While reading “Race and Social Media” and re-learning about the construction of race and its role in colonization and power, I was reminded about all my Latin American art history classes. Not only do we see this in art regarding latin american colonization, but also in how we treat art itself. With much of the art history (or any) education here in the United States, the Western world sees themselves as “greater.” When looking at the requirements for my art history degree, things are often categorized as “Western” and “Non-Western.” Western includes the United States, Canada, most of Europe or any “countries of European colonial origin” (according to Wikipedia). When we talk about Non-western we usually mean Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc. Labeling the art categories as such makes everything revolve around the West (the conquerors). People usually see the West as the “best” since they have “advanced” the most, but labeling everything as non-western kind of seems to demean it to me. One class in particular was labeled “Intro to Pre-Columbian Art,” which is very problematic as we are saying that these cultures (Inca, Maya, Aztec etc) are only visible because of Christopher Columbus. These cultures existed beforehand and Columbus’ arrival has nothing to do with their art. Of course my professor, who is an Inca art expert, changed the name to the class to “Art in the Americas before 1500” because she understood the conflict.

Not to mention that the colonizers thought they were bettering the world by spreading their Christian ideas and getting rid of the other cultures (aztec, maya, etc) because they were blasphemous and not like Europe.

Everything we talk about, we usually talk in the Western view. In my information studies class we talked about how our current time is called “the digital age” but in reality ONLY 12% of the world is plugged in. This Western view is everywhere, and the Western view was/is predominately white, even though we are so mixed nowadays and there is so much culture flourishing. We see it in leadership (mostly white males), in education, and in everyday things like entertainment. I feel like things are slowly changing, especially from the colonial times, but we need have more voices heard of different ethnicities, colors, race, whatever you want to call it.