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Courageous European Authors

Courageous European authors like Martin Bernal and Jacqueline Battalora have had a very special role in helping to awaken humanity. They are people devoted to the historical truth -- even when it does not reflect well on Europeans or their descendants. Their job is often more difficult than that of courageous Black American and African authors because they are not welcomed by people in their own communities who continue to subscribe to the colonial worldview.

Without perhaps realizing it, these courageous historians and authors are following The Principles of Ma'at -- the ancient Egyptian Goddess of Truth  who principles kept Egyptian culture elightened for thousands of years. Amazon says of Battalora's book Birth of a White Nation: "Finally, the book demonstrates how the social construction and legal enactment of "white people" has ultimately compromised the humanity of those so labeled."

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It is as though Bernal and Battalora understood that to re-enter the Age of Enlightenment that governed ancient Egypt, we must now exit the Dark Age in which we have been stuck for the last 2,600 years since the fall of Egypt. That requires telling the historical truth and ending the colonialism and neo-colonialism which limits all our minds, hearts, and souls.

Martin Bernal

 

Martin Bernal (1937-2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Bernal is best known for his work Black Athena which shows that ancient Greek civilization and language  are Egyptian in origin.  He  was born and grew up in London, the son of a physicist and an artist. Bernal was educated at Dartington Hall School and then at King's College, Cambridge where he was awarded a degree in 1961 with first-class honors in the Oriental Studies. He specialized in the language and history of China and spent some time at the Peking Univsersity. Bernal was a graduate student at Cambridge and also at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, finishing his PhD in Cambridge in 1965 when he was elected a fellow at King's.

In 1972, Bernal moved to Cornell University in New York. There he became a full professor in 1988. He taught there for the rest of his career, retiring in 2001. Initially he taught Government Studies and continued his research on modern Chinese history. Under the impact of the Vietnam War, he had also developed an interest in Vietnamese history and culture, and learned the Vietnamese language. He became Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 2001.

 

From about 1975, Bernal underwent a radical shift in his interests. When he studied Hebrew, he found a number of striking similarities between it and Greek. Bernal wrote the book Cadmean Letters: The Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean and Further West before 1400 B.C. which is  devoted to the origins of the Greek alphabet. Bernal had been interested in ancient Egypt since childhood, in part inspired by his grandfather.

 

He came to the conclusion that ancient Greek accounts of Egyptian influence on their civilization should be taken seriously. Bernal's new direction was strengthened by his discovery of the work of Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour. After he wrote Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1), Bernal devoted the next 20 years to writing the next two volumes of Black Athena -- with the second volume devoted to archaeological and documentary evidence and the third to linguistic evidence.

Jacqueline Battalora

Jacqueline Battalora was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and lived in Antwerp, Belgium for six years before her family relocated to Victoria, Texas. The experience of attending high school and middle school in Texas formed her understanding of race in America. While she is currently a lawyer and professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, she is also a former Chicago Police officer. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and has been engaged in anti-racist training since the mid-1990s.

Battalora is the author of the 2013 book Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today.

Amazon says: "Birth of a White Nation is a fascinating new book on race in America that begins with an exploration of the moment in time when "white people," as a separate and distinct group of humanity, were invented through legislation and the enactment of laws. The book provides a thorough examination of the underlying reasons as well as the ways in which "white people" were created. It also explains how the creation of this distinction divided laborers and ultimately served the interests of the elite. The book goes on to examine how foundational law and policy in the U.S. were used to institutionalize the practice of "white people" holding positions of power. Finally, the book demonstrates how the social construction and legal enactment of "white people" has ultimately compromised the humanity of those so labeled."
 

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