Afrocentric Education

Criticisms of the monocultural focus of the curriculum, "Eurocentric hegemonism" in schools, and the damage done to the psyches of African American students form points of departure for Afrocentric education reforms. According to this perspective, schools decenter and demotivate students of color. Their textbooks, courses, and pedagogical practices maintain a patterns of white hegemony. For the culture being transmitted by schools is based on traditions and images representing and favoring white students. Given the fact that the curriculum is based on Eurocentric assumptions, schools are not bastions of intellectual and cultural neutrality. On the contrary, in their omission of cultures of color, they practice "cultural racism," which according to Camille A. Clay, is "a belief in the superiority of the Eurocentric cultural heritage. Curricula that omit the contributions of minorities are culturally racist." Such racism is discernible in textbooks' omissions of the contributions of persons of color to world civilization and American society.

This goal of equal representation of racial and ethnic groups remains a core feature of multicultural education proposals. Advocates of an Afrocentric curriculum take this feature in a particular direction; they construct a causal relationship among portrayals of black history, low self-esteem and educational underachievement. The remedy, they suggest, is the infusion of an Afrocentric perspective throughout the learning process.

As Cameron McCarthy and Michael Apple write: "American education took a decisively more culturalist approach to schooling in the mid-seventies, partly out of a dissatisfaction with structural economic explanations of schooling and society." These critics claimed that schools fail students more through cultural omission than commission. Many teachers, they charged, ignore group-specific cognitive processes, the experiences students bring to the classroom, and the implications of the school's own cultural practices for different learning styles. The genes of the victims, that is, those forced to underachieve, are then blamed.

These remarks capture a basic theme of the cultural nationalist approach to black liberation. Culture is to be the starting point of all educational and political organizational efforts to liberate black Americans. Crucial to this objective is the claim that American culture is racist, oppressive, and psychologically destructive of black Americans.

Cultural-educational proposals for black liberation can be found in "black nationalist" writings in the 1960s as well as in the works of late nineteenthcentury Pan-Africanists and mid-twentieth-century "black cultural nationalists." Afrocentric education reform represents the most recent reappearance of black cultural nationalism. One of its foremost advocates, Molefi Asante, presents Afrocentricity as "an ideology for liberation" that rivals Marxism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism. Afrocentricity means prioritizing the interests of African people in all endeavors. Nevertheless, for Asante , the infusion of Afrocentricity is not merely a matter of politicizing the curriculum or imposing an Afrocentric perspective on schools. Truth and accuracy in scholarship and pedagogy are also at stake. African-American students are being indoctrinated with false interpretations about the past, and especially about the influence of ancient Egyptian civilization on Greece . Afrocentrists argue that, were the accomplishments of classical Africa to be given a small amount of the prime time that is accorded Europe 's, African-American students would fare much better in schools. More significantly, overall African-American attitudes to self and other African Americans would be positively different.