Even philosophy’s greatest minds embraced racist hierarchies that justified colonization

Evidence

Ironically, back in 1807, Hegel had expressed a very antiracist idea in his classic book Phenomenology of Spirit, condemning “the overhasty judgement formed at first sight about the inner nature and character” of a person. He revolutionized European philosophy and history in many important matters in the nineteenth century. Legions of philosophy chairs across Europe became Hegelians, and the philosophers he influenced—including men like Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels—constitute a who’s who of European intellectuals. But before his death in 1831, Hegel failed to free himself and Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist ideas. “It is … the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “God becomes man, revealing himself.” In contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” in the “first stage” of human development: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, just as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans in the Americas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Hegel explicit confirmation of the claim that racist ideas serve white self-interest (civilizational self-image); connects to the reader’s core project of applying the three-way scheme to any argument.
• QUESTION: Could a case be made that Hegel’s antiracist moment in Phenomenology of Spirit predates his racist policy-justifying writings, complicating the ideas-first reading? Worth chasing within the chapter’s logic.