The very idea posited by Euro- and Afro-centrists (or any individual attempting to idealize a historical group) that a lack of direct statements linking individuals to trends in their society, particularly in societies of which they were a leader, should be seen as evidence of their abstention from those practices isn't just bad source-reading, it's downright anti-historical. If there isn't a record documenting their personal views and policy on a topic, we must assume that whatever their personal beliefs they at least tolerated and abided the norms of their times. Otherwise, wouldn't somebody have mentioned it as being unusual? We can fantasize all we want about historical figures we admire sharing our views and being admirable by our modern standards, but unless there's some documentation to back them they're just fantasies. I might be (and am) fervently in favor of nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, but if I became President of the US and failed to make that a cornerstone of my policy and legacy historians would rightly assume that I was functionally tolerant and in favor of hydrocarbons as a primary source of power for my country. By the same token, if Mansa Musa didn't take action to abolish or reduce slavery in a way which could be seen in the historical records, or make public speeches railing against the evils of slavery and pronouncing the freedom of all previous royal slaves, why should we assume that he was personally anti-slavery? I'm all for humanizing and praising historical cultures and figures as a way to empower people and encourage others to feel self-worth and pride in their heritage. But the emphasis should be on *humanizing*, not idealizing. I don't want future generations to look back at our leaders and see some perfect marble staties to whom all future leaders should aspire, I want them to look back and see humans who made good decisions and terrible mistakes-- both of which can be learned from. Fully in support of you not backing down at all in this. It's all well and good for people to make snide critiques and casual commentary on history on Twitter, but if they want to wade into source-based historical arguments they'd better be ready to put up or shut up and know the rules of the space they're entering.
Thanks so much for the lengthy and detailed post. I fully agree there's a real danger of retrojecting our own ideals onto historical figures, and this has been aa constant problem with Eurocentric history, never mind anyone else. This kind of anarchronism is veryh tempting, but as you note there are very simple ways to check the likelihood (if not certainty), of a historical figure's views. Thank you so much for your support!
@@saratmodugu2721 yes, and I have nearly finished the script. I am taking some time to look at the lexical sources in Arabic, and I have needed some help with that since I have no competence in Arabic.
@@veritasetcaritas btw great video. I stopped taking Greathouse seriously when he started yapping that Europeans didn’t invent a single instrument until the early modern era. Now he’s yapping about chivalry of knights came from arabs that defected from the umayyads to the carolingians after the battle of tours.
I’m Somali and many years ago I started learning about my own country, East Africa and Africa as a whole. So as I was researching I started watching a documentary called Hidden Colours and I thought to myself this is interesting but then it got ridiculous and when they said certain monarchs in the last couple centuries in Europe were black I just turned the documentary off. Like whyyyyyyy? Africa has so many cultures and civilisation why do they need to make up random stuff that has literally nothing to do with Africa in most cases 🤦🏾♂️
Thanks for your contribution! I think people aiming to convince others of Africa's value by trying to connect Africa to European history, have completely the wrong approach and are ironically Eurocentric. Africa has its own value completely independently of Europe.
The thing is while I don’t agree that they were black you also need to understand that many places around the world had PROTO black populations. Take the aborigines, the Melanesians, the sentalese among others. These people got absorbed by other populations and today we only see remnants of them.
@@veritasetcaritas Pas-ta'ai (Chinese: 矮靈祭; pinyin: Ǎilíngjì), the "Ritual to the Spirits of the Short [People]", is a ritual of the Saisiyat people, a Taiwanese aboriginal group. The ritual commemorates the Ta'ai, a tribe of short dark-skinned people they say used to live near them. The ritual is held every two years and all Saisiyat are expected to participate. As I understand it these are not the only people in the world with similar traditions..
It's also easy to conflate time periods. For example, the Moorish presence in Europe and the resultant presence of African descendents through Europe, artwork from the time corroborating. Now does that mean that Black people founded or are responsible for everything European. Not necessarily. It is interesting nevertheless.
The same reason why many Americans try to downplay slavery in their country - both groups over identity with their ancestors (or the people they think were their ancestors, in some cases). They take pride in the ancestor's achievements, and get personally offended when the ancestor's imperfections are pointed out. They feel like they're being personally attacked.
shocking fact , every race owned slaves , and sold slaves , even Europeans sold other Europeans it is how it worked backed then , todays politics dont apply to yesterdays world
An Afrocentrist cited an antiquarian published in 1829 as proof that the ancient Scots were actually Black Africans. She even included a scan of the actual page from the book. The book was, of course, the author's own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. The absurdity of these people is breathtaking.
@BTL_LTW we regard white supremacists as absurd and worthy of condemnation. Meanwhile the internet - YT, FB, even TikTok - is awash with Afrocentric revisionism. Little to none of it attracts the attention of the powers that be.
@@BTL_LTW My previous reply seems to have gone astray, but anyway I have to thank you for wasting 10 minutes and 16 seconds of my life on a video by this Sepehr character (who I had never heard of), most of which is not about Mansa Musa and during which Sepehr never actually claims that Mansa Musa is "white". He obliquely mentions "white Berbers" and raises the issue of "blackwashing" images (a practice we know is common among internet afrocentrists). So once again, thanks for nothing.
I once saw a BBC documentary on Mansa Musa. It was an hour long puff piece praising him as the richest man in history claiming his wealth came from gold mines. The BBC presenter was black, and she NEVER mentioned he was a slave owner. Also, it amazes me the number of people that try to justify inter African slavery saying it "wasn't chattle slavery like in America." I'm sure slaves at the time could have taken comfort if they knew that.
Also, I'm pretty sure that past the initial travel through the Atlantic, American slaves had a higher life expectancy than those that stayed in Africa (we won't even mention those were sent to the Middle East, that truly was the nightmare ending) since they were more expensive to buy due to the cost and dangers of the travel, as such their owners had a greater incentive to have them *not* die, compared to Africa where slaves were very plentiful so replacing the lost ones was less of an issue for slave owners back there. I really don't see how you can gloss over this as if it's somewhat a "lesser evil" when it was something so profoundly entrenched in African societies
I live in a part of Africa where revisionist afro-centrism is almost a religion. I am so happy to see someone who has the knowledge and time to point out the selective nature of their understanding of history.
Haven’t fully watched the video yet but just reading Afrocentrist in title kills me. There is so much history in Africa that’s very interesting and to be proud of its just rarely talked about without glorifying it as more advanced then Rome or the British Empire.
@@veritasetcaritas There defiantly is which is also the saddest part about it. There were civil rights leaders championing this back then with the right direction just from what I’ve read. Sadly when ever this topic gets brought up it always feels like the bad ones get more light for saying pseudo history instead of a more grounded view. Anyway keep up the great work I always love your citations. It feels like I’m back in AP history class getting a mini project that introduces topics I usually would write off as boring or not important.
@@salj.5459 I used those examples only to point out that most the time when Afrocentrism’s like one in the video make claims they usually make general claims like “the Romans were advanced but not as advanced as X African nation” without going into their reasoning. Which it could be true in some regards but that’s far from the points people make like the one in the video.
It's a fricken shame. The history of Africa should be learned about, but GH seems like they are doing a great disservice to it. Mythologizing countries and cultures do no good, only serves to blind us to our faults and history, which serves those in power
@@veritasetcaritas I've heard of the term "narcissistic wound" applying to the ego of individuals, something that hurts our sense of self. I think there is a cultural version of this such that some people belonging to that wounded culture/people will express the kind of narcissistic like behavior that (regarding their history) is seen with GH and others.
@@TheLetsRead adjacent yes, but he strongly rejects the Hoteps. The real issue is that he doesn't post good Afrocentric content these days. He just posts inflammatory content about European history, attempting to rage bait white nationalists.
Most of these afro-centrists cite Musa as some sort of superman, but if he was truly as powerful as they thought he is, his empire would have lasted AFTER his death and the death of his children. Qin Shi Huang died, his children died, but the territorial extent of his empire remained under the Han Dynasty. Meanwhile Musa's empire collapse within a generation of his death.
He has certainly been lionized beyond his historical significance, like many European rulers. However I did find Samuel Isaacs' article much more balanced. www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-myth-of-mansa-musas-enslaved
@@veritasetcaritasTBF to Mansa and European Monarchs like Richard I and Baldwin the Leper King there are many Legendarily remembered rulers that get similar treatment round the Globe, Liu Bei for example in Chinese history in the grand scheme of things didn't do much for Chinese history but was deified, though this doesn't make them not impressive in their own ways, people just idealise them way too much.
@@forickgrimaldus8301 very true, Charlemagne as well. Ironically I think Charlemagne is heroized for the wrong thing; he's typically held up as a great political unifier of Europe, when I think his most important contribution was his support of the Carolingian Renaissance.
@@veritasetcaritas I think he reformed how Latin is spoken too essentially forming the basis for modern Ecclisiastical Latin so the guy did a lot but yeah Charlemagne's "Unification of Europe" wasn't Universal to Europe and didn't really last too long but it did form the basis of Medieval Geopolitics for generations after him, so not as successful in creating a Unified state but he did a lot of other things.
It’s a shame too, African History is genuinely fascinating and interesting , particularly how it much differs from Europe, now everything from European is apparently just from Africa
Alot of it is though. 😂😂😂. You can read the classics and see how many times Ethiopia is mentioned and pick up on how the Greeks and Romans revered them.
@@Ace-sb4il yes a lot of it is. In fact I had to explain to someone recently how much medieval Christianity was shaped by three African theologians; Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine. Their theology has influenced tens of millions of Christians for over 1,000 years.
I am willing to bet every single populist afrocentrist in existence will declare those three Africans evidence of European meddling in Africa, though. All three of them belonged to a church that will *inevitably* be linked to white Europeans.
I used to be a sucker too. Anybody who was able to spout "sources" with names and page numbers and paragraphs, I was sold. Then by chance I went to a lecture and happened to actually go home and check his sources. Well, I was floored when I saw that he had massively skewered the information. Never trusted anything from anybody again without checking the source myself.
Funny enough I recently went down a rabbit hole of witch hunts, mainly studying about Witchfinder General Hopkins, and the reality of what is widely believed to have happened is already bad enough as is that just making stuff up about the history of witch hunts just kind of invalidates what happened
This whole situation stinks of ego, no side wants to back down since backing down means defeat, and the more controversy that is generated the more people pay attention to it, it is vicious cycle that feeds itself and leads to greater feats of idiocy.
To address the wooly mammoth/uhaul truck tweet from the first few minutes. You would stop a 24mph uhaul the same way our ancestors put down a mammoth with a spear. You puncture a vital organ and then follow the trail to your prize. For someone claiming to be afrocentric, he should absolutely know what persistence hunting is. That itself is enough to disregard anything he says, in my opinion.
After he was shown several articles proving he was wrong he backed down a bit and modified his original claim, but later returned to it and doubled down. At this point it was difficult to avoid the conclusion he was trolling or grifting or both.
Persistance hunting is from our current understanding unlikely to have been used in any frequency. No hominid was ever able to keep pace with a large herbivore at flight speed, creating a extremely high risk of loosing sight of the intended prey. Skeletons of prey animals hunted by humans are also mostly of healthy adults in their prime, but persistance hunter would primarily catch juveniles or old and injured animals. This points more towards coordinated ambush hunting, this is also supported by the remains of human made pit traps.
@@lb540 that's not how persistence hunting works. The very reason it works is that you're not trying to keep pace with the animal. Youre following from a distance. Also, sweat glands play a huge role. Can you figure out why?
@@lionelmessisburner7393 yeah the sources may be good. But there are also wrong or outdated sources. And wiki is also very broad when talking about some historic events especially if it's something from before the early modern era.
@@lionelmessisburner7393 when read carefully as a tertiary source, it can be useful as a starting point for sources on a subject, but the sources cited aren't always good quality so they do need to be checked. Perosonally I prefer to look at an online academic bibliography. veritas-et-caritas.com/index.php/research-sources-freely-accessible-online-material/#scholarly_bibliographies
Isn't it obvious that the point of Great House videos aren't made for accuracy. They're made to appeal to emotions because that's Unfortunately what gets far more views and YT revenue
Slavery in Mali ? ? In 1993 or thereabouts I travelled around Mali, Mopti, Djene and the Dogon Country - The Falasie de Bandigara. Travelling from Mopti to the South West end of the Falaise with a truly excellent Dogon guide, Belco Bah, who I belive may have contributed to the Lonely Planet Guide, we passed through a village to buy some fire wood or at least the othet passengers did that were literally crammed with us in the taxi bruse/bush taxi. The inhabitants of this village were a mixture of ethnic groups, Bambara, Bozo, Dogon, Puel, identifiable by their dress. I asked Belco why all these differnt people were living together rather than in their own villages and he told me they were all ex- slaves that had been freed but because they were ex-slaves they couldn't return to their villages so eked out a living selling firewood to passing vechicles like ours. I consider Belco a reliable source of information, so not so long ago, towards the end of the 20th century there must have been some enslaved people around in Mali . Mali is a fantastic country to vist well, well worth any discomfort, the bush taxis by the way are or were the worst of anywhere.
I saw a thread by an Indian that used a “Roman map of the 2nd century” to make the argument that Europeans in the 14th century were inferior sailors. Then he used a map by those inferior sailors to prove Indian nationalism. Then called to throw off colonial perspectives.
@@veritasetcaritasNot to brown-nose even further, but I’m checking out the book which you shared alongside suggesting the article & look forward to engaging with it. Thank you for bringing it to wider attention!
You're work is very much so appreciated and clearly well researched thank you . Video Idea historical Africa clothing and how to adapted it for fantasy shows like House of the Dragon .
@@georgejoestarii9469 No comparison. Those who dig deep trying to seriously debunk flat earth, almost always end up convinced. Afrocentrism comes from inferiority complex.
I really hate those kinds of people, it's so disrespectful to so many great cultures, the history and facts don't matter though only their political implications.
"Did you know there original Irish were Aztecs? No? Research!. No, but research the book i personally wrote. Still dont believe it? Its because you are not ready for the truth." They are always using this pattern.
Now, from what I understand about mimosa, Samosa ruled after the time of Abu Barker and one of the things that Islam brought with it in the area was it did bring in a culture of slavery, but to say that slavery itself wasn’t a feature before the coming Islam to the area would be a misstatement so I think it would be harder to prove that Mimosa did not bring slaves, but I will ask the question what were the conditions of those slaves and we had to understand that the whole area was operating like that for 1200 years I mean, this is before the onset of the Portuguese. So I think that is tougher to prove that massa didn’t or was not involved the slave trade.
You need to better understand and clear up what parts of Africa. In the modern sense, we assume Africa=black. North Africans traded and interacted with European exploration for over 3k years. What we found out is the fact these were Caucasoid peoples. No evidence whatsoever of blacks getting on ships they built and explored the open seas.
Definitions are important. If you define "-centrism" as looking at history through the perspective of that particular demographic, fine and dandy. Each civilization is going to look at events differently. As long as you don't let -centrism give you historical tunnel vision, I don't see a problem. If we define "-centrism" as using history to prove a one group as universally superior to another throughout history, that's cringey as heck and should be disputed regardless civilization it stands for. You get this kind with every historical demographic you can think of. Everyone has a chip on his shoulder from some past slight in history, quite obnoxious.
I find it much more interesting that slavery was so common in Mali that at one time one of the most powerful men in Mali, a general, was a slave at the same time. Why does this matter? Because of what it says about the institution of slavery and how much its personal implications varied from society to society.
I do tend to believe the extreme numbers of slaves mentioned, at this time massive slave caravans were moving from sub saharan africa to Libya and from there to the entire Arab world (which in part fueled the Hasj rebellions) slavery also takes different forms, from Roman practices we know that some slaves would carry far more weight due to who they represented than any free person could hope to have, if the personal slave of Marcus Aurelius enters a jewelry store and he wants to buy a piece that the wife of a senator is planning to buy as well the shopkeeper is absolutely going to sell to the slave and the wife of the senator would probably be totally ok with it since she would also know who she'd be offending if she'd even complain. On the other hand it doesn't matter who your master is if you are a slave in a silvermine (asside from paying restitution for dammages to their master when hurting these slaves) Mali was absolutely a slave society and in fact the Portuguese addopted west African (and perhaps arab) practices when they developed the early plantation slavery. Had African slavery been lighter even personal as a rule they would not have sold them to Europeans after finding out the purpose. (looking at Ottoman- Arab slavery the divide in treatment was mostly ethnic based on price, attraction and abbilities. (black male slaves were used to work hard labour on farms and in mines, black female slaves were used as nursery maids, european and other white varieties were more of a status symbol and that counted tripple for females, males captured in battle were often used as galley slaves which shows that ethnicity allone was not everything.
@@MrSporksterThat’s uncharitable to the extreme. I hope that OP is able to provide you with a more nuanced framework of the subject & the individuals who have attempted to articulate it.
This video is a good example of why you should read your sources carefully and try to find other sources that backup the claim rather than just taking it as face value.
It a shame that African (especially northern and western) history get ruined by popular history stuff like Afrocentrist or the people acting like "Africa doesn't have that munch" because there is some cool stuff like the three kingdoms control a big potion of west Africa.
It's not like any oppressed peoples, black people, Jews, who can be also Black, are inherently morally better than peoples that oppresse them. It's a matter of circumstances and opportunities and interests.
They are not morally better, but they have historically been treated cruelly in ways which significantly disadvantage their modern day descendants. This is not the case with many other groups.
@@veritasetcaritas yes, and today many Black African leaders and the South Africa communist party support Russia's war against the people in Ukraine, Jews, Romani, tatars, Ukrainians and others. I'm a queer child to Jews from USSR Ukraine.
@@veritasetcaritas how are black people disadvantaged nowadays by historical oppression which everyone basically faced and most of which they inflicted upon themselves?
We can't be exactly sure, but historians make estimates of how many were likely to have been killed in such cases without being recorded, and add that to the estimated total. So the scholarly consensus includes executions for which we have no evidence and which may or may not have happened. It's a deliberate over-estimate of the most likely total figure.
You've clarified the record, mostly by repeating points you'd already made explicit in your original video. I hope you realize this is an exercise in futility. "Great House" will not concede nor discontinue the slipshod quality of his work, and will continue to misstate and mischaracterize your critiques ad infinitum. I'd suggest you ignore any response he may offer and simply move on. Otherwise, it will undoubtedly devolve into something neither constructive nor pleasant.
I don't think he will respond to this video, but yes I agree there's no point in pursuing these points with him. I may make additional videos demonstrating his reserach errors on other sujbects, such as failing to identify when he is using an oudated source, or using a work of fiction as if it was a work of history.
Yes I noticed he went quiet but I was surprised to see him actually lose so many followers throughout the year. I don't think this is explained by his brief hiatus.
The only real attention i ever gave to that user was when they claimed that Humans didn't hunt Mammoths despite the almost absurd and easy to find amount of evidence that suggested otherwise. Im fairly sure to this day that they still think Humans didn't hunt them, or at least they aren't completely convinced.
Yeah at first I think they realised they were wrong, and started backing off, but when more people called them out for it they reversed strategy and doubled down.
I appreciate you didn't fall down the culture war rabbit hole. I was expecting this video to go along the lines of: "tHiS wOKe LeFtIst SaYz ScOtS wErE bLAck!" or some other bs that other so called "historians" tend to shove down our throats. No name calling, very informative, no disrespect, no nonsense. I respect you kind sir👍
@@veritasetcaritas EXACTLY!!! I cannot stand social parasites that feed off of the misery of the world. Just to offer even more migraines with nonsense revisionism.
Reading comprehension and retention isn't the strongest in certain communities and as an American I apologies for failing education system that can't even get the basics right anymore with some people. Its effecting all of us especially in the under 30 crowd. It seems we are doomed to be ruled by imbeciles and compliant simpletons who must be mollycoddled with every detail explained down to its most basic level before they realize the actual CLEAR meaning of things!!
@@veritasetcaritas LOL, I am aware. I grew up in a juxtaposed household without the volatile hate that may exist in others. As a young boy and being fascinated by the Romans I always thought the Moors taught them how to bathe to be a bit much. I counter that any anti bathing rhetoric in Western Europe back then would have been tied more to Christianity and not some innate lack of bathing etiquette.
As an Afrocentrist I am appalled at some of his claims. I am more appalled however that every thing that black "talking heads" talk about is called Afrocentric.
I don't think that everything black "talking heads" talk about is Afrocentric. In fact I make the point that Great House himself spends most of his time making false claims about European history, instead of promoting Afrocentrism.
@@veritasetcaritas I noticed as the video went on. I do have a problem with everything that is said by a black person is at times, and by many deemed Afrocentric. That term has like many others become another way to just dismiss anything coming from those of us who are African and tend to challenge the idea of some eternal western hegemony.
@@kudjoeadkins-battle2502 yes I think it's lazy and unfair to take an individual and represent them as a whole. That's why I wrote in the video description "Great House is unrepresentative of Afrocentrism and Afrocentrists..
@@veritasetcaritas duly noted, and you did an excellent job in my opinion. I look forward to more information. I had come across you before, I forget the video. I thought I had subscribed to you back then. But I will certainly check you page out. I appreciate your response.
I personally find the number of 500 sl**** highly plausible (though not definitive), if only from reading enough medieval histroy to read about how many attendants (who were noble or gentry class themselves) high status persons had and the servants that supported the whole retinue.
I think it is unlikely given the amount of resources necessary for these people on a daily basis, espeecially on a long desert trip of over 3,000 kilometers. It's true that new resources could be purchased along the way, but 500 people is still a very large number of slaves to bring on such a lengthy journey in the first place, and even if every one of them only drank one liter of carried water a day that would still require carrying 500 liters of water, not to mention other provisions. This isn't comparable to a much shorter journey along a European river, or through a series of small European villages.
@veritasetcaritas the issue I have is that Arab slavers marched thousands across the Sahara, admittedly with a high attrition rate, but with sufficient returns to make the route viable. Armies too have made significant desert crossings with thousands of men. The devil is in the logistical details: if Mansa Musa had made adequate logistical arrangements before his journey (a likelihood) then it is entirely feasible to make the journey with the equivalent of a small army.
@@redjem6918 it depends a lot on the distance and route. And of course that attrition rate is important. But if he had 500 slaves, who else went with him?
Kudos to you for taking those folks seriously. It will drive you crazy though man. I jave a friend that jas fell victim to that garbage and its infuriating. Wait until they call all of your actual evidence "lies" and consider that actual evidence that they are right.
Yeah there are definitely diminishing returns when engaging with people like Great House. I might use some of his tweets in later videos however, as examples of common research errors, and to contrast with good research methodology.
Embarrassing to say the least. “Florida Virtual School CEO says she’s a knighted ‘genius.’ Um … what?” via Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel - The Sentinel has learned that the school’s new CEO - the woman who is supposed to clean things up - claims she’s not only a knighted dame (something an expert says she isn’t) but also one of the “500 Greatest Geniuses of the 21st Century” (a designation from a bogus and bankrupt organization). Now we’re reading a story about how the new CEO likes to be called “Lady Dhyana Ziegler.” She even had the school print the title on the placard she uses at meetings - though a royalty expert told the Sentinel that the title wasn’t bestowed by the Queen of England, but rather by a “fake” group that usually charges money “for a completely worthless piece of paper.” floridapolitics.com
Exaggeration is common in history whether it is Mansa Musa's Hajj, the size of Xerxes' army on the second Persian invasion of Greece or many other examples.
One of his most recent threads has been critiqued severely by people who are chasing up his sources and discovering how poor they are. I think I might make a video about it.
1. Right wing. 2. White nationalist adjacent. 3. Frequently racist. 4. Anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-multiculturalism. 5. Socially conservative. 6. Used to be more about history, but these days a lot less about history, and a lot more about cultural war content.
Probably one of the worst channels I've ever had the disgrace of coming upon. Not because I disagree with him, but because he's openly racist and blurts out incorrect, harmful things to further an agenda and has the balls to call himself a history channel. It's just another alt right source and lord knows we have too many of those
Thank you! My bachelor degree majored in classics and history. My Masters is in an unrelated field, information management. However I have also been a university research assistant and ad adjunct lecturer, so I'm familiar with academic searerch methods.
It’s nice to point out incompetence. But possibly the ignorant man brings more knowledge to other ignorants that would never seek any knowledge at all.
Perhaps Afrocentrism is not that bad on an academic scale (this is a serious PERHAPS). However, the channels, influencers, and people that promote it make me and others doubt a lot about it. There is a channel called African Stream, which is relatively accurate in some of its political arguments regarding African leaders, but lately it has been doing a small campaign on saying how Argentina is very "racist" (which, as someone who knows this country well despite not being Argentine, is extremely untrue) and its literally just been ranting about how some countries in Latin America are resisting "US Imperialism". In general, the channel just centers on the african communities of several countries outside of africa and calls most if not all interactions from latin america with the US "imperialism and exploitation" (something that, as someone from Panama and Venezuela, is not true lol). It also promotes a kind of "we vs them" kind of mentality. This is reflected in the comments, which instead of being about political correctness and improvements, say about how every country descended from europeans or with high heritage (Argentina, for example) will have the same flaws and is bad (something that is, ironically extremely racist and just as racist as insulting any African country). In conclusion, I mean that Academic Afrocentrism probably has much to offer. However, its representation with the people of that community, which can often be rather populist, is extremely bad and ruins the very concept with its own representatives and people that promote it, being honest.
Yes I know Afrocentrism isn't well represented on social media. The channel to which you refer sounds very much like it's a populist Afrocentrist source which is Hotep-adjacent.
Do you go around posting diatrides against the far more numerous and common European ethnographic supremacy history channels? Or does it only motivate you to act against these kinds of ideologies when the group is Black ?
@@TheEvolver311 firstly this is not a diatribe, this is a response to a personal attack. Secondly most of my channel attacks right wing and Eurocentric narratives. I have an entire playlist called "Fight the Right" with fifteen videos in it, I have five videos targeting a right-wing leaning libertarian RUclipsr, and I have several other videos discrediting Eurocentric colonialist myths and exposing colonial damage to indigenous people. Not only that, but I have more pro-black and African content on my channel than Great House has ever produced. Have you ever seen him create a 56 minute pro-black history video like this? ruclips.net/video/FV3sy-QWEOI/видео.html No you haven't. Have you ever seen him create a 35 minute anti-colonial video like this? ruclips.net/video/tcN23sETHKs/видео.html No you haven't. Have you ever seen him create a 35 minute anti-white savior video like this? ruclips.net/video/tpiswunQh40/видео.html No you haven't.
It’s important to note that no serious scholarly discussions about such topics are being had on YT. None of these people are credentialed scholars in the field and of the few who have a social media presence none contend that serious discussions on the research in these areas are being done on social media. There are flat earth channels but no one in the mainstream scholarly community takes it seriously. Why would anyone engage with such people? This is like the people who are engaged in debates with the likes of Clyde Winters. Why??
I am addressing Great House for the same reason that mainstream scholars address pseudo-archaeologists and flat-earthers. It's not just a matter of correcting falsehoods, it's a matter of explaining good historical practice. In this video most of my time is spent explaining how to do proper historical research, which is what this kind of correction video is good for.
@@veritasetcaritas Actually most of the time is spent focusing on your exchange with this person. I would applaud any channel that wanted to promote sound research methods but that doesn’t require engaging with his ilk. Secondly who in the mainstream scholarly community is sitting around writing papers on flat earth nonsense? It gets mentioned in the larger discussion about how social media is negatively impacted society but who is spending years of their professional life as a scholar in a related field debunking flat earthers? That is something that you see on social media my layman. They build a strange sort of following by feuding with such unhinged people while the credible scientific community ignores such people. There is a reason for this. The last thing you want to do is to give these people a platform. To mention their name or work on another channel elevates them. Moreover there are a group of Afrocentrists who have achieved some level of fame in the black community despite not being able to support their ridiculous claims. Diop , Clark, Van Sertima , Ben-Jochannan to name a few. They are considered laughing stocks in the world of mainstream research but at least they are known in their niche circles. There are scholars who have challenged their views but it’s not on social media. They wrote actual papers and books on the subject. Here you are challenging a nonentity for some reason. This is like ignoring someone like Alex Jones who promoted the most ridiculous conspiracy theories while going after someone with similar views that has 10000 online followers while elevating their profile. Might I suggest going after the big fish not the minnows.
@@drstevej2527 as I said, I am addressing Great House for the same reason that mainstream scholars address pseudo-archaeologists and flat-earthers; on social media, just like they do. I didn't say anythihng about scholars spending their lives as a scholar debunking flat earthers, or writing papers on them. I have made just two videos on one large Afrocentrist who has a wide reach, and several videos on an Afrocentrist channel with over 400,000 subscribers, and in response you complain about me correcting their claims. Do you know who has more access to the public than Diop , Clark, Van Sertima, and Ben-Jochannan? It's Afrocentrists on social media. The average person on the street has never heard of Diop or Van Sertima, but people like Great House get hundreds of thousands of views a month. Alex Jones is not a relevant comparison since he is literally on social media not in the academy, unlike Diop or \Van Sertima. What will youi do when I make my video addressing the claims in Black Athena and The Peacock's Tail? Will you tell me again to stop criticizing Afrocentrism?
@@veritasetcaritas Do you have any experience in the academy? Neither Diop nor Van Sertima has any standing in the academy but they have reached 10s of millions. Their work along with others has influenced generations of black laymen unlike this person. You seem to think that 400000 subscribers is a lot of people in a population of 8 billion. That number represents many people who subscribe years ago and never return. When you go to an African American bookstore you will find that no one heard of this individual. I hold a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago and I have been doing battle with the nonsense that is Afrocentrism for years. In all that time I have never heard of this person. I’m guessing that you are one of these people who thinks that a social media following gives someone standing. Hint it doesn’t! Again there is a reason why no one in this space in the scholarly community is refuting his claims as they don’t know that he is alive.
@@drstevej2527 I have a Bachelor degree, a Masters degree, I've been a university research assistant, I've been a university lecturer, and I've had papers presented at conferences and published in scholarly journals. So yes, I do have experience in the academy. I am fully aware that Van Sertima's "They Came Before Columbus" proposal has rightly been dismissed by academics, but I haven't been arguing about whether or not he or Diop is taken seriously by academics. I said they does not have the same ACCESS TO THE PUBLIC as the Afrocentrists on social media. Van Sertima, for instance, is dead. He has no access to anyone. As I said, you could ask a random person on the street if they know who Van Sertima is, and you could guarantee they would not know, but it is very likely they could cite an Afrocentrist they've seen on social media. No I do not think 400,0000 subscribers is a lot of people in a population of 8 billion, nor do I think that just because someone has as a social media following they have standing. What they have is an audience. I have seen no evidence from you that Diop and Van Sertima have influenced tens of millions of people, or that they are a continuing threat to the academy. As I said previously, your idea that academics don't attempt to counter bad history on social media is demonstrably false. There are historians and archaeologists on Reddit, Twitter, and even Instagram doing exactly that on a regular basis.
4:18 - I think this is partially a particular kind of brainrot that we've seen in Ireland from Americans. It shouldn't exist, but it comes from an actual agenda. The agenda varies, but Irish people are the most constantly useful counterpoint because history is hard. Because if you only have to think about something very, very narrow without having to deal with the why, everything gets easier.
Yes I agree. I really don't like the habit of appealing to the Irish and historical instances of white people being enslaved (sucha s the Barbary pirate slave raids), in efforts to diminish the historical impact and horror of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I should make a video on why historical"white slavery" is irrelevant in the context of modern discussions of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
@@veritasetcaritas Not to create too unwieldy of a tangent from the goal of countering modern-day Dunningesque perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but I feel there is also fertile ground out there to connect white slavery non-histories & the anxieties they have reflected in North American & European white supremacist/colonial/imperial societies to their contemporary equivalents (ie. “anti-white racisms,” hyper-fixating on white victims of human trafficking, white South African farmers being dispossessed or whatever, etc etc etc).
Poking around some of the sources (not very deeply, mind you) and wow oh wow does Mary Lefkowitz seem like the most insufferable of Classicists. I’m sure there’s veracity in some of the finer grain details of her academic work contesting non-nuanced afrocentrism, but I also can’t lie that I’m more generously predisposed to her critics what with the insufferable way in which Classics nerds refuse to accept the possibility of Mediterranean influences (thus, including Egypt) on proto-Greeks/Greek peoples/etc. Not trying to be contentious outside of noting that it’s a shame her career took such a sharp turn into what feels like the academic equivalent of Terminal Poster Syndrome 😵💫
I think specialists in particular can become very intellectually territorial, and Classicists seem to be prone to this. But in the case of Lefkowitz she has also been repeatedly accused of collaborating in an academic conspiracy to deny African achievemts and falsiify the historical record, and after a few years of that I can understand her being defensive.
@@TheLetsRead she believes Greece was inluenced by both Egypt and other Near Eastern sources, as she states here. "Of course there was some Egyptian influence on Greek thought (medicine, science, mathematics), but ancient Near Eastern sources (see below) must also be considered." bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/1996.04.19/
@@veritasetcaritas Thank you very much for the clarification! Yeah, the (anti-semitic sounding, in particular, to some degree 👀) harassment she’s received is definitely not the criticism I had in mind, and just makes me Feel about the oddball crap which has interfered with good faith (I’m so sorry to default to that term lmao) academic discourse.
Alas even in academia itself it is hard to find someone who deosn't cherry pick, rely on logical fallacy, selectively dismiss entire studies based on whether or not they already agree with it, take $ to manipualate data for certain ends in order to get funding etc. It's unfortunate but it is the case most of the time.
I find any kind of ethno centerist view very interesting. They are great for psychological study and may give us more insight as to how certain ideologies arise.
@@veritasetcaritas I don't think I have ever seen anything other kind of ethnocentrism outside those two groups. Similar to how the bloods where a reaction to the crips and the crips where a reaction to the LA Police force oh how times have changed but things stay the same.
@@Zane-It here in the Far East there is Sinocentrism, Han chauvinism, Japanocentrism, Korean ethno-nationalism, and Hindutva. These aren't even reactions to oppression, they're homegrown ethno-supermacist thinking resulting from historical cultural values and beliefs.
@@Zane-It yeah I'd say that there are a few ethno-national mythologies which emerged as reactions to colonialism, especially those surrounding supposedly ancient martial arts which were supposedly outlawed by scared European colonials. I made a video on one of them. ruclips.net/video/7vTi6VR0L_M/видео.html&ab_channel=veritasetcaritas
I'm from a mixed family, but for many different reasons. About 500 years ago we mixed in Brasil, a Spanish colony. We were not safe as Moroccan and Sephardi Jews. Later we mixed again with black from Suriname.Today we are white, colored or black, living in three continents. Many 'blacks' share the same values and culture as the 'whites'. I don't make a difference, though people who don't know me, are making assumptions without knowing me. I don't care. We're all people. In most respects we're all the same. Within family skin color is the only difference. We share so much. At my work a colleague with a dark skin color had a problem with doing business with some African countries. He lost a lot of money. Your skin color isn't always an advantage. Afrocentrism is denying historical facts. Respect African culture, history and African opportunities instead.
Popular and populist Afrocentrism often distorts history, but the contributions of academic Afrocentrism, or Afrocentricity as Asante preferred to call it, are valuable.
@@erdood3235 oh I see what happened. I actually posted it with the introduction "the populist Afrocentrism not taken seriously by mainstream scholarship". It just happened to still be on the screen when I mentioned his earlier, milder tweets.
The "ben" in that place was accidentally deleted in editing. Seconds later I identify him specifically as "Ben-Yehuda" since yes, I know "ben" in Hebrew means "son of", and is part of his name meaning "son of Yehuda".
Yeah that has occured to me. I think the other video is better in some ways, but this video does have a useful demonstration of how to investigate and analyze sources for accuracy and reliability. It also has a section on Afrocentrism which I think is very important.
Afrocentrism is an extreme reaction to the dominant Eurocentric view of African history that has been taught in the academia even on the continent. Europeans justified colonialism by says Africans had no history and separating them from world history, in highschool we learn of Vasco da gama and Ludwig Kraft European explorers instead of how the different kingdoms and tribes interacted for thousands of years. The extreme afrocentrism is the same thing colonialist did distort reality.
Yes this is true, but there's also perfectly regular academic Afrocentrism which is entirely valid and shouldn't be regarded as merely a reaction to European racism.
Afrocentrism is born as a gut reaction to the inferiority complex many africans have towards other races, which leads them to: lie about their history, steal achievements from other peoples, and generalised revanchism towards other races due to perceived injustices (as if europeans or asians have never been killed, raped and enslaved). Focusing on african history is cool, but pretending that it is in any way equal to european and asian history is intellectually dishonest.
I met a crazy dude from Nigeria who said I looked "Bangladeshi" (Im half white half somali) and also told my mom who is very much somali that she looks bangladeshi too and then proceeded to say the first president of the US was black, and the first prime minster of the UK was black too
The very idea posited by Euro- and Afro-centrists (or any individual attempting to idealize a historical group) that a lack of direct statements linking individuals to trends in their society, particularly in societies of which they were a leader, should be seen as evidence of their abstention from those practices isn't just bad source-reading, it's downright anti-historical. If there isn't a record documenting their personal views and policy on a topic, we must assume that whatever their personal beliefs they at least tolerated and abided the norms of their times. Otherwise, wouldn't somebody have mentioned it as being unusual?
We can fantasize all we want about historical figures we admire sharing our views and being admirable by our modern standards, but unless there's some documentation to back them they're just fantasies. I might be (and am) fervently in favor of nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, but if I became President of the US and failed to make that a cornerstone of my policy and legacy historians would rightly assume that I was functionally tolerant and in favor of hydrocarbons as a primary source of power for my country. By the same token, if Mansa Musa didn't take action to abolish or reduce slavery in a way which could be seen in the historical records, or make public speeches railing against the evils of slavery and pronouncing the freedom of all previous royal slaves, why should we assume that he was personally anti-slavery?
I'm all for humanizing and praising historical cultures and figures as a way to empower people and encourage others to feel self-worth and pride in their heritage. But the emphasis should be on *humanizing*, not idealizing. I don't want future generations to look back at our leaders and see some perfect marble staties to whom all future leaders should aspire, I want them to look back and see humans who made good decisions and terrible mistakes-- both of which can be learned from.
Fully in support of you not backing down at all in this. It's all well and good for people to make snide critiques and casual commentary on history on Twitter, but if they want to wade into source-based historical arguments they'd better be ready to put up or shut up and know the rules of the space they're entering.
Thanks so much for the lengthy and detailed post. I fully agree there's a real danger of retrojecting our own ideals onto historical figures, and this has been aa constant problem with Eurocentric history, never mind anyone else. This kind of anarchronism is veryh tempting, but as you note there are very simple ways to check the likelihood (if not certainty), of a historical figure's views. Thank you so much for your support!
I love your comment and my exact feelings about this subjects.
@@veritasetcaritasare you going to do a video Isaac Samuel’s claim of servants not slaves
@@saratmodugu2721 yes, and I have nearly finished the script. I am taking some time to look at the lexical sources in Arabic, and I have needed some help with that since I have no competence in Arabic.
@@veritasetcaritas btw great video. I stopped taking Greathouse seriously when he started yapping that Europeans didn’t invent a single instrument until the early modern era. Now he’s yapping about chivalry of knights came from arabs that defected from the umayyads to the carolingians after the battle of tours.
I’m Somali and many years ago I started learning about my own country, East Africa and Africa as a whole. So as I was researching I started watching a documentary called Hidden Colours and I thought to myself this is interesting but then it got ridiculous and when they said certain monarchs in the last couple centuries in Europe were black I just turned the documentary off. Like whyyyyyyy? Africa has so many cultures and civilisation why do they need to make up random stuff that has literally nothing to do with Africa in most cases 🤦🏾♂️
Thanks for your contribution! I think people aiming to convince others of Africa's value by trying to connect Africa to European history, have completely the wrong approach and are ironically Eurocentric. Africa has its own value completely independently of Europe.
The thing is while I don’t agree that they were black you also need to understand that many places around the world had PROTO black populations. Take the aborigines, the Melanesians, the sentalese among others.
These people got absorbed by other populations and today we only see remnants of them.
@@trevormcdonald385 yes absolutely. I live in Taiwan, where the aboriginal people are darker skinned descendants of Austronesians.
@@veritasetcaritas Pas-ta'ai (Chinese: 矮靈祭; pinyin: Ǎilíngjì), the "Ritual to the Spirits of the Short [People]", is a ritual of the Saisiyat people, a Taiwanese aboriginal group. The ritual commemorates the Ta'ai, a tribe of short dark-skinned people they say used to live near them. The ritual is held every two years and all Saisiyat are expected to participate.
As I understand it these are not the only people in the world with similar traditions..
It's also easy to conflate time periods. For example, the Moorish presence in Europe and the resultant presence of African descendents through Europe, artwork from the time corroborating.
Now does that mean that Black people founded or are responsible for everything European. Not necessarily. It is interesting nevertheless.
I don't understand why Mansa Musa wouldn't have owned slaves.
He did, and no need for apologetics. He was who he was and he made his nation strong, judging him by presentism western values is meh
@@superwatcher456 I concur.
The same reason why many Americans try to downplay slavery in their country - both groups over identity with their ancestors (or the people they think were their ancestors, in some cases). They take pride in the ancestor's achievements, and get personally offended when the ancestor's imperfections are pointed out. They feel like they're being personally attacked.
@@philipsalama8083 perhaps they should not feel that way.
shocking fact , every race owned slaves , and sold slaves , even Europeans sold other Europeans it is how it worked backed then , todays politics dont apply to yesterdays world
An Afrocentrist cited an antiquarian published in 1829 as proof that the ancient Scots were actually Black Africans. She even included a scan of the actual page from the book. The book was, of course, the author's own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. The absurdity of these people is breathtaking.
This is the kind of blunder Great House makes on a regular basis.
@@BTL_LTW "An Afrocentrist..."
@@BTL_LTW no one said he made any such claim.
@BTL_LTW we regard white supremacists as absurd and worthy of condemnation. Meanwhile the internet - YT, FB, even TikTok - is awash with Afrocentric revisionism. Little to none of it attracts the attention of the powers that be.
@@BTL_LTW My previous reply seems to have gone astray, but anyway I have to thank you for wasting 10 minutes and 16 seconds of my life on a video by this Sepehr character (who I had never heard of), most of which is not about Mansa Musa and during which Sepehr never actually claims that Mansa Musa is "white". He obliquely mentions "white Berbers" and raises the issue of "blackwashing" images (a practice we know is common among internet afrocentrists). So once again, thanks for nothing.
I once saw a BBC documentary on Mansa Musa. It was an hour long puff piece praising him as the richest man in history claiming his wealth came from gold mines. The BBC presenter was black, and she NEVER mentioned he was a slave owner. Also, it amazes me the number of people that try to justify inter African slavery saying it "wasn't chattle slavery like in America." I'm sure slaves at the time could have taken comfort if they knew that.
Yes I'm sure the slaves didn't see it like that.
Just like Kamala Harris' ancestors owning slaves, that were probably all happy, so okay.
Who did she think *worked* those mines? Fairies?
Also, I'm pretty sure that past the initial travel through the Atlantic, American slaves had a higher life expectancy than those that stayed in Africa (we won't even mention those were sent to the Middle East, that truly was the nightmare ending) since they were more expensive to buy due to the cost and dangers of the travel, as such their owners had a greater incentive to have them *not* die, compared to Africa where slaves were very plentiful so replacing the lost ones was less of an issue for slave owners back there.
I really don't see how you can gloss over this as if it's somewhat a "lesser evil" when it was something so profoundly entrenched in African societies
@@LolibethNo you see, the slaves that worked the mines WANTED to mine gold. They were better off in the mines anyway.
I live in a part of Africa where revisionist afro-centrism is almost a religion. I am so happy to see someone who has the knowledge and time to point out the selective nature of their understanding of history.
Thank you.
@@BTL_LTWnope, not the case at all. Just opposed to those who are forever appropriating european history to try to gain some clout.
as a ugandan; him saying idi amin did no wrong pisses me off.
Yeah that is just typical of his reactionary inflammatory rhetoric.
Idi Amin was a disaster for Uganda. Just as similar people has been a disaster in other nations.
Idi Amin is literally africas Hitler, can’t believe he said this shit
It's the equivalent of a Russian-American saying Ratko Mladić did nothing wrong
"idi amin did nothing wrong!"
*some random lake with two suspicious sacks and a car*
Haven’t fully watched the video yet but just reading Afrocentrist in title kills me.
There is so much history in Africa that’s very interesting and to be proud of its just rarely talked about without glorifying it as more advanced then Rome or the British Empire.
There is good and bad Afrocentrism; you could skip to 24:26 Academic versus populist Afrocentrism.
@@veritasetcaritas There defiantly is which is also the saddest part about it. There were civil rights leaders championing this back then with the right direction just from what I’ve read. Sadly when ever this topic gets brought up it always feels like the bad ones get more light for saying pseudo history instead of a more grounded view.
Anyway keep up the great work I always love your citations. It feels like I’m back in AP history class getting a mini project that introduces topics I usually would write off as boring or not important.
@@ItsJustCartier thank you so much!
Why do you assume that it *wasn't* more advanced than Rome or Britain? That's your Eurocentrism speaking
@@salj.5459 I used those examples only to point out that most the time when Afrocentrism’s like one in the video make claims they usually make general claims like “the Romans were advanced but not as advanced as X African nation” without going into their reasoning. Which it could be true in some regards but that’s far from the points people make like the one in the video.
It's a fricken shame. The history of Africa should be learned about, but GH seems like they are doing a great disservice to it. Mythologizing countries and cultures do no good, only serves to blind us to our faults and history, which serves those in power
It's also trustrating because he didn't start off like this. He made the decision to take this direction.
@@veritasetcaritas I've heard of the term "narcissistic wound" applying to the ego of individuals, something that hurts our sense of self. I think there is a cultural version of this such that some people belonging to that wounded culture/people will express the kind of narcissistic like behavior that (regarding their history) is seen with GH and others.
Just seems “hotep” adjacent, if not already there?
@@TheLetsRead adjacent yes, but he strongly rejects the Hoteps. The real issue is that he doesn't post good Afrocentric content these days. He just posts inflammatory content about European history, attempting to rage bait white nationalists.
Especially since in the Americans, west Africa did play a role in shaping both Latin America and Anglo America
Great work. Please keep doing this. Im personally sick of these false and biased "teachers"....
Thank you!
Most of these afro-centrists cite Musa as some sort of superman, but if he was truly as powerful as they thought he is, his empire would have lasted AFTER his death and the death of his children. Qin Shi Huang died, his children died, but the territorial extent of his empire remained under the Han Dynasty. Meanwhile Musa's empire collapse within a generation of his death.
He has certainly been lionized beyond his historical significance, like many European rulers. However I did find Samuel Isaacs' article much more balanced.
www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-myth-of-mansa-musas-enslaved
@@veritasetcaritasTBF to Mansa and European Monarchs like Richard I and Baldwin the Leper King there are many Legendarily remembered rulers that get similar treatment round the Globe,
Liu Bei for example in Chinese history in the grand scheme of things didn't do much for Chinese history but was deified, though this doesn't make them not impressive in their own ways, people just idealise them way too much.
@@forickgrimaldus8301 very true, Charlemagne as well. Ironically I think Charlemagne is heroized for the wrong thing; he's typically held up as a great political unifier of Europe, when I think his most important contribution was his support of the Carolingian Renaissance.
@@veritasetcaritas I think he reformed how Latin is spoken too essentially forming the basis for modern Ecclisiastical Latin so the guy did a lot but yeah Charlemagne's "Unification of Europe" wasn't Universal to Europe and didn't really last too long but it did form the basis of Medieval Geopolitics for generations after him, so not as successful in creating a Unified state but he did a lot of other things.
I disagree, as mismanagement by the inheritors is largely why we aren't all speaking Mongolian.
It’s a shame too, African History is genuinely fascinating and interesting , particularly how it much differs from Europe, now everything from European is apparently just from Africa
Yes, populist Afrocentrism ironically just looks like jealousy and rejection of real African history.
@@veritasetcaritasAfrocentrism is actually Eurocentrism unironically 😂. It’s all jealousy.
Alot of it is though. 😂😂😂. You can read the classics and see how many times Ethiopia is mentioned and pick up on how the Greeks and Romans revered them.
@@Ace-sb4il yes a lot of it is. In fact I had to explain to someone recently how much medieval Christianity was shaped by three African theologians; Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine. Their theology has influenced tens of millions of Christians for over 1,000 years.
I am willing to bet every single populist afrocentrist in existence will declare those three Africans evidence of European meddling in Africa, though. All three of them belonged to a church that will *inevitably* be linked to white Europeans.
I used to be a sucker too. Anybody who was able to spout "sources" with names and page numbers and paragraphs, I was sold. Then by chance I went to a lecture and happened to actually go home and check his sources. Well, I was floored when I saw that he had massively skewered the information. Never trusted anything from anybody again without checking the source myself.
Funny enough I recently went down a rabbit hole of witch hunts, mainly studying about Witchfinder General Hopkins, and the reality of what is widely believed to have happened is already bad enough as is that just making stuff up about the history of witch hunts just kind of invalidates what happened
Oh yes, I have done some work on that myself.
ruclips.net/video/_30jI9UgIVk/видео.html
Owning slaves is a known thing in Africa.
Every nation of the world invented two things - Slavery and cheese
It's still happening there
I’m African and this twitter account is embarrassing. We should learn the truth about every society’s history, whether good or bad.
Thank you!
This whole situation stinks of ego, no side wants to back down since backing down means defeat, and the more controversy that is generated the more people pay attention to it, it is vicious cycle that feeds itself and leads to greater feats of idiocy.
To address the wooly mammoth/uhaul truck tweet from the first few minutes. You would stop a 24mph uhaul the same way our ancestors put down a mammoth with a spear. You puncture a vital organ and then follow the trail to your prize. For someone claiming to be afrocentric, he should absolutely know what persistence hunting is. That itself is enough to disregard anything he says, in my opinion.
After he was shown several articles proving he was wrong he backed down a bit and modified his original claim, but later returned to it and doubled down. At this point it was difficult to avoid the conclusion he was trolling or grifting or both.
Persistance hunting is from our current understanding unlikely to have been used in any frequency. No hominid was ever able to keep pace with a large herbivore at flight speed, creating a extremely high risk of loosing sight of the intended prey. Skeletons of prey animals hunted by humans are also mostly of healthy adults in their prime, but persistance hunter would primarily catch juveniles or old and injured animals.
This points more towards coordinated ambush hunting, this is also supported by the remains of human made pit traps.
@@lb540 that's not how persistence hunting works. The very reason it works is that you're not trying to keep pace with the animal. Youre following from a distance. Also, sweat glands play a huge role. Can you figure out why?
Your videos are so good because of how well you cite your work. I feel like a lot of people who talk about history just use a single wiki article
Thank you so much!
Wiki is still really useful though. Especially bc it has many valid sources that it links
@@lionelmessisburner7393 yeah the sources may be good. But there are also wrong or outdated sources. And wiki is also very broad when talking about some historic events especially if it's something from before the early modern era.
@@lionelmessisburner7393 when read carefully as a tertiary source, it can be useful as a starting point for sources on a subject, but the sources cited aren't always good quality so they do need to be checked. Perosonally I prefer to look at an online academic bibliography.
veritas-et-caritas.com/index.php/research-sources-freely-accessible-online-material/#scholarly_bibliographies
Agreed! This is setting me down a (hopefully educational) rabbit hole hahaha.
I wouldn’t waste any more time on this nobody. Twitter/X has the same effect as alcohol on the confidence of non-smart people.
Spot on.
Isn't it obvious that the point of Great House videos aren't made for accuracy. They're made to appeal to emotions because that's Unfortunately what gets far more views and YT revenue
Yes.
Black roots in my family. DO NOT APOLOGIZE TO A MERE RACE BAITER AND DENYER OF FACTS OR TRUTH..
2:57 It was a pilgrimage to Mecca, Egypt was just a stop along the way
Slavery in Mali ? ? In 1993 or thereabouts I travelled around Mali, Mopti, Djene and the Dogon Country - The Falasie de Bandigara. Travelling from Mopti to the South West end of the Falaise with a truly excellent Dogon guide, Belco Bah, who I belive may have contributed to the Lonely Planet Guide, we passed through a village to buy some fire wood or at least the othet passengers did that were literally crammed with us in the taxi bruse/bush taxi. The inhabitants of this village were a mixture of ethnic groups, Bambara, Bozo, Dogon, Puel, identifiable by their dress.
I asked Belco why all these differnt people were living together rather than in their own villages and he told me they were all ex- slaves that had been freed but because they were ex-slaves they couldn't return to their villages so eked out a living selling firewood to passing vechicles like ours.
I consider Belco a reliable source of information, so not so long ago, towards the end of the 20th century there must have been some enslaved people around in Mali .
Mali is a fantastic country to vist well, well worth any discomfort, the bush taxis by the way are or were the worst of anywhere.
I saw a thread by an Indian that used a “Roman map of the 2nd century” to make the argument that Europeans in the 14th century were inferior sailors. Then he used a map by those inferior sailors to prove Indian nationalism. Then called to throw off colonial perspectives.
Some people are desparate.
They're still coping about the Indo-European migrations and the British to this day lmao
This was just randomly in my recommended but i really enjoyed this roasting/history lesson. 😂 thank you. Subbed
Thank you! You might like the video I made before this one, about my first encounter Great House. Check the link in the video description.
Thanks for providing Dr. Adeleke’s paper, it’s sounds very interesting!
You're welcome. Adeleke is a well respected professional in the field, so he is worth reading.
@@veritasetcaritasNot to brown-nose even further, but I’m checking out the book which you shared alongside suggesting the article & look forward to engaging with it. Thank you for bringing it to wider attention!
@@TheLetsRead you're welcome. I really should do a video on Afrocentrism as a topic, and the different forms it takes.
You're work is very much so appreciated and clearly well researched thank you .
Video Idea historical Africa clothing and how to adapted it for fantasy shows like House of the Dragon .
Thank you!
A beef between a youtuber and an academic... Ngl, the sheer contrast between you two in your interactions is fascinating
Thank you, I certainly hope the distinction is clear to viewers.
@@veritasetcaritas
Sir, these afrocentrists were like flat earthers.
@@georgejoestarii9469 No comparison. Those who dig deep trying to seriously debunk flat earth, almost always end up convinced. Afrocentrism comes from inferiority complex.
@@rzella8022They got conquered so hard it fried their brains! Or more likely their brains were already fried and that’s why they were partitioned lol
D
I really hate those kinds of people, it's so disrespectful to so many great cultures, the history and facts don't matter though only their political implications.
"Did you know there original Irish were Aztecs? No? Research!. No, but research the book i personally wrote. Still dont believe it? Its because you are not ready for the truth."
They are always using this pattern.
there are still real humans on twitter?
A few.
not really, and this isnt one of them
Now, from what I understand about mimosa, Samosa ruled after the time of Abu Barker and one of the things that Islam brought with it in the area was it did bring in a culture of slavery, but to say that slavery itself wasn’t a feature before the coming Islam to the area would be a misstatement so I think it would be harder to prove that Mimosa did not bring slaves, but I will ask the question what were the conditions of those slaves and we had to understand that the whole area was operating like that for 1200 years I mean, this is before the onset of the Portuguese. So I think that is tougher to prove that massa didn’t or was not involved the slave trade.
Europe and Africa: have evidence of bidirectional trade for thousands of years
Nationalists: "I'll pretend I didn't see that."
You need to better understand and clear up what parts of Africa. In the modern sense, we assume Africa=black. North Africans traded and interacted with European exploration for over 3k years.
What we found out is the fact these were Caucasoid peoples. No evidence whatsoever of blacks getting on ships they built and explored the open seas.
Northern Africa (mostly Egypt) was part of the Roman Empire so, yeah? Do people not know that Rome got most of their grain from Egypt?
@@adorablecockroach5131 and modern day Tunisia, Carthage provided Rome the City itself with much of its vital grain
@@adorablecockroach5131 not black,try again
Average TNO fan@@hopeundertheblacksun
Very good video, and also good on you with being logical and sticking your boots to the ground when facing this kind of drama.
Thank you!
Thank you for your hard work in dispelling pseudo history.
You're welcome.
By the way I hear you are an anarchist do you believe in a certain theory within anarchism?@@veritasetcaritas
@@interiordagoth yes, I am an anarcho-mutualist.
ruclips.net/video/DQiYekUjKYs/видео.html&ab_channel=AcademicAnarchist
@@veritasetcaritas interesting I myself am probably a mix of an syndicalist and an communist. Anyway, keep up the good work!
@@interiordagoth thanks!
Found this video by the grace of the algorithm, great channel and thanks for your rigorous content!
Thank you so much!
Definitions are important.
If you define "-centrism" as looking at history through the perspective of that particular demographic, fine and dandy. Each civilization is going to look at events differently. As long as you don't let -centrism give you historical tunnel vision, I don't see a problem.
If we define "-centrism" as using history to prove a one group as universally superior to another throughout history, that's cringey as heck and should be disputed regardless civilization it stands for.
You get this kind with every historical demographic you can think of. Everyone has a chip on his shoulder from some past slight in history, quite obnoxious.
Very true.
I find it much more interesting that slavery was so common in Mali that at one time one of the most powerful men in Mali, a general, was a slave at the same time. Why does this matter? Because of what it says about the institution of slavery and how much its personal implications varied from society to society.
And the word 'slave' itself comes from slavic peoples of Europe.
This is just yakubian tricknology at its finest
They weren’t slaves. Just unpaid interns.
I do tend to believe the extreme numbers of slaves mentioned, at this time massive slave caravans were moving from sub saharan africa to Libya and from there to the entire Arab world (which in part fueled the Hasj rebellions) slavery also takes different forms, from Roman practices we know that some slaves would carry far more weight due to who they represented than any free person could hope to have, if the personal slave of Marcus Aurelius enters a jewelry store and he wants to buy a piece that the wife of a senator is planning to buy as well the shopkeeper is absolutely going to sell to the slave and the wife of the senator would probably be totally ok with it since she would also know who she'd be offending if she'd even complain. On the other hand it doesn't matter who your master is if you are a slave in a silvermine (asside from paying restitution for dammages to their master when hurting these slaves)
Mali was absolutely a slave society and in fact the Portuguese addopted west African (and perhaps arab) practices when they developed the early plantation slavery. Had African slavery been lighter even personal as a rule they would not have sold them to Europeans after finding out the purpose. (looking at Ottoman- Arab slavery the divide in treatment was mostly ethnic based on price, attraction and abbilities. (black male slaves were used to work hard labour on farms and in mines, black female slaves were used as nursery maids, european and other white varieties were more of a status symbol and that counted tripple for females, males captured in battle were often used as galley slaves which shows that ethnicity allone was not everything.
Hopefully we see better representation of academic Afrocentrism in the mainstream in future
In my experience, Afrocentrism is pseudoscientific by default.
I would like to make a video as a guide to Afrocentrism.
@@veritasetcaritasThat would be a very cool video. You could even point out some Eurocentric views in comparison.
@@MrSporksterThat’s uncharitable to the extreme. I hope that OP is able to provide you with a more nuanced framework of the subject & the individuals who have attempted to articulate it.
Continent-centrism is dumb by default.
It appears I care more about African history that these African mythologists
Very likely.
This video is a good example of why you should read your sources carefully and try to find other sources that backup the claim rather than just taking it as face value.
It a shame that African (especially northern and western) history get ruined by popular history stuff like Afrocentrist or the people acting like "Africa doesn't have that munch" because there is some cool stuff like the three kingdoms control a big potion of west Africa.
African history is garbage without north Africa
It's not like any oppressed peoples, black people, Jews, who can be also Black, are inherently morally better than peoples that oppresse them.
It's a matter of circumstances and opportunities and interests.
They are not morally better, but they have historically been treated cruelly in ways which significantly disadvantage their modern day descendants. This is not the case with many other groups.
@@veritasetcaritas i meant that it's not that black or Jews, due to being oppressed, have never and can never be oppressors themselves.
@@erdood3235 yes I agree with that, and historically they sometimes have been oppressors themselves.
@@veritasetcaritas yes, and today many Black African leaders and the South Africa communist party support Russia's war against the people in Ukraine, Jews, Romani, tatars, Ukrainians and others.
I'm a queer child to Jews from USSR Ukraine.
@@veritasetcaritas how are black people disadvantaged nowadays by historical oppression which everyone basically faced and most of which they inflicted upon themselves?
How many witches were executed in small towns and villages without being recorded ?
We can't be exactly sure, but historians make estimates of how many were likely to have been killed in such cases without being recorded, and add that to the estimated total. So the scholarly consensus includes executions for which we have no evidence and which may or may not have happened. It's a deliberate over-estimate of the most likely total figure.
None, there are no witches
@@TheGahta
Did watch this video ?
New to the channel been binge watching for a few hours.
Amazing content ❤
Thank you!
@@veritasetcaritas no sir. Thank you for all the hardwork you put into your videos.
Good luck for your future endeavours 👍
@@ChUnGuShh thanks!
You've clarified the record, mostly by repeating points you'd already made explicit in your original video. I hope you realize this is an exercise in futility. "Great House" will not concede nor discontinue the slipshod quality of his work, and will continue to misstate and mischaracterize your critiques ad infinitum. I'd suggest you ignore any response he may offer and simply move on. Otherwise, it will undoubtedly devolve into something neither constructive nor pleasant.
I don't think he will respond to this video, but yes I agree there's no point in pursuing these points with him. I may make additional videos demonstrating his reserach errors on other sujbects, such as failing to identify when he is using an oudated source, or using a work of fiction as if it was a work of history.
"Do not argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience" something something
"Uh oh kiddo you just got, *radicalized!* "
Love this video and great house is obviously a clown, but his followers have been stagnating mainly because he wasn’t posting for a couple months.
Yes I noticed he went quiet but I was surprised to see him actually lose so many followers throughout the year. I don't think this is explained by his brief hiatus.
@@veritasetcaritas ah, well that’s good then
The funniest thing is that you can basically refute and "centrism" with "people just be doing shit everywhere"
Is ok to call him black supremacists
The only real attention i ever gave to that user was when they claimed that Humans didn't hunt Mammoths despite the almost absurd and easy to find amount of evidence that suggested otherwise.
Im fairly sure to this day that they still think Humans didn't hunt them, or at least they aren't completely convinced.
Yeah at first I think they realised they were wrong, and started backing off, but when more people called them out for it they reversed strategy and doubled down.
I appreciate you didn't fall down the culture war rabbit hole. I was expecting this video to go along the lines of: "tHiS wOKe LeFtIst SaYz ScOtS wErE bLAck!" or some other bs that other so called "historians" tend to shove down our throats.
No name calling, very informative, no disrespect, no nonsense. I respect you kind sir👍
Thank you. I despise culture war vultures who just grift off social conflict.
@@veritasetcaritas EXACTLY!!! I cannot stand social parasites that feed off of the misery of the world. Just to offer even more migraines with nonsense revisionism.
@@veritasetcaritas there should be more people like that.
Well I mean Afrocentristism is pseudo-history and attempt to colonize other cultures. @dg4545
If it were me, I simply would not attempt to clapback on veritas et caritas.
It was definitely not a good idea.
Reading comprehension and retention isn't the strongest in certain communities and as an American I apologies for failing education system that can't even get the basics right anymore with some people. Its effecting all of us especially in the under 30 crowd. It seems we are doomed to be ruled by imbeciles and compliant simpletons who must be mollycoddled with every detail explained down to its most basic level before they realize the actual CLEAR meaning of things!!
Especially if we can’t even define sex or gender anymore, I doubt we’ll have any say when the machines rule everything.
im guessing this is the kind that thinks he himself taught my ancestors how to bathe? 😂
Yes, he has made that claim also.
That's ridiculous. I challenge that one all of the time in my circles.
@@kudjoeadkins-battle2502 don't worry, there are plenty of Europeans who believe this too. It's not just a Hotep talking point.
@@veritasetcaritas LOL, I am aware. I grew up in a juxtaposed household without the volatile hate that may exist in others. As a young boy and being fascinated by the Romans I always thought the Moors taught them how to bathe to be a bit much. I counter that any anti bathing rhetoric in Western Europe back then would have been tied more to Christianity and not some innate lack of bathing etiquette.
You are one of the unsung heroes of the internet. Those who do their research do their due diligence.
Thank you.
Great job man.
Thank you.
A great number of slaves would not have been a logistic nightmare they would have been needed as a logistic solution.
As an Afrocentrist I am appalled at some of his claims. I am more appalled however that every thing that black "talking heads" talk about is called Afrocentric.
I don't think that everything black "talking heads" talk about is Afrocentric. In fact I make the point that Great House himself spends most of his time making false claims about European history, instead of promoting Afrocentrism.
@@veritasetcaritas I noticed as the video went on. I do have a problem with everything that is said by a black person is at times, and by many deemed Afrocentric. That term has like many others become another way to just dismiss anything coming from those of us who are African and tend to challenge the idea of some eternal western hegemony.
@@kudjoeadkins-battle2502 yes I think it's lazy and unfair to take an individual and represent them as a whole. That's why I wrote in the video description "Great House is unrepresentative of Afrocentrism and Afrocentrists..
@@veritasetcaritas duly noted, and you did an excellent job in my opinion. I look forward to more information. I had come across you before, I forget the video. I thought I had subscribed to you back then. But I will certainly check you page out. I appreciate your response.
@@kudjoeadkins-battle2502 thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Great House is very eloquent . I love the use of the academic term " shit " all the while .
His research method is equally scholarly.
@@veritasetcaritas Haha!
I personally find the number of 500 sl**** highly plausible (though not definitive), if only from reading enough medieval histroy to read about how many attendants (who were noble or gentry class themselves) high status persons had and the servants that supported the whole retinue.
I think it is unlikely given the amount of resources necessary for these people on a daily basis, espeecially on a long desert trip of over 3,000 kilometers. It's true that new resources could be purchased along the way, but 500 people is still a very large number of slaves to bring on such a lengthy journey in the first place, and even if every one of them only drank one liter of carried water a day that would still require carrying 500 liters of water, not to mention other provisions. This isn't comparable to a much shorter journey along a European river, or through a series of small European villages.
@veritasetcaritas the issue I have is that Arab slavers marched thousands across the Sahara, admittedly with a high attrition rate, but with sufficient returns to make the route viable. Armies too have made significant desert crossings with thousands of men. The devil is in the logistical details: if Mansa Musa had made adequate logistical arrangements before his journey (a likelihood) then it is entirely feasible to make the journey with the equivalent of a small army.
@@redjem6918 it depends a lot on the distance and route. And of course that attrition rate is important. But if he had 500 slaves, who else went with him?
Awesome Video. Subscribed.
Thank you!
can we get some oceania-centerism
There are indeed some recent attempts at exactly that. My advice is to read some indigenous islander-focused histories, fascinating stuff
Kudos to you for taking those folks seriously. It will drive you crazy though man. I jave a friend that jas fell victim to that garbage and its infuriating. Wait until they call all of your actual evidence "lies" and consider that actual evidence that they are right.
Yeah there are definitely diminishing returns when engaging with people like Great House. I might use some of his tweets in later videos however, as examples of common research errors, and to contrast with good research methodology.
Mansa Musa did not have slaves ? See my post on ex saves I saw in Mali n 1993. Why try and rewrite history ?
I love being a American descendent of west Africa and that doesn't require me to hate anyone else.
Yeah it's not complicated.
@@veritasetcaritas keep the cool vids coming
@@Personincrowd thank you!
I remember my first argument with an afrocentrist many stereotypes of his people were proven that day...
Note that Dyhana Ziegler (editor of the book) claims a knighthood and prefers to be called "Lady".
Embarrassing to say the least.
“Florida Virtual School CEO says she’s a knighted ‘genius.’ Um … what?” via Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel - The Sentinel has learned that the school’s new CEO - the woman who is supposed to clean things up - claims she’s not only a knighted dame (something an expert says she isn’t) but also one of the “500 Greatest Geniuses of the 21st Century” (a designation from a bogus and bankrupt organization). Now we’re reading a story about how the new CEO likes to be called “Lady Dhyana Ziegler.” She even had the school print the title on the placard she uses at meetings - though a royalty expert told the Sentinel that the title wasn’t bestowed by the Queen of England, but rather by a “fake” group that usually charges money “for a completely worthless piece of paper.”
floridapolitics.com
These people are low wattage. You'll never convince them of anything..
Exaggeration is common in history whether it is Mansa Musa's Hajj, the size of Xerxes' army on the second Persian invasion of Greece or many other examples.
He’s been as stupid as always lately. These videos are important.
One of his most recent threads has been critiqued severely by people who are chasing up his sources and discovering how poor they are. I think I might make a video about it.
@@veritasetcaritas I’d watch
those who do not learn of their past will always be doomed to repeat it
I would love to hear your opinions on the RUclips channel "History debunked"
1. Right wing.
2. White nationalist adjacent.
3. Frequently racist.
4. Anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-multiculturalism.
5. Socially conservative.
6. Used to be more about history, but these days a lot less about history, and a lot more about cultural war content.
Lost causer
Probably one of the worst channels I've ever had the disgrace of coming upon. Not because I disagree with him, but because he's openly racist and blurts out incorrect, harmful things to further an agenda and has the balls to call himself a history channel. It's just another alt right source and lord knows we have too many of those
As they say, you can’t fix stupid. Thank you for your work!
The scholarship of this channel is amazing. Was history your major in college or is it your interest?
Thank you! My bachelor degree majored in classics and history. My Masters is in an unrelated field, information management. However I have also been a university research assistant and ad adjunct lecturer, so I'm familiar with academic searerch methods.
@@veritasetcaritas Keep up the good work
@@shivamkumarmishra5051 thank you!
💯
Based. 😎👌
Thanks mate.
It’s nice to point out incompetence. But possibly the ignorant man brings more knowledge to other ignorants that would never seek any knowledge at all.
Perhaps Afrocentrism is not that bad on an academic scale (this is a serious PERHAPS). However, the channels, influencers, and people that promote it make me and others doubt a lot about it. There is a channel called African Stream, which is relatively accurate in some of its political arguments regarding African leaders, but lately it has been doing a small campaign on saying how Argentina is very "racist" (which, as someone who knows this country well despite not being Argentine, is extremely untrue) and its literally just been ranting about how some countries in Latin America are resisting "US Imperialism".
In general, the channel just centers on the african communities of several countries outside of africa and calls most if not all interactions from latin america with the US "imperialism and exploitation" (something that, as someone from Panama and Venezuela, is not true lol).
It also promotes a kind of "we vs them" kind of mentality. This is reflected in the comments, which instead of being about political correctness and improvements, say about how every country descended from europeans or with high heritage (Argentina, for example) will have the same flaws and is bad (something that is, ironically extremely racist and just as racist as insulting any African country).
In conclusion, I mean that Academic Afrocentrism probably has much to offer.
However, its representation with the people of that community, which can often be rather populist, is extremely bad and ruins the very concept with its own representatives and people
that promote it, being honest.
Yes I know Afrocentrism isn't well represented on social media. The channel to which you refer sounds very much like it's a populist Afrocentrist source which is Hotep-adjacent.
I can debate you on the argentina being racist thing
Do you go around posting diatrides against the far more numerous and common European ethnographic supremacy history channels? Or does it only motivate you to act against these kinds of ideologies when the group is Black ?
@@TheEvolver311 firstly this is not a diatribe, this is a response to a personal attack. Secondly most of my channel attacks right wing and Eurocentric narratives. I have an entire playlist called "Fight the Right" with fifteen videos in it, I have five videos targeting a right-wing leaning libertarian RUclipsr, and I have several other videos discrediting Eurocentric colonialist myths and exposing colonial damage to indigenous people.
Not only that, but I have more pro-black and African content on my channel than Great House has ever produced. Have you ever seen him create a 56 minute pro-black history video like this?
ruclips.net/video/FV3sy-QWEOI/видео.html
No you haven't. Have you ever seen him create a 35 minute anti-colonial video like this?
ruclips.net/video/tcN23sETHKs/видео.html
No you haven't. Have you ever seen him create a 35 minute anti-white savior video like this?
ruclips.net/video/tpiswunQh40/видео.html
No you haven't.
@@veritasetcaritas
I was responding to the og post of this specific comment.
It’s important to note that no serious scholarly discussions about such topics are being had on YT. None of these people are credentialed scholars in the field and of the few who have a social media presence none contend that serious discussions on the research in these areas are being done on social media.
There are flat earth channels but no one in the mainstream scholarly community takes it seriously.
Why would anyone engage with such people? This is like the people who are engaged in debates with the likes of Clyde Winters. Why??
I am addressing Great House for the same reason that mainstream scholars address pseudo-archaeologists and flat-earthers. It's not just a matter of correcting falsehoods, it's a matter of explaining good historical practice. In this video most of my time is spent explaining how to do proper historical research, which is what this kind of correction video is good for.
@@veritasetcaritas
Actually most of the time is spent focusing on your exchange with this person. I would applaud any channel that wanted to promote sound research methods but that doesn’t require engaging with his ilk. Secondly who in the mainstream scholarly community is sitting around writing papers on flat earth nonsense? It gets mentioned in the larger discussion about how social media is negatively impacted society but who is spending years of their professional life as a scholar in a related field debunking flat earthers? That is something that you see on social media my layman. They build a strange sort of following by feuding with such unhinged people while the credible scientific community ignores such people. There is a reason for this.
The last thing you want to do is to give these people a platform. To mention their name or work on another channel elevates them.
Moreover there are a group of Afrocentrists who have achieved some level of fame in the black community despite not being able to support their ridiculous claims. Diop , Clark, Van Sertima , Ben-Jochannan to name a few. They are considered laughing stocks in the world of mainstream research but at least they are known in their niche circles. There are scholars who have challenged their views but it’s not on social media. They wrote actual papers and books on the subject. Here you are challenging a nonentity for some reason.
This is like ignoring someone like Alex Jones who promoted the most ridiculous conspiracy theories while going after someone with similar views that has 10000 online followers while elevating their profile.
Might I suggest going after the big fish not the minnows.
@@drstevej2527 as I said, I am addressing Great House for the same reason that mainstream scholars address pseudo-archaeologists and flat-earthers; on social media, just like they do. I didn't say anythihng about scholars spending their lives as a scholar debunking flat earthers, or writing papers on them. I have made just two videos on one large Afrocentrist who has a wide reach, and several videos on an Afrocentrist channel with over 400,000 subscribers, and in response you complain about me correcting their claims.
Do you know who has more access to the public than Diop , Clark, Van Sertima, and Ben-Jochannan? It's Afrocentrists on social media. The average person on the street has never heard of Diop or Van Sertima, but people like Great House get hundreds of thousands of views a month. Alex Jones is not a relevant comparison since he is literally on social media not in the academy, unlike Diop or \Van Sertima.
What will youi do when I make my video addressing the claims in Black Athena and The Peacock's Tail? Will you tell me again to stop criticizing Afrocentrism?
@@veritasetcaritas
Do you have any experience in the academy? Neither Diop nor Van Sertima has any standing in the academy but they have reached 10s of millions. Their work along with others has influenced generations of black laymen unlike this person. You seem to think that 400000 subscribers is a lot of people in a population of 8 billion. That number represents many people who subscribe years ago and never return. When you go to an African American bookstore you will find that no one heard of this individual.
I hold a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago and I have been doing battle with the nonsense that is Afrocentrism for years. In all that time I have never heard of this person. I’m guessing that you are one of these people who thinks that a social media following gives someone standing. Hint it doesn’t!
Again there is a reason why no one in this space in the scholarly community is refuting his claims as they don’t know that he is alive.
@@drstevej2527 I have a Bachelor degree, a Masters degree, I've been a university research assistant, I've been a university lecturer, and I've had papers presented at conferences and published in scholarly journals. So yes, I do have experience in the academy.
I am fully aware that Van Sertima's "They Came Before Columbus" proposal has rightly been dismissed by academics, but I haven't been arguing about whether or not he or Diop is taken seriously by academics. I said they does not have the same ACCESS TO THE PUBLIC as the Afrocentrists on social media. Van Sertima, for instance, is dead. He has no access to anyone.
As I said, you could ask a random person on the street if they know who Van Sertima is, and you could guarantee they would not know, but it is very likely they could cite an Afrocentrist they've seen on social media.
No I do not think 400,0000 subscribers is a lot of people in a population of 8 billion, nor do I think that just because someone has as a social media following they have standing. What they have is an audience.
I have seen no evidence from you that Diop and Van Sertima have influenced tens of millions of people, or that they are a continuing threat to the academy. As I said previously, your idea that academics don't attempt to counter bad history on social media is demonstrably false. There are historians and archaeologists on Reddit, Twitter, and even Instagram doing exactly that on a regular basis.
4:18 - I think this is partially a particular kind of brainrot that we've seen in Ireland from Americans. It shouldn't exist, but it comes from an actual agenda. The agenda varies, but Irish people are the most constantly useful counterpoint because history is hard. Because if you only have to think about something very, very narrow without having to deal with the why, everything gets easier.
Yes I agree. I really don't like the habit of appealing to the Irish and historical instances of white people being enslaved (sucha s the Barbary pirate slave raids), in efforts to diminish the historical impact and horror of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I should make a video on why historical"white slavery" is irrelevant in the context of modern discussions of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
@@veritasetcaritas Not to create too unwieldy of a tangent from the goal of countering modern-day Dunningesque perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but I feel there is also fertile ground out there to connect white slavery non-histories & the anxieties they have reflected in North American & European white supremacist/colonial/imperial societies to their contemporary equivalents (ie. “anti-white racisms,” hyper-fixating on white victims of human trafficking, white South African farmers being dispossessed or whatever, etc etc etc).
@@TheLetsRead yes I agree.
The centrists done care if what they say is correct or not.
Unfortunately true.
Poking around some of the sources (not very deeply, mind you) and wow oh wow does Mary Lefkowitz seem like the most insufferable of Classicists. I’m sure there’s veracity in some of the finer grain details of her academic work contesting non-nuanced afrocentrism, but I also can’t lie that I’m more generously predisposed to her critics what with the insufferable way in which Classics nerds refuse to accept the possibility of Mediterranean influences (thus, including Egypt) on proto-Greeks/Greek peoples/etc. Not trying to be contentious outside of noting that it’s a shame her career took such a sharp turn into what feels like the academic equivalent of Terminal Poster Syndrome 😵💫
Like, does she hold these perspectives regarding Near Eastern influence on Greece?
I think specialists in particular can become very intellectually territorial, and Classicists seem to be prone to this. But in the case of Lefkowitz she has also been repeatedly accused of collaborating in an academic conspiracy to deny African achievemts and falsiify the historical record, and after a few years of that I can understand her being defensive.
@@TheLetsRead she believes Greece was inluenced by both Egypt and other Near Eastern sources, as she states here.
"Of course there was some Egyptian influence on Greek thought (medicine, science, mathematics), but ancient Near Eastern sources (see below) must also be considered."
bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/1996.04.19/
@@veritasetcaritas Thank you very much for the clarification! Yeah, the (anti-semitic sounding, in particular, to some degree 👀) harassment she’s received is definitely not the criticism I had in mind, and just makes me Feel about the oddball crap which has interfered with good faith (I’m so sorry to default to that term lmao) academic discourse.
@@TheLetsRead what's wrong with the phrase "good faith"? abuses of it shouldn't detract from the principle.
Alas even in academia itself it is hard to find someone who deosn't cherry pick, rely on logical fallacy, selectively dismiss entire studies based on whether or not they already agree with it, take $ to manipualate data for certain ends in order to get funding etc. It's unfortunate but it is the case most of the time.
No one should be an Afro or euro or asia or whatever centrist.
I'm sure glad I never got into Twitter
👍
I find any kind of ethno centerist view very interesting. They are great for psychological study and may give us more insight as to how certain ideologies arise.
Yes. To a large extent Afrocentrism is a strong reaction to Eurocentrism.
@@veritasetcaritas I don't think I have ever seen anything other kind of ethnocentrism outside those two groups. Similar to how the bloods where a reaction to the crips and the crips where a reaction to the LA Police force oh how times have changed but things stay the same.
@@Zane-It here in the Far East there is Sinocentrism, Han chauvinism, Japanocentrism, Korean ethno-nationalism, and Hindutva. These aren't even reactions to oppression, they're homegrown ethno-supermacist thinking resulting from historical cultural values and beliefs.
@@veritasetcaritas when you where talking about one being a reaction to the other that's where my mind went.
@@Zane-It yeah I'd say that there are a few ethno-national mythologies which emerged as reactions to colonialism, especially those surrounding supposedly ancient martial arts which were supposedly outlawed by scared European colonials. I made a video on one of them.
ruclips.net/video/7vTi6VR0L_M/видео.html&ab_channel=veritasetcaritas
I'm from a mixed family, but for many different reasons. About 500 years ago we mixed in Brasil, a Spanish colony. We were not safe as Moroccan and Sephardi Jews. Later we mixed again with black from Suriname.Today we are white, colored or black, living in three continents. Many 'blacks' share the same values and culture as the 'whites'. I don't make a difference, though people who don't know me, are making assumptions without knowing me. I don't care. We're all people. In most respects we're all the same. Within family skin color is the only difference. We share so much.
At my work a colleague with a dark skin color had a problem with doing business with some African countries. He lost a lot of money. Your skin color isn't always an advantage.
Afrocentrism is denying historical facts. Respect African culture, history and African opportunities instead.
Popular and populist Afrocentrism often distorts history, but the contributions of academic Afrocentrism, or Afrocentricity as Asante preferred to call it, are valuable.
Thank you.
So is idi Amin been not a monster bullshit or not?
That depends on whether or not you think massacring your own citizens qualifies as being a monster.
@@veritasetcaritas i do. But you showed the guy's tweet defending idi as part of the *mild* stuff
@@erdood3235 oh I see what happened. I actually posted it with the introduction "the populist Afrocentrism not taken seriously by mainstream scholarship". It just happened to still be on the screen when I mentioned his earlier, milder tweets.
@@veritasetcaritas thanks.
@@erdood3235 you're welcome.
So much interesting history from Africa, yet people feel the need to lie about it.
17:54 his surname is ben-yehuda, you forgot to say Ben.
Ben in this contexts means son of in Hebrew.
His surname isn't Yehuda. It's son of Yehuda.
The "ben" in that place was accidentally deleted in editing. Seconds later I identify him specifically as "Ben-Yehuda" since yes, I know "ben" in Hebrew means "son of", and is part of his name meaning "son of Yehuda".
Ok
It's really funny that this video has 3* more views than the original
Yeah that has occured to me. I think the other video is better in some ways, but this video does have a useful demonstration of how to investigate and analyze sources for accuracy and reliability. It also has a section on Afrocentrism which I think is very important.
Afrocentrism is an extreme reaction to the dominant Eurocentric view of African history that has been taught in the academia even on the continent. Europeans justified colonialism by says Africans had no history and separating them from world history, in highschool we learn of Vasco da gama and Ludwig Kraft European explorers instead of how the different kingdoms and tribes interacted for thousands of years. The extreme afrocentrism is the same thing colonialist did distort reality.
Yes this is true, but there's also perfectly regular academic Afrocentrism which is entirely valid and shouldn't be regarded as merely a reaction to European racism.
Afrocentrism is born as a gut reaction to the inferiority complex many africans have towards other races, which leads them to: lie about their history, steal achievements from other peoples, and generalised revanchism towards other races due to perceived injustices (as if europeans or asians have never been killed, raped and enslaved). Focusing on african history is cool, but pretending that it is in any way equal to european and asian history is intellectually dishonest.
I met a crazy dude from Nigeria who said I looked "Bangladeshi" (Im half white half somali) and also told my mom who is very much somali that she looks bangladeshi too and then proceeded to say the first president of the US was black, and the first prime minster of the UK was black too
Very odd.
@@veritasetcaritas I know right weirdest encounter ive ever had in my life
As a black man thank you for debunking these people man. Idk how they think this makes us look good
Thank you. Don't worry I know these people are a tiny minority and don't really represent black people at all.