Enlightenment race theories spanned racist, neutral, and anti-racist positions
Evidence
The Enlightenment, which built on the scientific thinking of the Renaissance, displaced religion and prioritized reason over Christian dogma. Many leading lights of the Enlightenment—such as Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, and Hume—expressed what today would be considered shockingly racist views. However, as a whole, the Enlightenment was more contradictory than that. Philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, in his anthology of race in Enlightenment philosophy, argues that while some thinkers were undoubtedly racist, others advanced theories of race that were neutral—and still others were anti-racist. Enlightenment thinkers classified human beings into races and in the process produced a schema in which whiteness came to be associated with cultural and racial superiority, while “unreason and savagery was conveniently located among the non-whites.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 123
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Complicates a flat ‘the Enlightenment was racist’ narrative; connects to discussions of modernist critique and how origin myths get either lionized or wholesale condemned.
Related
- The Enlightenment laid the basis for modern ideas of race (similarity 0.82)
- Enlightenment thinkers excluded non-Europeans from full humanity in explicitly racial terms. (similarity 0.82)
- Enlightenment race science was contradictory, not uniformly racist (similarity 0.80)
- Ideological racism emerged precisely because Enlightenment values demand rationalizations for evil (similarity 0.79)
- Enlightenment race theory about Muslims required colonial dominance and liberal societies (similarity 0.78)