Nobody claims the Western world is perfect. Libraries overflow with books, academic careers, and prizes earned by cataloguing its historical sins—slavery, colonialism, segregation, and every failure measured against today’s standards. Every major civilization has committed acts that later generations judge evil, and many were hypocritical even by the norms of their own time. The relevant question is not whether the West has flaws, but whether a better set of values and practices exists today—and whether any other living civilization has advanced further on the issues that dominate Western self-criticism, particularly race relations.
The American phrase “a more perfect union” captures the point precisely. It appears in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and reflects an explicit recognition that the founding order was incomplete. No serious observer pretends that every person in the United States or Western Europe enjoys perfect equality of outcome or treatment. Persistent disparities exist by race, sex, and other categories. Yet the West’s distinctive feature is its willingness—and institutional capacity—to confront those failures publicly, measure progress, and revise institutions. That self-correcting mechanism is rarer than many assume.
Progress Measured Against History and Contemporaries
Consider race. In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans approved of marriage between Black and white people. By 2021 that figure had reached 94 percent. Interracial marriages among newlyweds rose from roughly 3 percent in 1967—the year the Supreme Court struck down remaining state bans in Loving v. Virginia—to 17 percent by 2015. Black newlyweds intermarrying at rates that more than tripled between 1980 and 2015. These are not abstract ideals; they are measurable shifts in behavior and attitudes over a single lifetime.Brookings
World Values Survey data consistently place high-income Western countries among those least likely to object to neighbors of a different race. In the United Kingdom, the share saying they would not want such a neighbor fell from 10 percent in 1981 to about 1–2 percent in recent waves. Similar low figures appear in Sweden, Norway, Germany, and the United States. Rankings that combine survey data on racial equality and tolerance routinely put Scandinavian nations, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and other Western democracies at the top. China and Russia rank far lower.
These outcomes did not arise by accident. Western legal traditions—rooted in individual rights, equality before the law, and open debate—created space for abolitionist movements, civil-rights legislation, and cultural change. The same free speech that allows relentless criticism of Western history also enables reform. Few other civilizations have produced equivalent internal engines of self-scrutiny and correction on this scale.
Reality Checks from Elsewhere
Compare that record to concrete examples from two major non-Western powers. In late-1990s Russia, the song “Ubili Negra” (“They Killed a Negro”) by the band Zapreshchennye Barabanshchiki became a mainstream hit. Its lyrics include the lines: a dead snake does not hiss, a dead goldfinch does not chirp, a dead Negro does not go play basketball—only a dead Negro does not go play basketball. The chorus celebrates the killing “for no reason at all.” The band later added a disclaimer opposing racism, yet the track’s popularity and the alternative choruses that emerged revealed a casual racial callousness that would have ended careers in the contemporary West.Genius
In China, a 2016 television commercial for Qiaobi laundry detergent showed a Chinese woman approached by a Black man covered in paint. She inserts a detergent pod into his mouth, shoves him into a washing machine, and he emerges as a light-skinned Asian man. The ad aired on Chinese television and was defended by some as mere product promotion or artistic exaggeration. It was a near-copy of an earlier Italian commercial that had reversed the transformation; the Chinese version inverted the message to equate Blackness with dirt. International outrage followed, but domestic reaction was muted, and the company initially suggested foreign media were oversensitive.
These are not isolated curiosities. Reports document persistent anti-Black discrimination in China, especially in Guangzhou’s African trading communities: evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, online abuse, stereotypes equating Africans with crime or disease, and limited institutional pushback. Chinese social-media platforms have hosted large volumes of openly racist content with uneven moderation. Historical campus clashes involving African students in the 1980s and more recent incidents show patterns that Western societies now treat as unacceptable.
Russia’s post-Soviet period likewise featured elevated rates of racist violence against Africans and other minorities, with police responses often inadequate. Neither country possesses the same density of independent media, civil-society organizations, or legal tools that force continuous public reckoning in the West.
Values That Enable Improvement
The deeper difference lies in foundational values. Western liberal traditions prioritize the individual over collective identity, empirical inquiry over dogma, and institutional reform over permanent grievance. These produce both the capacity to catalog past evils in exhaustive detail and the mechanisms—courts, elections, free press, open universities—to address them. Other civilizations have rich histories and achievements, yet many retain stronger hierarchies of blood, ethnicity, or ideology that constrain similar self-correction.
Surveys of global attitudes reinforce the pattern. People in many non-Western societies express higher levels of discomfort with racial or ethnic difference as neighbors. Ethnic fractionalization is high in parts of Africa and Asia, but tolerance metrics do not automatically follow diversity. Western societies have combined high immigration and demographic change with declining explicit racial animus over decades. That combination is historically unusual.
Critics sometimes reply that Western self-criticism is itself evidence of unique guilt or decline. The opposite is nearer the truth. Civilizations that cannot examine their own record stagnate. The West’s ability to produce both the most severe internal critiques and the most rapid measurable advances on race, women’s rights, and individual liberty is a competitive advantage, not a weakness. Utopia does not exist. The practical standard is the existing alternatives.
Maintaining Influence for Broader Progress
Because Western institutions have generated the highest living standards, the broadest protections for speech and conscience, and the most documented progress on the very issues their critics emphasize, preserving their global influence is not mere chauvinism. It is a pragmatic preference for the set of values that have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to improve. Dominance here means the continued spread of norms that expand individual opportunity rather than the imposition of any particular ethnic identity.
The alternative is not a neutral global marketplace of equally advanced civilizations. It is a world in which the most successful self-correcting tradition yields ground to systems less able—or less willing—to confront their own shortcomings. The historical record of the West is imperfect. Measured against reality rather than an imaginary pure society, it remains the best available foundation for further progress. The task is not to abandon that foundation under the weight of its own criticism, but to keep using the tools it uniquely provides to form a still more perfect union
0 Comments