Are Europeans uniquely racist?

Race is a social construct

In one of ASU’s employee training videos, three scholars discuss race and “antiracism.” According to them, race is a social construct used to separate and divide individuals based on a notion of who is deserving and who is undeserving, who is human, who is not human, who belongs, and who does not belong. And also that race is not a natural thing. It is a category we created to divide people. One even says that who counts as smart is based on this narrative.

If you’ve followed postmodernism at all, you’ll immediately recognize that philosophy operating here. There is not an objective world but just so many human constructs. So even “nature” and what counts as natural is a human construct. Instead, it would indeed be true that humans develop ways of thinking about the world, but the world is real, and these categories we develop are real things that we study and learn more about over time.

The fascinating thing about one video was that a scholar says that the Europeans, through colonization, invented a binary system by which to rank who is good and who is bad. This is the white supremacy they think is structured into our system today. It is baffling to hear this because, of course, Europe did not invent binary thinking, and it is not obvious that this reductionistic binary thinking was going on. The same lens could be used to evaluate Africans who captured and sold other Africans as slaves. Or of conquests by non-Western empires which divided up people groups.

The assumption is that Europeans were uniquely racist in their thinking and that this is what shaped colonization and modernity. Ask for evidence of this claim. You’ll find there is none, and what is given is itself a racist claim about Europeans.

Parents and students, do you want to be categorized as racist by a professor who has never met you? You do not have to accept this. You can resist by calling it for what it is.