Hi Amod! *waves* Glad to see you on Substack :) I really liked this post when it came out on your blog a while ago, and happy to see it here on the platform too--a much needed corrective into the current discussions around race. Will be looking toward to reading you here as well :)
>a much needed corrective into the current discussions around race
But let me guess - it's a completely one edged sword, right? Africans get to decry any white person living in or having any say on anything in Africa as "colonial", by virtue of the white person's race, right? Europeans owe everyone else, but everyone else gets to treat race as real and whites as the enemy race.
Nika can speak for herself, but I do not believe that race is real, in any sense bigger than the social effects of the concept. In the long term, I would like to see the idea of race ended entirely. That is connected to the point of this post: the idea of Western civilization is something bigger, better, more important than mere race.
On a more serious note, I mostly agree with this stance, perhaps with the caveat that race is real in so far as it’s a socially constructed reality—at least, it’s very real for many people living today, whether they want it to be so or not. That said, it’s also a category that evolved and morphed and changed over time, and so there is little reason to believe it is some sort of immutable essentialist thing that cannot continue to change—or even recede into the background as something that used to be historically relevant but is no longer. (MLK, notably, expressed more or less such an approach to race).
That said, Amod, you’re amazingly kind in entertaining a serious discussion after such a comment :) I respect it all the more given I myself didn’t have the patience 🤷♀️
Well, I do think it's important to reach across political divides where possible - plus I'd like to grow my comments section, so it's nice to treat people well even if they don't return the favour!
But yes, I agree with this. I have no problem (at least in principle) with considering race *at the moment* for targeted interventions, like affirmative action, that are designed to *reduce* its ultimate salience. What I have no patience for is the renewed left-essentialism of the past ten years that *renews* race's significance (teaching kids to recognize race, racializing thumbs-up icons, etc.)
I agree, treating people well regardless is always a good practice—and I strive to! But sometimes I really do lose my patience… 🙈
And on that last point, absolutely. It’s fascinating to me how the project of visibility and representation—such as inclusivity in tv casting, ads, imagery, etc., which in itself is a great thing—has actually turned on itself ouroboros-like, producing all this neo-essentialism which sounds in places rather ominous and reminds me of a far less tolerant era… and sadly the state of discourse is so polarized at the moment that discussing these things at all, no matter how measured the manner, provokes many people to bile-fueled vitriol, as we’ve just unfortunately witnessed.
That said, I think it makes it all the more urgent to keep talking—and I appreciate you providing a space for that :)
Errr…. Did you manage to deduce all of that from my comment above?? Or from anything else I’ve said or written online? If so, care to elaborate? (By the same token, it actually sounds like you’ve at best skimmed Amod’s article, because none of that can be deduced from his writing here, either).
On a general note, I must say the tactic of coming in hot with a lot (unsubstantiated) assumptions and attacking a totally unknown stranger online based on a *single* comment is absolutely the worst excesses of online culture. I have zero patience for it, and I think it’s time to put it away. Not only is it uncivil, it’s deeply unproductive. How likely am I to want to engage with the ideas of someone who just made a bunch of baseless assumptions about me and then attacked me for them? Very unlikely. How likely am I to take what they say seriously? Even less so.
Btw, normally I don’t respond to trolls. (Unless they’re a real life Norwegian fairy being, that is, guarding a bridge I’m about to cross.) And thankfully, so far I’ve encountered very little trollish behavior (or not at all!) on Substack, but I guess as the platform grows, bad habits carried over from twitter are bound to pop up… I vote that we take a collective vow to discourage it as much as possible, as creatively as possible. I may begin responding with lyrics from Yankee Doodle. Any other ideas?
This was a view I don’t see often out in the world, and I appreciate your highlighting the need to engage with western philosophical traditions without grafting racial identity onto them. It deeply bothers me when women in particular dismiss knowledge simply because of the race and gender of the speaker. It’s such a troglodyte tendency and keeps us from reaching higher levels of understanding.
Absolutely agreed. I don't think there is reason to believe that being marginalized (in whatever dimension) gives one a better understanding. A *different* understanding, perhaps, but not inherently a better one.
Excellent! I too have written an essay on this topic, but from a more recent perspective, also criticizing the Americano-centric view that says the West=whiteness. It's written from the perspective of an Eastern-European: https://altaifland.substack.com/p/what-is-the-western-world
Good essay! Thanks for sharing it. When I originally posted the present essay on my blog, it was tied to two other essays that bear closely on the points you're making:
I think we might differ some in the details of the views we're articulating, but we share a project of questioning the way "the West", "whiteness" and "Europe" are so often understood as synonyms.
Yes, I completely agree. We question a framing of the "West," which is taken as "natural, but in fact is done entirely from an American point of view and a history specific to the US. You and I show that the West can be conceptualized in other ways, even if each of us does it in a way that is grounded in our specific history and knowledge.
There was cultural and intellectual exchange between Europe and other places. Great.
But this does NOT mean that non-Europeans are entitled to unlimited mass immigration into Europe, and nobody is fooled by these pathetic rationalizations for such.
Additionally, all of this implies a collorary - it argues AGAINST your framing of things as "colonial". You people portray western (white) influence on things as colonial, but your very argument shows that many these non-white parts of world have had substantial white european influence for thousands of years. You're simply trying to have your cake and eat it too - white europeans owe the world everything, whereas the world is somehow not indebted to europeans at all.
You say that Africans have been cultural centres of the west for thousands of years - well, Europeans have ruled and given rise to African civilizations for that time period to, so the idea that Europeans are "foreign" "invaders" should be equally as nonsensical as you think a "white" west is. White south africans have lived in south africa for hundreds of years longer than the vast majority of black south africans, and most of the blacks who were there first were violent invaders in the first place, so if thinking about things in terms of race is wrong, then "white" south africans are just as if not more south african than any "black" south africans. Of course, you don't think this - it's always a one edged sword.
So just come right out and say what you really mean - white people don't get a home. They don't get to exlcude foreigners the way everyone else does, they don't get to protect their culture and identity liek anyone else does, they're morally obligated to become minorities in their own homelands to hostile foreign hordes, they're morally obligated to let their daughters to be raped by "new europeans". This is what you REALLY mean. So stop this whole charade and say what you really mean.
I do not believe that European countries should open up unlimited immigration.
I believe that the world is very indebted to Europeans.
I believe that white South Africans are as South African as black South Africans are — just as I believe that white Americans, and for that matter Asian Americans, are as American as Native Americans are.
I don't think there's anything in my post that implies the contrary of any of these.
Based on the things you have just said in this comment, I think many people would call your post a "dog whistle"; they would infer that you believe that all non-white people are necessarily inferior, or for that matter are rapists. I would prefer *not* to assume such things about you, and instead respond to the things you actually say. Would you mind extending the same courtesy to me?
I have seen some right-wing thinkers (notably Oswald Spengler and his modern followers like the eco-reactionary John Michael Greer) attempt to sever the ancient Greeks, Hebrews, and paleo-Christians from the Western tradition as separate "Magian" and "Apollonian" civilizations that died at the end of antiquity, and postdate the West to around 800 with the conquests of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, thereby turning it from "Western civilization" into a Germanic or even Frankish (perhaps, if you really want to stress the ugly implications of this, "Aryan", and not the Indo- kind but the Hitler kind) civilization.
I suppose that's the way someone could do it if they really wanted to insist on a white West - but it already looks a little silly. Is Charlemagne really more deserving of credit for the accomplishments of the modern West than are Aristotle and Euclid and Moses? At that point "the West" becomes less about a grand civilizational tradition and more about ethnic separatism, and I think that's a pretty sad way to use the term.
The Spenglerian/post-Spenglerian worldview is obsessed with separation. The whole basis is the idea that each "civilization" is a distinct phenomenon built around a unique and non-recurring ideological theme bound to a specific area of land. A hybrid of apparently different cultural expressions is not any sort of authentic culture but an older, dominant culture masking the younger, subaltern culture that will eventually replace it. There's a sciencey-sounding name given for this, "pseudomorphosis", and Greer expands it so that there are always two where a developing culture mimics one old culture and then another before coming into its own. Under this schema, the music of Rachmaninoff or the other Russian classical masters, for instance, could not be both authentically Russian and authentically European, it had to be young Russia "putting on" old Europe because it hadn't found its real voice yet (it should not surprise you that Greer is *virulently* anti-Ukrainian and sees the crushing of Ukraine as part of Russia realizing its cultural destiny and fully becoming itself).
It is indeed very sad, a really depressing and deterministic ideology that crushes any sort of human agency and expression under the working-out of colossal civilization-scale egregores.
That is new to me and quite interesting. I guess my thought is that whiteness and Europeanness are ahistorical and irrelevant categories when it comes to the ancient Greeks and their world but they always knew they were not Asians (Lydians, Cappadocians, etc.) even though they lived in close physical and cultural proximity with them. Of course the Hellenistic kingdoms were multiracial and Greekness was a culture, not a nationality, with them. It’s a good question whether Greeks were ever seen as having much commonality with Western Europeans before the 19th century. Maybe “orientals” would have been more usual categorization, but mostly It would have been important that they were Christians. An interesting course of study.
I would imagine the kind of lineage question you referred to becomes important with Alexander, when the Greek world expands much farther into Asia. I don't know exactly how the ancient (historic) Greeks thought of the different peoples of Asia Minor - that would be an interesting question - but as far as I can tell, as long as there has been a Greek world that understood itself as Greek (Hellene), it included the Ionians (and Italians) as well as the peninsula and islands we now call "Greece". ("Greece" in that sense is a modern invention.) I don't think Ionia and Ionians were any more alien to the Greek world than Italy and Italians, and probably not even than the city-states of the peninsula and islands.
I'm actually thinking about something much, much earlier. The foundation myths of Greek cities emphasize common family descent among the citizens. For example, the Thebans claimed descent from the sons of Cadmus, and the Athenians from the people of the villages gathered together by Theseus. Citizenship was passed down by lineage. The citizen population (the demos) was the heads of a few hundred families, or maybe up to a few thousand for the biggest cities. The citizenry would have been blood cousins after a few hundred years or so, even if some naturalization occurred.
The tribes of the Greeks (the Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians) existed before the colonization period (circa 7th century BC). It's possible that these may have begun as leagues of unrelated cities, but the fact that the Greeks felt the need to claim founders of mythological descent indicates that the idea of a common descent was important to them. The cities of Sicily, Italy and other distant places were founded as colonies from older cities in the Greek mainland, or from older colonies in Ionia or the Aegean islands. The colony was always associated with the tribe (Ionians, etc.) to which the mother city belonged. The Greeks recognized an enduring tribal relationship among cities because of this common "family" relationship, so in that case I recognize what you're saying: it makes more sense to say there were Greek cities of different tribes in many geographies, than to speak of a geographical Greek "motherland" distinct from "colonial" territory.
We might think of there being a sense of Greek racial consciousness (free Greeks versus enslaved Asiatics) that arose during the Ionian revolt and the Persian invasions. But I think this is a modern inference based on wartime politics. The fact is that many Greek cities fought on the Persian side in those wars based on their own perceived advantage. The real focus of patriotism remained with the polis. This persisted in the wars with Alexander and the Romans, until the latter stripped the Greek cities of their independence. By that time, "Greek" had become a (very influential) cultural concept that was ultimately absorbed into the wider concept of Christianity. It is a very interesting evolution!
The Greeks saw themselves in terms of lineage. The Ionians were such a lineage. When they founded colonies in Asia Minor, they remained Hellenes. Europeans. The native peoples of that area were always considered by them to be foreigners - “barbaroi” - meaning people who did not speak Greek. This remained so even when those people adopted Greek culture. They were of different lineage. I wonder how this affects this discussion.
Yes, the Hellenes/Greeks distinguished themselves from the barbaroi - but I don't think this was equated with whiteness or Europeanness. I'm far from an expert on any of this, but I'm not seeing any reason to believe the equation of "Hellenes" with "Europeans." Just on a quick Google search, we find this passage with a quote from Thucydides: https://www.thoughtco.com/why-are-the-greeks-called-hellenes-117769
"Before the Trojan war there is no indication of any common action in Hellas, nor indeed of the universal prevalence of the name; on the contrary, before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, no such appellation existed, but the country went by the names of the different tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian. It was not till Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis, and were invited as allies into the other cities, that one by one they gradually acquired from the connection the name of Hellenes; though a long time elapsed before that name could fasten itself upon all."
That is, the people who would come to be called Hellenes ( = Greeks) were already spread out across different territories, including Asia Minor, *before* the term "Hellene" was ever used. Whatever the meaning and referent of the term, it does not seem to have been tied to Europe. If it had the lineage meaning you say, that seems to have been a later development.
Hi Amod! *waves* Glad to see you on Substack :) I really liked this post when it came out on your blog a while ago, and happy to see it here on the platform too--a much needed corrective into the current discussions around race. Will be looking toward to reading you here as well :)
>a much needed corrective into the current discussions around race
But let me guess - it's a completely one edged sword, right? Africans get to decry any white person living in or having any say on anything in Africa as "colonial", by virtue of the white person's race, right? Europeans owe everyone else, but everyone else gets to treat race as real and whites as the enemy race.
Nika can speak for herself, but I do not believe that race is real, in any sense bigger than the social effects of the concept. In the long term, I would like to see the idea of race ended entirely. That is connected to the point of this post: the idea of Western civilization is something bigger, better, more important than mere race.
On a more serious note, I mostly agree with this stance, perhaps with the caveat that race is real in so far as it’s a socially constructed reality—at least, it’s very real for many people living today, whether they want it to be so or not. That said, it’s also a category that evolved and morphed and changed over time, and so there is little reason to believe it is some sort of immutable essentialist thing that cannot continue to change—or even recede into the background as something that used to be historically relevant but is no longer. (MLK, notably, expressed more or less such an approach to race).
That said, Amod, you’re amazingly kind in entertaining a serious discussion after such a comment :) I respect it all the more given I myself didn’t have the patience 🤷♀️
Well, I do think it's important to reach across political divides where possible - plus I'd like to grow my comments section, so it's nice to treat people well even if they don't return the favour!
But yes, I agree with this. I have no problem (at least in principle) with considering race *at the moment* for targeted interventions, like affirmative action, that are designed to *reduce* its ultimate salience. What I have no patience for is the renewed left-essentialism of the past ten years that *renews* race's significance (teaching kids to recognize race, racializing thumbs-up icons, etc.)
I agree, treating people well regardless is always a good practice—and I strive to! But sometimes I really do lose my patience… 🙈
And on that last point, absolutely. It’s fascinating to me how the project of visibility and representation—such as inclusivity in tv casting, ads, imagery, etc., which in itself is a great thing—has actually turned on itself ouroboros-like, producing all this neo-essentialism which sounds in places rather ominous and reminds me of a far less tolerant era… and sadly the state of discourse is so polarized at the moment that discussing these things at all, no matter how measured the manner, provokes many people to bile-fueled vitriol, as we’ve just unfortunately witnessed.
That said, I think it makes it all the more urgent to keep talking—and I appreciate you providing a space for that :)
Errr…. Did you manage to deduce all of that from my comment above?? Or from anything else I’ve said or written online? If so, care to elaborate? (By the same token, it actually sounds like you’ve at best skimmed Amod’s article, because none of that can be deduced from his writing here, either).
On a general note, I must say the tactic of coming in hot with a lot (unsubstantiated) assumptions and attacking a totally unknown stranger online based on a *single* comment is absolutely the worst excesses of online culture. I have zero patience for it, and I think it’s time to put it away. Not only is it uncivil, it’s deeply unproductive. How likely am I to want to engage with the ideas of someone who just made a bunch of baseless assumptions about me and then attacked me for them? Very unlikely. How likely am I to take what they say seriously? Even less so.
Btw, normally I don’t respond to trolls. (Unless they’re a real life Norwegian fairy being, that is, guarding a bridge I’m about to cross.) And thankfully, so far I’ve encountered very little trollish behavior (or not at all!) on Substack, but I guess as the platform grows, bad habits carried over from twitter are bound to pop up… I vote that we take a collective vow to discourage it as much as possible, as creatively as possible. I may begin responding with lyrics from Yankee Doodle. Any other ideas?
This was a view I don’t see often out in the world, and I appreciate your highlighting the need to engage with western philosophical traditions without grafting racial identity onto them. It deeply bothers me when women in particular dismiss knowledge simply because of the race and gender of the speaker. It’s such a troglodyte tendency and keeps us from reaching higher levels of understanding.
Absolutely agreed. I don't think there is reason to believe that being marginalized (in whatever dimension) gives one a better understanding. A *different* understanding, perhaps, but not inherently a better one.
Standpoint epistemology was one of the worst ideas to escape the academy, truly.
It has some competition in that regard, but generally agreed.
Excellent! I too have written an essay on this topic, but from a more recent perspective, also criticizing the Americano-centric view that says the West=whiteness. It's written from the perspective of an Eastern-European: https://altaifland.substack.com/p/what-is-the-western-world
Good essay! Thanks for sharing it. When I originally posted the present essay on my blog, it was tied to two other essays that bear closely on the points you're making:
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2022/01/why-the-west-is-a-real-thing/
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2022/01/against-euro-american/
I think we might differ some in the details of the views we're articulating, but we share a project of questioning the way "the West", "whiteness" and "Europe" are so often understood as synonyms.
Yes, I completely agree. We question a framing of the "West," which is taken as "natural, but in fact is done entirely from an American point of view and a history specific to the US. You and I show that the West can be conceptualized in other ways, even if each of us does it in a way that is grounded in our specific history and knowledge.
There was cultural and intellectual exchange between Europe and other places. Great.
But this does NOT mean that non-Europeans are entitled to unlimited mass immigration into Europe, and nobody is fooled by these pathetic rationalizations for such.
Additionally, all of this implies a collorary - it argues AGAINST your framing of things as "colonial". You people portray western (white) influence on things as colonial, but your very argument shows that many these non-white parts of world have had substantial white european influence for thousands of years. You're simply trying to have your cake and eat it too - white europeans owe the world everything, whereas the world is somehow not indebted to europeans at all.
You say that Africans have been cultural centres of the west for thousands of years - well, Europeans have ruled and given rise to African civilizations for that time period to, so the idea that Europeans are "foreign" "invaders" should be equally as nonsensical as you think a "white" west is. White south africans have lived in south africa for hundreds of years longer than the vast majority of black south africans, and most of the blacks who were there first were violent invaders in the first place, so if thinking about things in terms of race is wrong, then "white" south africans are just as if not more south african than any "black" south africans. Of course, you don't think this - it's always a one edged sword.
So just come right out and say what you really mean - white people don't get a home. They don't get to exlcude foreigners the way everyone else does, they don't get to protect their culture and identity liek anyone else does, they're morally obligated to become minorities in their own homelands to hostile foreign hordes, they're morally obligated to let their daughters to be raped by "new europeans". This is what you REALLY mean. So stop this whole charade and say what you really mean.
I do not believe that European countries should open up unlimited immigration.
I believe that the world is very indebted to Europeans.
I believe that white South Africans are as South African as black South Africans are — just as I believe that white Americans, and for that matter Asian Americans, are as American as Native Americans are.
I don't think there's anything in my post that implies the contrary of any of these.
Based on the things you have just said in this comment, I think many people would call your post a "dog whistle"; they would infer that you believe that all non-white people are necessarily inferior, or for that matter are rapists. I would prefer *not* to assume such things about you, and instead respond to the things you actually say. Would you mind extending the same courtesy to me?
I have seen some right-wing thinkers (notably Oswald Spengler and his modern followers like the eco-reactionary John Michael Greer) attempt to sever the ancient Greeks, Hebrews, and paleo-Christians from the Western tradition as separate "Magian" and "Apollonian" civilizations that died at the end of antiquity, and postdate the West to around 800 with the conquests of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, thereby turning it from "Western civilization" into a Germanic or even Frankish (perhaps, if you really want to stress the ugly implications of this, "Aryan", and not the Indo- kind but the Hitler kind) civilization.
I suppose that's the way someone could do it if they really wanted to insist on a white West - but it already looks a little silly. Is Charlemagne really more deserving of credit for the accomplishments of the modern West than are Aristotle and Euclid and Moses? At that point "the West" becomes less about a grand civilizational tradition and more about ethnic separatism, and I think that's a pretty sad way to use the term.
The Spenglerian/post-Spenglerian worldview is obsessed with separation. The whole basis is the idea that each "civilization" is a distinct phenomenon built around a unique and non-recurring ideological theme bound to a specific area of land. A hybrid of apparently different cultural expressions is not any sort of authentic culture but an older, dominant culture masking the younger, subaltern culture that will eventually replace it. There's a sciencey-sounding name given for this, "pseudomorphosis", and Greer expands it so that there are always two where a developing culture mimics one old culture and then another before coming into its own. Under this schema, the music of Rachmaninoff or the other Russian classical masters, for instance, could not be both authentically Russian and authentically European, it had to be young Russia "putting on" old Europe because it hadn't found its real voice yet (it should not surprise you that Greer is *virulently* anti-Ukrainian and sees the crushing of Ukraine as part of Russia realizing its cultural destiny and fully becoming itself).
It is indeed very sad, a really depressing and deterministic ideology that crushes any sort of human agency and expression under the working-out of colossal civilization-scale egregores.
That is new to me and quite interesting. I guess my thought is that whiteness and Europeanness are ahistorical and irrelevant categories when it comes to the ancient Greeks and their world but they always knew they were not Asians (Lydians, Cappadocians, etc.) even though they lived in close physical and cultural proximity with them. Of course the Hellenistic kingdoms were multiracial and Greekness was a culture, not a nationality, with them. It’s a good question whether Greeks were ever seen as having much commonality with Western Europeans before the 19th century. Maybe “orientals” would have been more usual categorization, but mostly It would have been important that they were Christians. An interesting course of study.
I would imagine the kind of lineage question you referred to becomes important with Alexander, when the Greek world expands much farther into Asia. I don't know exactly how the ancient (historic) Greeks thought of the different peoples of Asia Minor - that would be an interesting question - but as far as I can tell, as long as there has been a Greek world that understood itself as Greek (Hellene), it included the Ionians (and Italians) as well as the peninsula and islands we now call "Greece". ("Greece" in that sense is a modern invention.) I don't think Ionia and Ionians were any more alien to the Greek world than Italy and Italians, and probably not even than the city-states of the peninsula and islands.
I'm actually thinking about something much, much earlier. The foundation myths of Greek cities emphasize common family descent among the citizens. For example, the Thebans claimed descent from the sons of Cadmus, and the Athenians from the people of the villages gathered together by Theseus. Citizenship was passed down by lineage. The citizen population (the demos) was the heads of a few hundred families, or maybe up to a few thousand for the biggest cities. The citizenry would have been blood cousins after a few hundred years or so, even if some naturalization occurred.
The tribes of the Greeks (the Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians) existed before the colonization period (circa 7th century BC). It's possible that these may have begun as leagues of unrelated cities, but the fact that the Greeks felt the need to claim founders of mythological descent indicates that the idea of a common descent was important to them. The cities of Sicily, Italy and other distant places were founded as colonies from older cities in the Greek mainland, or from older colonies in Ionia or the Aegean islands. The colony was always associated with the tribe (Ionians, etc.) to which the mother city belonged. The Greeks recognized an enduring tribal relationship among cities because of this common "family" relationship, so in that case I recognize what you're saying: it makes more sense to say there were Greek cities of different tribes in many geographies, than to speak of a geographical Greek "motherland" distinct from "colonial" territory.
We might think of there being a sense of Greek racial consciousness (free Greeks versus enslaved Asiatics) that arose during the Ionian revolt and the Persian invasions. But I think this is a modern inference based on wartime politics. The fact is that many Greek cities fought on the Persian side in those wars based on their own perceived advantage. The real focus of patriotism remained with the polis. This persisted in the wars with Alexander and the Romans, until the latter stripped the Greek cities of their independence. By that time, "Greek" had become a (very influential) cultural concept that was ultimately absorbed into the wider concept of Christianity. It is a very interesting evolution!
When I say ancient Greeks I am speaking of historic times, not the Trojan War.
The Greeks saw themselves in terms of lineage. The Ionians were such a lineage. When they founded colonies in Asia Minor, they remained Hellenes. Europeans. The native peoples of that area were always considered by them to be foreigners - “barbaroi” - meaning people who did not speak Greek. This remained so even when those people adopted Greek culture. They were of different lineage. I wonder how this affects this discussion.
Yes, the Hellenes/Greeks distinguished themselves from the barbaroi - but I don't think this was equated with whiteness or Europeanness. I'm far from an expert on any of this, but I'm not seeing any reason to believe the equation of "Hellenes" with "Europeans." Just on a quick Google search, we find this passage with a quote from Thucydides: https://www.thoughtco.com/why-are-the-greeks-called-hellenes-117769
"Before the Trojan war there is no indication of any common action in Hellas, nor indeed of the universal prevalence of the name; on the contrary, before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, no such appellation existed, but the country went by the names of the different tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian. It was not till Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis, and were invited as allies into the other cities, that one by one they gradually acquired from the connection the name of Hellenes; though a long time elapsed before that name could fasten itself upon all."
That is, the people who would come to be called Hellenes ( = Greeks) were already spread out across different territories, including Asia Minor, *before* the term "Hellene" was ever used. Whatever the meaning and referent of the term, it does not seem to have been tied to Europe. If it had the lineage meaning you say, that seems to have been a later development.