What the author doesn't mention in this otherwise brilliant essay is the concomitant rise of capitalism, a system created by early capitalists in search of riches which, in turn, gave them enormous power over the rest of humanity. They became so addicted to riches and power that they had no inhibitions about committing crimes against the rest of humanity who stood in their way, and they continue with this obsessive pursuit of wealth and power today--probably more than ever. This ruling class has, like all ruling classes, its own propagandists which Baraka erroneously refers to as a "class of intellectuals"--they are only a sub-class of the ruling capitalist class.
Eurocentric academicians, still a hegemonic force in the West, don’t historicize the “great” humanitarian theories of Europe and critically juxtapose the rise of those theories with the concrete practices of European powers. Those practices involved the systematic slaughter of millions of Indigenous people throughout the America’s and the African slave trade that made Europe fat and rich and allowed for the creation of a class of intellectuals freed-up from the struggle to earn a living and able to engage in the higher contemplations of life.
However, Eurocentric liberalism was never just confined to the academy. It became the hegemonic ideological force that embedded itself in the culture and collective consciousness of the Western project and with it the de-valuation of non-European life and culture. In other words, the white supremacist ideology and world-view, normalized and thus unrecognized by most, has become a form of psychopathology.
