Some examples: In an entry on Hegel, the Dictionary lists City University of New York Professor Leonard Jeffries, perhaps the most outrageous of the Afrocentrists, as one of those who "owe[s] a significant debt" to the German philosopher. An aside reports that T.S. Eliot's Waste Land is "the white man's ballad of sexual frustration."

The Dictionary's introduction promises to "provide what every American needs to know as we enter the next century." This invites critics to go into their shoot-fish-in-a-barrel mode, ticking off the dead white men excluded from the volume. Here is one round of fire: Herodotus, Horace, Cicero, Virgil, St. Thomas Aquinas, Giovanni Boccaccio, Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev all fail to make the cut. We learn about lesser known writers such as the Argentinean Alfonsina Storni and Korean-American Ronyoung Kim but hear nothing of Thomas Hardy and Ezra Pound. And on and on.