What are your thoughts on Frank Snowden?

[anansi]

zarahan
As for Snowden, he is a product of his time. His famous "Blacks in Antiquity"
was written in 1970, and his commentary on the so-called "Black Athena
Controversy" of the early 1990s makes it clear he was still stuck in
the anthropological models of the 1960s with its "true negroes" and
"wandering Caucasoids." One he steps outside his area of expertise
in the classics and starts in upon the anthropology of the Nile Valley
or Africa, he is clearly at sea. To his credit, his books can yield
good detail on blacks in Ancient Greece, provided you give his 1960s
"race" model a deep discount.


Couldn't agree more, despite his flaws I still reference his works,as for Bernal what ever his motivation he did bring the subject to national and even international dialog a thing not seen since Diop and Obenga at the 1974 Cairo Symposium,only the breaking news of the discovery at the finds at Qustol came close.

[africurious]

Dec 13, 2011 23:33:19 GMT -5 zarahan said:

Nov 19, 2011 18:08:48 GMT -5 nebsen said:

Africurious,

It has been more than a few years since I've read "Black Athena" which a close friend lent me his two volumes. It was truly a ground breaking, earth moving book coming from a Euro American who I believe is also part Jewish. Academia was quit upset with Mr. Bernal esp. the classical departments around the globe. How dare he even suggest that the ancient Egyptians be Black Africans, even in part.

If I remember correctly, he was saying that the ancient Egyptians were Afro/Asiatics in part because of the ties that the ancient Egyptians had with the Phoenicians & Anatolia regions including Palestine ? By him being a professor of Linguistics he based his theory on common words & branches of language groups he found in the region including of course Greece .

Martin BErnal has not done much for placing Egypt in its African context.
His agenda is altogether different, and some critics say he cynically
piggybacked on "the Afrocentric angle" to gain exposure and
notoriety for his agenda- (the "Black Athena" title would be one
ploy), and then, press and cash in hand, extended his payday by
"distancing" himself from Diop & other "Afrocentrists" thus both
burnishing his "moderate" credentials, and ingratiating himself
with academia at the same time. Bernal himself is on record
admitting that the title "Black Athena" is a marketing ploy. In his
volumes he gives short shrift to the biocultural Africanity of Ancient
Egypt, preferring at the most a thin outline. For all the talk about
"Black Athena" - in 3 big volumes, he produces very little of the hard
data confirming Egypt as an indigenous African civilization, even
though a substantial bloc of data was on hand when he wrote his
tomes.


Scholar Ivan Van Sertima has also taken Bernal to task for
the way he has denigrated DIop and other black scholars- using
their work to ratchet up notoriety for his, while denigrating and
subtly dismissing their contributions. Some blacks I have met on the
college scene a decade ago, seemed to naively hail Bernal as some
sort of Messiah - giving "voice to the voiceless" and "finally saying
what we have been saying all along." But as it turns out they too
have been played by Bernal. Van Sertima saw this clearly. SOme of what
Bernal said is true- such as the existence of a deep-rooted ancient
Greek respect for Egypt, and the rise of a racist/racially tinged Aryan
or Euro-supremacist model in the field that distorts the field. But
some of this work is also questionable as shown in detail by his
critics -- language claims, interpretative claims on Greek texts, etc etc..

And some of his Aryan versus Ancient model is hardly earth-shattering news.
Classics scholars for example have long noted the deep propaganda
pushed by Roman sources- such as biased Roman claims about Carthage
that have come down to us, with relatively little from Carthage (the
loser) to balance the accounts. Eurocentrics likewise in the 1800s
continued the same propaganda tradition - in a different way- but still propaganda,
and biased interpretation and sourcing.
--------------------------------

As for Snowden, he is a product of his time. His famous "Blacks in Antiquity"
was written in 1970, and his commentary on the so-called "Black Athena
Controversy" of the early 1990s makes it clear he was still stuck in
the anthropological models of the 1960s with its "true negroes" and
"wandering Caucasoids." One he steps outside his area of expertise
in the classics and starts in upon the anthropology of the Nile Valley
or Africa, he is clearly at sea. To his credit, his books can yield
good detail on blacks in Ancient Greece, provided you give his 1960s
"race" model a deep discount.

Yes, Bernal hasn't done that much for placing egypt in it's african context but that was never his aim. His aim was to debunk the mainstream history of the ancient world that is held with great certitude by the powers of academia, specifically the falsehood that greeks were pure and did not owe much to egypt and the levant for their culture or technical progress. This nonsense is nothing less than the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy from a social science perspective and goes with the racist ideology that was put forth in biology too (blacks have smaller brains, lower IQ's, etc.). Matter of fact, I don't know what field of study wasn't informed by the racism of the 19th to 20th centuries. This racism has been largely wiped from the other fields but the models are still present to large degree in history, archaeology and the like. This is because these models aren't readily apparent as racist. It seems like just a dispute among scholars until you look into the history of these models and the evidence that rubbishes them. Unlike Snowden, at least Bernal accepts that some egyptians were black and doesn't do mental gymnastics to explain away greeks and romans calling them black. Yes, Bernal's lack of full comprehension of Egypt's africanness pisses me off, but the dude made a great contribution. His publisher wanted the title to sell books, yes, but whatever publishing is a business and he acquiesced to the one place that agreed to put his stuff out. His distancing himself from ppl like Diop really gets me but I find that this is common among scholars who want to portray themselves as mainstream. So they try to distance themselves as "afrocentric" has become a synonym for nut and a catch-all for anyone who is black and says anything against the accepted history of the ancient world and africans place in it. Heck, even Bernal is called an "afrocentric".

Regarding the messiah thing, yea lot's of ppl are sheep so this isn't surprising.

Yea Bernal has made mistakes in his work (was it even possible for him not to given the breadth of fields he delved into and the enormous info he dealt with?). Did he make any egregious mistakes? Some of the critiques against him by those of the lefkowitz ilk don't seem to measure up. If you've got some examples of significant criticisms, i'd be happy to hear them (this isn't a challenge to you--I'm just open-minded and trying to further my knowledge).

[africurious]

Dec 14, 2011 6:03:53 GMT -5 anansi said:

zarahan
As for Snowden, he is a product of his time. His famous "Blacks in Antiquity"
was written in 1970, and his commentary on the so-called "Black Athena
Controversy" of the early 1990s makes it clear he was still stuck in
the anthropological models of the 1960s with its "true negroes" and
"wandering Caucasoids." One he steps outside his area of expertise
in the classics and starts in upon the anthropology of the Nile Valley
or Africa, he is clearly at sea. To his credit, his books can yield
good detail on blacks in Ancient Greece, provided you give his 1960s
"race" model a deep discount.


Couldn't agree more, despite his flaws I still reference his works,as for Bernal what ever his motivation he did bring the subject to national and even international dialog a thing not seen since Diop and Obenga at the 1974 Cairo Symposium,only the breaking news of the discovery at the finds at Qustol came close.

^Indeed, Anansi, that's a salient point.