The Emancipation of the Negro and the Negro Spirituals From the Racialist Legacy of Arthur de Gobineau

In terms of what Africa means to millions of African Americans today, the racialist legacy of Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races ([1853] 1915) has followed us. It has followed us via a gene- alogy of African and New World African scholars who adapted Gobineau's idea of black essentialism. This legacy in the thought of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and others is the premise behind Anthony Appiah's com- plaints in In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). Briefly, the problem Appiah identifies is that the Europeanist thought to which these black scholars subscribed left people of African descent with a self-denigrating notion: that we have an inherently (ontologically) distinct history, tradition, personality, and purpose which imprint upon our culture such traits as emotionality rather than intellectuality, sensuality rather than rationality, and inferiority rather than "superiority." While the intent of claiming that blacks were "distinct but equal" was to vindicate and liberate the Negro, these negritudinaires, so Appiah's argument goes, built their new myths about blackness on the foundation of Gobineau and thereby merely relativized the supposed inferiority of blacks

African descent · Argument (complex analysis · Emancipation · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Essentialism · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Sociology · Theology · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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