Thread by @DavidDecosimo

We are witnessing the rebirth of the most vile & damaging racist ideas of the early modern era by ideologues who claim, like their forebears, to bring 'enlightenment.'

Here is *extremely* toxic & vile racism from Kant.
Brace yourselves - it's incredibly offensive. 🧵1/

For Kant & his ilk, 'the white race' was the bastion of reason, objectivity, scientific & mathematical thinking, discipline, literacy, & hard work.
In sum, all qualities deemed necessary & good for human flourishing, social & scientific progress, freedom, & self-rule. 2/

They viciously claimed that 'the black race' was the opposite: lazy, irrational, unintelligent, incapable of abstract thought.
Claiming that race determined human capacities, they put Blacks at the bottom of a scale with Whites on top. 3/

This is as ugly & wrong as it gets.

The identification of *any* race with intelligence, reason, discipline, hard work, & scientific progress, & the very notion of unequal capacities is false & evil.

That was the heart of Truth's cry, King's oratory, & Firmin's prose.👇💯👇 4/

Yet some have resurrected these racist lies.
It's Kant, but worse.
Reason, objectivity, writing, science are "White" once again.
Only now *these very ideals*, on which hang so much flourishing, social progress, & opportunity, are declared hateful, oppressive, & anti-Black. 5/

*Rejecting* Firmin & MLK, who say reason & objectivity are *human* ideals that no race can claim, they *agree* with racists like Kant that such ideals are White. But then declare the *ideals* bad.
What Kant says out loud of non-Whites, they imply & leave unspoken. 6/

If history’s worst racists devised a plan for oppressing Black people, they could hardly come up with a more destructive program than this: spurning ideals of objectivity, discipline, abstract thinking, & the 'written word' as 'anti-Black.'
Compare their vision to Douglass's.👇7/

Even if you thought (absurdly) that these ideals were not *really* universal or good, in what world is any person or community *better off* or *more successful* to reject these ideals? Not to pursue them?
On pragmatic grounds alone they are essential for flourishing & success.8/

Kant was wrong.
But he *thought* he was using science & he *aimed at truth* - even as he was disastrously mistaken.
These folks are worse.
They reject science entirely & simply make this stuff up. Far from seeking the truth, they deny that truth even exists. 9/

So let's reject once & for all 'enlightenment' racism's vile identification of rationality, objectivity, & discipline as 'White' - whether in the original or novel version.
Those ideals belong to *all of us.*
And we need one another to seek & realize them together. fin/