Resolved: Philosophy Is Racist

Hegel, hapless victim of his own racism.

We suddenly find ourselves in the belly of the beast: an essay explaining why philosophy itself is racist: “Philosophy’s Systemic Racism.”

Or at least it seems to claim to. Then it focuses on Hegel. So that the case, even if made, would appear to be not systemic racism, but individual racism.

But the inconsistencies or confusions of terms do not end there. The author calls “explicitly racist” the postulated view that “Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European enlightenment.”

Only one element of that statement implies racism: that black or indigenous people might be “inferior.” Savagery is not genetic; neither is being in need of correction. Yet these are all thrown together, as though one’s culture and one’s system of government were racially determined. An ideal justification for colonialism or indeed slavery, coming from the present author.

Does he go on to make a case that Hegel considered black or indigenous people inferior?

“Hegel certainly was an explicit racist. He believed, for example, that Black Africans were a ‘race of children that remain immersed in a state of naiveté’. He further wrote that Indigenous peoples lived in ‘a condition of savagery and unfreedom’. And in The Philosophy of Right (1821), he argued that there is a ‘right of heroes’ to colonise these people in order to bring them into a progress of European enlightenment.”

Nothing here implies racial inferiority. It implies that their social organization, their government, is inferior. By this logic I would be guilty of anti-black racism for saying the black slaves in the antebellum US South were being held in a state of unfreedom. And if I do not support the government of Michigan, I am an anti-Michigander racist. “Explicitly.”

At the same time that he condemns Hegel for supposedly thinking that indigenous social systems or culture were inferior to European ones, and calls this “racist,” he condemns Rousseau as “racist” for thinking that indigenous social systems or culture were superior to European ones. “Unlike Hegel, however, he thought that he was reading about people leading idyllic lives.” He then condemns Schiller as racist for thinking that European and indigenous cultures simply had characteristic strengths and weaknesses, and could learn from one another through contact.

On this basis, the only possible conclusion, surely, is that “racist” is simply for this author a synonym for “European.” Or, to use the racist term beloved of racial theorists, “white.”