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Black hair in the United States remains misunderstood and othered against Eurocentric standards of beauty and professionalism as evidenced by the ongoing policing of Black hair in schools and workplaces. The CROWN Act of 2019 was passed in several states to protect Black adults and children from hair-biased discrimination, and was introduced to the United States Congress in December 2019. In September 2020, the CROWN Act passed in the US House of Representatives, however, it has not been passed in the Senate, yet. In this paper, I provide a critical race analysis of hair policies and challenges collected from news articles, the CROWN Research Study, and testimonies in support of the CROWN Act to demonstrate the importance of this bill's passing at the federal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Eurocentric scholars theorize the world in terms of Western evolutionary progress rather than de-evolutionary retrogression, this paper takes a different perspective. Forced to transition away from their tangible and intangible heritages, from their families and marriages, cultures, societies, polities, and economies in ways that legitimized imperial claims to res nullius (unowned resources) and terra nullius (empty land), some indigenous people wittingly and unwittingly increasingly devolved their heritages to the colonialists that benefited from the African transitions. The point here is that unlike "Bushmen" and those that practiced transhumance, contemporary Africans are forced to transition, to change and to transform away from owning and controlling their tangible and intangible resources, including land, culture, laws, religions, polities, economies, livestock, families, marriages, and so on. Whereas "Bushmen" and transhumance migrated and transitioned while retaining ownership and control over their land, forests, livestock, and so on, contemporary Africans are forced to transition in ways that divorce them from their families, marriages, cultures, religions, polities, and from ownership of their material resources. Because Eurocentric forms of transition put African institutions and resources on the chopping boards, we argue that this kind of transition is cannibalistic. Made to believe that transition is easier to accomplish without the supposed burden of repossessing ownership and control over one's resources, Africans are witnessed as disinherited and wandering around the world arguably in ways that even precolonial "Bushmen" and transhumance pastoralists would not envy. There is no justice in "transitional justice" that transitions indigenous people from their heritages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African intellectuals are debating the future of knowledge construction in the wake of the collapse of colonization, European settlerism, and apartheid. Tawanda Sydesky Nyawasha has posited the debate between Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism in his paper "I am of Popper; I am of Asante: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa" published in Studies in Philosophy and Education as an expression of this contested ground. This response article argues that Africans have a duty to interrogate their own epistemological discourses in order to understand the history of knowledge construction on the continent of Africa. As the construction of the first pyramid at Sakkara was a consolidating event of human study, detailed investigations, elaboration of ideas, and advancement of the sciences and arts around 2700 BCE, clearly, African studies should stand at the head of the discourses about knowledge. Therefore, in this response, the author challenges Nyawasha's understanding of Afrocentricity and criticizes the marginalization of African perspectives as just another assertion of Eurocentric ideas as universal when in fact they arise from a specific history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construct of femininity has typically been conceptualized from a Eurocentric perspective as traditional femininity ideology (TFI). This hegemonic femininity construction might not be fully applicable to African American women given their unique history and experiences. Moreover, the strong Black woman ideology (SBWI) which, although formulated during slavery, has become an adaptive and idealized cultural idealization. Both constructs have been associated with stress. The current study sought to investigate the relative strength of the links between TFI versus SBWI and perceived stress among a sample of African American women, and whether these relationships were moderated by feminine gender role stress and racial stress. Participants were 292 African American women recruited via social media and students from a Midwestern university for a web-based survey. As hypothesized, SBWI accounted for unique variance in perceived stress; however, TFI did not explain any of the variance. Results also indicated that gender role stress approached significance in its moderation of the link between TFI and perceived stress, although racial stress did significantly moderate the relationship between SBWI and perceived stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary-critical discourse on the Black Zimbabwean novel constitutes one of several platforms on which the self-other dialectic in Zimbabwe finds expression. This is especially the case at the level of literary-critical theory where the tendency is to advance arguments that frame Afrocentric and Eurocentric literary-critical theories as mutually exclusive. In this article, I explore the scholarship of Flora Veit-Wild and Ranka Primorac on the Black Zimbabwean novel with a view to discoursing the ways in which it can be argued that in their discussion of the corpus, the two scholars are anchored in the Eurocentric framework. In pursuing this objective, I focus on the critics’ reliance on Eurocentric literary-critical theories and apparent discomfiture with Afrocentric benchmarks in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Thus, I argue in this article that while the version of critical discourse discussed here speaks to the complex and contradictory ways in which cultures find places of translation and dialogic engagement where history is made, the overall impression created by Veit-Wild and Primorac in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel is that Eurocentric perspectives are universal, normative, and indispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1906 and 1920, eight of the most prominent Black Greek-letter organizations were established. The creation of the Black fraternity had a dual purpose. First, these organizations were established for the greater purpose of pooling the resources of African Americans in the hopes of acquiring an education. Second, these organizations were formed as an attempt by Black students to gain acceptance into American society. Black Greek-letter organizations are some of the most influential organizations in the country. Collectively, these organizations claim approximately 800,000 members, with many coming from the social elite of Black culture. Despite the great influence and vast membership that these organizations possess, the activities of the Black Greek-letter organization have included secret meetings, selective membership, and a preference for lighter-complexioned members. Moreover, the failure and shortcomings of the Black Greek-letter organization have allowed Black elites to create a separate privileged society based on snobbery and arrogance and have thus enabled these organizations to perpetuate the vicious cycle of racial prejudice and White supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses what justice is and how it is perceived by members in the Black community. The Black community is composed of people of all races and ethnicities who live and/or work in predominantly Black areas. Interviews were conducted and analyzed focusing on this question: “What is justice?” The Black community does not have a monolithic view of the meaning of justice, nor of the process. We interpreted participants’ definition of justice in terms of Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, or simply cultural sensitivity (“enculturated”). The goal of this article is to lay the framework and groundwork for dialogue among and to provide recommendations to scholars and professionals in the allied fields of education, legal studies, and criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the nicknaming of White farmers by indigenous Black people of Zimbabwe as one way through which they expressed their utter discontentment about the way White settlers treated indigenous Black farmworkers and surrounding Black communities during and after the colonial era. It notes that such nicknames played a vital communicative role that reflected the nature of the existing relations between White farmers and Black indigenous people. First, the article characterizes the concepts of naming and nicknaming. Second, it notes that nicknames that were given to colonial White farmers depicted quite variant relations that existed between White farmers and their Black subjects. Grounded on the theoretical framework of Afrocentric theory, the article situates Black people’s resistance to White colonial settlers’ brutality via such communicative nicknaming within the broader context of misplaced colonial perceptions about Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article lays the foundation for how Eurocentric and Afrocentric organizations employ decision-making models differently. An investigation of the archetypes for each organization and its cultural dimensions develops the bases from which to draw conclusions about their decision-making preference. For the purposes here, decision-making includes rational, emotional, political-coalitional, and garbage-can models. This paper also reviews how emotions impact those processes. Findings show that Eurocentric organizations tend toward more rational and political models with strategic use of emotions. Afrocentric organizations deploy more garbage-can or holistic models. When members from Eurocentric organizations employ political models, they aim to please leadership. Members in predominately Afrocentric organizations frown on such behavior. Members from Afrocentric organizations express emotions more freely and with less strategic intent than their counterparts. When members from these cultures encounter each other, having an understanding of these decision-making models may help unpack the negative connotation associated with the concept of cultural baggage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The desperate Eurocentric intellectual undertaking to undermine the Afrocentric conception of reality is not a recent development. It originated the moment Europeans awoke from the slumber of their Dark Ages to find themselves lagging far behind in the march of the world's civilizations. The subsequent expropriation of principles and standards from ancient African civilization, the brazen European abduction of African people into slavery, and the unpardonable colonization, exploitation and dehumanization of African people all concatenate to drive European scholars into adopting an aggressive stance toward ideas that expose them in their cultural, social, political, economic and intellectual nudity. The Eurocentric prerogative to subvert the Afrocentric conception of reality is therefore a struggle for European survival and is inspired by the desire to keep the world misinformed in order that Europeans may escape their inferiority and crimes. This exegesis identifies the disappearance of the slave that Afrocentricity facilitates and the sordid nature of Europe's transactions with non-European peoples in history as the major reasons behind European intellectual discomfiture with Afrocentric principles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Black Studies as Human Studies, a contemporary literary work identified as an African American Studies text, is the focus of this article. That drive to humanize suggested in the title of Joyce's book is maneuvered not by the "particular cultural voice of the composite African" but rather is guided conceptually by Eurocentric constructs. Joyce indicates awareness of the deepseated ethnocentric European structure of human studies in the academy, where the formal bodies of academic knowledge attribute European knowledge as universal, but she works primarily within the confines of a European episteme. Joyce approaches literary criticism from a multitude of currents; her plan, however, is not approached Afrocentrically. Nor is her language along the lines of Afrocentric thought. Because of Joyce's training in the Western tradition and because there are elements of cultural dislocation in this work, Joyce appears to be bipositional, with tendencies toward a multipositional place or location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restorative justice has been suggested as a means to deal with disproportionate minority confinement and other social problems within communities of color, specifically the Black community. However, scholars and practitioners have pointed Out cultural concerns that must be addressed in the restorative justice process. Afrocentric theory and its principles have been suggested as a way to deal with the cultural concerns within the restorative justice process. This article examines the contemporary and historical means of informal dispute resolution in the Gullah Islands of South Carolina. These strategies of dispute or conflict resolution were used to deal with crime, delinquency, civil matters, community grievances, and other social wrongs outside the traditional common and civil legal systems. Through on-site in-depth interviews, focus groups, and an analysis of archival documents, the research determined that the strategies used on the Gullah Islands fell within the Afrocentric restorative justice model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically evaluates the analysis that Gebrehiwot Baykedagn, a prominent intellectual among the early Ethiopians who were exposed to Western education, gives of Ethiopia's social and technological lag behind European countries. It shows how the Eurocentric conception of history prevented Baykedagn from developing any positive view about Ethiopian history and culture and how this failure led him to prescribe wrong remedies despite his remarkable insights into the dangers of economic dependency. The need to get out of Eurocentrism is strengthened by an attempt to approach Ethiopian history from the viewpoint of Ethiopians themselves rather than from European norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine the current phase in the discipline with a projection of what it could be in the future if researchers reevaluate their responses from the standpoint of African people as subjects instead of objects. Research centered on African agency and centeredness asks different questions than does that which views Africans as problems or issues to be handled by Eurocentric examinations. Thus, the building of departments, the administrative unit for programs and disciplines, must begin with the view that African American studies (Africology, Africana studies, Black studies, etc.) is not merely history, sociology, or literature. What researchers in this field do, by virtue of their disciplinary and philosophical orientation, is something entirely different and is based on an exposure to a new paradigm that is deeply embedded in the notion and practice of African agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maulana Karenga ends the "Creative Production" chapter in Introduction to Black Studies with a justifiable, negative critique of literature's modern lapse into types of detachment and personal gratification that are antithetical to the Black studies enterprise. Scholars have embraced this negative critique of the possibilities of literature to contribute to the problem-solving activities of the discipline. Karenga's critique is required study for the discipline as he issues a call for discourse "to provoke and expand the discussion, not to close or avoid it." This essay is a response, provoked by Karenga, that evaluates axiological and epistemological variables of the academy, the discipline of Black studies, and African culture that support the rescue of the literary in Black studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the legacy and current presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the Sorcery of Color as a metaphor for the Brazilian standard of race relations, which transforms a perverse system of racial domination into a pretense of antiracist ideals and establishes what the author describes as the category of virtual whiteness, a fulcrum of identity intrinsically intermeshed with issues of gender and patriarchy. The groundings of Afrocentric thought can be found in the writings and actions of African Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century, and its most articulated expression is the thesis of Kilombismo, developed by Abdias do Nascimento in the context of his work in Pan-African affairs in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing observation by many social scientists is that the method through which European Americans maintain control over society's political, economic, and cultural institutions has mutated. Over the last 30 years or so, Eurocentric domination can be assumed to have mutated away from domination by repression/terror toward domination by seduction. This article discusses five sociopolitical trends through which this mutation has occurred and examines how this transformation has placed African Americans at significant risk of capitulating to Eurocentric domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the concept of Eurocentric discourse on writing. Indication that Europeans are the most literate people; Findings of the alphabet as a superior system of writing; Suggestion that African people are subjected to European ethnocentrism.

Analyzes the development and emergence of Afrocentric, multicultural and postmodern critique of Eurocentrism and the new world order. Development theory of globalism and the new world order; Dilemma of development discourse; Inequalities produced by development theory, globalism and the new world order; Politics of diversity, postmodernism and minority discourse.

Examines the struggle between the ideas of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. Background information on historical origins of Eurocentrism; Analysis of Afrocentrism.