Kant grounded moral incapacity claims in skin color as physical evidence.

Evidence

In short, according to Hume, nature has given Westerners higher levels of mental capacity than the Negroes. Similarly, Immanuel Kant classifies humans into “white” (European), “yellow” (Asians), “Black” (Africans), and “red” (American Indians). From a psychological standpoint, Kant’s classification denotes that the American Indians, the Africans and the Asians appear to be incapable of moral maturity because they lack talent – a gift of nature. Kant further classifies American Indians as completely uneducable because they lack “affect and passion”, the Africans as only fit to be “trained” or “educated” as “slaves and servants” because they are “lazy and prone to jealousy and hesitation” and, “for climate and anthropological reasons, he or she lacks ‘true’ (rational and moral) character”. Kant further argues that, “white skin, it seems, is only the concrete, physical evidence of this racial superiority … skin colour reveals race as species class and morally, as ‘difference in Character’”. As such, according to Kant, blackness denotes both racial and mental inferiority. In one of the classical racial sentiments of history, Darwin labelled African women as “mutes who fit in the same category as the goats and chickens that they domesticate,” further arguing that “the child, the female, and the senile white all have the intellect and nature of the grown-up Negro”. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 931

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes critiques of Kant’s racism developed by Emmanuel Eze and the broader Afro-Philosophy literature; also connects to the notion of epistemic violence in postcolonial theory.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether Kant later revisions to his anthropology softened these claims, as some Kant scholarship argues.