Video Archives - Racism Lecture Delivered by Robert Bernasconi (2011)

Tuesday, February 1^st, 2011: Race, Slavery, and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment

Lecturer: Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State.

Robert Bernasconi challenges the defense of enlightenment philosophers who supported or defended race based slavery in their writings and raises questions about how racism infects their philosophy. In this lecture, he aims to implicate John Locke and Immanuel Kant in the development and propagation of an idea of race as an absolutizing, essentializing concept that motivates racism and racial slavery.

Bernasconi explores how Locke and Kant employ an idea of race that girds slavery. Locke and Kant are often excused with the claim that their racism was a mere epistemological error. Defenders of the philosophical tradition argue that Locke and Kant were not racists or that if they were, theirs was a racism of the time that did not impact the basic truth of their thinking. Against such defenses, Bernasconi argues that racism is not culturally relative, but is evil, infecting and raising questions about the classic texts of enlightenment thinking.

[caption id="attachment_13795" align="alignleft" width="200"] Robert Bernasconi[/caption]

Bernasconi moves from the 17^th century up through the UNESCO declaration against racism in 1950. He identifies the first use of the word “race” roughly as we know it in a 1664 essay by a German naturalist. But the crux of his case is identifying the 1669 constitution of South Carolina as the real birth of racism. That document states that a “free man shall have absolute authority over his Negro slaves” irrespective of the opinion of religion of the slave. Prior to the 17^th century, the distinction between servant and slave was vague; after the justification of slavery in 17^th century America slavery is explicitly linked to race. Moreover, John Locke himself was a secretary who presided over the South Carolina 1669 constitutional convention; in 1682, when he went back to revise it, he left the offending clause in place. Locke believed slavery could never be considered voluntary, nor that it should be transmitted hereditarily. But attendant to those beliefs was his feeling that should one be a slave, the master holds the right of life and death.

Kant, writing a century afterwards, is portrayed as having a more complicated moral relationship to slavery. Locke invested in and legally authorized slavery, but Kant did neither. In fact, he seemed opposed to the convention in some of writings. Nevertheless, in his lectures he argues that Africans are best suited to slavery. For Bernasconi, where Kant errs is his willingness to support the idea of a permanent, hereditary racial difference between peoples that can be hierarchized.

Professor Bernasconi seeks an understanding of the history of the idea of race and racism that doesn’t merely excuse it as a mistake but rather comes to a more comprehensive grasp of how evil played a role in its emergence. He implicates the Western philosophical canon in the creation of racism--not towards the end of excusing it, but towards the end of combating the racism we face today. The terrible aspect of racism that he brings into focus was its mainly palliative use for people in power—“Even though there was no solid justification,” says Bernasconi, “it didn’t really matter.”

Summary by Dan Perlman

You can watch the entire lecture below:

Robert Bernasconi: Race, Slavery, and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

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