The Benediction
The Benediction
Ashe Ashe Ashe O
This concluding chapter summarizes the study's key findings and presents some final thoughts. The Afrocentrism practiced at the First Afrikan Presbyterian Church employs essentialist constructions of blackness and Africanness in order to meet the needs of a community whose knowledge of its African origins has been fractured; whose sense of connection to Christianity has been undermined by Eurocentric biblical interpretations; and whose feelings of assimilation into the larger American culture are not fully realized despite their middle-class status. Afrocentrism supplies an explanation for the community's disconnection from their ancestral, spiritual, and national moorings through arguments of deliberate marginalization of blackness and privileging of whiteness. It also argues that the remedy lies in arguments of a transcendent and timeless blackness that naturally inheres in all people of African descent.
Keywords: Afrocentrism, First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, blackness, middle class, Africanness
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
