From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3360
Date: 2000-08-22
----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Monday, August 21, 2000 7:18 AMSubject: [tied] Bernal.To be fair, Bernal is by no means a militant Afrocentrist. Being a white British-born and Cambridge-educated academic whose one grandfather was Sir Alan Gardiner, he's hardly the right type, socially. He is cautiously silent on the question whether the roots of Ancient Egypt were in "Black Africa". His theory is simply that the cultural contribution of Egypt to the development of the Classical civilisation was enormous and that this fact has sytematically been ignored or downplayed by Eurocentric scholarship. But he's an imaginative writer; and in trying to prove his point he has created a myth which -- in a much cruder form -- has been claimed by more radical ideologists as their own and "corrected" by emphasising the "blackness" of the Egyptians, the alleged civilising influence of Bantu culture on Egypt or whatever.PiotrThis is the first time I've had opportunity to respond to my experience with Bernal's theory. Quite seriously, you don't know how baffled I've been in the presence of black women who insist that Egypt was a very black culture -- as a matter of *race* -- and insist that anyone who says anything to the contrary is a nazi fascist racist pig. The same goes for the idea that the original Children of Israel who did the Exodus out of Egypt were also 'black', in the US sense.Right-wing Republicans in the US vaguely refer to this theory, but don't understand; it's sort of like Mormans explaining the pre-Columbian Aztecs.