The need for objective Truth
The Global South and East calls the West to a dialogue of civilizations
As a young man seeking to understand things during the period 1967 to 1972, I discovered that truth is relative, that truth is understood from a paradigm or frame of reference that is rooted in social position. I discovered this at the Center for Inner City Studies, a teaching center in South Chicago, affiliated with Northeastern Illinois University (on the other side of town). The faculty was black, and the student body was 90% black. Four faculty members who influenced me put forth a comprehensive analysis of modern colonialism from the vantage point of the colonized. Their analysis of the modern world was fundamentally different from and opposed to the progressive worldview to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student at Penn State.
Black nationalist intellectuals of the era assumed they were seeing and disseminating Truth, with insights rooted in their vantage point as colonized. They were seeking to expose a previously hidden Truth; they did not see themselves…