Abstract One of the many virtues of Huaping Lu-Adler’s Kant, Race, and Racism is its questioning of the very meaning of “racism” attributed to Kant. Yet more important is Lu-Adler’s own attempt to go beyond the “individualistic” approaches that focus on Kant’s mind or heart behind his philosophical racism. By engaging with some current philosophical accounts of racism, Lu-Adler instead reconceptualizes Kant’s relation, as philosopher-cum-educator, to racism. What matters first and foremost, according to Lu-Adler, is Kant’s position in power relations, which had an impactful role in shaping modern racial ideology. I, however, argue that Lu-Adler thereby makes some unnecessary and undesirable sacrifices, which I discuss in three interconnected respects. First, I question Tommie Shelby’s “non-moralistic” analysis of racism, which Lu-Adler adopts. Second, I challenge Lu-Adler’s denial of “hierarchism” as an element of racism. Third, I object that Lu-Adler’s novel approach of reading Kant by way of Sally Haslanger’s critical revision of Shelby’s “ideology” account of racism is not pluralistic enough for antiracism. Overall, this article does not purport either to refute or to adhere to Lu-Adler’s account simpliciter. Rather, it argues that her reconceptualization of Kant’s racism is more fruitful if it is used complementarily to other approaches. I close the article by sketching how this might work: I consider an example of a pluralistic approach that combines Lu-Adler’s “ideological formation” approach and Pauline Kleingeld’s “individualistic” approach for a more consistently antiracist account of Kant’s racism.

Abstract Huaping Lu-Adler’s new book Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere confronts the issues of race and racism in Kant’s philosophy directly. In the legacy of Charles Mills, Lu-Adler brings these issues from the margins to the mainstream of philosophical scholarship. This article offers a series of observations on defining racism in relation to Kantian philosophy, how much we have yet to learn from interdisciplinary scholarship, and how our attachment to philosophical rigor may have made us complicit in white supremacy.

Abstract This article situates Kant’s theories and epistemologies of race within a wider architecture of knowledge production and coloniality, and from there considers how his approach can illuminate our understandings about methodology and scholarly praxis. In doing so, this article seeks to move the conversation beyond Kant’s raciology, which by and large has been “outed,” and to instead draw attention to his methodology and praxis. It argues that by recognizing and articulating Kant’s philosophical and practical incrementalism, dualism, and erasures in knowledge production and dissemination as a methodology, we can better identify, make sense of, and critique those methodologies when they are employed in contemporary scholarship and political action. Additionally, this article attempts to answer the question of what comes next for a racially aware Kantian studies (or at least point toward possibilities) by drawing upon decolonial and postcolonial theories and a necessarily interdisciplinary approach. It then proposes a three-step approach of historicity, citational politics, and contrapuntality to address Kant’s raciology and “white ignorance” as a reflexive method with which Kantian scholars and students may be able to move forward both ethically and intellectually.

Abstract This article reads chapter 6 of Huaping Lu-Adler’s Kant, Race, and Racism as a contribution to the contemporary debate about racism and the philosophical canon that began with Peter Park’s Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. Lu-Adler adds to Park’s narrative a detailed analysis of the link between racism and the historiography of philosophy in Kant’s own work, not just in his followers or those who influenced him. By doing so, this article argues, Lu-Adler enables critical philosophers of race to tell a new version of the story about racism in the history of philosophy that preserves the main conclusions drawn by Park, without having to rest so much of the case on an argument about the influence of Christoph Meiners. The second part raises two problems for Lu-Adler’s account, the first relating to the question of methodology and the role of pre-Kantian historian of philosophy Jacob Brucker, and the second relating to Lu-Adler’s account of Kant as an educator who contributed to racist ideology.

Abstract This critical response clarifies the critique of the commonly held assumption that racism contradicts Kant’s pure moral philosophy. This piece explains why Kant’s belated criticisms of some practices of slavery should not be interpreted as a rejection of colonial slavery as an institution. It ends with a reflection on the relation between Kant’s philosophy and antiracism.

Abstract This article discusses Huaping Lu-Adler’s book Kant, Race, and Racism, in particular the third and fourth chapters. These chapters undertake a double contextualization of Kant’s writings on race: first, within Kant’s work and, second, within the naturalists’ discussions of his time. The engagement with these chapters focuses on the relationship between philosophy and its “outside.” This relationship is discussed in three dimensions: first, in the relationship between philosophy and natural science (Naturforschung); second, in the relationship between philosophy and prejudice; and third, in the relationship between philosophy and practice. All of these dimensions revolve around the problem of how to grasp the specific meaning and role of philosophy in its historical social context—a systematic question that can be derived from Lu-Adler’s analysis, even if it is not explicitly central to her work. The main conclusion is that the problem expressed in Kant’s views on race is not so much that he succumbs to the particular, limiting, and prejudiced ways of thinking of his time but rather that, in doing so, he also relies on an understanding of philosophy that cannot conceive of its own situatedness; a philosophy that sees itself as detached from the world and cannot grasp its own practical implications.

Abstract The nature of race is a complicated discipline. There is a plethora of nuanced details that must be considered and should those nuanced details not be considered, the account being advanced might not hold. Chike Jeffers’s cultural constructionist account may seem attractive on the surface due to its intuitive nature, but as this article argues, does not hold when we begin to unpack it. The main issue with Jeffers’s cultural constructionist account of race is that it is not clear what he means by “culture.” There is a problem of ambiguity being smuggled in and Jeffers needs to address it. This article shows where that ambiguity problem is and how it specifically affects his account. It is argued that it is not clear what guiding features demarcate cultural groups.

Abstract When Black agents engage spaces and phenomena that suggest a racialized, potential danger, Black agents shift in their existential understanding of themselves and their phenomenological engagement with the world. This article describes that existential and phenomenological change, and examines the issue of hypothetical anti-Black racism. Utilizing Sartrean and Fanonian conceptions of existential phenomenology, this article explicates three terms: Black nausea, Black vertigo, and a phenomenology of caution. These terms are used to describe the tension that Black agents experience when they are confronted with phenomena related to the history of anti-Black racism, and that confrontation brings their Blackness to the surface of their consciousness. This article argues that “Black paranoia” is an inappropriate label for a justified phenomenology of caution, and that Black freedom includes addressing these nauseating phenomena.

Abstract Michel Foucault argued that a key modality of state racism is biopower, through which the life of populations is differentially supported, shaped, and neglected. However, Foucault’s account of state racism is unfinished, because it fails to identify the modalities of power that persist when states withdraw life-supporting technologies from racialized populations, thereby committing “indirect murder.” This article develops Foucault’s account of racism and the racial state by describing the carceral technologies that expand with the withdrawal of biopower. To do so, it draws on Foucault’s theorization of carcerality in Discipline and Punish. It argues that biopolitical withdrawal is doubled by a simultaneous carceral investment, such that the state’s denial of life-supporting technologies occurs in tandem with the racially structured policing of the poor. Additionally, this article explains how Foucault’s concept of the management of illegalisms identifies a key vehicle of racialization, and illuminates the utility of carceral systems to racial capitalism.