramids built anywhere else at that time. A hundred and six pyramids built in Kemet, that the Greeks later called Egypt. Two hundred pyramids built in Sudan, in Nubia.

This is a historical fact. It's a fact. But it doesn't figure in my elementary education. It didn't figure in my high school education. And when I went to community college in Texas, it didn't figure in my community college education.

And when I finished UCLA, it didn't figure in my graduate education. So how did I get this information? I had to be a guerrilla.

I had to find the information wherever I could. And then I had to organize it and put it together. And that's why I write so much. There's so much to say that has not been said, and there's so much to refute that has been said.

You can't claim that Africa is a continent of darkness when Africa gave the world its first light. But all humanity is from the continent of Africa. The origin of the human race is Africa.

All 7 billion people in the world today can trace their ancestry to the continent through DNA. That's a fact. That's a scientific fact.

Early civilizations are now valley civilizations. It's a historical fact. The origin of writing in Kemet. And this is long before the Arabs came to Egypt. The Arabs got to Egypt in the 7th century AD, this era, Christian era, 639 AD.

It's when General El Az came from Arabia into Egypt, into Africa. And then we get, of course. The occupation of the army and of course the invasion of Arabs into Africa. That's not 700 B.C. That's not 2700 B.C.

That's 7th century Christian era. Africa is a black continent. It's always been a black continent.

The ancient black people still live in Libya. It's always been. In Egypt, it's the same way.

I see them when I go there. I'm going there again this year. I've been there about 16 times. You see?

So when you raise these questions and you look at this, you ask yourself, so what do they teach us, the pyramids? They taught us a lot about astronomy. They taught us a lot about construction, masonry. They taught us a lot about biology, because the mummification...

of the kings that went into the pyramids was an extensive laboratory, you see, of knowledge. So Afrocentricity, I start there. That's my fundamental side.

So this paradigm seeks to locate or relocate African phenomena, things that Africans do, all African experiences, within the The context of African agency, that we're not just observers to history, we do things, we have done things. And so that's the beginning of that. And I raise a question that...

some of you may have known, know this name, York. But I asked the question, who was York? Just as an example, right? Who was York?

And when you ask that question, people say, which York? What York, right? You say, the York that would, you know, traveled across the continent with Lewis and Clark.

So I didn't know there was a York. York figures big in this exploration of the North American continent with Lewis and Clark. He was an African who went with him.

Two white guys, this black guy, York. The Afro-centrist asked a question, why has York been lost? See, this is an Afrocentric question. For me, as an African intellectual and scholar, when I read the story of Lewis and Clark, and I read all those exploits of York, who obviously either could not write or did not write, but Lewis and Clark, they wrote. They wrote about how York saved them from a bear, how York was an intermediary with the native peoples, how York learned the language.

of the natives as he traveled throughout North America. And so as an Afrocentric intellectual, my question is, where is the agency of York? But the only way I find his agency, since he did not write, is through what the white people wrote about him. But if they wrote about him, I want to see that emerge.

Do you see? So in our Ph.D. program at Temple University, which is the first Ph.D. program in Africology and African American Studies, these are the kind of questions that we ask our students to explore. What did York do?

What's his response to his reality? What did African people say when the founders met in Philadelphia? for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention. You know what I'm talking about. You hear this group of white guys sitting in this room in Constitutional Hall or Independence Hall, and they are having these discussions.

But the people who were cooking for them, The people who were driving the wagons, the buggies for them, the black people who were the enslaved people that Jefferson held in bondage, or that Washington held in bondage, what were they thinking? About what was going on. What did they say to themselves about Mr. Jefferson? Or the brutality of George Washington? That's an Afrocentric question.

You see? You see how we explore? That's the meaning of this notion of Afrocentric inquiry. We have students from all over the world come to attend. just to study the Afrocentric technique.

They come from Bangladesh, they come from Germany, they come from Holland, they come from China, Japan. And many African countries. Because we don't want to study African American history from a European point of view. We want to understand what African people thought. And what did they write.

did they say? How do you get to their experiences? That's Afrocentric.

So why should people be scared of that? It's a funny question. Wait a minute. Why? What's the problem here?

And remember, they're not just white people who are scared of it. They're black people who are scared of it. They say, oh, Oh, that Malefia Asante is an Afro-Centrist, and I'm not that. I go to church on Sundays, and my parents told me not to even listen to that black stuff.

There are black people like that. And you wonder... why? It's education.

It's a lack of education. It's miseducation. How many American athletes are at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang? There are 244. Why did the Fox News executive vice president, executive vice president, John Moody say that the U.S.

Olympics committee seemed to want a team that was darker, gayer, and different? And then I asked myself, how many black people on the team? There are 244. You know how many black people on the team? Ten. You know how many expressly gay people on the team?

Two. What's his problem? How does he come to see this as a big problem that the American team at the Winter Olympics is, you know, and I guess it's different, I didn't even ask.

what he meant by different unless he just meant the Asians. But it's a crazy, crazy world because there are people who have this tunnel vision about human reality. that's John Moody the executive from Fox now there's another term as I'm talking about Afrocentricity let me just mention this term Africanity Africanity is different from Afrocentricity Africanity would be fashions I'm wearing an African shirt for example that's an Africanity where am I my hair may be African style. That's Africanity. Africanity does not mean that you are conscious.

Sometimes you're not conscious. Sometimes people wear African clothes and stuff. That doesn't mean they're conscious of anything about their history or culture. Sometimes it is an expression of it, right?

So how do you separate it? Afrocentricity is a conscious understanding of the role that African people play now and have played in history. It's a conscious thing.

Because people can live on the continent of Africa itself and not be Afrocentric. Just by living in Africa doesn't make you Afrocentric. You can be a colonized African living in Nigeria.

You can be a disoriented African living in Kenya. And I taught in Zimbabwe and I met many disoriented people. Africans living in Zimbabwe. So that place has, in terms of location, geographical, has nothing to do with it. Eurocentricity is a perspective that asserts a particular idea as universal.

This is seen in many cultural and political and scientific developments. It creates insanity in Africans who seek to join this model. People like Clarence Thomas, Marina da Silva, Clarence Walker, and so on.

Now, let me just tell you what I mean by this. There should be nothing wrong with Eurocentricity because European people should have ideas, examples, concepts that come out of the European experience. And they do.

They should. That's normal. It's a cultural thing.

It's a way we develop and so forth. However, what has happened to Eurocentricity is that it has become, in many respects, an imposition on everybody else as if it is the only way to look at the world. This imposition is an ethnocentric idea. It's an idea that valorizes the European experience above all other experiences and claims... maybe not overtly, but in its actions, that it is universal.

That the way white people do things right, the way other people do things wrong, that is taking all the space to cover all areas. This is the way it should be done. Why do you do it that way in China?

This is the way it should be done. Why do you do it that way in India? This is the way it should be done.

Why do you do it that way in Africa? This is the way it should be done. You see? What has happened is that many people, particularly who have been dominated, who live in a society where they don't have control or power, they accept that as reality.

That is a universal thing. European experience is universal. However the Europeans said, then that is what should be done.

This is seen in almost everything. Let me just raise this question with you. Do you imagine that the Africans who built the civilizations along the Nile River never named the stars? Then you ask the question, why are all the names now given by Europeans? Then the Africans...

have a way of naming the days of the week? Then why don't we get them European, you see? So the Afrocentric says, wait a minute.

There were Chinese scientists who did fireworks long before Europe. Who elevates the Chinese? At least in this notion of Western universalism, it is that that is our fundamental issue and problem, you see.

So how do you grapple with that? in an intellectual way. This is what the Afrocentric is about. Our main assumptions are these, and I'll be quick.

I don't know what time I have. I'm sure, Christy, you would tell me what time. Give me about five or ten minutes to wind up. down. African cultures have certain common elements, and I'll just do this quickly.

Ancestral reverence, burial of the dead, extensive greeting behavior, xenophilia, loving of strangers. This is an African cultural form. Wherever you go on the continent, it's the same.

Whether you're white, black, Arab, Asian, you go on the continent, we greet you. That is the African continental value. It is a value that if a person has been traveling, you give them water.

That is an African, all over the continent, no difference. Throughout the continent of Africa, you have the same sense of humanity, that we are, in fact, all of human society. African origin of humanity and civilization, that's another assumption we make.

All economic events are related to culture and location. That's another assumption we make. And Afrocentricity is itself a fundamental critique of domination. That's what it is. And I think that the element of it as a critique of Eurocentricity and any other imposition on African people is itself a contribution to human knowledge.

Classical cultures are always examples. I always tell people... tell people that for Europe, Greece and Rome are key civilizations. For Asia, China and India are key civilizations.

These civilizations opened the door to other civilizations in that region. And for Africa, Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia opened the door to all African civilizations. If you ask anything, whether you ask about language or greetings or whatever, ever.

If I, you know, just, you know, I introduce you to this notion of hotep, which is a word that comes from those of us who teach the ancient language of Kemet. We teach the language of Kemet, and hotep is a greeting. It's just a formal greeting.

And it's just like you would say shalom or assalamu alaikum. We say hotep. It's a fundamental African greeting. It's an old greeting.

And it means to be at peace or to be satisfied. It comes in a variation of names of the deities like Amenhotep, which was the name of a king, you see, or Potahotep, which was the name of an ancient philosopher. So all these are, so this is a part of that culture that in a sense we have recovered by digging deeper than what we were taught when we were students. And we, and now we have have students getting PhDs who understand this. And it's a very powerful, liberating force.

So Egypt and Nubia and Ethiopia are to Africa as Greece and Rome are to Europe. That is a way to sort of structure this in your mind and to ask questions about classical Africa, which is a cradle of African and world civilization. Orientation to data and age.

Let me just tell you basically what this means. This means that facts and information and data, that's important, but that's not so much what I'm talking about. I'm talking about...

how do we orient ourselves toward these facts, toward that information, toward that data. Let me give you just one fact. We know that there is an ocean on the eastern side of the continent of Africa.

It's called the Indian Ocean. We know that there is an ocean on the western side of Africa. It's called the Atlantic Ocean. The question is, how do we get those names? Africa is the largest continent facing both ocean and ocean.

oceans. The one on the east used to be called the Ethiopian Ocean. That was what it was called. There's some old maps that still have that.

But the Africans always understood the one on the west as the ocean of Abibaman. So how do we get these different realities? How is it that Africans are moved off of of their terms.

They can't speak from their terms. You see? So that is the question. So what is the African agency in any situation? What is our condition now and so forth?

The meaning of this is discovering the centered place of the African in literature and history and psychology, which we call Saku in religion. Location is the metaphor of analysis. So for example, someone asks asked me, can a white person teach African American history?

I said, it depends on where the white person is coming from. Where is he located? If you're located in a place where you understand that African people ought to be given primacy in their own historical narrative, then yes, a white person can teach it.

But if you're going to try to teach African American history from a Eurocentric standpoint, then what's going to happen is that you're going to valorize most often European history. history, and that's not what African history ought to be. I should not pick up a book on African history and read, for example, that David Livingstone was the greatest person who ever lived in Southern Africa. That doesn't make sense. But there are history books that do that.

So that's the problem. So how do you change that? You change that by demonstrating the tremendous heroism of African history.

heroics and values and activities of the people who lived in that region, you see? How we can be trapped by language and symbols. When you hear someone say universal man, that's a problem. It's not just a problem Afro-centrically, but it's a problem of gender, but it's a big problem.

When someone talks about the foundations of the Middle Ages, and this is one of the things that struck me sitting in my classes in college, people talk about the Middle Ages as if nothing was ever going to change. was going on in Africa. Can you imagine?

You're hearing these discussions as an African student about the knights and all this stuff and you're saying, wait, this is the 1400s. What's going on in Africa? Absolutely, right, of course.

We know that, right? So that means I don't know whether you got that at the Suffolks. You may have got it somewhere else, but you got it right.

It's true. You say, wait a minute. I'm sitting in this class and this European oriented professor, maybe black or white, is teaching me about the Middle Ages as if there are no other Middle Ages. That is crazy.

You have to ask yourself, and that's where the insanity comes up. Black people say, wait a minute. I know there's something going on in Africa.

I don't know what it is, but there must be something. going on somewhere else in the world, right? That's where the Afrocentric idea comes in.

It says, wait a minute. There are things going on in Asia in the 1400s. I mean, China is not just sitting over there doing nothing. So what we ask, and this is why, you know, in a sense, I see this as a...

A powerful way to try to understand reality is to open up our minds to knowledge so that we all understand that we all bring things to the table of humanity. There's not just one. plate on the table. There are many plates that can be put, but we must allow them. So when we say modern language departments, what do we mean by that?

Every modern language department that I know of has never had an African language in it. They don't teach Zulu, they don't teach Yoruba, they don't teach Swahili, they don't teach Wolof, Hausa. I said, why do you call this the Modern Language Department? Password question.

to me. And I raise this question to deans, to professors, they can't explain it. Well, we just don't have, we don't teach that, but you know, we just teach German, Spanish, French. modern language, you see.

So, this is the issue. World great books. I'm not going to go through that. You know the whole notion of canons.

Ballet, the classical dance. Ballet is European classical dance. There are other classical dances. The Kete, my middle name, Kete is a classical dance of the Asante people of Ghana. Kete.

So, now here's the situation. So, So Europe takes all the space by saying, well, we got classical dance. Everybody else, we got folk dances.

That's not correct. All people have dances and art forms that they feel could be emulated by other people. That's what classical means.

But it is not for people to assume that... that what we call ballet is the only classical dance and that the Japanese don't have classical dance or the Chinese don't have classical dance. How can you assume that?

How can you make that kind of statement? This is the grabbing of everything. The obligatory point of entry for whites in movies, with the exception, perhaps, of the Black Panther, but we'll see that when it comes out. Okay, now, location and position.

We can never be sure that our place is secure enough. We are self-choosing. This is for African people.

African people must be able to, at least, in a class, take... Take a class on mathematics. The first calculator in the world was an African calculator.

48,000 years ago, the Africans and Swazi, the Swazi people created the Limbombo bone calculator. 28,000 years ago, another African people, the Ishungi people of Congo created the Ishungo bone calculator. This is mathematical history.

But I'm sitting in the class as an African student. I don't know. know Ishongi, I don't know Swazi, my teacher obviously doesn't know it.

So I'm sitting up in there as if I have to go get something which is already a part of my heritage. That's great, that's where you get insanity. You see? That's crazy.

Because we don't know. That's why we have been, you've been shut out away from that, okay? But knowing the concept of place helps us to determine argument logic and so forth.

so forth. Elements of place, I don't have time to go through these. History, mythology, ethos, and motif.

Afrocentricity is an orientation to data, like Marxist theory, deconstruction theory, development theory, or post-colonial theory. It is not data itself. It is an orientation to data, how you look at it.

It's a perspective on it, you see. And I always say this, who criticizes Afrocentricity? Some white scholar.

scholars, they say, well, it's anti-white. Some black scholars, they say it's all about Africa, not about America. Some liberals, they say it's too collective, it's not individual enough.

Most Marxists, they say it's about culture and it's not about class. All conservatives, they say it's radical, it's going to destroy our value system. All reactionaries, they say it's too progressive because we need to go back to the status quo.

quote anti. And they're all black conservatives. They say it's separatist. And they say it's separatist because their location most often is inside the Eurocentric framework and they cannot imagine that African people could be off of the plantation. So it's normally criticized because it's a new departure in analysis.

It is at the intersection of race, sex, class, and culture. contemporary American society, and it insists that human values must not be neutral, but vigorously anti-racist and anti-sexist. It insists on putting the African interest in the center of the narrative. All language reflects the ruling classes in America.

Good English is never that spoken by African Americans or Korean Americans. This is not a matter of ethnicity, but of cultural origin. African language is the root of all of this.

language is the creativity of American speech. And I always say this, that I believe that the most fundamental contribution that African Americans have made to this society, well there are two really, music and speech. Because it's in those categories that you see the creativity of all these hundred different African ethnic groups coming together and being able to speak with each other. Because of Igbo and the Yoruba and the Wolof and the And the Asante do not speak the same languages.

And yet when we came together in America, we had to learn to understand each other. And then we had to learn to speak to the European overseer. That's just like if you had French, Swedish, Polish, German, and Italians on a plantation and their overseer was a Chinese. And they have to learn to speak with each other.

and then they have to learn to speak with the Chinese. That was what confronted Africans when we came to this continent. Power determines the condition for interpretation of reality. Buffalo Soldiers and the American West, I always talk about the Buffalo Soldiers because even though they were important for the Civil War, they were used for purposes of fighting with the native peoples. Christmas Addicts, who was a...

the first person to die in the Boston Massacre. This black man, Christmas Addicts, was supporting the Americans, but there were black people, more than 3,000, who fought on the side of the British, who fought as loyalists to the government of Britain against the American colonists. And those black people were rescued in New York City and taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

They're still up there, some of the descendants. And then... the Alamo, this is talking about history and power.

The Alamo, when it was seized in 1835 by the Texans, it was Mexico. That was Mexico property. It was not American property they seized. And then, of course, then it was retaken by the Mexicans under Santa Ana. And then, of course, in 1836, you get the settlers under Sam Houston fighting to take it back.

But Mexico, I mean, Can you imagine Mexico lost in the war with the U.S.? It lost almost half of its territory. I mean, Texas was Mexico.

New Mexico was Mexico. Arizona was Mexico. California was Mexico.

All this was Mexican territory, which was lost to the United States. And the United States, of course, invaded and took over their territory. Until the lion learns to write, the hunter will always be the hunter. always be a hero. That is the lesson of Afrocentricity.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I understand there are time for questions. or comments?

Greetings. Greetings. I'm over here. There you are.

First, I'd like to welcome you and your wife to Long Island Suffolk County Community College. Actually, you've been in our discussions for probably over 20 years. I would like to say hello to your wife because I know we used to talk a lot. Thank you.

I want to say in Suffolk County Community College language, hotel. Hotel. My question to you is how can you spend a little bit of time, I think you did, but I want to ask you in terms of education. The education that we're teaching our kids is a model education. But yet the students are multicultural.

Can a mono-education actually work for a multicultural population? No. I'm sorry to be so sharp on that, but you cannot have a mono-cultural education.

system when you've got a multicultural educational body. But it does not make any sense. It is domination.

It is hegemony. It is an imposition on other people. And I think that the best way to have...

have to contemplate any kind of educational experience in this country, which is multicultural and will be multicultural for the foreseeable future, regardless of what Trump does or what he thinks. It's a multicultural country. And if you've got a multicultural country, you've got to figure out how to teach in a way that does not negate the cultural experiences of the other person sitting in the classroom. You've got to do that.

that. It's fundamental. Thank you. Thank you, Malefia Asante, for coming to Suffolk to speak.

I had two questions. Well, I had. The first one was about language and education.

You answered the first one. My second question is how do I engage my peers in political thought that's more Afrocentric and not the Eurocentric? Thank you very much for asking that question. I know him. He He's the guy who walked me over to the building.

Thank you, Victor. Here's how you do it. I think at least one of the ways that you can do it in terms of engaging your peers. I had a good friend. He is a historical personality, Kwame Tore, who used to give one answer to that question over and over again.

He says, you must. organize. Organize, organize. That is the solution to working with your peers.

Now there are a number of organizations that I would certainly hope you would be interested in, and I can share that with you later, but the Afrocentricity International is an organization that has chapters around the world. It's based on the principles that were established by Marcus Garvey of having chapters in every city or town or community of people who are engaged in the process of having some Afrocentric understanding. They study books and articles that are written by people who want to bring about what is called an African renaissance, a renaissance of thinking on the part of African people.

Renaissance is not the African word, but it was a word that was used in 1948 by Cheikh Anta Jope, and people... use it, but a reawakening of African intellectuals and activists toward a conscious approach to science, to math, to culture, and so forth. And we see some good steps already.

Internationally things are happening. The African nations, for example, have just decided to have a common market throughout the continent, where they're going to lower tariffs for all the nations. They're going to try to get rid of visas.

You're traveling between South Africa and Ghana. Why should you need a visa and so forth? Yeah, like the African passports? Pardon?

Just one passport, Africa. It would be Africa. You have a passport for Africa. That's a continent where you can put the U.S., the 48...

states of the U.S. can go inside Africa four times. That's how big it is. It's a massive continent.

And so people are finally getting, and the biggest intellectual movement is Afrocentricity by the way, in Africa. I mean, I'm a university professor at the University of South Africa as a professor extraordinarius, where I read dissertations and do work for them. And South Africa is probably the leading Afrocentric thinking. And nation in Africa because they're thinking after so many years of apartheid, you know, what do we, what have our ancestors said? Because the white minority government gave them the impression black people never thought of anything.

So now they're recovering all this information and knowledge and so on. And I think in black American, African American community, it's happening. It's happening in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. It's an awakening because people are asking Afro- Centrocentric questions. And we should have.

I asked these questions a long time ago, but we're now doing it. But I like the fact that the young people are asking it. If you listen to some of the rap music, you know, they're cautious.

There's a lot of cautious people. So this is... you know they could be maybe they could be a little more conscious in some ways but but Lamar is trying to do his best and some other people are trying to do some things alright thank you Hi.

Thank you for coming and thank you for speaking and dispelling knowledge. It's always appreciated. So my question is one of practicality, so to speak.

How do we take Afrocentricity from a perspective in which we look at scholarly data, like you were saying, to something that we can apply to our current condition as African Americans? You mentioned Africa a lot. Whether it be the advancements that we brought forth to the world or what we've done for culture all these really interesting and meaningful facts but what do we do with those as young African American, black American whatever we want to classify ourselves as especially in an academic sense yeah and in a more practical sense. Yes so like when we were bringing forth a suggestion to bring African or black studies to campus like yeah Last year, it wasn't received well because people didn't see the practical use for such an education. Like, if you cannot be a skilled worker with this education, why is it needed?

So maybe if you can speak on that. That's a good question. Thank you. Very good question.

Thank you very much for that question. Well, to me... And I've been in education a long time. I was thinking yesterday, I've been teaching at universities for 45 years. So I have some views on this, and very clearly...

The most practical education at the undergraduate level is an education that you are passionate about. That's number one. Number two, if a person asks that question, what can you do with it, it could be asked of any subject that is not a vocation.

In other words, so I'm taking... political science. So what can I do with it?

So I'm taking English. So what can I do with it? Anything anyone can do with any degree that is not a vocation where you actually learn a skill like speech therapy or engineering you can do with African American studies. There's no difference. Any job they can get, if you are studying sociology, if you're studying sociology, it doesn't make you a better employee than a person who is studying African American studies.

They can both get the same job when they get the BA. It's the same. There's no... No, always... what I've seen, the agency reduction for not having black studies is most often a resource allocation problem.

They don't want to take resources from other departments to create a black studies program. But there's no reason why a college like this should not have three or four people who are dedicated to African American studies. What is the problem?

I don't understand the problem. It's not a problem. It is a will.

to do it. If a university has a will, one of the most beautiful things, let me just tell you this is a true story. When I first went to Temple to create the Ph.D. program, I was head of the communication department at Buffalo. It was a large department. I was the first African-American ever running that department.

I ran that department until I got the offer to come to Temple. And the president was Peter Leo Koros. He was a second generation Greek.

He said, I want you to come to Temple, and I want you to build the best department of African-American studies in the nation. Because at a university like this, which we're a big urban university, 35,000 students, at that time 19% African-American. He said, we should have the best. So let's build the best. So his will, the will of your president, I don't know, Mr. President, Sister President, Mr. President, if you were here, I'm not talking about you, I just don't know.

It is the will of the administration, working with the deans and working with the faculty, to make this happen. It could happen anytime. So I'm sorry it takes so long to answer your question.

No, that's fine. I like it. Thank you.

I have another question. more so agree or disagree type of situation. So from the little studies I've done, I'm not like a scholar or anything yet, but speaking into existence, right?

The way I view this, and definitely in an academic sense, that our education from K through practically now, when it comes to perspective and theory-based education, it has a purpose of building an individual from the inside out. So what we learn and what we digest in these books, and if it comes from a perspective that does not include our greatness, we are then not great because we're kind of invisible and behind the eight ball in every sense of that phrase. So when you're speaking of the importance.

of Afrocentricity, I just want everyone to leave with that. But do you agree with that? I agree with that, sure.

Absolutely, you should be planning to go to Temple. Any other questions? Thank you all very much. Thank you everybody so much.

Thank you Dr. Asante for speaking with us today about Afrocentricity. Please leave the surveys with the person that's standing by the door on your way out.

Transcript for:Exploring Afrocentricity with Dr. Asante

Transcript for:
Exploring Afrocentricity with Dr. Asante