Eurocentric Worldview Research Articles

The Significance of Afrocentricity for Non-Africans

Each country of the world is a unique composite society with a diversity of races and cultures. People originally migrated to different continents and countries, bringing cultural traits from their homelands. Each culture's diversity has been at the center of the making of this multicultural world. However, the assumption that being civilized and culturalized is acting European is still deeply rooted within prevailing universal social notions. That belief is based on a Eurocentric worldview, which has sought to a very great extent to colonize and enslave people of other races. This Eurocentric worldview hypothesizes that because non-Whites are different, they are inferior. To be superior means to be the same as the White ethnic group. I grew up in Japan reading Story of Little Black Sambo, drinking the juice whose trademark is a Black minstrel, and playing with a Black stereotyped doll. I had never realized that those products were an insult to Africans until I became aware of race problems by studying ethnicity and actually living in the multicultural society. Most Japanese people believe that Japan is a homogeneous country that disregards other Asian and indigenous populations, and therefore, it is not necessary to deal with racial and cultural issues. The Japanese distorted perception of Africans and African

From complicity to coherence: Rereading the rhetoric of afrocentricity

Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentricity offers an analysis of the role of Africa in postmodern history that calls into question many of the basic assumptions of Western thought. Critics of Afrocentric thought contend that it advocates a wholesale rejection of Eurocentric worldviews and illustrates an underlying paradox that emerges in much postmodern thought: the complicitous acceptance of the assumptions of essentialism. This essay explores this paradox by illustrating the common grounds of Afrocentric and Eurocentric thought, the extent to which each way of knowing is implicated in the other, and the possibility of moving beyond the complicity of essentialist epistemology to a coherent integration of opposites.

Afrocentricity as an Alternative World View for Equality

An official goal of the social work profession is that of equality for all. However, social work's ability to achieve this goal is hampered by the Eurocentric world view, wherein reality is structured to emphasize fragmentation, conflict, and domination, which foster inequality. A better philosophical ''fit'' for social work is the Afrocentric world view. Its view of reality that underscores interdependency, collectivity, and spirituality places it in an excellent position to promote equality. Social workers are encouraged to apply the Afrocentric paradigm to transform social work from a profession primarily concerned with direct practice to a social movement of equality and justice.

Blues, History, and the Dramaturgy of August Wilson

August Wilson's dramatic project is comprised of a cycle of plays explore some of the historical choices have confronted African Americans during the twentieth century. Wilson contends the black community currently is floundering because it has failed to turn to its history for strength or guidance: ... blacks in America need to re-examine their time spent here to see the choices were made as a people. I'm not certain the right choices have always been made. That's part of my interest in history--to say Let's look at this again and see where we've come from and how we've gotten where we are now. I think if you know that, it helps determine how to proceed in the future. (Powers 52) Although the process of empowering the African American community through history appears relatively straightforward, it is potentially problematic, since traditional historiography is the product of a Eurocentric world view valorizes white men. Because the cultural experiences of marginalized groups like African Americans have been interpreted by historians according to the values and ideals of a white male culture, the recovery and, indeed, the revaluation of African American history demands an alternative method of inquiry, one is distinctly African American. Perhaps it is not surprising, considering Wilson's functional aesthetic as well as the limitations of historical discourse, Wilson claims his project is entirely based on the ideas and attributes come out of the (qtd. in Goodstein and Rosenfeld C4). For Wilson, the blues are the African American community's cultural response to the world; they are a music that breathes and touches. That connects. That is in itself a way of being separate and distinct from any another (Ma xvi). The blues are a connective force links the past with the present, and the present with the future. The analysis of Wilson's blues aesthetic follows is much indebted to the vernacular theory proposed by African American literary scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Like Wilson Baker provides a broad and open-ended definition of the blues, describing them as an amalgam of work songs, group seculars, field hollers, sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald humor, elegiac lament, and much more' (5). The blues, rather than being a hybrid of European aesthetic forms, constitute an expressive matrix reflects the complexities of African American culture. Their potential as a critical tool in examining African American literature is consequently far-reaching. By using Baker,'s vernacular theory of the blues as its interpretative framework, this study offers an R.S.V.P. to his invitation to inventive (14). I specifically seek to explore how Wilson's plays function as a cultural trope foregrounds the marginalization of African Americans in order to reawaken cultural consciousness. History theoretically is an open-ended discourse does not constitute reality but provides a meaning, or an interpretation, of past events by an objective observer. In practice, however, historians subjectively choose and arrange events to reflect their own cultural experiences, making the so-called objectivity of history a fallacy. In constructing American history, for example, historians (the majority of whom have been white male Protestants) have valorized white male settlers and marginalized women and people of color. As such, American history tends to be the story of religious men willed by God to tame a savage land devoid of humans and human institutions. Whereas Puritan and Pilgrim settlers (and their descendants) function as subjects in this narrative, marginalized groups such as African Americans play supporting roles. Wilson's dramaturgy challenges the secondary position of African Americans within American history by contextualizing black cultural experiences and, in turn, creating an opportunity for the black community to examine and define itself. …

Empowerment:

It has been twenty years since Robert Hill's seminal research on Black family strengths revolutionized the perceptions, attitudes and modalities related to the coping abilities of Black people. His findings were instrumental in effecting changes in a body of knowledge from one that focused on a monolithic, ethnocentric deficit model to one that affirmed strengths within an historical, culturally diverse conceptual framework. Much of the information available is theoretically based on the Euro-centric worldview resulting in limited use, acceptance and credibility among social work practitioners, social policy analysts and social work academicians. This paper revisits the literature relative to the strengths of Black families. Utilizing recent works of Billingsley (1990), Boyd-Franklin (1989) and others, the strengths of Black families will be re-examined for the purposes of comparing Hill's strength model with the contemporary model of African-American families and its implications for social work education, practice and policy. Additionally, new imperatives are described that possibly will insure African-Americans greater power and control over life situations in the decade of the 90s and into the twenty-first century.

Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World.

The American Educational Tradition: Hostile to a Humanistic World History?

trism in textbooks and the lack of systematic teacher training in the field. But these issues need to be seen in the larger context of American educational history and philosophy wherein the more subtle biases toward Euro-centric world views have emerged. Such analysis and changes in teacher preparation are both necessary if a truly humanistic and integrated world history is to come about in the schools. Almost from its beginnings, historical writing in the West has been caught in a paradox. Because Herodotus and his successors were creating a new way of organizing what they saw around them, they were unaware that as they sought to record facts objectively, they were unconsciously using the norms of their own civilization as the basis for all civilizations. Herodotus presented the histories of Egypt and India as exotic deviations from Hellas. Western historical writers from Augustine to Toynbee have continued to draw that same invisible line separating the civilized West from the alien others of Asia, Africa, and the pre-Columbian western