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
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