5/17/98
Classicist Mary Lefkowitz has learned to expect controversy when she visits a university campus, and there were those at Colorado State University May 7 who were eager to supply it. 
     Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College, came to Fort Collins to talk about her book, Not Out of Africa, which discusses the historical background for Afrocentrism. She identifies one major source as a 1731 French novel, Sethos, by Abbe Jean Terrasson. This fictional tradition of ``Egyptian mysteries'' is the one Mozart drew on for his opera The Magic Flute. 
     But it has another line of descent, through Marcus Garvey and a widely read book, Stolen Legacy, by George G.M. James, which claims that ``the Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but the Black people of North Africa, The Egyptians.'' 
     That summarizes two tenets of Afrocentrism; that the achievements of classical Greece were either massively borrowed or stolen outright from Egypt, and that the Egyptians of that time were ``black'' in the modern sense of the term. 
     Most classicists believe neither of those claims is plausible, given the historical evidence. But they recognize there's room for debate, and books like Martin Bernal's two-volume Black Athena has generated plenty of it. Lefkowitz and a colleague have recently edited a collection of essays critiquing Bernal's work, Black Athena Revisited. 
     People should be able to disagree civilly about such things, but some Afrocentrists believe the only reason their views are not universally accepted is that generations of white scholars have covered up the truth because they are racists. 
     That's not a scholarly claim; it's a slander. And it leads to ugly talk, as it did at CSU. 
     One man accused Lefkowitz of believing that ``anything significant comes from white Europeans'' and from Africans nothing. 
     ``I suppose the pyramids were built by extra-terrestrials,'' he sneered. ``They couldn't have been built by black folks 'cause they're not that smart.'' 
     Nothing Lefkowitz said warrants such a comment. ``It's a racist notion,'' she said, ``lumping all Europeans together. And I'm not a European, I'm an American.'' 
     That brought hoots and catcalls from a group of young people seated together at the back. 
     ``You're Americans too,'' she told them. 
     ``Noooooh'' they chorused. 
     ``I don't know what an American is,'' one said. ``It's a thief.'' 
     Another said ``The bottom line is your book is a brutal attack on my people, intended to wipe us off the face of the earth.'' 
     Eurocentrism, said another, ``is still flooding our schools full of lies.'' 
     Yet another took offense at the term Afrocentrism, and said it should be called African-centered thought. 
     ``I'm tired of bastardization of what is true and what is real,'' she said. ``We have had European lies rammed down our throats until we choked. 
     ``My babies can't even graduate unless they study European history.'' 
     When she blamed that on ``your schools,'' Lefkowitz objected. 
     ``They're not `my schools,' '' she said. ``That's racist.'' 
     ``I am a racist,'' the young woman said. 
     At that point the group stood up and started to walk out. 
     If you haven't spent much time on campus recently, and maybe even if you have, this mockery of civil debate is startling. Lefkowitz said after the talk that it was comparatively mild compared with some campuses she's spoken, and it's true they did let her finish her speech without interruption. Clearly, though, nothing she said got through to them, because they've never learned to distinguish between reasoned argument and personal attack. 
     I suppose, though I do not know for certain, that these young people are students at the university. If they brought their bigotry and their ignorance with them to campus, and CSU has not been successful in eradicating either, that's sad. If their college experience is nurturing bigotry and ignorance, that's worse.