Mumbo Jumbo, I believe, marks a departure from previous perspectives of race and racial dynamics in America—besides the obvious denunciations of portrayals of the "African American Experience" and their associated issues, Reed creates this worldview, this quasi-religious perspective and that incorporates various cultural, sociological, and historical phenomena into one. As an obligatory mention, this postmodernist motif of blurring the lines between "objectivity" and "subjectivity" appears here—the seemingly incongruent handling of how we treat history (often seen as objective) and sociological phenomena (perhaps thought of as being subjective, the result of social constructions) equally seems to demonstrate this point well.
Now in regards to Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo Worldview', I take concern with its passive dichromatism despite it's clear and superficial "anti-European" sentiments...
Within this quasi-religious framework, we see the start of Jes Grew and an animating "Afro-American" spirit stemming from ancient Egypt; in the chapters describing the mythological origins of Jes Grew and Atonism, this theme of brothers-turned-enemies sets the stage for a bipolar dynamic. If we then follow the spread of Atonism, we extend into Europe, a predominantly white and Christian continent; for example, "the Atonists in the late 4th century B.C. convinced the Emperor Constantine to co-sign for the Cross" (Reed 168). This thread of the brotherly conflict, in its spread and its embodiment through Hinckle and Safecracker, shows a uniquely white facet of this dichotomy.
However, if we consider the spread of Jes Grew or its present existence, we see a uniquely African American movement—besides other more obvious examples, if we just consider that the Haitian authorities, those from the only country in the world which gained independence through an African slave revolt, we can see how this aspect of the brotherly conflict is characteristically black.
Despite the seeming Afrocentric origin of this brotherly conflict, I still wonder why Ancient Egypt was the primary setting... despite its geographic location within Africa, Egypt and the rest of northern Africa were much more connected to southern Europe—Egypt was once part of the Roman Empire! Further, there seems to be a geographic disconnection even with regards to ethnicity: many of the slaves that were exploited and forcefully brought to America were mostly from western Africa; with some inconsistencies and seemingly carefully curated anthropologic examples, I am concerned about this narrative in the first place. I assert this: under a superficial cover of Afrocentrism, we still see a disconnection and that the story is still ultimately Eurocentric. Given the previously mentioned sentiments that this text seems to espouse (anti-colonialist, anti-Eurocentric), I would think that the underlying narrative would be more complex, unlike the condensed and monolithic representations that are concomitant with books about the 'African American Experience' that fall under the Atonist tradition and perhaps even broadly simplistic and dichromatic 'Black vs White' dynamics...
