Immanuel Kant sketched out a more formalized racial hierarchy in his own anthropological work. “In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the perfection of the temperate zones,” Kant wrote. “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.” Elsewhere, Kant asserted that “[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” This racial theorizing can’t simply be divorced from the moral philosophy for which he’s hailed, since, as the late Emmanuel Eze has noted, it comprised a substantial portion of Kant’s career. Eze writes in “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology”:

Kant’s position on the importance of skin color not only as encoding but as proof of this codification of rational superiority or inferiority is evident in a comment he made on the subject of the reasoning capacity of a “black” person. When he evaluated a statement made by an African, Kant dismissed the statement with the comment: “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” It cannot, therefore, be argued that skin color for Kant was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rather, evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality

Eze’s re-examination in the 1990s kicked off a flood of research and dialogue—some critical, some supportive. Either way, it is fair to say that Kant’s race theorizing matters for how we understand the history of race. On this point, philosopher Robert Bernasconi is blunt: “[Kant] supplied the first scientific definition of race; he promoted this definition when it was challenged, and he saw it adopted by some of the leading students of human varieties at that time.”

John Locke precedes Kant, but his work also shows the influence of early modern racial thinking. In “The Contradictions of Racism: Locke, Slavery, and the Two Treatises,” Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann present the pre-eminent liberal philosopher as an architect of the race-based slavery developing in the American colonies during the mid–17th century. At a time when religious conversion could spare an African or Native American from permanent servitude, Locke wrote a provision in The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina—the governing document for the colony that would become North Carolina and South Carolina—that specified that slaves could be “of what opinion or Religion soever … But yet, no Slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his Master has over him, but be in all other things in the same State and condition he was in before.” About the same time, when there was still widespread debate over the treatment of enslaved people, Locke changed a clause in that constitution to give slave owners “absolute power and Authority” (versus “absolute Authority”) over their slaves, giving them full rein to treat slaves as they pleased.

It is true that, in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke proclaimed himself an opponent of “slavery.” But this “slavery” refers to the political domination of an absolute monarch. In the second of the treatises, Locke provides a justification for slavery as a result of war, using the same “absolute power” language that grants slave owners the power of life and death over their slaves. While his argument doesn’t fit the hereditary chattel slavery taking shape in the Americans, it was nonetheless used to justify the practice. For Bernasconi and Mann, the Locke of the Two Treatises must be read in dialogue with the Locke of the The Fundamental Constitutions, and can’t be bracketed from his role as a colonial administrator and investor in the slave trade. This Locke, they argue, must be understood as concerned mainly “with the freedom and prosperity of Englishmen, and not troubled if they were gained at the expense of Africans.”

One can make a similar argument with regard to Native Americans. In Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo notes how “the Second Treatise makes repeated reference to the ‘wild Indian,’ who moved around ‘insolent and injurious in the woods of America’ or the ‘vacant places of America.’ ” For Locke, “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit and for the greatest conveniences of life they could get from it, he can’t have meant it always to remain common and uncultivated.” In the context of English settlement, it’s an argument for theft.

It should be said that this view is contested. Recent scholarship challenges this vision of Locke—situating him in a broader conversation that leaves him less tolerant of slavery than he appears. Still, as one of the widely read thinkers of the period, his work remained influential to slaveholders, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and the Framers of the Constitution, for whom racial slavery and native expropriation were compatible with natural rights and representative government. Decades later, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun would appeal to Locke in his defense of individual liberties and attacks on “absolute governments” that turn “the governed” into “the slaves of the rulers.” Calhoun’s cause, of course, was slavery.

The Enlightenment VALIDATED the idea of slavery by inventing race.

Posted on behalf of mothra, unfairly permanently banned with no reason given!