How White Is Kant's White Race, after All?

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To begin with, Kant was a racist. Some philosophers still hold he was not,^[1] but it’s hard to see why (though it may well be disputed whether Kant’s racist thinking is also reflected in his moral philosophy). Kant was not only a racist because he, incidentally, as it were, said some really condescending things about Native Americans, Black people, and a number of other peoples. Kant’s racism has a reason, a specific rationale and theoretical background. But Kant is not only a racist. He’s also, I submit, a semi-racist, an ethnicist, and a cultural chauvinist. I will first briefly explain what all this means. My focus, however, is on another question: Those who have successfully debunked Kant as a racist (such as Charles Mills^[2]) all too easily identify one of the four races that Kant postulates, to wit, the so-called “white race,” with white Europeans (both old and new). But this is a mistake. The white race Kant talks about, I further submit, is not to be identified with white Europeans.

Here is the basic idea of Kant’s race theory: There is only one human species. In it there are germs (potentials) and natural predispositions that, depending on the environment in which people live, lead to the development of different human races, which differ mainly by their skin (nota bene: not only its color). There are many hereditary traits that are inherited in families (e.g., consumption) and peoples (e.g., hair color), but which do not belong to the genus and do not define a race; none of them “is inherited unfailingly” (DCH 95).^[3] This is true only for skin (and skin color), according to Kant, and only such inevitable inheritance establishes the concept of different human races. Says Kant: “The concept of a race is therefore: the classificatory difference of the animals of one and the same phylum in so far as this difference is unfailingly hereditary” (DCH 100).

However, there is not only racism but also semi-racism, ethnicism (as opposed to nonbiological ethnocentrism), and cultural chauvinism in Kant’s writings. For all these forms of group-based misanthropy, it is not the group identification itself that is problematic, but only the group discrimination that accompanies it. The race thesis is only racist when it is combined with evaluative theses that devalue or discriminate against or even hierarchize human races in terms of their inevitable hereditary characteristics; racism arises from race-based despection or devaluation. Semi-racist are Kant’s pejorative remarks about particular peoples insofar as he links them to or derives them from his theory of race. I call them semi-racist because peoples, for Kant, are to be distinguished from races, and because they are based upon biological, inheritable traits. The discriminatory devaluation of non-unfailingly inheritable characteristics of peoples—hair color, for example—which are not races but varieties, is ethnicist. Where Kant disparages peoples, nations, and cultures in terms of noninheritable cultural achievements and expressions, the term cultural chauvinism lends itself. Kant was guilty of all of these positions; he was a racist, a semi-racist, an ethnicist, and a cultural chauvinist. And Kant was so in all phases of his thought: In 1798, in the chapter on the “Character of Race” in his Anthropology, Kant refers to Christoph Girtanner’s book On Kant’s Principle for Natural History (1796), who wrote it, says Kant, “in accordance with my [i.e., Kant’s] principles,” and “beautifully and thoroughly” so (APP 320). Girtanner, however, as pointed out by Joris van Gorkom,^[4] advocates a racial hierarchy. Thus he writes that the Americans are “a human race which, with regard to abilities and talents, occupies the lowest level, and is even lower than the Negro” (p. 139)—and here Girtanner refers to Kant’s essay On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (which he quotes almost verbatim).

Let us look at this a tad more closely. In Of the Different Races of Human Beings, Kant attributes to each of the four biological races he postulates a “character of . . . race” (DRH 432) in a way that is clearly racist. Thus, he writes, “this results in the Negro, who . . . given the abundant provision of his mother land is lazy, soft and trifling” (DRH 438). And these racial characters carry over: “I believe to be able to derive all remaining hereditary ethnic characters from these four races,” (DRH 432, my emphasis) and further: “When Nature can work undisturbed (without transplanting or foreign mixing) through many generations, then she always produces finally a lasting sort, which marks ethnic groups forever and would be called a race, if what is characteristic did not appear too insignificant and were not too difficult to describe to ground a special division on it” (DRH 431). It fits to this that Kant writes in his lecture on anthropology from the winter 1775–76: “The determination of the character must not be taken from random things, e.g., from religion . . . but the hereditary peculiar, uniform of the determination must be picked out” (AA 25.1, 654). But also in the Anthropology of 1798 he writes, for example, that the English and the French each have an “innate character . . . of which the acquired and artificial is only the consequence” (APP 312). If one takes this derivation-thesis of Kant’s seriously, the disparaging descriptions in his remarks about peoples’ characters must be classified as semi-racist and not only as ethnicist or cultural chauvinist. In his writing On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, it is particularly evident that Kant’s evolutionary theory of dispositions and germs provides the theoretical ground for explicit racism with respect to the so-called “negroes,” “gypsies,” and “Americans.” The so-called “creole negroes,” for example, driven from their homeland, would lack on the new soil (as former slaves) a “drive to activity” (UTP 174), the pronounced development of which from one of those original dispositions had not been necessary in their homeland, but would then make itself felt as a deficiency on the new soil. Other races like the North Americans, on the other hand, had gone on wanderings before the final development, which is why “this race, which is too weak for hard labor, too indifferent for industry and incapable of any culture—although there is enough of it as example and encouragement nearby—ranks still far below even the Negro, who stands on the lowest of all the other steps that we have named as differences of the races” (UTP 176). In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant writes: “this fellow was all black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid” (p. 255). It should be noted that such alleged characteristics are, as natural, inhibited qualities, permanent. In a so-called Reflexion (No. 1520), Kant says: “The Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but never genuinely civilized. He falls into savagery of his own accord. Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. They therefore serve only as slaves.”

Kant distinguishes (not always consistently) four races, one of which is in any case the “white race.” It needs no proof that in the public discourse on race as well as in the relevant (non-philosophical) disciplines the “white race” almost always means Europeans and North Americans. Yet even an excellent philosopher and Kant expert like Charles Mills engages in this quasi-identification, and particularly so with respect to Kant. He speaks alternately of the white race and Europeans as if they were the same thing; as a matter of fact, in reproducing Kant’s taxonomy of race he renders Kant’s talk of the white race as “white Europeans.”^[5] Now it is true that Kant assigns a special status to Europeans. But it is not true that he identifies the white race with Europeans. In Of the Different Races of Human Beings Kant writes: “Among the first race, which is located primarily in Europe, I count also the Moors (Mauretanian from Africa), the Arabs (following Niebuhr), the Turkish-Tataric ethnic tribe and the Persians, as well as all other peoples from Asia who are not explicitly excluded from it by the remaining divisions” (DRH 432). In his Determination of the Concept of a Human Race, Kant assigns the following territories to the white race: “the class of the whites from Cape Finisterra through the North Cape, the Ob river, Little Bukhara, Persia, Arabia Felix, Abyssinia, the northern border of the Sahara desert up to the White Cape in Africa or to the mouth of the Senegal” (DCH 93). In his lecture on Menschenkunde (1781/82?), we can read: “Among the Whites one could make the division of the Oriental and the Occidental stratum” (AA 25,2:1188). Girtanner, to whom, as noted, Kant refers very praisingly, distinguishes the white race as follows: “The race of the whites divides itself into four strains: a) Into the strain of the flesh-colored. Most Europeans. b) Into the strain of the dark-yellow. Mongols. c) Into the strain of the brownish-yellow. Creoles. d) Into the strain of the brownish-whites. Mauritanians” (pp. 59f.); among the white peoples, Girtanner includes the Afghans, Syrians, Persians, Arabs, Moors, even the Japanese and Chinese (pp. 67ff.). Obviously, many of these peoples and areas are nowadays not considered white, let alone European.

Again, Kant was a racist. However, in order to adequately understand his theory of race, one should acknowledge that what Kant and other race theorists such as Girtanner meant by “white race” is not what many people assume it to mean.

Notes

1. Michael Wolff, “Kant war eine Anti-Rassist,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 9, 2020. Thanks to Charles W. Mills for his friendly review of this text.

2. Cf. Charles W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 169–93; and Charles W. Mills, “Black Radical Kantianism,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 1 (2018): 1–33.

3. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (APP); Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (DCH); Of the Different Races of Human Beings (DRH); On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (UTP). Page numbers refer to the standard pagination of the so-called Akademie-Ausgabe (AA). Except for the lectures, all translation of Kant’s texts are taken from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

4. Joris van Gorkum, “The Reddish, Iron-Rust Color of the Native Americans: Immanuel Kant’s Racism in Context,” Con-Textos Kantianos, International Journal of Philosophy 9 (June 2019): 154–77.

5. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” p. 173.