September 20, 2002

'Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Sociology makes for strange bedfellows in Amy J. Binder's Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press). Afrocentrism and creationism have radically different ideologies and constituencies. But they share similarities as movements vying for influence and invoking pluralism.

Ms. Binder, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, argues that the two are more than ethnographically interesting phenomena. She hopes