Dr.Carr's Lecture- Jasmine Rice

Dr. Carr's lecture
Jasmine Rice
Sept 2,2010

I enjoyed Dr. Carr's lecture on the African World Experience. He began the lecture introducing us to the basic terms of Africana learnings and teachings.
To my surprise many of these early symbols looked like hieroglyphics. Than I began to understand that saying that " nothing is new in this world, only recycled."
I always knew that Egypt was in Africa but you always hear about hieroglyphics exclusively "belonging" to the "white" or should I say lighter and richer egyptians. Or atleast all the great things that blacks did being attributed to our white counterparts. But I digress, Dr. Carr countinued to show us just how African teachings and culture have found its way to the shores of America and into the thoughts of great thinkers like WEB Dubois, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X. He lectured that global traditions and innovations in teachings have all come (in some way or another) from the contemporary African Experience. He made it clear to us that we must not see ourselves as beginning with slavery but that we are bigger than that; our thoughts go deeper than that. If we see ourselves as bigger, we will also see that every race of people has had their time on the bottom ( being oppressed) but that taken notice or not we all have contributed profoundly to the world we live in. He cited black intellectuals who wrote about the plight of the black man losing his culture and therefore the self- woth of his thoughts; in summary concluding that if one's self worth is taken the rest will follow. He also outlined for us the goals of African Deep Thought as 1. To recover African Deep Thought from its historical African background and 2. To show that such deep thought is the basis of what is now "academic" work. I took from this lecture that we as people must see ourselves as academic equals to others for them to respect us the way we want them too. We must look at history objectively and see the facts (and interpret them) soley as they are, and move on.