This year, the 300th anniversary of the birth of German philosopher Immanuel Kant was commemorated. Born on April 22, 1724, Kant was a significant philosophical figure of the Enlightenment. Three centuries later, Western formulations of freedom, dignity and equality are still inseparable from his name and work.

But on this anniversary, we cannot ignore the legacy of racism that Kant’s liberal humanism engenders. An objective lens on Kant’s racism means looking not just at what is known as his critical philosophy, where he draws the limits of what can and cannot be known, but also at how racism and Enlightenment philosophy remain fundamentally intertwined. What becomes clear are the deeply problematic additional limits drawn by Kant regarding who constitutes the “human.”

Kant’s conception of the Enlightenment is captured by the Latin phrase, “sapere aude,” which means, as human beings we should “dare to know” — dare to use our courage to break free from our self-imposed immaturity. After all, the Enlightenment emphasized reason and autonomy over the weight and dogmatism of tradition.

Yet notably, reason has historically been associated with whiteness.

Reflecting on the color symbolism of light and whiteness, philosopher Charles Mills argues, “Whiteness is light; whiteness is all-encompassing; whiteness is the universal; whiteness is Euro-illumination.” For Mills, “whiteness becomes the identity of both enlightenment and of the human bearers of enlightenment.”

As a Black philosopher, I came to discover that philosophy obfuscates its explicit and implicit investment in whiteness, which means that philosophy often resides in the space of ideal theory. For Mills, ideal theory abstracts away from the messiness of social injustice. On this score, ideal theory refuses to come to terms with the ways in which white philosophers perpetuate whiteness within philosophy and the world.

Provocatively, Mills quotes a Black American folk aphorism in the opening epigraph of his well-known philosophical 1997 bestseller, The Racial Contract: “When white people say ‘Justice,’ they mean ‘Just us.’” While the profession of philosophy is predominantly white and male, which is in itself a problem that must be addressed, Mills places an emphasis on “the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the discipline.” One central feature of this conceptual or theoretical whiteness of philosophy is that its moral ideals and principles were never meant to apply to Black people. Mills reminds us that the “real principles were the racially exclusivist ones.”

As I witnessed Kant’s birthday come and go, I wondered whose version of Kant was being celebrated. Part of my worry was generated after reading philosopher Susan Neiman’s article, in which she argues, “Some of his [Kant’s] remarks are undeniably offensive to 21st-century ears. But it’s fatal to forget that his work gave us the tools to fight racism and sexism, by providing the metaphysical basis of every claim to human rights.” Rather than “offensive,” I would describe his philosophy as fundamentally and profoundly anti-Black. Moreover, I’m not sure what is “fatal” about forgetting that Kant supplies tools to fight against racism when in fact Kant himself was racist, and thereby belied those tools.

Black people reside outside Kant’s understanding of full legal and moral “personhood.”

In fact, Black people reside outside Kant’s understanding of full legal and moral “personhood.” In “On the Different Races of Man,” Kant argued that the first race is white and very blond. He also argued that “Negroes stink,” which sounds like racist discourse straight from the playbook of the Ku Klux Klan. In “On National Characteristics,” Kant wrote, “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.” Kant believed that Black people were “so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.” Indeed, for Kant, Black people were said to have thick skin and thereby should be “disciplined” not with “sticks, but rather whip[ped] with split canes.” This practice reflects the brutal violence inflicted on enslaved Black people and violates the principle that human beings should be treated as ends in themselves — that is, treated with the kind of special consideration granted to rational human beings. In short, enslaved Black people were used/exploited as merely a means to the prerogatives of white people. It is clear that Black people were not included within the framework of Kant’s “Herrenvolk” (master race) political and ethical formulations.

For Kant, Black people are apparently devoid of reason. Referring to a specific Black man, Kant said, “This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” Given this claim, there is a certain irony that Black philosophers should feel when reading the works of Kant. To be Black and to engage philosophically with his works would, for Kant, be a........

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