section_path: Philosophy/Anthropology/Racism
section_name: Racism
paragraph_text: Racism
  
  Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship. While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination. Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted. Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism. Philosopher Charles W. Mills is unequivocal: "Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race."
  
  Using the four temperaments of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans. Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and that "fusing of races" is undesirable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He states that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite". Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his "Anthropology", Kant called the Jews "a nation of cheaters" and portrayed them as "a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world".
  
  Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works. Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant "did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.
  
  While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist Georg Forster, and other scholars prominent in that period. Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors. By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, "with which he argues, against the zeitgeist, for the unity of humanity".