philosophy (particularly epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and logic). She is the author of Kant and the Science of Logic (2018).
Lu-Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere, and reported the following:
Page 99 is a good window into this book. It begins with a question: “What are we to make of this picture?” The preceding page depicts how Kant relates to racism both as a prominent scholar and as a lecturer with a decades long teaching career. As a scholar, Kant developed a groundbreaking scientific theory of race. He dedicated three essays to that task (1775/77, 1785, 1788). Meanwhile, Kant the lecturer would drop racist remarks here and there in his popular courses on anthropology and geography, which he taught in alternate semesters for decades. He claimed, for instance, that the race represented by Amerindians were incapable of any culture whatsoever, whereas the race of “Negroes” (a special term referring to the Senegambian Africans) were suitable for none other than the “culture of slaves.” It is worth adding that Kant intended his anthropology and geography courses to equip his white students with the pragmatic world knowledge (Weltkenntnis) they supposedly needed in order to navigate the world as their “stage.”Learn more about Kant, Race, and Racism at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 then describes how a typical Kantian today would respond to the above picture. The response makes the following basic assumptions. First, racism is a matter of personal prejudice on Kant’s part, which should be separated from his philosophy. Second, racism directly contradicts Kant’s “moral universalism,” understood as the view that fundamental moral laws—particularly the law that one ought to treat every human being respectfully as an end and not as mere means—apply to all humans without exception. With these assumptions, a typical Kantian would admit that Kant was a racist individual, only to insist that his philosophy is stronger than his racism and can—or even must—be read independently of the latter. Meanwhile, insofar the majority of Kant’s racist remarks are found in texts like student notes of his lectures, a typical Kantian would decline to give much weight to those remarks for the reason that they might not accurately represent his considered position. Furthermore, there is a tendency to think that Kant’s claims about race are simply ignorant and that he was mostly regurgitating what he gleaned from travelogs. He was, so to speak, just being a child of his time (Kind seiner Zeit).
On the next page, I challenge the assumption that racism is simply a matter of personal prejudice. This assumption is ubiquitous in the discourse on Kant and racism, which often dwells on whether or for how long he was a racist. This individualistic or atomistic approach, as I call it, ignores the fact that Kant was a social actor who occupied highly influential positions of power—both as an eminent philosopher and as a university professor. By writing and lecturing repeatedly about race from those positions, he must have played a crucial part in the formation of modern racist ideology. Chapter 2 of the book, which includes page 99, reconceptualizes “racism” as racist ideological formation to capture that observation. Chapters 5 and 6 then explore the far-reaching impact of the resulting ideology.
I challenge other assumptions behind the typical Kantian response elsewhere in the book. For instance, Chapter 1 shows how Kant’s lofty moral philosophy is in fact compatible with the racist claims he made about non-white races. The main thing to know is that, for Kant, it was not enough simply to articulate a highly abstract vision of humanity’s moral destiny—as he did in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He must also explain—as he did in his anthropology courses and writings—whether or how humanity, as a species, is equipped to eventually realize that vision here on earth. Even more specifically, given his views on how the various human races fundamentally differed from one another in temperament, talent, and other morally relevant characteristics, he wanted to know which of those races could work as agents to propel humanity toward its moral destiny. Needless to say, his conclusion was that the white race alone could play this agential role. And he would see no contradiction between this racist conclusion and the moral claims he made at an extremely abstract level in the Groundwork.
Meanwhile, Chapters 3 and 4 reject the view that Kant was a mere child of his time on the issue of race. To the contrary, Kant was a key player and pathbreaker in the process of racial knowledge production that extended from the 17th through the 18th century. This process implicated well-known natural philosophers from Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle in the 17th century to Carl Linnaeus and Georges Buffon in the 18th century. While those philosophers paved the way for Kant, he went beyond them in putting forward his own scientific account of “race” as a hereditary biological character. He was perfectly aware that his account was unprecedented and controversial. Facing criticisms, he defended it with a great deal of ingenuity and sophistication. I show how some of his signature philosophical ideas were deeply implicated in this endeavor.
Overall, the goal of this book is not to call Kant out as a “racist.” Rather, by uncovering Kant’s role in the formation of modern racist ideology, I hope that Kantians today will recognize that they have a special burden to help undo the lasting legacies of that ideology through their research and teaching alike.
--Marshal Zeringue
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