Black History Month: Celebrating legacy of renowned Temple professor Molefi Asante

Also, as part of our Black History Month recognition, we are introducing you to one of America's top 100 thinkers, Malefi K. Teasante, the 83-year-old author of more than 100 books who's widely recognized for his pioneering work in African studies and his commitment to examining race, power, and identity in the world. Our community journalist, Tim Matter, has the renowned Temple University professor in his own words. Hey, hello, how you doing? Good to see you, man. The destruction of ignorance in the United States is perhaps one of the greatest and most sacred activities that we can do. The whole field of Africology as a discipline is something that I was intimately involved with from my student days at UCLA until my professional career. You have to understand that when Africans were taken from the continent of Africa and brought to the Caribbean, brought all over to North America and South American continents, you have incredible diversity. So Afrocentricity was a response to that. Afrocentricity is about re-centering at least our experiences so that our experiences are told from our point of view. The genius of the African in the Americas, there are two aspects of it. One is language, and the other one is music. I teach a grad course. We also interrogate the question of race because race, of course, is a false construction. And it's a false construction because the 230,000 years that Homo sapiens lived in Africa, Homo sapiens knew that there were people of different complexions, but they never ranked them. Europe did that for its own interests. And when it did that, it put Europe always at the top, Africans always at the bottom. That's called the racial ladder. That tells you how you should respond to that person. That racial ladder, to me, is the most dangerous concept in the Western world. Mania, let me give you, this is, that's for you. Those are the three books for you. I've had over 140 doctoral students. I am a very sincere Asantiite. He is a genius. He is generous. And I think he's also a scholar who has influenced people all over the world for decades. I went to Temple exclusively because Dr. Asanti was there. Dr. Asanti was a prodigy. He started his career very young, and he is a pioneer. Earning promotion to full professor at age 30 is just unthinkable for the rest of us. He is probably the most kind person I've ever been around. He's reached out to me more than I've reached out to him. And I don't understand how he does it. I have never won an election that I didn't have a call from Dr. Asanti and his wife screaming on the phone, you won, girl, you won, you Secretary of State, you won. He was always there for me, and he became my role model. He is hands down one of the most brilliant persons on earth. He produced more PhDs in a short period of time in communications than anybody else. He is a model to really combat, confront, and challenge racism. But he leads his life that way. So he is a sincere and true exemplar of the paradigm that he erected. He sees us as these individuals, these independent scholars who are grounded in bringing change. And he's proud of that about us more than anything else. I am always honored to have had many of them in my classes, to debate with them, to have learned from them. And I am extremely proud of them. There were at least 4,000 words in English that came out of West Africa. Okay, okay is a Roloff word. That comes from West Africa. So the lexicon also was important. Dr. Asante told us objectivity is nothing but a collective subjectivity. It was one of the defining moments, I think, of my own intellectual journey. And that happened in a classroom with Dr. Asante literally 20 years ago. He gave me a new way of thinking. Well, your standards aren't judged by some European concept. When Asante comes out with this idea, it made you reevaluate not only what you've done your whole life, but how you've looked at yourself, your community, and the things that you value. And Asante helped us to see that, that the Afrocentric model was not just something to think about, but it was really something to live by. We took the structure of the African languages and we applied those structural elements to English. You said bye-bye. Why bye-bye? Because in the Hausa language in West Africa, you always have the repetition when you want to say it's final. So bye-bye is an African expression in the English language. There's only one human race. All humans derived from Africa. There are no Homo sapiens who did not come from Africa. Of the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have been around, 230,000 years were spent in Africa. It's only 70,000 years ago that Homo sapiens began the out-migration from the continent. So almost everything that we have, the formation of culture, during the period of the Mesuite, which was a period of the formative years of human culture, all of that time was spent on the African continent. Obviously, it's difficult for a person who's putting out ideas that challenge the status quo. In fact, some of his books have been banned. He has given us so much, and he's still writing, thinking, developing thoughts still. The most important thing is good character. That's what I've always taught my children. Yes, I want you to have good grades in school, but I want you to have good character. And good character is at the source of our resilience, you see? The earliest concept about human dignity was an African concept. Protecting the vulnerable. This is a key African concept. The fundamental thing that people tend to want is to have justice and fairness. And the best way to do that is always to defend the weakest people.