We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism

209 Pages·2001·2.8 MB·English

by  Clarence E. Walker

We Can’t Go Home Again:
An Argument about
Afrocentrism
Clarence E. Walker
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
We Can’t Go Home Again
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We Can’t Go Home Again
AN ARGUMENT ABOUT AFROCENTRISM
Clarence E. Walker
1
2001
3
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2001 by Clarence E. Walker
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
isbn0-19-509571-5
Book design & composition by Mark McGarry
Set in the Scala family of types
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Paul Goodman, professor of history,
and Jacquelyn Mitchell, director of
African-American studies
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Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by them-
selves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when
they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in
creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such
periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits
of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle
cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world his-
tory in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”
Karl Marx,
the eighteenth brumaireof Louis Bonaparte
. . . when you give Negroes the facts in their case, they call for flat-
tery and misinformation.
Carter G. Woodson
When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippman
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
xi
Note on Usage
xv
Introduction
xvii
part one
If Everybody Was a King, Who Built the Pyramids?
Afrocentrism and Black American History
1
part two
“All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man,”
or “Not All Knowledge Is Power”
83
Notes
133
Index
165