(4) a celebration of "centeredness" and agency and a commitment to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people.

There is an Australian poem that was taught in successive editions to primary school children in that country which reminded white Australians that

"We won our land from a nerveless race,
Too mean for their land to fight;
If we mean to hold it we too must face
The adage that might makes right."

This is how people are uprooted against their wills. But Europe makes no apologies to these peoples and whites have made no apologies in the United States for robbing the indigenous nations of their lands. In Africa, they sought to rob the land but found it overpowering and the people resilient on the land of their ancestors, yet Europe left an entire continent moved off of center, off of its own terms, and has repeatedly spoken of a failed Africa, a tired Africa, a HIV-infected Africa, a sick Africa, a despised Africa, and an Africa that cannot get its act together. Of course, for us, Africa must be convinced to do three things: (1) return to a strong sense of cultural identity, (2) create international networks of Africans on the continent and trans-continentally to cooperate on a global level, and (3) place emphasis on teaching children to leap-frog old technologies and finding ways to exploit the new information possibilities with vigor.

In this way we will celebrate centeredness and agency and not dismiss our own ethnicities, histories, and lessons to embrace others. All Africans, wherever in the world, have made valuable contributions to their countries, whether in the West or in Africa, and must be viewed and must view themselves as accountable, responsible agents in the world, not to be acted upon, but to act. Thus, it means that we must build institutions everywhere in our image and in our interests. One thing that happens to a people who lose their god, is that they lose their institutions, their reasons for being, and their language, and you cannot find the proper strength to build institutions until you rediscover your cultural center. Of course, we have many infusions into the African cultural stream and those infusions must be recognized, given voice, and seen as a part of creating a new African reality. Nothing remains exactly the same, but over time changes are often cosmetic, external, not core changing. Wood may remain in water for ten years, but wood will never become a crocodile.

We have been condemned for seeking lexical refinement, but that is exactly the role of any philosophy, to clarify issues, to discover the hidden pitfalls, and to steer people around dangers. You cannot refer to Black Africa and White Africa, you must not speak of Africa South of the Sahara, you should not talk of issues in the West and East as if there is no South, you will encounter an Afrocentrist if you speak of pygmies, Hottentots, and Bushmen. You cannot allow African agency to be assumed by Europe in the construction of science, history, or art. Why should a Nigerian write that Mungo Park discovered the Niger River? Did Livingstone really discover Victoria Falls or did someone bring him to Musi wa Tunya and he declared out of his own arrogance that he would rename it Victoria Falls? We have a big job, but it will be done this millennium.

(5) a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of African people.

Whether we are on this side or the other side of the Atlantic we are an African people. There is no real reason to posit some hypothetical Black Atlantic. The Atlantic is neither black nor white, it is a deep blue. It is an ocean, and an ocean is neither a barrier to human interaction nor is it necessarily a consolidater of the human experience. We remain African though we become Jamaicans, African British, Haitians, African Americans or African Costa Ricans.

We must learn from each others experiences. It is the imposed isolation that has kept us from our true undestanding of ourselves. When the Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin in 1895 wrote his famous book, The Equality of the Human Races, he was defending all black people, those in the United States, Brazil, United Kingdom, and Nigeria, against racist assaults and bias commentary.

I am convinced that the constituent elements for our recentering are rooted in four general areas of inquiry:

Cosmology-- nature of beingness, Ontology, Mythology;
Axiology--nature of ethical values;
Epistemology--nature of knowledge, proofs, methods; and
Aesthetics--nature of creative and economic motifs.

But what are we up against in promoting a mature understanding of how knowledge is constructed in the West to encourage racism? Often we are up against strange and bleak careerists who are writing as if they are writing out of our experiences when, in fact, their aims are totally distinct from the recentering of Africans in a human place.

Periodically there appears a book that runs counter to the wisdom of experience in the African American community. Against Race by the sociologist Paul Gilroy is just such a book. Gilroy, a British scholar, who teaches at Yale University, made a reputation in the states with the postmodern work, The Black Atlantic. I see this book as a continuation of that work’s attempt to deconstruct the notion of African identity in the United States and elsewhere. Of course it runs squarely against the lived experiences of the African Americans. The history of discrimination against us in the West, whether the United States or the United Kingdom or other parts of the western world, is a history of assaulting our dignity because we are Africans or the descendants of Africans. This has little to do with whether or not we are on one side of the ocean or the other. Such false separations, particularly in the context of white racial hierarchy and domination, are nothing more than an acceptance of a white definition of blackness. I reject such a notion as an attempt to isolate Africans in the Americas from their brothers and sisters on the continent, and of course, to continue the separations of Africans in Britain from each other. It is as serious an assault and as misguided as the 1817 Philadelphia conference that argued that the blacks in the United States were not Africans but "colored Americans" and therefore should not return to Africa. To argue as Gilroy does that Africans in Britain and the United States are part of a "Black Atlantic" is to argue the "colored American" thesis all over again. It took us one hundred and fifty years to defeat the notion of the "colored American" in the United States and I will not stand idly by and see such misguided notion accepted as fact at this late date in our struggle to liberate our minds. We are victimized in the West by systems of thinking, structures of knowledge, ways of being, that take our Africanity as an indication of inferiority, something to be overcome. I see this position as questioning the humanity and the dignity of African people. Despite what looks like acceptance of Africans on a political level, it is racist at the core, because it is an acceptance of what whites find acceptable, that is, the idea that certain blacks are no longer Africans. The easiest and quickest way in the United States to assume that position is to say that "you never left anything in Africa" or "you are not an African nor a black but an American" or to say "Africa never did anything for me." You become immediately accepted as an honorary white.

It should be clear that Gilroy’s new book, Against Race is not a book against racism or racialism, as perhaps it ought to be, but a book against the idea of race as an organizing theme in human relations. It is somewhat like the idea offered a decade or more ago by the conservative critic, Anne Wortham in her reactionary work, The Other Side of Racism. Like Wortham, Gilroy argues that the African American spends too much time on collective events that constitute "race" consciousness and therefore participates in "militaristic" marches typified by the Million Man March and the Million Woman March, both of which were useless in his mind. The only person who could make such a statement had to be one who did not attend. Unable to see the awesome power of the collective construction of umoja within the context of a degenerate racist society, Gilroy prefers to stand on the sidelines and cast stones at the authentic players in the arena. This is a reactionary posture. So Against Race cannot be called an anti-racism book although it is anti-race, especially against the idea of black cultural identity whether constructed as race or as a collective national identity.