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Black Athena Revisited: A Review Essay
It is perhaps appropriate that Mary R. Lefkowitz asks the question in the first chapter of Black Athena Revisted, "Are Ancient Historians Racists?" The volume, edited by Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, contains chapters by eighteen authors who are pretty much convinced that few if any of the white historians of the ancient world were racists. Quite predictably, Lefkowitz never really answers the question she sets out to answer in the introduction, and therein is the key to the book Black Anthena Revisted. The book is essentially an exercise to disprove the claims made by Martin Bernal in his monumental work, Black Athena, particularly volume one.
The authors of this volume are essentially agreed that Bernal's Black Athena undercut the rather placid Eurocentric world of classicists who had been content to hide behind the enduring myth of some noble and unadulterated miracle of Greece. But alas, as Bernal discovered in his research, in line with others such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, George James, and Leo Hansberry, the Greeks are but children to the Egyptians when it comes to the production, of knowledge in the ancient world. This is not an anti-Greek position since all of these authors credit the Greeks with extraordinary achievements of their own.
I believe that what is especially troubling to some of the writers of this volume is that Bernal is a European scholar who, in their judgment, should have known better than to open the can of worms of racist research in the classics. It is a case of Bernal being viewed as traitor to the tradition of European and American scholarship that projected the white model of intellectual development as superior to all others and consequently had appropriated so much of ancient classical Africa as part of the "Mediterranean" or "Near East" or "Oriental" world that any disturbance of such a tradition had to be confronted. Lefkowitz started the attack on Bernal with her book Not Out of Africa. Now in this volume there is an attempt to gather additional cohorts to challenge the Afrocentrists as Lefkowitz and Rogers see it.
Nothing seems to bring out the circling of the wagons of Europe more than the questioning of European culture superiority....