Ask the Scholars

First of all, what we're dealing with here are assumptions based on western education. What the writer is really saying is, why have I only learned about advances in science, literature, and art in white nations. Well, basically it's because western education is biased towards western historical achievement. How about art and literature in China, how about literature in the subcontinent of India, Native American poetry and philosophy? There are terribly impressive things! So what we reve...

Fundamentally, cultural development has nothing to do with the race of a people, but with the environment, the geography, the history, and especially the presence of locales where frequent contact among different people have been made possible, so they were able to learn from one another. It hasn't always been the case that European culture was dominant. Most of those developments - cultural, scientific - were made in the last 200 years. Until the 16th century, the Islamic world dominate...

What I would add is that we shouldn't necessarily fall into what I would consider to be an essentialist view that because the Egyptians wouldn't be considered white today, they would be considered black today. The concepts of black and white, as we have them today, just simply didn't exist in the ancient world. These racial categories we're posing are fairly recent creations. In fact, the idea that there was a white race and a black race as such can be dated to the late 17th, early 18th ...

That brings up another part of the question that I was really amused by, actually, when I read it. What's a white nation? Is the United States a white nation? And if so, how do we judge the accomplishments of Charles Drew, for example, an African American who discovered blood plasma? Upon which our medical technology today is based. Again, there are many assumptions in the questions which need to be addressed.

The other thing to remember is that the nations of Europe and the west...