The left is diligent in accusing everyone of “eurocentrism” and “ethnocentrism”. When the right is usually faced with these accusations, the common tactic used is ridicule. One such common example is the case of “White privilege”. Everything else being equal, a white individual will receive certain benefits that non-whites won’t. And there are actually studies where the theory of white privilege is actually validated.
However, the left is horridly wrong when it comes to the estimating the effects of white privilege on differences in education or income. There is literally no proof in any part of the world, or in history, where discrimination leads to poverty.
The two important words here are “the world” and “history”. If the left would study societies outside of the West, one could very easily come to the conclusion that the effects of discrimination, long-standing poverty and slavery on group differences in income and education is null.
This lack of interest in history and the world, leads to many of their ideas that they push through universities being western-centric. It is an monstrous task to not cringe when they accuse others of ethno/eurocentrism.
One of the most obvious examples of their western centric worldview is observable in their insistence that racism is prejudice with power. Power + Prejudice = Racism. Anything else is not racism at all. Therefore, non-whites can not be racist against whites.
To counter this argument, one could bring up the clear racial discrimination employed by Harvard Medical School against White and Asian students through affirmative action. And Harvard having institutional power, this fulfills the definition of racism. However, our leftist could counter this argument by simply answering:
“Yes, there is racial discrimination against whites in this particular institution. But if you account for the discrimination that non-whites experience in the housing, mating and job market, the system as a whole is biased for white people”
And that sounds as rational as it can be. Right? It is. But the problem is that the definition suddenly becomes western-centric.
What they essentially do, is that they make racism a zero-sum game. That means that we sum up all the prejudices that each group experience in society and compare them. The one’s that are on the top, who are whites, do not experience racism, since the system is most lenient and supportive towards them. While everyone in the bottom are devoid of all the privileges of the one’s at the top.
But let us see how well our Power + Prejudice definition fares outside of the west. Think of a country with 10 institutions with equal amount of yield and 10 equally large ethnic groups. Suppose that discrimination is forbidden by law, but in spite of that, every single institution is dominated by one of the 10 ethnic groups. Each ethnic group “owns” one of these institutions and do everything in their power to keep the other groups out.
Well, since they all posses equal amounts of power, there is no racism in our made-up country! Our western leftists have successfully eliminated racism in most of the non-western world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, whose countries rarely have a group that is in actual majority, but solely in plurality.
But our leftists don’t have to leave their western world. They could just open any history book and study Ashkenazim Jewish history. Why did the Holocaust happen? Why did the Europeans keep slaughtering, exiling and stealing the properties of the Ashkenazim? Perhaps the Ashkenazim were a lot more richer than their European counterparts, in spite of the Europeans controlling the military, church and the state?
How do we use their definition to understand a situation when a minority has more power in the economic sphere? You can’t. A holistic and zero-sum definition of racism is the peak of the western-centricity. What other part of the world can it explain? It works on only in the contemporary relatively homogeneous western world, nothing else.
And if asked why were the Jews exiled from “109 locations” the leftists have no answer. The answer is easy to find if one studies other groups who had similar positions as the Jews. Why were the Christians of the Ottoman empire “exiled”? Why were the Lebanese in west Africa exiled? Why were the Indians in Uganda exiled?
It’s because they all were better at creating wealth in their respective societies. The Muslims, Europeans and Africans didn’t understand the contributions that these respective groups made to their societies. Just as contemporary leftists don’t understand the contributions of the entrepreneur to his society.
Then race instead becomes a vehicle for one group to violate the private property and self-ownership rights of another group. A non-western centric definition of racism would be the violation someone’s property rights or self-ownership due to their race. Examples of that would the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians, the Arab countries’ crimes against Mizrahim, Trans-Atlantic slavery and most past genocides in history.
Escaping western-centric thought means escaping socialism itself. And there lies the real problem. They need “Power + Prejudice” to push through their socialist agenda. Understanding racism through a non-western centric worldview illuminates the evil of socialism. Socialism feeds on the exact same mistrust, prejudice and superstitions that lead to the genocide of the Jews and Ottoman Christians and the expulsions of the Lebanese and Indians.
Western-centricity is a bliss for them, but a curse for the free world.
hedging oc philosophy by atalay oral 