WhIte IgNoRaNce ( 61 )tend to do the opposite— to interpret the data through the grid of the con-
cepts in such a way that seemingly disconfirming, or at least problematic,
perceptions are filtered out or marginalized. In other words, one will tend
to find the confirmation in the world whether it is there or not.
Now apply this to race: consider the epistemic principle of what has
come to be called “white normativity,” the centering of the Euro- and later
Euro- American reference group as constitutive norm. Ethnocentrism
is, of course, a negative cognitive tendency common to all peoples, not
just Europeans. But with Europe’s gradual rise to global domination, the
European variant becomes entrenched as an overarching, virtually unas-
sailable framework, a conviction of exceptionalism and superiority that
seems vindicated by the facts, and thenceforth, circularly, shaping percep-
tion of the facts. We rule the world because we are superior; we are superior
because we rule the world. In the first essay of a posthumous book collec-
tion of his pioneering 1940s– 1960s essays against Eurocentrism, world
historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson invokes the “New Yorker’s map of the
United States,” which— like Saul Steinberg’s later and more famous March
29, 1976, New Yorker cover cartoon depiction of the “View of the World
from 9th Avenue”— offers us the bizarrely foreshortened perspective on the
country afforded from its self- nominated cultural center.^39 Hodgson argues
that the standard geographical representations of Europe by Europeans, as
in the Mercator projection world map, are not really that radically different:
It would be a significant story in itself to trace how modern Westerners have managed to
preserve some of the most characteristic features of their ethnocentric medieval image
of the world. Recast in modern scientific and scholarly language, the image is still with
us.... The point of any ethnocentric world image is to divide the world into moieties,
ourselves and the others, ourselves forming the more important of the two.... We
divide the world into what we call “continents.”... Why is Europe one of the continents
but not India?.... Europe is still ranked as one of the “continents” because our cultural
ancestors lived there. By making it a “continent,” we give it a rank disproportionate to its
natural size, as a subordinate part of no larger unit, but in itself one of the major compo-
nent parts of the world.... (I call such a world map the “Jim Crow projection” because
it shows Europe as larger than Africa.).... [Mercator] confirms our predispositions.^40And this geographical misrepresentation and regional inflation have gone
in tandem with a corresponding historical misrepresentation and infla-
tion. Criticizing the standard historical categories of Western historians,
Hodgson suggests that “the very terms we allow ourselves to use foster
distortion.” The “convenient result” is that Europe, an originally periph-
eral region of what Hodgson calls the “Afro- Eurasian historical complex,”
is lifted out of its context and elevated into a self- creating entity unto itself,