The Chauvinism We Hate Isn’t Our Path, Either : Afrocentrism: Is it any wonder that a people so marginalized would turn to black nationalism?

It was enough to make one an Afrocentric.

I’d walked into New York’s famed used bookstore, the Strand, to find a copy of the long-out-of-print “The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois,” edited by Julius Lester. While I could borrow one, I considered my personal collection incomplete without the essential compilation of works by one of the greatest American intellectuals of the 20th Century.

After a fruitless search through the store on my own, I caught a salesclerk on the fly, “Du Bois, hmmmmm,” he paused, standing at the top of stairs he was about to descend when I stopped him. He winced, furrowing his forehead, then shifted his eyes from side to side as if scanning the space between his ears for information. None existed, at least on this subject. “I’m sorry, that name’s not triggering anything for me.”

I looked at him wide-eyed for seconds. If I had been in one of those chain bookstores in a mall, I wouldn’t have been surprised by his response. But I naively held higher standards for the Strand, a bibliophile’s paradise. Besides, it was African-American history month, a time when even mall bookstores exploit the annual bow to black culture and history.

I gave him a sound bite on Du Bois: Harvard-educated sociologist, historian and editor, whose writings spanned about 60 years; co-founder of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People; peace activist, and the intellectual bridge between the militant, African-American human-rights activist, Frederick Douglass and the modern civil-rights movement.

The clerk looked at me with the same vacant stare I’d get two other white salesclerks later. “Well, I couldn’t help you with that,” he said. “I work downstairs in the Americana section--you know, people like Benjamin Franklin.”

The last time I was shocked by such ignorance from so unexpected a source was nearly two years ago, while watching the erudite, conservative commentator, William F. Buckley Jr., in an exchange with a guest on his television show. He arched an eyebrow, then asked, “Who is Harriet Tubman?”

The guest was Lynne V. Cheney, who chairs the National Endowment for the Humanities. She and Diane Ravitch, now an assistant secretary of education, were lamenting with Buckley the findings of a study documenting how woefully ignorant American 17-year-olds are. Even Cheney looked taken aback by Buckley’s ignorance.

Euro-Americans with the most primitive knowledge of African-Americans usually know about Tubman and the underground railroad, that organization of safe houses that provided an escape route for enslaved blacks from the South to the North. Tubman, after escaping from bondage, repeatedly risked her life to return to the South and free hundreds of blacks via the underground railroad.

Black essayist Stanley Crouch, a favorite of neoconservatives, often cites Tubman as an example of the great American pioneer woman; a national metaphor whose application should not be delimited by color. But the blank Buckley drew strongly suggests otherwise.

It’s no wonder that a people so central to the American experience yet continually marginalized, as African-Americans are, turn today to a philosophy resurrected from the ashes of an old black nationalism: Afrocentrism.

In theory, Afrocentric scholars argue that black history must be examined from the vantage point of those who created and experienced the culture, rather than from outsiders. Afrocentrism rejects a Eurocentric frame of reference and argues, most significantly, that the origins of Western civilization are not Greek but African, specifically, black Egyptian.

To the extent that Eurocentric scholars have allowed for at least the influence of Egyptian civilization on Greece, they dismiss the argument that the Egyptians were black. They tend to hypocritically accept the little-dab’ll-do-you school of genetics for African-Americans--any known or perceptible Negroid ancestry makes one black in America--but not for the ancient or contemporary Egyptians who descend from Negroid peoples who mixed with non-black invaders.

This American concept of “race,” as it regards African-Americans, is scientifically bogus, but it is central to the debate about “black” influence on Greece. Yet Mary Lefkowitz, the Wellesley College scholar who attacks Afrocentrism in the Feb. 10 issue of the New Republic magazine, says that she never took this notion into consideration.

After we’d discussed it during a telephone interview, she told me, “I never considered . . . this was one of the underlying premises” of the Afrocentric argument. As a scholar of antiquity, she looks at the world in a colorblind fashion, just as the ancients did, she says. The one-drop-in-the-bucket theory of descent for American blacks is “bizarre” and should have been abandoned after the Civil War, she asserts. But it’s a reality for African-Americans--ask the Census Bureau.

“I’m white,” says Lefkowitz, “I don’t think that way myself (about black identity) and I never had to personally confront it.”

We live in parallel universes, blacks and whites. But within these spheres, as well as when they intersect, there exists a common culture by now as fundamentally shaped by Afro-Americans as it is by Euro-Americans. Such a view of American history leads me to an embrace of multiculturalism, which, in my reckoning, synthesizes the best elements of nationalism and the cultural synergy that represents the best of the melting-pot ideal.

Too much of Afrocentrism reflects a dangerously romantic nationalism. The often prescient Du Bois, who both sought black power and honored a liberal idealism that transcended color, was ever vigilant against the dangers of black chauvinism. In 1933 he warned that there are those “who will want to say that the black race is the first and greatest of races. . . .” We cannot entirely escape this, he said, but “we can refuse deliberately to lie about history.”

Though white arrogance and ignorance nudge me toward it constantly, I reject Afrocentrism because I hope to see future generations of black people empowered, worldly and liberated from the kind chauvinism we view with righteous contempt every day of our lives.