Kant ranked Africans below Native Americans, contrary to Mills’s reading

Evidence

Charles Mills (1998:187-9) calls this “subpersonhood.” He insists, again, that the creation and elaboration of the category of subpersonhood is a product only of what I have identified above as the naturalist tradition. As he says, ” . .for these beings [suhpersom], a different set of normative rules applies; natural law speaks differently” (Mills 1998:188; his emphasis). A little later Mills insists that Kant, “preeminent Enlightenment theorist of personhood and the founder of the modern concept of race,” places Native Americans at the bottom of his hierarchy of races, a rung beneath blacks. But nothing Kant says bears this ordering out. Quite the contrary, Kant’s characterization of “Negroes” - as “stupid” with “no feeling rising above the trifling” — is in clear contrast to his sometime, if begrudging, praise for “the savages of North America” whom he insists are not one of “the four original races” but derivative from the “Hunnic (Mongolian or Kalmuck) race” of northern Asia (Kant, 1950:17-18). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1752

Categorization

• QUESTION: A direct factual challenge to Charles Mills’s influential subpersonhood account — worth verifying against Kant’s own Anthropology text.
• SHARE: Strong candidate for a scholar of race theory who would enjoy the Kant vs. Mills textual dispute.