Needless to say, other cultures and civilizations are capable of great intellectual rigor. It doesn’t require endorsing the fashionable theories that the West invented nothing and rose to preeminence through colonialism and theft to acknowledge the historic achievements of China, India and the Islamic world.
It was Muslims who transmitted Arabic numerals and various important mathematical concepts to the West and played an outsized part in preserving the legacy of the classic Greeks.
The West did indeed forge the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, along with the Enlightenment, that shaped the modern world, and it did so at a time when white males occupied a privileged position in society through law and custom.
Still, there wasn’t a “white male” opinion on the high-stakes questions roiling Western society at that time. When Galileo encountered resistance to his defense of heliocentrism in the early 1600s, he didn’t find trans people of color arrayed against him, but other white males.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member