I can NOT wait to see 
I want to start out today by thanking Dave for the email that tuned me in to this book. I’ve never heard of Mary Lefkowitz before today, but after reading this review in the Wall Street Journal, I think I might just take some time to investigate more of her writings. They definitely seem to be worth the time.
For those of you who (like me) have never heard of her, Mary was a classicist at Wellesley College in the early ’90s, when she began to notice that some “Afrocentric” types were trying to rewrite history. This didn’t sit too well with Mary, what with her being one of those brick-headed “facts-are-good” types and all. Here’s a bit of what John Leo over at the WSJ had to say about it:
During this whirlwind of dubious scholarship, the academic world mostly remained mum, hiding behind the curtain of academic freedom and withholding its criticism lest a statement of simple truth be branded “racist.” For a 1991 column in U.S. News & World Report, I phoned seven Egyptologists and asked whether the ancient Egyptian population had been “black.” Of course not, they all responded, but not for attribution, since, as one said, “this subject is just too hot.”
The scholar who did the most to break this silence was Mary Lefkowitz, a mild-mannered classicist at Wellesley College. Without fully understanding the abuse she would invite by speaking out against Afrocentrism, she accepted an assignment in the fall of 1991 to write a long review of the second volume of Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena” for the New Republic magazine. She was shocked to discover that the Bernal volume, and a stack of other nearly fact-free books on Afrocentrism, had made headway in the schools and even in the universities.
She concluded that the Afrocentric authors regarded history as a form of advocacy: Like other postmodernists, they believed that truth is impossible to know — that all “narratives” are socially constructed and thus possess an equal claim to legitimacy. At the time, traditional scholarship was generally under assault, but the classics were particularly vulnerable, because they purported to study the foundational texts of the West. Attacking the classics as a complex system of lies was emotionally important to those who wanted to take Western culture down a peg. Feelings and politics mattered, not scholarship. As Ms. Lefkowitz puts it: “[Bernal] seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history.”
Read the whole review. I don’t know about you, but I definitely plan on reading this.
