In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis set off a wave of massive protests that spread to Europe within weeks. Invited to comment on them, historian Michael Zeuske stated on German public radio that “Kant helped lay the foundations of European racism in his anthropological writings.”

The remark sparked a debate in the German-language media. By the end of the year, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities hosted a lecture series titled :“Kant, a Racist?”

Immanuel Kant is one of the most widely taught thinkers in western moral philosophy, famous for the formulation of what he called the categorical imperative in 1785:

“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

How could someone who set out such a demand have defended, at the very same time, a hierarchy among human races?

The answer is less straightforward than it might appear. Behind the question “was Kant a racist?” lies another, more rarely asked: what principles guide our own reading of the racist prejudices of a classic author?

The ‘Americans’ in Kant’s hierarchy

In his texts, lectures and private notes, Kant affirmed the unity of the human species while distinguishing four “races,” identified by skin colour, to which he attributed unequal capacities.

One feature sets his scheme apart: the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, then called “Indians” or “Americans,” occupy the lowest rank, after the “Whites,” the “Hindus” and the “Blacks.”

In 1788, Kant explained this last rank through a hypothesis, with no empirical data and no claim to scientific status. As the ancestors of Indigenous Americans migrated from Africa through Asia to North and South America, passing through changing climates repeatedly interrupted and stalled........

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