Challenging the Concept of “The West”

Summary

Dr. Irvin speaks on the prominence of Western, Euro-centric education as well as the limitations and failures of the Western humanities. He explains how narrow thinking can feed into superiority complexes (like those belonging to white supremacy) and offers ways that students can challenge their own unconscious biases. 

Video Transcript

Hello, everyone, I'm Matthew Irvin, and I teach medieval English literature. You might think that there isn't much to say about race in the Middle Ages that might matter to the present moment, but that can be a dangerous misconception. In fact, there are a number of groups, some explicitly white supremacist and some not, that see medieval Europe as a place to locate a "pure" (white) European past.

However, another danger, that I think is one much more likely to create models for racism and anti-Blackness than explicit white supremacy comes with a subtler and more popular version of the "pure" Europe argument: the way we think about the concept "Western Civilization." That concept, which is often put at the heart of "humanities" curricula, is a complicated one, but it generally means the intellectual tradition based on ancient Greece and Rome, and which now encompasses Western Europe and its majority-white former colonies (the US, Canada, Australia). If you read Shakespeare or Homer, Plato or Marx, or St. Thomas Aquinas or Chaucer (if we're getting medieval), you're reading part of the tradition of the West.

I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't - but instead to mark something that often is hard to see when reading these texts. The Western tradition claims for itself a universal position - that is, it claims that speaks about "humanity" as a whole - but in fact is limited to the kind of humanity created in the West. There are beautiful aspects of that humanity, but there are also tremendous failures. Think, for instance, about the West's notion of freedom: it comes about through philosophy and literature from ancient Greece and Rome (like Aristotle and Cicero) - both slave-owning societies that defined freedom in terms of slavery. The very terms and arguments that we use in the West to think about something as important as freedom were developed in such a way so that slavery could be preserved. The West's universal claim also suggests that Western ways of thought are the only ways to contemplate "the human" - which implies that the West is more advanced, more human than other places, and other peoples. The fact that the vast majority of our courses in the humanities deal with the West, often without marking the limits of the West's claims (and I've been guilty of this myself), means that that idea of the West as more human doesn't need to be explicitly stated for it to have an effect. A bias is born from thinking that all "real" humanistic thought comes from a "West" easily associated with whiteness. This limited way of thinking is part of what creates "systematic" racism, even when there is no individual evil intention: superiority over other kinds of humans becomes an assumed part of the very structure of thought.

So what can you do? First of all, support calls to diversify the curriculum. These calls aren't (or aren't just) about giving everyone representation: they're about making all of our educations properly humanistic, really dealing with humanity in its fullness, and challenging the structures that the Western tradition has put into place. Second, diversify your own curriculum: seek out courses on non-Western thought and literature, and ask professors about how they see the limitations of the West. Educate yourself as well (be careful not to put the burden of your education on people of color): read and listen to non-white voices, both in the classroom and elsewhere, and make space for them. That might mean not only staying quiet for others, but listening actively, or making space in your own thought, allowing yourself to consider challenges to what seem like foundational truths. Finally, be ready to see what might seem like local or particular issues as parts of larger problems. You may see yourself as distant from inner-city police brutality, or anti-colonial struggles, or just the experience of your Black classmates. But what you are here to do is discover relations, to find a humanity that fully includes these human experiences, too.

So, while the tradition of the West is important (I wouldn't be teaching medieval literature if I didn't believe that), it can not only limit our understanding, but produce powerful biases, both conscious and unconscious. It is our duty to challenge those limits, and open ourselves and our institution to the larger community of human voices. Rather than a system of racism that can work even when we are unaware of it, become an active part of an anti-racist community.