IT'S BLACK HISTORY MONTH
MY NEWEST BOOK: "BUILD BACK BETTER": AN AFROCENTRIC PERSPECTIVE WILL BE PUBLISHED THIS WEEK ON AMAZON AS AN EBOOK. HERE IS THE PREFACE:
PREFACE
On the very first page of the Introduction to Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization, Volume 1, Martin Bernal announces:
These volumes are concerned with
two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or
Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian
and Semitic cultural area. I call them the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Ancient’ models. The
‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and
Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of
colonization around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the
native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from
Near Eastern cultures.
Most
people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been
brought up to believe, developed only during the first half of the 19th
century.
The French intellectual, Count Constantine Francis
Chassebeuf de Volney, who was a contemporary of our own Thomas Jefferson,
declared with reference to Black Africa, or African Ethiopia, as he would have
put it: “There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet
barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected
from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of
the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the
universe.” The European ideologues who concocted the Aryan Model were dishonest
scoundrels who sought to provide an alibi for their fellow ruthless barbarians
who had raked in incalculable wealth from their participation in the two
greatest crimes against humanity, to wit, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
the Conquest of America.
I am a person of African descent who was born and raised
in Trinidad and Tobago. After completing my undergraduate studies with the B.A.
(honors) in French and Spanish from University College, Dublin (Ireland), I
returned to the Americas for my graduate work. I earned the M.A. from the
National Autonomous University of Mexico City and the Ph.D. from the University
of California, Los Angeles. For more than four decades I have served my people
as a faculty member of one of the nation’s premier HBCUs (historically Black
college / university), located in Washington, D.C.
The nation’s HBCUs were established by the white ruling
class to help Negroes overcome the curse of Ham, by exposing them to the ways
of Western civilization. The Western civilization envisaged by the white ruling
class is an utter falsehood founded on the Aryan Model. And this “civilization”
is represented by that violent barbaric lynch mob of white supremacists
storming the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021. I am a humanist and an academic;
so it is only appropriate that I confront the abominable fallacy in the arena
of my specialty. It is also of particular relevance that the university at
which I have exercised my profession for over four decades happens to be the
alma mater of our nation’s first ever female vice-president, who is also a
person of African descent.
The Afrocentric perspective presented in my book is
informed by my particular experience as a person of African descent.
IAN ISIDORE SMART
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THE EPIPHANY 2021
