Although the histories of Europe began as national ones, thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries looked to 4th-century Germanic tribes as their pure, white ancestors. In alliance with the “scientific” study of the past, scientific racism, the international slave trade and colonialism, this approach began to change the way people understood the past. No longer individual nations — and also no longer simply “Europe” because of the need to include North America — these thinkers used the term “the West” to encompass one (supposedly) common heritage that explained why white men ought to rule the world. Western civilization, then, became the story of an unbroken genealogy that stretched from Greece to Rome to the Germanic tribes to the Renaissance to the Reformation to the contemporary, white world.
This history undergirds the way many Americans think about “Western civilization,” a term that today quietly suggests our understanding of the past should be the same as it was at the end of the 19th century. Since the late 20th century, however, that premise has been challenged as scholars have begun to incorporate other stories into the tapestry of history. We talk about the role of women, about what gender meant at different moments in the past, about the construction of race as an idea, about the diversity of Europe’s peoples. The research in these areas is original and convincing.
But the older voices — the ones who fall back on the earlier, racist conception of the West — still speak loudly. In the 21st century, violent white supremacists, including Anders Breivik, Jeremy Christian and other neo-Vikings, and the racists who marched in Charlottesville, all deploy this nostalgia for a mythical “West” in their fight to dominate the future. They insist that Europe has always been white, Christian, patriarchal and pure. They want to see Europe and its colonial children “return” to that imaginary state and are willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure it happens. King’s defense of “Western civilization” does the same work, especially when placed alongside his long history of racist statements. It just does that work more politely.
