Eurocentrism

As I was saying before in my last post, I believe that it was the destruction of the University of Sonkore that ultimately lead to the racial issues in society today. If the Moroccans had not destroyed the library or just had not invaded at all, the scholars of the time would have been able to flourish and many Africans would have become better educated. If this had been the case there would have been a much better chance that the Africans would not have been treated so poorly by the Europeans because they would have held some form of higher education. However this is not the case and Sonkore was destroyed leaving behind a path of Eurocentrism.

Eurocentrism is the act of viewing the world from a European point of view and with an implied belief either consciously or subconsciously. One example of how Eurocentrism effected the African American population, how one person will judge another person based on social and ethnic qualities of the European race. We see it rear its ugly head today especially after the 9/11 attacks when we now think of all Arabs as terrorist that could never have a correct European style democracy. We see it in our history books when people expected that African Americans could never do well in school or business and the superiority of the white society of the time tried to make sure that that statement remained true. In a way Eurocentrism is a main cause of racism in our world. If you notice though Caucasian could be considered a “race” it is never a white person that is discriminated against because of their ethnicity. That is because most of society including non-Caucasian people holds everyone to “white” standards of living. Most people have been conditioned to filter everything they see through a Eurocentric filter so everything and everyone must be held up to white standards because they believe that that is the only goal that should be reached not that could be reached

I am not saying that white supremacy is correct. Only that Eurocentrism is real and people have these unconscious standards that they try to hold themselves and others up to when they should be trying to have their own standard of living.



Woodson, Carter Godwin. The Miseducation of the Negro. Las Vegas, NV: IAP, 2010. Print.