African Diaspora Studies and the Lost Promise of Afrocentrism

Abstract

contributions of a multigenerational group of Black scholars, who do not all define themselves as anthropologists but make use of anthropological tools, guided by the “faith” that anthropology has “relevance to the liberation of Black people from the devastating consequences of over four centuries of white racism” (Drake, quoted in Walker 1978, 76). As an anthropologist and organizer who was both radicalized and professionalized in the wake of spectacular Black deaths and the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, what I find most generative in this essay is Walker’s insistence that “there is fertile ground for anthropologists to plow that really needs plowing” (Walker 1978, 83). I understand this statement to be an invitation to re-center the goals of Black liberation in Black scholarship, to interrogate the question of what it is that anthropology can materially do for Black people (if anything), and, returning to “The Virtues of Positive Ethnocentrism,” to audaciously love our folks out loud. In two months of quarantine and another two months in the streets, the most hopeful I have felt about the prospects of Black freedom was in those jubilant moments shouting “I love being Black.” Black people are dying, slowly and quickly. We are also always struggling, surviving, loving, and creating the new worlds we envision. As Walker’s scholarship continues to teach us, to be positively ethnocentric, to be one who “gratefully and ecstatically participates in [the] many manifestations of that cultural orientation,” is and must be joyful selfdetermining kin-work (Walker 1991, 24). To imagine oneself as contributing to the liberatory struggles of one’s people is and must be an act of pleasure. To like it, to love it, to be pleased by it, is enough.