You have not read the book, Black Athena.

You do not know Bernal's academic credentials...Professor Emeritus Ancient Eastern & Mediterranean History - Cornell

Before you call Ward Churchill a fraud maybe you should ask how much of his people the native americans got genocide, so much that their present population is not even at 10%.

I for one don't cater for Ward Churchill's extremism, but when you consider the man in his social and psychological context, the man has every right to hate his perceived enemies.

Imagine 3000 people died on Sept 11th, and that brought about a concensus cry for vengeance upon the perpetrators. Now consider Ward's situation where over 300,000 + of the natives of this country got slaughtered etc, broken treaties, disposession of lands etc and you expect him to be silent and submissive to this Fox News Culture? I am not saying that Ward was right in calling the Victims little Eichmann's, but you at least should consider the man in his entirety before you call him a fraud.

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Newt Gingrich??????????????? who do you hang out with???????????????????????

Before you call Ward Churchill

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Yes, let's discuss Newt Gingrich and Ward Churchill.....

As usual the inability to actually address the topic, even his own topic is the crippling flaw in the Professor's semantics.

Let us know when you actually read the book, that you are referring to as a fraud Professor.

The debate is still fresh within academia and will continue.

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Originally posted by ausar:
Whatever Bernal's credentials, his Black Athena debate was taken seriously enough by academics to respond to. Otherwise if his points were not valid then there would have been no uproar like there was over the whole debate.

The debate is still fresh within academia and will continue.

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It's topics like this that really bother me. I haven't read all of Bernal's work but from what I've seen so far he's a humble man whose words have often been twisted by his opponents. The other problem is the people who attack him without ever having read his material.

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Originally posted by Horemheb:

The book was trash, pure and simple, as are the people who support perverted academics.

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Please share with us, 'exact' details of what the book says, and we can try to work from there. Now, that ought to be a deal, don't you think.

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It's topics like this that really bother me. I haven't read all of Bernal's work but from what I've seen so far he's a humble man whose words have often been twisted by his opponents. The other problem is the people who attack him without ever having read his material.

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I don't know whether Bernal is happy with the response to his work or not, but he has been very helpful in terms of erroding the facade of Eurocentricism simply because he attacked it "from within".

This is the reason for the empty howl's of protest - he is really being attacked as a 'traitor' to the faith.

Bernal is hardly the be all and end all of the anti-Eurocentrists school of history, but the furor still rages over his now 10 year old book, which gets more attention now than when it first came out.

In some ways he gets too much credit and attention, for in many cases, being a Eurasian descent scholar who repeats some of the work of far more important, more original, and more subversive African scholars such as Diop.

Martin Bernal has done fine work. There's really nothing the matter with it. His grandfather was Alan Gardner, a famous and important Egyptologist. He went into other things, but has always been, at heart, an Egyptologist. He knows his Egyptian materials very, very well. And as he started looking at these materials, he became interested in the history of literature dealing with Greek-Egyptian connection. He saw that, as you moved into the 19th century, histories became increasingly distant from what the Greeks themselves said about their Egyptian connections. People imagined that Greece had this wonderful sort of Enlightenment before the Enlightenment. In many senses this wasn't wrong; the Greeks really had tremendous breakthroughs in thinking. But they didn't come up with all of this in isolation. We can't ignore, for instance, Euclid saying that he stayed in Egypt and, after he returned, wrote the Geometry.

A whole bunch of people in the Classics departments have made their careers - and they deeply feel this - the wonder of the Ancient Greeks. They get great joy and happiness from doing this. If you make any connection between Africa and what the Greeks were doing, our Western upbringing can come back to surface in a way people don't realize is taking place.

They don't realize it because they feel they have eliminated racism from their thinking. They're sure that Africans, given different circumstances, would have been just as advanced as everyone else. They don't realize that, actually, Africans were just as advanced. They have, maybe, more continent to move into; they have less dense population and only some areas move into urbanization. Societies develop more oral literature, so they don't have the written documentation—people choose alternative modes to develop their history. And then there's the thought of Egypt was this place that got great but then just stopped, stagnated. And that's not a correct reading of history either. The New Kingdom was doing things that were far different from the Old and Middle periods. Now, beyond the New Kingdom, nobody pays much attention. I want to fix up Civilizations of Africa to go into 7th century Egypt. There are important things, new things, happening there.

Anyway: the idea of all this Egyptian influence on Greece is threatening to people who fear that it challenges Greek uniqueness and originality. I don't think it does at all. After all, human societies invent new patterns through encounter with other societies. What Greeks achieved is all the richer if we understand that they were grappling with ideas from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere.

And then you have a very different reaction from Afrocentrists. Some Afrocentrists are really out there, far beyond left field. Martin and I don't mind that they use our work, as long as they are grounded in the evidence. But Classicists say, well, Bernal is just an Afrocentrist. And he isn't. He's someone who's got real evidence, and who's got a valid critique of European scholarly understanding of Greece over the last century and a half or so. Of course, some of the people he criticizes are among the founding fathers of Classics.

But, yeah, it does look like the Middle Kingdom did have a big impact on the Mediterranean. Maybe there wasn't a circum-Aegean conquest from Egypt, but there was a cultural impact that was later remembered. I think basically Martin has really enriched things.

No need to get hung up on credentials gained from being apprenticed to some "master scholar". In fact, works of real genius and insight are usually produced by autonmous free-thinking minds unpolluted by the conventional "wisdoms" handed down by dull, unoriginal, pedestrian scholars.

Examples:

1)The market economic system that is at the foundations of Western Capitalism was developed by a non-economist named Adam Smith. Adam Smith was a professor of MORAL PHILOSOPHY and JURISPRUDENCE at the University of Glasgow. He also taught rhetoric.

2)The most thorough critque of the economic system known as capitalism was carried out by none other than Karl Marx who was not trained as an economist but as a philosopher. Marx's critique of capitalism was so effective that the Capitalist West mounted very vigorous intellectual attacks for decades on those who adhered to Marx's econmic ideas and sought to qurantine those nations that tried to practice Marxian economics. Cases in point: Cuba and Vietnam

3)The theorist who rescued capitalism from its imminent demise after the big crash of 1929 was John Maynard Keynes who received only a BA in Mathematics from Cambridge University. Nothing more. Keynes's text "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" serves as the foundations of modern macroeconmics. And all the economies of the highly economically suucessful Scandinavian countries have been founded on Keynesianism.

4)Sigmund Freud was trained as a medical doctor but Freud invented the medical field of psychiatry from whole cloth[/]

5) Albert Einstein was trained in experimental physics and failed his doctoral defence. He ended up working as a humdrum experimental physicist in a patent office [b]but Einstein's greatest contributions to physics came from his contributions in theoretical physics--not in experimental physics.

6)Emile Durkheim, [b] the founder of modern sociology was trained in philosophy not sociology. The same holds for Lucien Levy Bruhl a colleague of Durkheim.

7)Thomas Kuhn the author of the very influential "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was not trained in the History of Science but in physics. And he did not receive his doctorate until many years after his famous text appeared.

8) The very influential British philosophers--some say the most influential in the 20th century--Wittgenstein, Russell, and Popper were not trained in philosophy at all but in engineering(Wittgenstein), mathemnatics(just BA in mathematics for Russell) and education(Popper). Etc. Etc. Many more exmaples exist.

On Ward Churchill

The way the remmants of the defeated Native American peoples define "Indian heritage" is by the very controversial "blood quantum" criteria established by the colonial Bureau of Indian Affairs. Given that the BIA doles out "Aid" to the reservations, those in charge see it in their best intersts to keep the numbers potential Indians to a minimum.

Millions of white Americans have Native American ancestry which many don't know about and if they knew couldn't identify the Native American "squaw(s)"(a very disgusting word) that was(were) responsible. In those cases the evidence would just be heresay. No proof would be available.

Example: White American geneticist Mark Shriver only discovered his Native American (and African) ancestry after he did a DNA test on himself.

Example: Most of those thousands of Mexicans who cross the U.S. borders into the U.S Southwest obviously have Native American ancestry but if asked to supply specifics they just wouldn't be able to do so.

Example: The president of Brazil, Lula claims that he has African ancestry but he looks white. I doubt, he could prove it--except maybe with a DNA test.

In fact, the University of Colorado admits that it cannot "nail" Churchill on scholarship(the man has written over 20 books) and heritage claims(the call is theirs to disprove that he has some Native American ancestry), so they are now mounting a "plagiarism charge".

The Moral of the Above

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Originally posted by rasol:
Linguist & Professor Christopher Ehret on Martin Bernal:

Martin Bernal has done fine work. There's really nothing the matter with it. His grandfather was Alan Gardner, a famous and important Egyptologist. He went into other things, but has always been, at heart, an Egyptologist. He knows his Egyptian materials very, very well. And as he started looking at these materials, he became interested in the history of literature dealing with Greek-Egyptian connection. He saw that, as you moved into the 19th century, histories became increasingly distant from what the Greeks themselves said about their Egyptian connections. People imagined that Greece had this wonderful sort of Enlightenment before the Enlightenment. In many senses this wasn't wrong; the Greeks really had tremendous breakthroughs in thinking. But they didn't come up with all of this in isolation. We can't ignore, for instance, Euclid saying that he stayed in Egypt and, after he returned, wrote the Geometry.

A whole bunch of people in the Classics departments have made their careers - and they deeply feel this - the wonder of the Ancient Greeks. They get great joy and happiness from doing this. If you make any connection between Africa and what the Greeks were doing, our Western upbringing can come back to surface in a way people don't realize is taking place.

They don't realize it because they feel they have eliminated racism from their thinking. They're sure that Africans, given different circumstances, would have been just as advanced as everyone else. They don't realize that, actually, Africans were just as advanced. They have, maybe, more continent to move into; they have less dense population and only some areas move into urbanization. Societies develop more oral literature, so they don't have the written documentation—people choose alternative modes to develop their history. And then there's the thought of Egypt was this place that got great but then just stopped, stagnated. And that's not a correct reading of history either. The New Kingdom was doing things that were far different from the Old and Middle periods. Now, beyond the New Kingdom, nobody pays much attention. I want to fix up Civilizations of Africa to go into 7th century Egypt. There are important things, new things, happening there.

Anyway: the idea of all this Egyptian influence on Greece is threatening to people who fear that it challenges Greek uniqueness and originality. I don't think it does at all. After all, human societies invent new patterns through encounter with other societies. What Greeks achieved is all the richer if we understand that they were grappling with ideas from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere.

And then you have a very different reaction from Afrocentrists. Some Afrocentrists are really out there, far beyond left field. Martin and I don't mind that they use our work, as long as they are grounded in the evidence. But Classicists say, well, Bernal is just an Afrocentrist. And he isn't. He's someone who's got real evidence, and who's got a valid critique of European scholarly understanding of Greece over the last century and a half or so. Of course, some of the people he criticizes are among the founding fathers of Classics.

But, yeah, it does look like the Middle Kingdom did have a big impact on the Mediterranean. Maybe there wasn't a circum-Aegean conquest from Egypt, but there was a cultural impact that was later remembered. I think basically Martin has really enriched things.

Now, as for the linguistic materials: some Greek words are going to turn out to be early borrowings. I want to get together with Martin on this issue. There are definitely word borrowings from Egypt into Greece, and there's certainly a lot vocabulary that comes from ancient Semitic languages.

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You started a thread about Bernal yet you veered off onto Ward Churchill. He is irrelevamt to Bernal so here's my final comment on your claims:

1) I have read all of Churchill's internet available articles and nowhere does he claim that death camps were Jewish propaganda. Sources and citations please? On the contrary, he's quite harsh with those who are referred to as "holocaust deniers".

2) The media is made up of news reporters who know nothing about genetics and geneaology. So I doubt they could prove the following negative:
"WC has no Native American ancestry".

And by the way I have looked closely at WC's phenotype on the internet and although these are mere impressions there's something about it--a je ne sais quoi--that diverges from the European norm--as in the broad brow and overly straight hair.

Your point about the "warrior" nature of the Native Americans is amusingly ironic. It's like the story of the hunter who shot an elephant from 200 metres away and claims--"wow! he put up a great fight".

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Lamin writes: You started a thread about Bernal yet you veered off onto Ward Churchill.

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because he hasn't read Black Athena; isn't familiar with Bernal's thesis, and therefore can't refute it?

Let's help him change the subject:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
lamin...the University of Oklahoma has a tremendous series on Indian history in America. With what they had to work with the Indians put up a hard and admirable fight to defend their way of life. There is honor in defeat if the fight is well fought. They made us earn every mile of north America and they are hardly victims.

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Then you should admire Africans even more.

The plan of the whites, from south Africa and Rhodesia [Zimbabwe], to Namibia, Zambia and up thru Kenya, was to marginalise [read: genocide] the Natives whilst colonising the lands with ever more white settlers.

But Africans defeated the settlers in Nation after Nation.

Africans beat them in open warfare;

broke their morale;

defeated them with international economic and diplomatic pressure.

The reason you hate Africans is precisely because Africans defeated European colonialism.

Admit it Professor: You'd hate the "Indians" too, if they were taking back their land and driving the European colonists off of it.