Let us be clear here, Against Race is not a book against all collective identities. There is no assault on Jewish identity, as a religious or cultural identity, nor is there an attack on French identity or Chinese identity as collective historical realities. There is no assault on the historically constructed identity of the Hindu Indian, nor on the white British. Nor should there be any such assault. But Gilroy, like others of this school, see the principal culprits as Afrocentrists who retain a complex love of African culture, consciousness of African ancestry, and belief in Pan Africanism. In Gilroy’s construction or lack of construction, there must be something wrong with African Americans because Africa remains in their minds as a place, a continent, a symbol, a reality of origin and source of the first step across the ocean when they are really not African. But Gilroy does not know what he is talking about here. This leads him to the wrong conclusions about the African American community. The relationship Africans in the Americas have with Africa is not of some mythical or a mystical place. We do not worship unabashedly at the doorsteps of the continent although we have an active engagement with all that it means. Are we always conscious of it? Of course not! You will not find all African Americans walking around the streets of Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles thinking about engaging Africa, yet we know almost instantly that when we are assaulted by police, denied venture capital or criticized for insisting on keeping Europe out of our consciousness without permission that Africa is at the center of our existential reality. We are most definitely African, though modern, contemporary, Africans domiciled in the West.

Actually Gilroy spends a considerable amount of time in this book explaining how race, a false concept, "is understood." He writes "Awareness of the indissoluble unity of all life at the level of genetic materials leads to a stronger sense of the particularity of our species as a whole, as well as to new anxieties that the character is being fundamentally and irrevocably altered" (p. 20). I do not know how Gilroy can move from this position to indict the African people as the carriers of this anxiety about "race," clearly a concept that was never promoted by African people in this country or on the continent. It is essentially an Anglo-Germanic notion, manufactured and disseminated to promote the distinctions between peoples and to establish a European hierarchy, as well as a hierarchy among Europeans themselves. We have no business with any kind of hierarchy; our business for this millennium is the recentering and reordering of the African world’s priorities based on a firm acceptance of Africa’s on role in securing the mutuality of the human destiny.

When a new generation looks upon us, may they look upon this generation of Africans with the pride that comes from knowing that there have been those who stood for truth and right when it was easier to melt into the crowd of turncoats. May that new generation take up the same battles and go from victory to victory until we wipe all forms of human degradation from the face of the earth.

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