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But Jeffries had a following well beyond the academic community. When he returned to New York from a trip to Africa last week, nearly 1,000 of his supporters greeted him at John F. Kennedy International Airport -- far outnumbering the handful of mostly Jewish protesters who had turned out. One pro-Jeffries placard said, WELCOME HOME, BLACK PRINCE. A supporter declared, "Jeffries is exposing the big white lie." Another added: "The attack on Dr. Jeffries is an attack on Africa. It's an attack on all of us." The placard that received the loudest applause said, WHITE PEOPLE PUT JEWS IN THE OVEN, NOT JEFFRIES. Later in the week, more than 1,000 people showed up at a pro-Jeffries rally in a Brooklyn church, where they cheered a videotape of his speech.
The hating part of Jeffries may not represent the opinions of most American blacks. But a cloud of black-white cultural politics -- sometimes ugly, sometimes rather sad -- swirls around him. Possibly the professor subscribes to what might be called the Guidelines of Slur Compensation, whereby every vicious, ignorant remark ever uttered over the centuries by a white American may be repaid by a similarly ignorant viciousness mucked back in the opposite direction. Yin and yang -- every Black Devil has a mirroring White Devil.
Jeffries serves up outrages of pseudo scholarship that sound sometimes as if they originated in the lodge hall of Amos 'n' Andy's Mystic Knights of the Sea -- a rich irony in which Jeffries, a black foe of racism, makes himself sound like the Kingfish, a racist invention of whites. Blacks are "sun people," Jeffries explains, and whites are "ice people." New York Newsday quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, "Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history." Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment, gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.
If Jeffries were a tenured white professor peddling race hate tricked up as learning, would he be more furiously criticized? Or less? Another C.U.N.Y. professor, Michael Levin, has, outside his classroom, preached the racial inferiority of blacks without being dismissed from his post. Perhaps that is because, as a lone academic crank, he speaks for no coherent movement and has no following. Jeffries marches onstage in all the panoply of Afrocentrism.
Afrocentrism is a culturally passionate and sometimes intellectually troubling development that is becoming something like a new religion in the African-American community. During his Albany lecture, Jeffries spoke feelingly about the need for black Americans to look into the past for their heroic selves. One important component of Afrocentric scholarship is a political-cultural exercise that attempts to appropriate the civilization of ancient Egypt as a black African phenomenon. Everyone must have his memories. Saul Bellow wrote once that they "keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." If some scholars doubt that Egypt is the black American's true memory, still, maybe memories can be invented.