Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

KaNt’s UNTERMENSCHEN ( 95 )

In this spirit, Allen Wood speaks of what he sees as Kant’s “unqualified
egalitarianism”:

People tend to judge themselves to be better than others on various grounds, such as

birth, wealth, honor, power.... But [for Kant] these judgments are always mere opin-

ions, without truth, and all social inequalities are therefore founded on falsehood and

deception.... The reason that Kant’s egalitarianism is unqualified is that the worth of

every human being is a “dignity”— that is, an absolute and incomparable value.^3

An inspiring picture— but the problem with it is that, as philosophical
work by Emmanuel Eze and Robert Bernasconi reminds us (I say “remind”
because both writers emphasize that this is old news in other disciplines, if
breaking news to contemporary philosophers), Kant is also seen as one of the
central figures in the birth of modern “scientific” racism.^4 Whereas other con-
tributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach had offered only “empirical” (scare- quotes necessary!) observa-
tion, Kant produced a full- blown theory of race. His lectures and writings on
anthropology and physical geography are usually ignored by philosophers,
but the question is whether this bracketing is theoretically legitimate con-
sidering that they map a human hierarchy of racialized superiors and inferi-
ors: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, red Amerindians.
Consider the following passages (all cited from Eze or Bernasconi):
The Racial Hierarchy:

In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the

perfection of the temperate zones. Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white

race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of Talent. The Negroes are lower and the

lowest are a part of the American peoples.^5

Whites:

The white race possesses all motivating forces and talents in itself.^6

[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all disposi-

tions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones

who always advance to perfection.^7

Asians:

[The Hindus] do have motivating forces but they have a strong degree of passivity and

all look like philosophers. Nevertheless they incline greatly towards anger and love. They

thus can be educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences.