An Afrocentric Manifesto by Molefi Kete Asante

Author:Molefi Kete Asante
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Wiley

“Wade in the waters, children, don’t you get weary”

We have been mesmerized, tranquilized, and paralyzed when it comes to the education of African American children. But we must face up to and defy the predictions. That has been our history. How is it that our ancestors built colleges with pennies and dared to call them universities and some teachers and administrators want to say that African American children cannot be motivated?

Symbols of resistance

There is the idea that there are two discourses about multiculturalism. Different adherents to the theory have different views on what it means. There is only one discourse that is relevant to the liberation of the minds of African and white people in the United States and that one is based upon the acceptance of Africa as central to African people in terms of place, location, foundation, history, as the starting point for any discussion. Diane Ravitch argues that there is a pluralist multiculturalism and a particularist multiculturalism. This is nonsense. These ideas exist only in Ravitch’s imagination. Either you are for multiculturalism or you are not. The divisions she advances are really to conceal her position. You either support the maintenance of white supremacist teachings in education or you do not; there is no other possibility. Support of these positions depends upon keeping other people ignorant. Information must be distorted, suppressed, books never written or if written, never published, and if published, banned from the school district. All of the tactics are the tactics of those who prefer Africans on the mental and psychological plantation. Diane Ravitch has been called the leader of the professors who are opposing multiculturalism. But since their positions are indefensible they argue that they are for multiculturalism which means when you read their works that they are for a white perspective on everybody else’s culture. I call these professors resisters because they are attempting to resist the progressive transformation of a mono-ethnic curriculum. The resisters say that Afrocentricity is anti-white. If Afrocentricity as a theory is against anything, it is against racism, ignorance, and white hegemony in the curriculum. This is not anti-white; it is pro-human. Others have written that it brings about the tribalization of America but America already has ethnic diversity; Afrocentricity provides all Americans an opportunity to examine the perspective of the African person in this society. No one raises an eyebrow at Chinatowns in America; it is only when the African seeks to create from his or her center that reaction sets in to deny the transformation.

Pluralism is recognition of our difference. America is already divided if you speak of opportunities afforded in education to children. The white child, by virtue of the protection provided by society and enforced by the curriculum, is already ahead of the African American child in the first grade. We have got to concentrate on giving the African American child opportunity at the kindergarten level. But the kind of assistance the child needs is as much cultural as academic. Indeed, if the cultural information is provided, the academic will follow.

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