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The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism
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# : |
19885 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
5,038 Words |
| Author
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Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante is a professor and chair of the Department
of African American Studies at Temple University. He is the
author of thirty-two books, including three seminal works on
the Afrocentric philosophy, Afrocentricity, The Afrocentric
Idea, and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge |
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., won Pulitzer prizes for his books The Age of Jackson (1945) and A Thousand Days (1965). These works and the Age of Roosevelt, The Imperial Presidency and Robert Kennedy and His Times established him as a leading American historian. Yet Schlesinger's latest book, The Disuniting of America, serves to call into question his understanding of American history and his appreciation of diversity. As a designated great American historian, he is supposed to know something about what he writes. However, one of the most obvious manifestations of hegemonic thinking in cultural matters is pontification. Measuring the amount of pontification in The Disuniting of America, one comes away with a certain distrust of Schlesinger's writing as well as his perspective on American society. This is doubly so if one is an African American.
Schlesinger envisions an America rooted in the past, where whites, actually Anglos-Saxon whites, defined the protocols of American society, and white culture itself represented the example to which others were forced to aspire. He loves this vision because it provides psychological justification for the dominance of European culture in America over others. In his vision, there is little history of enslavement, oppression, dispossession, racism, or exploitation. In effect, there is no disunion in the Union; adjustments need to be made, for sure, but they are minor ripples in the perfect society. Fortunately, many whites as well as African Americans see this vision as corrupted by the arrogance of political, academic, and cultural dominance. How, they ask, can one have such a vision of America with what we know of our history? Yet his is Schlesinger's perspective on American society.
Alas, the vision is clouded by Afrocentrists, the bad guys in Schlesinger's book, who bring disunity to this perfect world. Trapped in his own cultural prison, Schlesinger is unable to see the present American cultural reality, and I believe he has missed the point of the past as well. The evidence suggests that he holds a nearly static view of America. Perhaps the America of his youth--its academic life, social life, business environment, and political institutions--was framed for him in some version of the white American dream.
There is, of course, a nightmarish side to Schlesinger's vision or fantasy. He peoples his vision with negations, colored by axioms that support no truth but that are ultimately structured to uphold the status quo of white male privilege and domination. Had Schlesinger admitted this as a goal of his book, it would have allowed a more honest footing for discussion
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