And, of course, he would have been hounded off campus, if only by black students, had he been a white racist making comparable crazed comments about African-Americans.
New York magazine contributor John Taylor contended that Jeffries “would never have been given administrative responsibility and authority had he not been black. ”įor espousing what he feels are the “real issues, ” Jeffries has been portrayed in the press as a racist using questionable scholarship to attack whites, especially Jews. Nobody wants to deal with the real issues. “But there is an intellectual dishonesty when people really don ’t like what is being taught here. “We ’re talking about the African origin of human kind, the African evolution of society, the African civilization in the Nile Valley, the African fusion of culture with other people, the stolen legacy of the Greeks, the African foundation of Christianity and Islam, the African factor in Islam, the development of Africa in Europe and the development of Africa in the New World, ” Jeffries commented in Emerge. In his capacity as a college professor and also as a speaker in public forums, Jeffries has stood as an exponent of several controversial theories: that the presence of different levels of melanin -a skin coloration pigment -has caused biological and psychological differences between blacks and whites that the slave trade was run and financed by wealthy Europeans, including Jews and that Africa ’s role as a force in the creation of modern Western civilization has been systematically undermined by white, Eurocentric historians.
“It also has highlighted the growing concern for … black scholars who are now subject to ridicule and branded as incompetents and anti-Semites, as well as being second-guessed by those who object to blacks reexamining world history and offering a dramatically different perspective on the African impact on society. His career as chairman of the Department of African-American Studies at the City College of New York has “given a sense of urgency to the notion of expanding African-American studies in classrooms everywhere, ” according to Emerge correspondent Michael H. Vilified in some quarters as a racist and demagogue, Jeffries has also been hailed as an educator who uses his classroom to raise the consciousness of African Americans.
Leonard Jeffries and his ideas about race, history, and cultural politics have caused a raging controversy both in the halls of academia and in American society at large.
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