Quotes About Eurocentrism

If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.

The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today's left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.

The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans "discovered" the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn't exist before Europeans saw them.

A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of "Africans" into one single category and undifferentiated masses of "Indians" into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

We must remind] those who are too quick to engage in critiques of Eurocentrism that the very conceptual tools they use are part of (what these same critics identify as) the European philosophical tradition, evidence precisely of these tools' subversive universality.

European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.

Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.

evaluando dichas culturas como primitivas y atrasadas. Fue así como surgió el mito de la «superioridad de Europa»

Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.

it is not 'Eurocentrism' or (anti-)'Orientalism' to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is a statement of the obvious.

Burton and his ilk also had a distinctive philosophy: they believed that science showed that Europeans and Americans were biologically, mentally, and socially superior to others. "The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery," wrote August Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

Thus much of our Western thinking is not scientific and objective but is orientated through a one-eyed perspective which reflects the prejudiced values of the West, and which necessarily prevents the enquirer from seeing the full picture. This is equivalent to what Blaut calls 'Eurocentric tunnel history'.32 What happens, then, when we view the world through a more inclusive two-eyed perspective?

In sum, when we reveal the larger picture that Eurocentrism obscures, then its pristine picture of Western civilisation - as autonomous, ingenious and morally progressive - appears more like Oscar Wilde's picture of Dorian Gray, whose real image has been hidden away from the viewer.