What does the Enlightenment have to do with racism?

DW (English)

The Enlightenment saw the birth of ideas like freedom, equality and human rights. But how did its thinkers come to terms with the highly profitable exploitation of non-European peoples? And what impact do racial theories from that period still have?

Transcript

00:00The term race is totally taboo. You won't find it anywhere. Nobody says it anymore.

00:05Instead, we talk about culture, people, society.

00:13People are always trying to set themselves apart from others.

00:17But before we get to that, let's look back hundreds of years,

00:21when widespread concepts of race began to emerge.

00:26Around 1800, what are called color models developed first.

00:31There were the white Europeans and those who had settled in North America

00:35who were to a certain extent considered to be at the apex.

00:38Then there were what were called brown peoples or Orientals

00:42and what we now call the Middle East.

00:44Then there were Asians who were placed a little higher

00:47because certain civilizational achievements could be attributed to them.

00:51And the group that was to some extent on the bottom rung were the Africans.

00:56The reason they were placed at the bottom of this hierarchical model

01:02was justification for the fact that for centuries,

01:06Africans had been treated not as human beings, but as subhumans.

01:14This is Christian Goilen.

01:16He's a professor of modern history who's studied racism for years.

01:20The reasons for why Africans were on the lowest rung

01:24involved the Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade,

01:27where millions of black people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas.

01:32Europeans sold the goods that enslaved people were forced to produce

01:36back to their home countries and invested high profits in more enslavement.

01:42The system didn't change even after the Age of Enlightenment.

01:49It'd be nice to say that after Universalism and the Enlightenment arrived,

01:53equality, freedom, fraternity, these basic values,

01:56that racism disappeared.

01:58But the opposite happened.

02:00That's when racism became a justifying ideology

02:03providing specific hierarchies of superiority and inferiority.

02:07On the one hand, racism, at least since the 18th century,

02:11says very clearly, of course, all people are members of humanity,

02:15no one is excluded.

02:17But the cultures outside Europe have less biological value,

02:20and that was why it was legitimate to exploit them.

02:24Racial theories like these were widespread among Enlightenment thinkers

02:28like Kant, Voltaire, Schiller and Goethe.

02:32I'd say 99% of all intellectuals or politicians believed it.

02:37That's how people thought.

02:40But the theory of evolution and scientists like Darwin and Lamarck

02:44altered the intellectual landscape.

02:47Their ideas made it clear that nature was constantly changing,

02:51so there could be no such thing as a natural, unchangeable order,

02:56not even among humans.

03:00That rolled over Europe like a shockwave.

03:03It meant Africa could pose a challenge,

03:05South America could pose a challenge,

03:07that we were all in a fight for survival and had to prove our supremacy,

03:11which until then had been a given.

03:15Racial theories propagated by the Nazi party in Germany

03:20emerged in the 20th century.

03:23Hitler and his followers laid out the ideas in his book Mein Kampf,

03:28but they also focused the whole problem on a racial contrast,

03:32namely that between Aryans and Semites, so Germans and Jews,

03:37with the latter declared a kind of counter-race.

03:41That's not a Darwinian concept.

03:44With Darwin, the fight for survival is taking place everywhere.

03:48But Hitler could have cared less about what biology or scientists were saying.

03:52For him, Judaism was the enemy racially, biologically, politically and culturally,

03:57and if the German was to survive as a culture and state,

04:01then it would have to be destroyed.

04:04The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews,

04:07industrialized genocide on a scale that remains unique in history.

04:12Theories of race have long since been refuted.

04:16There are no human races.

04:18So what does racism look like today?

04:21Like we said at the start,

04:23people still constantly seek to distance themselves from others.

04:27Many will take to the streets to protest against immigrants

04:30because they feel threatened by them.

04:33Even political movements claim they'll free people from the threat.

04:38The whole thing, the whole shebang, no longer requires the concept of race.

04:43Biology doesn't play a big role either.

04:46Instead, we talk about culture, about people, about society.

04:49It's a bit different in the US because race has a different status there.

04:54But even there, if you look at how Trump talks about these things,

04:58he doesn't repeat classic racial theories and ideologies from the 19th century.

05:03Instead, he's developed his own language to talk about it,

05:06one that clearly has a racist undertone.

05:09But it's difficult to detect if you believe there's only racism

05:12where you have the concept of race.

05:14However, there are common themes that you can follow,

05:17and I think it's important to keep an eye on them.

05:20And that's only possible if we don't focus on the future,

05:23wondering, when will the bad thing come back?

05:26I think it's taking on new forms,

05:28and we have to watch out for what's disappearing and what's carried forward.

05:32That's what you have to keep an eye on.

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