Culture is the immune system that protects, defends, strengthens, and rejuvenates a collectively-oriented people from alienation, attack, and disintegration. Culture transcends the expressions of cultural products, such as dress, customs, language, dance, song, music, cuisine, and theology. Naturally, culture is ideological, sociological, psycho-spiritual, and behavioral. Culture provides structure, organization, and direction to a people's way of knowing, their ideas of being, their conceptual universe, value systems, and understanding of the cosmic universe.
(An Afrocentric Definition)
As we continuously confront a multi-front battle against the unity of African people worldwide in the 21st century, four arenas stand out: cultural rootedness, ideological oneness, an identity that transcends colonial and neocolonial definitions, and the valuing and pursuit of power. The ways we think, understand, ideate, relate, and solve problems form the basis for our survival and our thrust for liberation—everlasting peace and happiness.
No matter where you are—whether an African in the Americas, the Caribbean and West Indies, Euro-Asia, or on the motherland —our collective plight and condition—from history to the present day—demands a fusion of culture, consciousness, and nuance. This fusion, in turn, produces a coherent system of being and relating, denoted as an African World Identity. This identity is rooted in the collective revolutionary spirit, which harnesses, channels, and directs Pan-African self-determination.
Building on this, it is essential to recognize that an African worldview and Afrocentric conceptual system must reflect and project the optimal, positive images, ideas, and values that are life-enhancing, life-generating, and life-perpetuating.
Considering the effects of this worldview, it is clear that for the mental health of African people across the diaspora—especially those cut off from their roots—the main challenge is to deal with the widespread ideas, messages, and images spread by the dominant influence of Eurocentric control. Here, 'Eurocentric-hegemonic control' means the dominance of European cultural values, beliefs, and ways of seeing the world, promoted as universal. The 'conceptual universe' is the set of ideas and views that shape how African people see themselves and their environment. The tension from this imposed value system has shaped—and sometimes distorted—our worldview.
To further clarify, a conceptual universe consists of beliefs, ideas, images, attitudes, values, precepts, and moral and ethical leanings that give content and form to a worldview system. Consequently, a worldview is the composite of ideas and thoughts around the nature of reality, the nature of being in the universe, the nature of knowledge and truth, and the nature of realizing values.
Dr. Linda James Myers emphatically asserts that White, European, and European-American societal control distorts constitutional principles of freedom, liberty, and justice. She argues this results in self-alienating values—individualism, competition, and materialism—which reshape societies, institutions, and human relationships into fragmented systems that undermine our sense of humanity.
Western society was built on indigenous and cultural genocide, land theft, and multiple forms of servitude and enslavement, inflicting centuries of physical and psychological violence and protecting its descendants from consequences. For people of African descent who have been historically oppressed and marginalized, it is vital to transform their worldview from suboptimal to optimal. In Afrocentric terms, power means defining your own reality, so reclaiming and restoring communal and family strength is key to nationhood and unity.
In alignment with this imperative, Dr. Linda James Myers—a respected elder, psychologist, educator, writer, and developer of Optimal Psychology and the Belief Systems Analysis approach—encourages people of African descent to realign and recenter themselves with divine wisdom and truth. She urges us to pursue both personal and collective transformation, to reflect on our precepts and values, to examine the factors causing distress and discomfort within ourselves, our community, and society, and to reassert our identity and authority as people with rich traditions that precede materialism.
To support this journey of realignment and reclamation, below you will find self-knowledge-enriching resources to initiate the process of returning to the source of our historical past, origins, and indigenous culture:
1) Paper on The Deep Structure of Culture
2) Digital Copy of Understanding an Afrocentric Worldview: Introduction to an Optimal Psychology
3) Presentation on Optimal Conceptual Theory and the African Worldview Pt. 1
4) Presentation on Optimal Conceptual Theory and the African Worldview Pt. 2
5) YouTube series, Creating Zola Mondays, hosted by Dr. Linda James Myers