From The Dartmouth Review
A Book Review by A. S. Erikson
History Lesson: A Race Odyssey
Mary Lefkowitz
Yale University Press, 2008
I recently heard in passing that Aristotle stole all of his philosophical teachings from the library in Alexandria. Being not completely ignorant in matters of antiquity—and something of a contrarian by nature—I was intrigued partly by this claim, but even more by the fact that I had never heard this view of history before. I was so intrigued that I googled ‘Aristotle’, ‘stolen’, and ‘Alexandria’ in the hopes of finding out more. This led me to find Mary Lefkowitz’s newly published book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.Lefkowitz is an Emerita Professor of Classics at Wellesley College. The book recounts the 1990s face-off between herself and a member of the Africana movement: Tony Martin, a professor in the Africana Studies department at Wellesley. The Africana movement was in the business, beginning in the late eighties and continuing through the nineties, of advancing not only the Aristotle fallacy but of claiming that Western Civilization itself came from Africa. The argument advanced was one of cultural, not biological, history. The Greeks had stolen all of their ideas of note from Africa.
For proponents of the Africana movement, Aristotle is a fraud and Socrates was a black man. Lefkowitz, upon learning of “The Stolen Legacy” theory, was, in turns, dumbfounded and appalled. In 1992, she penned a review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena for The New Republic entitled “Not out of Africa: The Origins of Greece and the Illusions of Afrocentrists.” The event marked the beginning of Lefkowitz’s Long Road. History Lesson is the story of her ugly confrontation with Martin and his movement; yet, it is also about—paradoxically—the future of history.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly was the Africana movement, and what was the agenda they were pushing? The movement was concerned with revising history. The confrontation described in the book is primarily concerned with the proper way to study history. On the one hand, Lefkowitz maintained that history must be backed up with relevant facts, but her opponents saw history as an area perfect for the sowing of the ‘noble lie.’ This is the sort of lie that would make whole races feel better about their own history. The movement was composed of pseudo-intellectuals and academics (e.g. Bernal was tenured at Cornell University).
This movement was not interested in scrutinizing past scholarship, like how past scholarship downplayed Greek sexism or xenophobia. No, unlike modern scholars who try to “set the record straight,” the Africana movement was creating its own past; they were attempting to causally project themselves back into the past. The project was not merely about propping up their own insecurities, though: “In the introduction to Volume 1 of Black Athena, Bernal admitted that his project had a political purpose, which was, ‘of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.’”
The writers of the Africana movement stand in stark contrast to Lefkowitz, who is consistently—and perhaps a bit frustratingly—non-confrontational in her writing. In the New Republic review that started it all she objected to Bernal’s view of history, putting forth her own: “All these civilizations . . . like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.” Instead of rebuffing the Africana movement’s claim outright, she welcomed them to the fold, claiming no one had a special claim to ancient Greek civilization.
Nonetheless, Lefkowitz was concerned with the claims being advanced by Bernal and others:
As I saw it, Bernal’s book presented a serious challenge, both to the basic narrative of ancient history and to the whole purpose of studying the past. If I read him correctly, he was saying that one shouldn’t study history to learn what had happened—because—it was impossible to discover all the facts, especially in the case of the remote past—rather, the best one could do was to offer a “plausible” account. The role of the historian
was to assess the various “competitive plausibilities” and pick the one that was most persuasive.But how to decide which was the most plausible? Bernal seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history, a project to revamp the past in order to bring about social change in the present. To Bernal, the Egyptian pharaohs could “usefully” be called black, because, presumably, today a lot of people wanted them to be black.
With her characteristic understated way of putting her concerns, she continues:
I was uncomfortable about Bernal’s competitive plausibility method, because it
was fundamentally subjective. If Bernal or I could simply rewrite history to
bring about the social changes we desired (and I felt sure that I hated the
racism in American society just as much as he did), then what was to stop the Ku
Klux Klan from rewriting the history to suit their nefarious purposes?
At Wellesley the movement’s representative was Tony Martin, whose class “Africans in Greece and Rome” was the beachhead at the college for Bernal’s and others’ writings. When some classics majors were upset by the lies being spread by Martin, they took their complaints to the President Nan Keohane, who “advised them to consider Tony Martin’s feelings. “He was on his own,” Lefkowitz said, while Lefkowitz herself had the support of tradition and the classics profession. The events are completely surreal; the college President tells students to beware a faculty member’s feelings because he practiced poor scholarship. Lefkowitz wryly writes, “I couldn’t help wondering why we were talking about feelings instead of historical values.” Martin was repeatedly coddled by the college’s administration.
As Keohane demonstrated by her fear of confrontation, one of interest-group-intellectualism’s unintended consequences is the utter stifling of intellectual debate and the installment of a constant fear: fear of what one says, fear of what one writes, even fear of what one thinks. It is the fear that anyone—even a liberal professor—can be branded as a racist reactionary.
All of this sounds a bit odd maybe—hardly innocent—but, after all, it’s a debate about ancient history. Yet, there was an even darker side to the movement, a side steeped in and stained by anti-Semitism.
The attacks from the Africana studies establishment were appalling to read about. At a debate Lefkowitz participated in at the University of San Diego, her counterpart, Dr. Khallid Muhammad, called her “Dikeda Left-o-witch.” She was a “homosexual . . . imposter man . . . imposter Jew” and a “hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating . . . something . . . something . . . so called Jew.”
Another disturbing element to emerge in Lefkowitz’s narrative is the students’ (and others’ as well) inability to tell a work of scholarship from a thinly veiled polemic. At first I chuckled aloud when she recounted how a student pointed to the number of footnotes as proof that The Secret Relationship Between the Blacks and Jews was not anti-Semitic. This is a book claiming that Jews dominated the slave trade and were the predominant slaveholders in the American South, all of this and more at a time when they were mostly confined to ghettoes in Europe. The laughter subsided as this tactic was used again and again to defend the above work—anonymously authored and published by the Nation of Islam—and others.
The Africana movement was perhaps the logical endpoint after several decades of multiculturalism occupying the apex of university chic. The establishment can tell everyone how special their culture is for only so long before people start reflecting on the fact for themselves. All cultures were not created equal, and to claim so downplays the incredible achievements of ancient Greece or Arabia during the Middle Ages.
Lefkowitz recounts all of these events from her past deftly and clearly. The tone throughout is neither one of sentimentality nor one of outrage, but one of bafflement. Her narrative easily keeps the reader’s attention, but the book is about more than Lefkowitz’s encounter with the Africana movement. This book is about two issues: first, the balance between political correctness and intellectual inquiry, i.e. how to keep campus debates both intellectual and civil; second, the extent to which the long-time virtues of history (clear argument, evidence, and attempting to recount reality rather than fantasy) are under attack in the academy.
As Keohane demonstrated by her fear of confrontation, one of interest-group-intellectualism’s unintended consequences is the utter stifling of intellectual debate and the installment of a constant fear: fear of what one says, fear of what one writes, even fear of what one thinks. It is the fear that anyone—even a liberal professor—can be branded as a racist reactionary.
All of this sounds a bit odd maybe—hardly innocent—but, after all, it’s a debate about ancient history. Yet, there was an even darker side to the movement, a side steeped in and stained by anti-Semitism.
The attacks from the Africana studies establishment were appalling to read about. At a debate Lefkowitz participated in at the University of San Diego, her counterpart, Dr. Khallid Muhammad, called her “Dikeda Left-o-witch.” She was a “homosexual . . . imposter man . . . imposter Jew” and a “hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating . . . something . . . something . . . so called Jew.”
Another disturbing element to emerge in Lefkowitz’s narrative is the students’ (and others’ as well) inability to tell a work of scholarship from a thinly veiled polemic. At first I chuckled aloud when she recounted how a student pointed to the number of footnotes as proof that The Secret Relationship Between the Blacks and Jews was not anti-Semitic. This is a book claiming that Jews dominated the slave trade and were the predominant slaveholders in the American South, all of this and more at a time when they were mostly confined to ghettoes in Europe. The laughter subsided as this tactic was used again and again to defend the above work—anonymously authored and published by the Nation of Islam—and others.
The Africana movement was perhaps the logical endpoint after several decades of multiculturalism occupying the apex of university chic. The establishment can tell everyone how special their culture is for only so long before people start reflecting on the fact for themselves. All cultures were not created equal, and to claim so downplays the incredible achievements of ancient Greece or Arabia during the Middle Ages.
Lefkowitz recounts all of these events from her past deftly and clearly. The tone throughout is neither one of sentimentality nor one of outrage, but one of bafflement. Her narrative easily keeps the reader’s attention, but the book is about more than Lefkowitz’s encounter with the Africana movement. This book is about two issues: first, the balance between political correctness and intellectual inquiry, i.e. how to keep campus debates both intellectual and civil; second, the extent to which the long-time virtues of history (clear argument, evidence, and attempting to recount reality rather than fantasy) are under attack in the academy.
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