THE HAZARDS OF TELLING THE TRUTH

Afrocentrism began on college campuses in the 1980s and gained astonishing momentum with the publication of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" (1989). Though the arguments were contradictory and scattered, the point was that Western civilization had been founded on materials and discoveries borrowed or stolen from black Egyptians.

During this whirlwind of dubious scholarship, the academic world mostly remained silent, hiding behind the curtain of academic freedom and withholding its criticism lest a statement of simple truth be branded "racist". The scholar who did the most to break this silence was Mary Lefkowitz, a classicist at Wellesley College. Outraged by the nonscholarly approach of Afrocentric writers, she somewhat naïvely imagined that facts would put their extreme theories to rest. She noted, for instance:

• Socrates couldn't have been black, as alleged, because his parents were Athenian citizens and blacks, in classical Athens, were not eligible for citizenship.
• Aristotle would have had a tough time stealing his philosophy from the library at Alexandria, since he died before the library was built.

Such arguments went nowhere, Lefkowitz writes, with those who saw Greek philosophy "as yet another case of a colonialist European plundering of Africa."

[after universal vouchers for K-12 we need internet-based college to take professors as much out of the loop as possible]

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