The teachings are sheer fantasy, unsubstantiated by any credible evidence: ancient Egyptians mastered flight with gliders, which they used for both recreation and travel. They invented electric batteries and mastered electroplating, discovered the principles of quantum mechanics and anticipated Darwin’s theories of evolution. Furthermore, all Egyptians were black, and their abundance of the dark skin pigment, melanin, not only made them more humane and superior to lighter-skinned people in body and mind but also provided such paranormal powers as ESP and psychokinesis. Incredible as it may seem, these fallacies are being included in public school multicultural courses in a growing number of U.S. cities and espoused in black-studies departments on some college campuses. The ideas represent the views of extremists within the Afrocentric movement, which is intended to acquaint U.S. blacks with their long-ignored African heritage and raise their pride and self-esteem. While approving of the legitimate aims of Afrocentrism, many educators, both black and white, are concerned that its excesses will subvert the very goals it seeks to accomplish. “It defeats what we’re trying to do because it’s going to be discredited,” says David Pilgrim, a sociologist at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. “All the good reasons why it was proposed are going to come back tenfold as negatives on the black community — and on the black intellectual community specifically.” Pilgrim, who is black, calls the claims of the extremists “pseudoscience” and “reverse Jensenism,” referring to the controversial theories of Arthur Jensen, who argued that blacks were genetically less intelligent on average than whites. Much of the Egyptian lore of Afrocentrism stems from the African-American Baseline Essays, published in 1987 by the largely white Portland, Oregon, school district to encourage multiculturalism. This series of seven essays has since been used as a guide by public school systems in Atlanta; Detroit; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and other cities. Teachers are encouraged to read the essays and incorporate at least some of the material into their lesson plans. The science essay is a strange, error-filled melange of pseudoscience, the Egyptian religion Ma’at and other fanciful ideas, written by Hunter Adams, a former environmental technician at Argonne National Laboratories in Illinois. Yet despite the essay’s bizarre claims, it has been accepted not only by Afrocentric extremists but also by apparently scientifically illiterate school boards. The dissemination of the science essay dismays Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, an anthropologist at Detroit’s Wayne State University who has long lobbied for greater minority representation in science. “The danger of an Afrocentric scientific curriculum,” he says, “is that if you start doing pseudoscience in schools under the guise of getting more minorities into science, you actually end up with fewer minorities in the real sciences.”
