As a reconstructive and interpretive world-view, Africology was meant to 'pose different terms for the debate around race, culture, and community'(Asante, 1996, p. 526) insofar as Western/Eurocentric theories and methodologies, its proponents claimed, could only serve to distort the authentic experience of African people. As the intellectual arm of black cultural nationalism, it articulated a vindicationist narrative in which the self-determination of African descendants was inextricable from the reclamation of an African past, a system of shared commitments, and an ethics of mutuality. Africology posited that Eurocentrism and white supremacy threatened and conceptually incarcerated the political, economic, social - and most importantly, cultural - conditions of African people on the continent and throughout the world. Africologists asserted that, given the reality of white supremacist exploitation and domination, Africans and Europeans had a fundamentally different experience in the world. The shared reality among dispersed Africans resulted in a pan-African perspective forged through a common heritage, history, and identity rooted in Africa. This set those racialized as black apart from whites. Stated differently, the divide between the 'composite African' and the European, as explicated in Ani's Yurugu, was both ontological and metaphysical.  
In his illuminating text, Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness, Stephen Ferguson II (2015) offers a distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' Afrocentrism. The strong iteration, represented by scholars including Frances Cress Welsing, Leonard Jeoffries, and Wade Nobles, argued for biological, scientific, and metaphysically exclusivist differentiations between African and European peoples. The weak position, articulated by thinkers such as Greg Carr, Marimba Ani, Molefi Asante, and Ama Mazama, maintained that the differences between the African and the European were sociocultural, ideological, and epistemological.