Molefi Kete Asante

"A common expression among African Americans relates the good to the beautiful, "beauty is as beauty does" or "she's beautiful because she's good." The first statement places emphasis on what a person does, that is, how a person "walks" among others in the society. The second statement identifies the beautiful by action. If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful."

"The idea found embedded in European thought, particularly in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that Africans were inferior socially and behaviorally has tainted most of what passes for social science in the West, definitionally and conceptually. Few have been able to escape Alexander Pope's dictum in the Essay on Man (1733) "some are, and must be, greater than the rest" and its implication for European contact and interpretation of that contact with the rest of the world."