Birmingham City University Professor of Sociology Kehinde Andrews believes academia should stop crediting white men for creating the modern world and give credit to the many dead enslaved Black people truly responsible.
Andrews said the Western world’s reverence for dead white men has desensitized people to the global despair white supremacy and capitalism has created. The bulk of this propaganda comes from the world of academia, he said, where the age of discovery, the age of enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions are triumphed as crowning cultural achievements to be celebrated.
“It is a lie that the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics are solely responsible for the advancement of the West,” Andrews says. “But in truth, none of this so-called progress happens without the genocide in the Americas, the barbaric slavery of African people and the colonization of most of the world by European powers.”
Many academics gloss over the role racist ideology plays in creating this misconception. Andrews pointed out that the Founding Fathers had no issue writing the Consitution while countless Black people were still in bondage. While they discussed freedom for white men, historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and others did not view Black people as people. They saw no problem because many of the founding fathers were planters and “created the knowledge that justified this conquest and murder.”
“Race was created as a scientific reality designed to maintain a hierarchy,” Andrews says. “The enlightened white European sits at the top, while the savage Black African is at the bottom.
“The uncomfortable truth is that the world has been created in the Founding Father’s image of white supremacy.”
