On Jul 23, 2012, at 10:03 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:
> Peace John,
>
peace
>
> I attended UCLA, class of '99 (I was a transfer student from Compton College and I caught the bus from Inglewood, my hometown, everyday so I didn't know lots of folks).
It's a commuter school. I can't believe Juan Cole and I went there at the same time but I never met him. But then I'm surprised I met as many people as I did.
> Anywho, I signed up for a class with the highly touted British scholar, and expert on all things African, Merrick Posnansky. Prof. Posnansky was about 5 minutes into his first llecture when he calls the ancient Egyptians "Caucasoids." I raised my hand and (politely) challenged him. We went back and forth for some time and I refused to concede. At the end class I stopped at his desk for more debate, after which he suggested that I drop the class. I did, and that was that.
Were you suggesting they were Negroid? Anyway, Merrick was never a physical anthropologist. You may be interested in the physical anthropology chapter in _Writing African History_ although the person who wrote it got involved in the human genome project later and wanted to redo the whole thing based on recent research. Physical anthro is a field that has been changing very rapidly for decades and which can be expected to change rapidly for the foreseeable future.
Also as a Brit he couldn't be expected to share American ideas of race. Prince Charles is a descendant of Pushkin, and therefore from Gannibal, the famous Russian general who was apparently from what is today Cameroon. That of course makes him black under the American "one drop" rule, but I haven't heard anyone in the UK raise objections to his ascending the throne on that basis yet. Even the most ardent critics of the Black Athena thesis would admit that the Egyptians would be black under the American "one drop" rule.
> Around that same time (1999), another highly regarded UCLA professor, Jared Diamond, published his famous book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Chapter 19 is titled "How Africa Became Black." In that chapter he argues that the ancient Egyptians were "white." The struggle continues. kzs
Yeah, well, he's not a physical anthropologist either and his chapter on the Bantu is (I hope) the weakest in his book. Anyway I certainly wouldn't send anyone to his book for an understanding of the Bantu expansion, and I hope the other chapters are more reliable, but I'm less able to evaluate them.
John Edward Philips <http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/philips/>
International Society, College of Humanities, Hirosaki University
"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." -Terentius Afer
<http://www.boydell.co.uk/www.urpress.com/80462561.HTM>
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