Can Metaphysical Beliefs Explain the History of Racism? A Response to Shuchen Xiang’s Chinese Cosmopolitanism

Shuchen Xiang’s thesis in Chinese Cosmopolitanism is that racism is primarily a Western phenomenon and that racism never developed in China. According to Xiang, Chinese metaphysics, centered on what she calls processual holism, places an obstacle in the path of racism. Xiang also claims that the rise of racism in the West is to be explained by appealing to the dominance of essentialist substance metaphysics. Xiang holds that substance metaphysics explains why, in the West, “barbarians” came to be seen not only as inferior but also as unassimilable and unimprovable. Xiang claims that anti-assimilationist racism has been dominant in the West since classical antiquity. I argue that Xiang’s account is based on a misreading of ancient Greek and Roman sources. Xiang ignores the existence of assimilationist policies during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. I contend that Xiang’s attempt to explain the divergences between Western and Chinese social histories through appealing to different metaphysical orientations is unsuccessful. When it comes to explaining racism the materialist explanatory framework is still far more powerful than its idealist competitors.