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Adams is a member of a loose-knit consortium of Afrocentrists and "melanin scholars" that includes Leonard Jeffries, the controversial chairman of black studies at City College in New York; Wade Nobles, a psychology professor at San Francisco State University; Asa Hilliard, a professor at Georgia State University; and other black scholars and psychiatrists. These "melanists," Ortiz de Montellano writes in the latest issue of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, provide a supposedly scientific explanation for the excessive claims of Afrocentrism.
Basing their beliefs largely on a speculative scientific paper published in 1983 by Dr. Frank Barr, a San Francisco physician, the melanists assert that blacks -- who indeed have more of the skin pigment than other races -- possess superior and supernatural traits that can be ascribed to the magical qualities of neuromelanin, a little-studied substance in the brain. Yet while neuromelanin is markedly different from the skin pigment, the melanists often fail to differentiate between the two and ignore the fact that all humans have similar amounts of neuromelanin. According to the melanists, neuromelanin can convert light and magnetic fields to sound and back again, and can capture sunlight and hold it in a "memory mode." Furthermore, they say, melanin granules are minicomputers that can respond to and analyze stimuli without interacting with the brain.
Barr is aghast at the distortion of his writings: "I wrote a paper for a theoretical journal about specific properties of an interesting, neglected molecule," he says. "It included no stupid things like the more melanin you have, the smarter you are."
That kind of disclaimer apparently has little impact on the school boards that embrace Afrocentric extremes. In Detroit the public schools' radio station has rebroadcast in their entirety Adams' rambling lectures. Adams has participated in seminars for the school system's science teachers, who in one session accepted without protest the assertion that Egyptians were flying around in gliders thousands of years ago. And in Atlanta, Gladys Twyman, coordinator of the African-American infusion program for public schools, confirms that the concept of melanin is used both as a teaching tool and as part of the curriculum. That concept, she explains, "is the thread, the core of the project."
Afrocentrist myths have taken hold in higher education as well, extending beyond black-studies courses. In one of the required multicultural courses for freshmen at Southern Methodist University, for example, the Rev. Clarence Glover, director of intercultural education and minority affairs, tells students that melanin content generates certain emotional reactions. He suggests that those with little melanin and a Nordic background are "member- object" oriented: they rely on objects like warm clothing made of animal skins to survive. But Africans, with more melanin, he says, "have a 'member- member' orientation and value human relationships more than objects."