White men created the modern, industrialised world. It is for this reason that they are now being erased from view, as may be seen in advertisements.

In Britain, images of white people, particularly men, are fast becoming a thing of the past

Whatever one’s views on history, politics or anything else, it is impossible to deny that the world in which we live is almost entirely the creation of white men. Certainly, some women have contributed valuable insights into the nature of things, one thinks for instance of Marie Curie’s work on radioactivity and also Roslind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography, leading to the discovery of the structure of DNA. It is also true that there have been great Indian mathematicians and scientists. But by and large, every single development in science and politics, all the world’s major inventions, bar a handful which originated in China, have been the work of white men. This is a sobering thought and one which is very unwelcome to many people today. How is it possible that men from Europe could have been the only people to shape the world, by inventing democracy, building space rockets, inventing the internet, setting up power stations and all the rest of it? Why weren’t these developments distributed evenly about the world, so that people from the Amazon, say, discovered the existence of atoms, Africans invented the telephone, Australian aborigines came up with the idea of the internet and the Eskimos perhaps divined the structure of DNA. Only of course, it didn’t work like that, did it? This obvious and undeniable fact runs counter to modern ideology, which holds that both genders and all ethnicities are equally well endowed with intellectual ability and the capacity for abstract thought. It may of course be so, but the evidence for the idea is scanty and sparse.