Common Values

Molefi Kete Asante's Answer to the Question of Common Values

(At a public meeting sponsored by the Free African Society, October 18, 2003, at the First District Plaza, Philadelphia, Molefi Kete Asante was asked, how can blacks and whites act together to build a common community? Here is part of his answer.)

To act together in society depends upon certain common values toward humanity. White racial supremacy as a doctrine and white racial hierarchy in practice are the twin towers of a code of societal instability. I cannot act together and neither can you to build a world of common humanity with those who do not accept you as human, as equals, as genuine partners in togetherness. Different values always yield different conclusions. I do not like to see the world in binary ways, because I do believe it is far more complex. However, when it comes to the discussion of Afrocentric values and the current Western values that are ruining the national and international community one must seek to launch the most extreme analysis.
Thus, the binary focus can be seen in several dimensions: perspective, agency, and location. These are all locational and locatable categories in the Afrocentric paradigm. Indeed, I am interested in describing how certain perspectives lead to certain conclusions about human beings and human life. This is why the idea of perspective is so important to my discourse. I shall return to this at length.
I am also interested in the agency question because it involves the self generation of ideas, concepts, movements, and all human actions. Agency and actions are intertwined. Finally, the discourse must include the key notion of location, the idea that we must always be about the business of establishing human balance and order in the midst of all chaos. This is not a secret, mystical, metaphysical quest; this is the concrete reality of everyday existence. What many recent converts to grand theories have sought are ways to look at a concept, spiral it up to another level of abstractions, sometimes so they cannot even understand themselves, dress it into some metaphysical or epistemological vocabulary, and announce that they have arrived at a new interpretation. Fortunately, people are concerned about real theories, not metaphysical ones. Few people care about the compatibility or incompatibility of systems of numerology, biological determinism, or theories that have no practical grounding.
What I am interested in is establishing forms of resistance to domination in the concrete sense. I cannot escape the ever present cultural, political, social, and economic vise of the white racial domination in my life and that of my brothers and sisters without some fundamental approaches to my own consciousness rooted in historical and cultural substance. I discover in my search, my own Afrocentric path, a way of determining a response to white racial domination, globalization, and the extension of enslavement without becoming a footnote, as many of our contemporary black philosophers have become, to Plato or Hegel. Indeed, Plato was a student of the African people, and Hegel a racist; a separation of nearly two thousands years did not disconnect the one from the other.
Now the binaries for underscoring the point might be seen in a discussion of the structure of agency, perspective, and location