Western Civilization: Whiteness By Another Name
Why Western Civilization is really just “Civilization” when “White People” do it, except at the expense of “Non-White” people.
June 2, 2025
You may have noticed that Utah and other states in the U.S. are advancing policies and legislation to emphasize “Western Civilization” in educational curricula.
But what do they really mean by “Western Civilization” and “Western Culture”, and what is the true motivation behind this push?
The motive is quite clear. Proponents desperately want to believe, and for others to agree, that Western Civilization represents the pinnacle of human progress and that the United States is its greatest achievement, as well as the best hope for humanity going forward.
Even at a glance, this is already a highly problematic view considering the sheer amount of carnage and damage that has been done under the various banners of Western Civilization and Culture since the advent of the colonial era. This Western European-driven epoch appears to be entering its final stages. But as history teaches about late-stage empires, the modern scions of “western” colonial imperialism are doing everything in their power to maintain their slipping strangleholds of dominance. As history also illustrates, such battles are fought in the hallways of intelligentsia as much as they are in streets and battlefields.
But ask even the most full-chested champions of “Western Civilization” to apply a rigorous definition, they will talk themselves into convoluted circles. And yet, their ramblings would be unwittingly clarifying at the same time.
Proponents would point to concepts such as individual liberty, democracy (or representative government), reason and scientific inquiry, free-market capitalism, Judeo-Christian moral foundations, and constitutional law-based orders.
Even if we were to accept that each of these ideals has resulted in a net-positive for humanity and the planet at large (a couple on this list are questionable), why must we affix the term “Western” to the package?
For starters, Europeans had little concept of personal liberty and egalitarian constitutionalism until encountering the Haudenosaunee of North America just after the turn of the 17th century. Personal liberty as a natural right was not discussed by European thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke until nearly a half-century later.
Also, the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace was unique and highly advanced for its time in its establishment of the separation of powers, checks and balances, collective decision-making, and equality among nations/tribes (a.k.a. federalism).
The Great Law of Peace was likely formalized between the 12th and 15th centuries. Nothing comparable existed in Europe or Asia until centuries later. Benjamin Franklin and the founding fathers explicitly acknowledged its direct influence when drafting the world’s first non-indigenous constitution.
This means that individual liberty and constitutionalism are two pillars of Western Civilization that are fundamentally indigenous, and not uniquely “Western” at all. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is also an example of democracy arising independently from Europe, removing a third pillar that is supposedly owed to Western Civilization.
Buddhist, Zulu and Islamic kingdoms also recognized and protected personal rights and liberties long before such concepts were formally articulated by European thinkers. Moreover, democratic systems were established and practiced by various African, Indian and Islamic people centuries before it happened in Europe. According to Eurocentric perspectives, the Athenian system of participatory governance was the world’s first democracy. But Athenian democracy serves as a noble origin story that ignores the fact it was rooted in slavery and empire. The non-Athenian examples were far more inclusive and ethical.
Reason and science are not unique to the so-called “West”, either. It is true that Classical Greece thinkers made considerable strides in this area. But it is also true that the ancient Greeks from this era were themselves primarily influenced by the more advanced civilizations of Asia and Africa while deriding the lighter-skinned people to their north and west as mindless barbarians.
But then the priests and scribes of Christendom, the other supposed cornerstone of Western Civilization, did their best to falsify and expunge the writings from the Classical Greece period because they were two traditions inherently at odds with one another.
So much for an internally consistent understanding of Western Civilization.
In fact, it was Islamic scholars of Asia and North Africa who were far more active in preserving the writings from Classical Greece. But they did much more than preserve. Islamic scholars substantially expanded the pioneering concepts developed by Classical Greek thinkers to achieve revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine, science and mathematics. Islamic scholars literally laid the groundwork for the scientific method and algebra. Without them, the modern world would not be possible. Naturally, their contributions heavily influenced the Age of Enlightenment, which was really the Age of “Europe finally catching up to the rest of the world”.
The Chinese and Indians were also centuries ahead of Europe in science and technology while Mesoamerican civilizations were light years ahead of Europe in not only understanding the cosmos, as evident by their highly advanced calendar systems, but also in agricultural and hydro engineering. The Mesoamericans also invented the mathematical concept of zero.
A similar theme is observed in economics. Early forms of free-market capitalism and sophisticated market economies were developed and practiced throughout much of the world before first taking root in Europe. Examples include the Islamic Souk systems, the Great Zimbabwe and Trans-Saharan Trade, the Indian Ocean Trade Network, and the Aztec Pochteca. These systems influenced the development of so-called “Western” capitalism in ways that were not foreseen by Adam Smith and his direct intellectual successors. Adam Smith envisioned a system that operated primarily according to self-interest within a framework of national economies. But the non-European predecessors recognized the need for a regulatory regime along with the inherently cooperative, transnational potential of such networks. They also innovated sophisticated credit and proto-banking systems which are instrumental to the viability of capitalism today.
This leaves us with Judeo-Christianity as the only pillar of Western Civilization left standing. But nobody denies that Christianity spawned from an Asiatic religion with its most sacred tenets based on the teachings of, and faith in, an Asiatic man who counted himself a devout adherent to Judaism. Although, it must be noted that an honest and careful reading of the teachings attributed to Jesus strongly suggest the namesake of Christianity would not approve of the capitalistic obsession of his modern followers.
Altogether, it is easily established that the pillars of Western Civilization and Culture are not fundamentally Western at all, and neither are they particularly coherent. But “Western” chauvinists will claim a direct line of cultural inheritance from Classical Greece to Rome to Christendom to the Enlightenment and to the modern “West”. This is a convoluted claim considering that the Classical Greeks were much more similar to Persians, Egyptians and other Asiatic and North African people than they were the Germanics and Celts to their distant north and west. This is not only true in terms of cultural and intellectual traditions, but it also applies to genetics.
Even in terms of their bloodlines, they were more closely related to the people of western Asia than they were western Europeans.
With claimed connections being remote and tenuous at best, it is odd that modern people of primarily Germanic, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon lineages would claim that anyone could be innately unfit to participate in this civilizational package they have deemed “Western”. This is especially true when considering that ancestral Western Europeans were among the last to adopt the trappings of advanced civilization.
During the age of Classical Greece, formal writing systems had already been developed throughout Asia and in parts of Africa and the Western Hemisphere. But no such systems existed in Northern or Western Europe. If ancient, non-literate barbarians could learn and embrace the more advanced ways of the ancient Greeks, Asians, Americans and Africans, then who are the descendants of these non-literate barbarians to say that they are culturally superior by birth? In fact, Western cultures still have a lot to learn from “non-Western” cultures, such as ecological sustainability and the inherent interconnectedness of all living things and dynamical processes throughout the planet and universe at large.
But one thing can be said for certain: Claiming that this particular civilizational package is fundamentally “Western” is not only an example of undeserved self-aggrandizing, but it is also insidious in its practical effect. It is invoked not for the sake of inclusivity, but for the sake of exclusivity. Proponents tend to use the term, and all the insinuations that go along with it, as a cudgel to imply that “non-westerners” are not naturally compatible with what they claim to be the highest form of civilization. This mindset motivated several pieces of legislation in the U.S., including:
The Naturalization Act of 1790 which restricted citizenship to “free white persons”;
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 which was based on the idea that Native Americans could not be “civilized” or coexist with “civilized whites”;
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884 which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens based on the belief they were unassimilable;
The Immigration Act of 1924 which set strict quotas to reduce immigrants from Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe;
Operation Wetback in 1954 which was a mass deportation of Mexicans, who were believed to be incapable of integrating into America—the pinnacle of Western Civilization and Culture.
The U.S. also passed Eugenics Laws in the 20th century which mandated the sterilization of people deemed undesirable, disproportionately victimizing indigenous, Black and immigrant communities.
Other settler-colonial states, such as Canada and Australia, enacted similar policies. The colonial powers justified their conquests and apartheid occupations as “civilizing missions”, justified by the notion that indigenous people around the world were not capable of building and upholding an advanced civilization on their own.
It is easy to dismiss these historical discriminations as outdated beliefs and actions, but similar ideas are being promoted and enforced today, especially coming from the Trumpian/MAGA movement in the U.S.
Case in point: The Trump administration has suspended the U.S. refugee settlement program with only one exception. Of all the people in the world facing racial and political persecution, the Trump administration is allowing asylum to only white South Africans, based on the racist claim of White Genocide in this country where the effects colonialism and apartheid are still plaguing the Black population while uplifting the White population. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau gave away the administration’s true sentiment when he told reporters that Afrikaners and other white South Africans had received an exemption to the president’s order because they could be “assimilated easily” into the United States.
The strong implication here is that “Western Civilization” equates to “Advanced Civilization”, and that those of European lineage are not only most worthy in being granted entrance, but they are also the most compatible with it.
It is this very notion that best explains the ascendancy of Donald Trump. He has consistently extolled the superiority of “The West” and the insinuation that it must be protected from immigrants and Muslims. He has also sparked a resurgence in primarily white-identifying people taking pride in this association.
Nowhere is this more evident than the rise of the aptly named “Proud Boys”, a white nationalist organization that has garnered tacit support from Donald Trump. Embracing the “Western” in Western Civilization is the central tenet of the Proud Boys. To gain membership in the group, initiates must declare, “I am a Proud Western Chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
This is not only a rallying cry for extremist groups in the U.S., but it is also a common sentiment among white-identifying people throughout the country today who generally accept and take pride in the idea of “Western” exceptionalism. Most white-identifying people in the modern U.S. agree with the notion that Western Civilization is something to be celebrated, not apologized for. This brings us full circle as to why Republican state legislatures around the country are now mandating that “Western Civilization” be included in the educational curricula.
But what will be taught, exactly?
Will they acknowledge that the principles and ideas which are associated with Western Civilization are really an eclectic mosaic built upon the contributions of diverse and disparate people around the globe and across time?
Will they exercise a healthy criticism of what Western Civilization has evolved to represent, including dismissiveness of ecological sustainability and the inseverable interdependency and fluidity of cultures, peoples, and all living things?
The truth is, every course on Western Civilization has inevitably centered and elevated people of European descent, with non-European contributions whited out, quite literally. They neglect to consider the fluid and eclectic nature of human cultures and how deeply connected they are to all living things and planetary systems. Ultimately, Western Civilization courses are generally a tool for what proponents see as a civilizational battle for dominance that must be won at all costs.
But the question is, “who” gets to be on the winning side? Western Chauvinists would have us believe that this concept is really about a lineage of ideas more than a lineage of specified groups of people. But they tell on themselves when they claim that certain people are more assimilable into Western Civilization than others, and especially when these certain people are nearly always “White” or white-adjacent.
When we zoom out to view everything in its totality, it becomes blatantly clear that Western Civilization is ultimately about taking ideas from non-European people and repackaging them into a Eurocentric and Euro-flattering narrative, with the strong implication that those of European descent are most deserving in claiming the fruits of modern civilization in the form of wealth, prestige and power.
In other words, Western Civilization is ultimately predicated on ensuring that “white” people remain at the top of the societal hierarchy.
How do we know this? To answer this question, let’s explore how the concept of “Western Civilization” came to be.
The idea of Western Civilization was not conceptualized until the Enlightenment period when European philosophers invented a new meta-identity that was no longer based simply on Christianity. It was during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries that intellectuals were rediscovering the ideas of Classical Greece. Before then, Europeans thought of themselves as members of their respective kingdoms and language groups, with Christianity serving as the umbrella that unified them together into a larger, collective identity. Before the 16th century, Europeans did not think in terms of racialized differences. While they noticed that people’s complexions were darker the farther south one ventured, they attributed this (quite astutely) to the effects of climate. It did not occur to them that skin color served as a marker for deeper traits, such as intellect, virtue or the degree to which one was inherently “civilized”.
This changed with the advent of the colonial era, which was initiated by a weakness. When the Islamic Ottoman Empire conquered all of Anatolia (modern Turkey), including Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the European kingdoms were forced to pay higher prices for eastern goods, such as spices, silk and porcelain. Muslim middlemen now dominated the overland routes, adding cost while also limiting access to goods that the Western elite had grown dependent upon. This prompted Western European explorers to seek out maritime routes.
When they serendipitously encountered the lands of Africa and the Americas, they did not view the people as “non-Westerners” or “non-Europeans”, nor did they view them as different races of people. They had no concept of these things. Instead, they simply saw them as non-Christian heathens. This was all the differentiation needed to justify their butchering, enslaving and stealing from them at will.
The indigenous of Africa, America and other parts of the world were not organized for sustained military conflict to the extent that the Europeans were. In the Americas, they were also dying off at rapid rates which made it easier to take possession of their lands and resources.
But then these colonized people started to convert to Christianity en masse, which presented a moral dilemma to the European colonizers. If they were fellow Christians, how could they justify this level of exploitation and expropriation? Ultimately, greed won out, and they came up with a solution. They invented race. Now they could resume with their unrestrained campaign to take possession of their lands, resources, and their bodies, because they decided that skin color was a marker of deeper traits. This rendered people with darker skin as divinely mandated servants, with white-skinned people as their divinely appointed masters.
This took place in a series of pronouncements during the 16th century, long before virtually any European had ever heard of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle or any of the other great thinkers from Classical Greece. When educated Europeans were first made aware of the Classical Greek philosophers during the Enlightenment Age, they creatively incorporated these luminaries into their origin story. They wanted so badly to believe that the Classical Greeks were fair skinned like they were, they convinced themselves that the white marble statues from the era were a literal portrayal of their intellectual heroes. It did not occur to them that white marble was abundantly available in the area, and that it was easy to carve, polish and paint. Unbeknownst to them, the original paint depicting realistic complexions had worn off.
The fact that their contemporary Greeks were of darker complexion left Western Europeans to conclude that they had become racially degraded over time. They further concluded that they, descendants of the same Celts and Germanics derided by Classical Greek philosophers as mindless barbarians, were the literal descendants of these vaunted figures.
This is how Western Civilization was really born, and it is inextricably tied to the invention of “Whiteness”.
The later custodians of Western Civilization only reinforced this notion throughout the eugenics craze of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ironically, Greeks and Italians were not considered “White”, despite the foundational importance of Greco-Roman tradition. Neither were the Irish for that matter. But in the U.S., the imposition of segregation laws and race-based immigration quotas forced “white” lawmakers to draw the line somewhere to satisfy a binary concept of race. It was through these racist programs that Greeks, Italians, Irish and even Eastern Europeans gained entrance into “Club Whiteness” where they were deemed legitimate heirs to Western Civilization. Thus, our modern conception of race and what it means to be “white” dates only to the mid-20th century. It is an entirely contrived categorization based on arbitrary and outright fabricated criteria, usually based on laughable misunderstandings of biology and history.
By the second half of the 20th century, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, referring to Western Civilization as the exclusive domain of “white people” fell out of vogue. But it doesn’t need to be said out loud anymore because the implication has never receded. The invocation of Western Civilization has graduated to the realm of effective dog whistle, joining refrains such as States Rights and Law and Order. Modern proponents of Western Civilization simply cannot picture a world where a society is considered “Western” without that society being majority “White”.
If you don’t believe this, then just listen to what they say. They bemoan the fact that “white people” are on track to become a minority in the U.S. They insist that people migrating from predominately non-white countries are not “assimilable”, and that they will “poison our blood” and degrade our culture.
If Western Civilization was simply a package of lofty ideas, then advocates would not see any problem in accommodating those from other culture who have already expressed an eagerness to embrace its core tenets. But this is clearly not the case.
Consequently, we can only conclude that Western Civilization is being pushed as part of a strategy to maintain “White” dominance. But racists are as clever as they are vicious. They have learned that being blatant in their racism tends to invite resistance and backlash. But the use of dog whistles has proven extraordinarily effective, as evident by the erosion of gains from the Civil Rights Era we are seeing throughout the world today, especially in the U.S.
Western Civilization was never about ideas. It was never about fairness or justice. It was always code for racial dominance. Admittedly, many people not considered “white” have been tolerated and even elevated within its ranks. But this was never due to benevolence or graciousness. Such developments typically came only after sustained resistance, or as a pragmatic concession to serve a strategic purpose. But the world is changing rapidly, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for “Whiteness” to justify itself as a valid identity, much less one that is deserving of power and privilege. The current push to venerate so-called Western Civilization can only be seen as its final stand to subvert the rest of the world to is will.
It is under the guise of Western Civilization that they attempt to consolidate their ill-gotten gains while perpetuating the theft into the future. This is how they continue to erase and exterminate inconvenient peoples. This is how they make the planet unlivable for everyone else, and then ultimately for their own descendants as well. There is nothing more dangerous than Western Civilization, because it is the memetic virus by which they will annihilate the masses for the privilege of the few.
