The newly-founded African-American studies program invited a nationally and internationally renowned orator to speak last week as part of the scholar-in-residence program at Mississippi State University.
Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African-American studies at Temple University, helped to create the first doctorate program in 1987 and is the most published African-American scholar, having written nearly 70 books and published 300 articles.
African-American studies director Stephen Middleton said the scholar-in-residence program is where AAS brings scholars who have national and international reputations in their respective fields to MSU.
“During their period of residency, they are a part of the faculty in African-American studies,” he said. “We hope that during this period of residency that we will build a relationship with [each] international scholar and establish a wonderful relationship with him and our university.”
Asante said his purpose was to discuss the problems of the American education structure, to demonstrate the necessity of AAS and to point people in the direction of Afrocentricity.
Asante said Afrocentricity is about African people being located in a healthy, safe and center position so they will be able to see the world clearly through their own eyes.
“There is no problem with someone from China to have a Sinocentric world view, but the problem is ethnocentrism,” he said. “Ethnocentrism is when you degrade other cultures and you impose your culture as if it is universal.”
Asante also discussed why AAS was not simply talking about black people.
“The first lesson we learned was that African-American studies is not and should not be an aggregation of courses about black people,” he said. “We got to that lesson because we discovered that universities had courses that talked about black people and put them together with the same syllabi that they were already using and with the same perspective that they were using.”
What had happened to the mind of Africans was that their history in the United States was seen in a lockstep way with European history, Asante said.
“However these were two separate perspectives,” he said. “If you are talking about African people, I want to know what the perspective is of the enslaved person because that’s the person who has the problem.”
With Afrocentricity came a whole new development, Asante said.
“Afrocentricity has created so many changes,” he said. “It created a lot of tension and a lot of problems for people because it was African people getting off the mental plantation.”
Assistant history professor Michael Williams said Asante’s lecture was quite informative as he addressed many of the problems associated with the study and teaching of African and African-American history.
“Some of the key points of his lecture for me included his discussions regarding an often lack of appreciation for the cultural and historical significance of Africa’s contributions to world history, structure of knowledge in education, identity and the importance of agency,” he said.
Williams said he believed Asante’s discussion of Afrocentricity was expressed in an understandable way.
“His notion that Afrocentricity is based upon Africans and African-Americans understanding themselves as subjects of their own history and seeing themselves as subjects of their own history and seeing themselves as agents in that history came through quite clear,” he said.
Sociology graduate student Paul Gilbert said he found the speech informative.
“I found that professor Asante made a solid argument regarding the problematic structure of American education, particularly its negation of and marginalization of the black person and the accomplishments of the African world broadly,” he said. “I also found interesting his discussion of how Egypt was divorced from Africa and the purposes that served politically as well as scholastically.”
Gilbert said he attended the event because, as a black person and as a scholar, these sorts of discussions interest him.
“I like to see famous scholars with my own eyes to see what I can learn from their posture and how they present themselves at a public event,” he said. “I have been pursuing a greater understanding of the black position in the West for many years, and professor Asante’s lecture has given me more grist for the intellectual mill.”