It seems to me that many of the people outside America who are reviling the electoral victory of Donald Trump are, in fact, secretly pleased that the ignorant billionaire is going to be the President of the United States. This is because Trump’s elevation to the highest office of the world’s most powerful nation has allowed these people to return to their comfortable narrative of racist imperialist America, which the presidency of Barack Obama hampered.
However, their easy assertions that Trump was elected by white racists reveals their own bigoted mindset, since the demographics of America make it impossible for white people only to elect a president, let alone white racists.
This fact gives no pause to the anti-American ideologues, who readily assert that all white people are, by definition, racist. Ironically, this claim is often supported by white-controlled institutions within the US itself. The University of Delaware in a 2007 document for students’ orientation, for example, defined a racist as “one who is both privileged and socialised on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (ie, people of European descent) living in the United States...” But, as the (black) economist Walter E Williams noted in an article titled Academic Cesspools, “This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you’re white, you’re a racist.”
One sometimes local SJW (social justice warrior) posted a similar jewel on her Facebook page after Trump’s victory: “Once we recognise that ‘White Power’ is nothing like Black Power, or PRIDE, or any other movement to empower a people, and we realise it is nothing more than the idea of advancing the white ‘race’ while keeping everyone else down, then we can move forward. This is tied up in the idea that white culture is inherently better...that all advancements come from white people...White supremacy isn’t just about skin colour, but about culture.”
This is standard diatribe from the SJW cohort, whose membership in our society consists mostly of academics and people who don’t have to actually work for a living. The incoherent polemic I have quoted conflates race and culture, even though white supremacists typically define race biologically and base their beliefs on racial superiority, whereas a culture is technically open for anyone to adopt. Moreover, the most successful non-Western nations are those which sought Western knowledge and adopted Western political ideals. The outstanding example of this is, of course, Japan, which managed to do so without losing Japanese culture.
The American economist and historian Thomas Sowell in his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice asserts: “Clearly, the question as to whether there have been large performance differences between peoples, as of a given time, is quite different from the question as to whether those differences are racial or genetic in origin. Even so, resistance to acknowledging superior performances has in recent times been fierce, determined, and ingenious, even if not always ingenuous.”
The crucial distinction here is between a moral assertion and an empirical one. Morally, every culture obviously has a right to exist; one might even go so far as to assert that, potentially, all cultures are equally capable of achieving happiness and prosperity for its members. Empirically, however, no one can seriously refute the assertion that “white culture”—more accurately, Western civilization—is by all significant measures historically superior to every past culture, civilization or society on Earth. Note that this is completely different from the claim that white people are superior. It was Western civilization which gave the world democracy, capitalism, and science. And ironically, without those concepts, those who badtalk white people and the West wouldn’t even have the vocabulary to express their criticisms or, indeed, the free speech right to do so.
It is also possible to make a moral comparison between cultures, without impugning the fundamental moral worth of non-Western cultures. It is simple historical fact that Britain was the first society in the history of the world to declare that slavery was morally wrong and to take action to eradicate it; it was Western societies which first bruited the argument for women’s equality and changed their laws to ensure it; it is Western nations which led the way in rights for animals, the disabled and, ironically enough, other cultures.
While it is true that Western nations have often failed to live up to their ideals, it is specious to argue that such failures make the West morally inferior to societies which didn’t even have such ideals in the first place. Moreover, white people have not been inherently more violent or oppressive than non-white peoples—it is only that the technological superiority of the West allowed power to corrupt to an extent not possible in previous eras.
Even so, the world is largely better off because of the Industrial Revolution and the political ideals which have been spread by the West. And, despite the anti-West rhetoric from elitists who are prime beneficiaries of those ideals, it is the Western nations’ levels of prosperity and freedom that most of the world’s peoples aspire to attain.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a History textbook.
