TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826102.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.3 KB | 158 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 19

CONTROVERSIES

The Provocative Professor


A black historian draws fire for racist and anti-Semitic remarks,
but followers defend his Afrocentric theories

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York


    The professor offered the following observations:

    -- "Russian Jewry had a particular control over the
movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together
a financial system of destruction of black people." This was "a
conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood"
by "people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani . . ."

    -- "Rich Jews" operating in Seville and Lisbon and Hamburg
and Newport, R.I., and other cities financed the African slave
trade.

    -- Whites are "pathological," "dirty," "dastardly,
devilish folks."



    Leonard Jeffries, chairman of African-American studies at
New York's City College, put on a surreal performance. For long
stretches of his speech before an Empire State Black Arts and
Cultural Festival in Albany last month, Jeffries made an
intense and affecting case for blacks to study African history
and learn the buried side of their own stories in America. But
he kept veering obsessively back into a snarling racism. Strange
to watch: the intelligent angels of his nature were wrestling
with nasty little cretins. The cretins won a few rounds.

    Diane Ravitch, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, is
a "sophisticated Texas Jew," Jeffries said, "a debonair racist."
He repeatedly called her "Miss Daisy." Historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., who has written against Afrocentrism, is "a
weakling . . . slick and devilish." White people, including
"very nice white folks," "distort history in what I call racial
pathology. They are as diabolical as that." Jeffries sang out
falsetto imitations of various Jews and other whites, manic
little strokes of mockery and emasculation. Through it all, he
invoked the liberating powers of truth. When he was finished,
the audience gave him a rather tired standing ovation. He had
gone on for almost two hours.

    At first, Jeffries' speech escaped wider public attention.
Then NY-SCAN, the state's cable-television channel, broadcast
the performance, and the New York Post published a long account
of it. That set off an indignant debate that had larger
implications.

    The first question: Are Jeffries' moments of flamboyant
malice protected as exercises of academic freedom? New York
Governor Mario Cuomo was not sure. First he said Jeffries' rant
was "so egregious that the City University ought to take action
or explain why it doesn't." Cuomo later backtracked and defended
Jeffries' "freedom to abuse ((freedom))." New York Times
columnist A.M. Rosenthal was not ambivalent. He placed Jeffries
in the dreary international tribe of bigots -- Hindus paranoid
about Muslims, white South Africans who proclaim black
inferiority, Jew baiters everywhere. In the Washington Post,
critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, "Talk such as Jeffries engaged
in at Albany has nothing to do with `ideas' -- it's bigotry,
pure and simple."

    But Jeffries had a following well beyond the academic
community. When he returned to New York from a trip to Africa
last week, nearly 1,000 of his supporters greeted him at John
F. Kennedy International Airport -- far outnumbering the handful
of mostly Jewish protesters who had turned out. One pro-Jeffries
placard said, WELCOME HOME, BLACK PRINCE. A supporter declared,
"Jeffries is exposing the big white lie." Another added: "The
attack on Dr. Jeffries is an attack on Africa. It's an attack
on all of us." The placard that received the loudest applause
said, WHITE PEOPLE PUT JEWS IN THE OVEN, NOT JEFFRIES. Later in
the week, more than 1,000 people showed up at a pro-Jeffries
rally in a Brooklyn church, where they cheered a videotape of
his speech.

    The hating part of Jeffries may not represent the opinions
of most American blacks. But a cloud of black-white cultural
politics -- sometimes ugly, sometimes rather sad -- swirls
around him. Possibly the professor subscribes to what might be
called the Guidelines of Slur Compensation, whereby every
vicious, ignorant remark ever uttered over the centuries by a
white American may be repaid by a similarly ignorant viciousness
mucked back in the opposite direction. Yin and yang -- every
Black Devil has a mirroring White Devil.

    Jeffries serves up outrages of pseudo scholarship that
sound sometimes as if they originated in the lodge hall of Amos
'n' Andy's Mystic Knights of the Sea -- a rich irony in which
Jeffries, a black foe of racism, makes himself sound like the
Kingfish, a racist invention of whites. Blacks are "sun people,"
Jeffries explains, and whites are "ice people." New York Newsday
quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, "Our thesis
is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal
hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans,
colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world
history." Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment,
gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.

    If Jeffries were a tenured white professor peddling race
hate tricked up as learning, would he be more furiously
criticized? Or less? Another C.U.N.Y. professor, Michael Levin,
has, outside his classroom, preached the racial inferiority of
blacks without being dismissed from his post. Perhaps that is
because, as a lone academic crank, he speaks for no coherent
movement and has no following. Jeffries marches onstage in all
the panoply of Afrocentrism.

    Afrocentrism is a culturally passionate and sometimes
intellectually troubling development that is becoming something
like a new religion in the African-American community. During
his Albany lecture, Jeffries spoke feelingly about the need for
black Americans to look into the past for their heroic selves.
One important component of Afrocentric scholarship is a
political-cultural exercise that attempts to appropriate the
civilization of ancient Egypt as a black African phenomenon.
Everyone must have his memories. Saul Bellow wrote once that
they "keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." If some
scholars doubt that Egypt is the black American's true memory,
still, maybe memories can be invented.

    The real history of blacks in America, of course, is
abundant and rich and suffuses the entire culture: the texture
of the U.S. is infinitely more black African than it is French
or German or Scottish. And the real history of whites in America
is far grimmer than the standard textbook version: it is more
than a moral inconvenience that Washington and Jefferson were
slave masters, and the national myth has never been rewritten
to take full measure of the fact. Indeed, a dirty secret of all
humankind is that everyone's roots are primitive and
disreputable. The appalling 20th century slaughters accomplished
by the European ice people suggest that they have not entirely
improved on their cave-dwelling, fur-bearing, head-bashing
ancestors.

    Perhaps two spiritual imperatives are at war in the
conflict over Afrocentrism and American blacks. On one side is
everyone's need to make myths. On the other is the absolute
necessity to stop lying.