Eurocentrism Quotes

“Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.”
― J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History

“Look, I'm not here to lecture you about Eurocentricity or media bias; I just want to put forth the idea that maybe China has been the punching bag of the West for a very, very long time, and that nothing is gained from the continued demonization of its people... of my people. If you can accept that a single country can give birth to both a Donald Trump and a Donald Glover, a Steve Carell and a Stone Cold Steve Austin, you shouldn't have any difficulty accepting that the 1.3 billion people who call China home are just as varied in their ideologies and philosophies. There are the party officials, the pure-of-heart idealists, the Crazy Rich Asians, the activists, the social media influencers (smash that subscribe button!), the internet trolls and every conceivable thing in between–but perhaps most of all, there are the families like my parents, who simply did their best to stay out of trouble and survive from one day to the next.”
― Simu Liu, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story

“Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe.”
― André Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

“Far from being Eurocentric, my analysis "exoticizes" Europe. Europe is historically aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely Europe's fault. But, in any case, it is nothing about which Europe should boast. Perhaps Europe and the world will one day be cured of this terrible malady with which Europe (and through Europe the world) has been afflicted.”
― Immanuel Wallerstein

“Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Maps of the world are whitewashed,
history of the world is whitewashed,
ethics of the world are whitewashed,
knowledge of the world is whitewashed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.”
― Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb

“China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, Asian improvements and adaptations of current (twentieth- to twenty-first-century) Western-developed technology are taken as further signs of lack of creativity.”
― Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb

“It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-West" to compare it with, it would quite simply not exist; there would be no word for it in our vocabulary. If the concept of the West did not exist, of course, the spatial variations within the geographical area now subsumed under "the West" would loom larger in our minds. The difference between France and America might seem just as great as those between China and the West.”
― Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past

“La critique ne peut consister en l'éternelle invocation du sujet, que ce soit dans les catégories ou en tournant le dos aux catégories ; elle doit viser la remise en cause théorique et, à terme, la destruction pratique de la matrice catégorielle, donc du sujet, du mâle-occidental-blanc lui-même.”
― Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital

“Marx championed technical progress and his attitude was strongly Eurocentric, including a lack of interest in the problems of underdeveloped countries.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy. They are the product of Eurocentrism and colonialism. To act in ways that reinforce their fixedness rather than undermine them is to continue to operate in the terrain mapped out by white supremacy.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism').”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice

“The habit of looking at the last ten thousand years as well as at the array of early societies as a mere prelude to the true history of our civilization which started approximately with the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, is, to say the least, out of date.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“World History 101 - The Actual History

History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything.

Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language.

Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s.

Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil.

The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain.

Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is.

That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors.

No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you?

Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“The systemic suppression of non-European culture and history in education may not seem important, but it is a part of the same ethos which permits the everyday culture of ethnic minority life to be totally ignored in schools.”
― Jaspreet Kaur, Brown Girl Like Me

“Educating the Educators (Sonnet 2281)

Greeks did not invent philosophy,
philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa,
Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier,

not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life,
later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean,
but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy
goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth.

Maps of the world are whitewashed,
history of the world is whitewashed,
ethics of the world are whitewashed,
knowledge of the world is whitewashed.

No wisdom is flawless 'n absolute, ancient or modern,
but the point is, enlightenment and civilization
did not originate in europe, they were born of
the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Greeks did not invent philosophy, philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa, Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier, not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life, later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean, but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Enlightenment and civilization did not originate in europe, they were born of the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“White men are the apex predator of earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Childish eurocentric conventions are too puny to contain the vastness of a transcendental human, sometimes I'm Dervish, sometimes Advaita, and the Brain Scientist keeps out the superstition.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Life is Nonbiblical, Truth is Nonbinary
(Sonnet 2349-2350)

Atheism is a white european invention,
outside the shortsighted gutter
of eurocentrism there are people who don't
need to believe in a creator to be holy,

you can be sacred without being superstitious,
the human world is teeming with such cultures
where life is holy, duty is holy, laughter is holy,
but of course your whitewashed, eurocentric
little intellect cannot fathom nonduality -

that's why you mustn't confuse intellect with wisdom,
some of the brilliant minds are first class idiots,
their binary brains have zero capacity for nuance,
they confuse the backwater fiction-centric narrative
of the church to be the entire lifespring of theology,

so naturally, either they believe like sheep
or reject like robot, because in a world of sheep
and cyborgs either there is god or there is not,
either you submit to blind faith or icecold logic,
there is no place for heart, humanity and tolerance!

Not Christ, but church doctrine was
a major downgrade in theology existing
hundreds and thousands of years prior,
at the same time, european reductionism
was a major downgrade in a wholesome
life-centric understanding of truth.

We need a life-centric understanding of truth,
not truth-centric understanding of life -
we need a human-centric realization of divine,
not divine-centric realization of human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Not Christ, but church doctrine was a major downgrade in theology existing hundreds and thousands of years prior, at the same time, european reductionism was a major downgrade in a wholesome life-centric understanding of truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Lack of inclusivity in society is not a bug, it's a feature of western eurocentric education.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“There's no such thing as slave traders, get your language straight, you idiots - they were human traffickers, not traders, you trade in commodity, not people.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“The Nondual Nutcase (Sonnet Beyond Binary)

Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought,
whether it's separation between the mortal and divine,
or the separation between reason and theology,
or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry.

Every single aspect of human consciousness
touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and
desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness,

which is why I never felt at home with euroschools,
despite the fact that I too like everyone on the
planet grew up in a westwashed education system.

However, it took me over a hundred books and
2000 sonnets to wake up to the tangible realization,
that the entire eurocentric paradigm is separatist,
from its science to philosophy to theology to poetry.

In euro schools of thought we say:
keep the divine separate from the people,
keep science separate from philosophy.
In Naskarian we say:
integration is divine by reason of poetry.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought, whether it's separation between the mortal and divine, or the separation between reason and theology, or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry. Every single aspect of human consciousness touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“The human race comes from Africa, but inhumanity originated in Europe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock