Guyanese Online

 – By Mohamed Hamaludin

In his review of Justin E.H. Smith’s “Dialectics of Enlightenment” in The New York Review of Books, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that some noted figures of the “Enlightenment” held downright racist views. Voltaire “emphatically believed in the inherent inferiority of les Nègres, who belonged to a separate species, or at least breed, from Europeans—as different from Europeans, he said, as spaniels from greyhounds.”  Kant, commenting on something a black carpenter told him, said that “the fact that he was black from head to toe was proof that what he said was stupid.”

This racism carried over from the Enlightenment and liberal democracy into the body politic of Western civilization and its attitudes towards non-white peoples. One consequence was that it encouraged “the thought that the more advanced civilizations were merely lifting up those more backward when they conquered and colonized them,” Appiah noted.            Continue reading →