1The preponderance of scholarship on environmental racism tends to focus on concrete racialized communities, whether historically or today, living and dying in conditions of environmental disparity, depravity, or degradation. Much of the literature is focused around the United States, and on the shaping of lives of Black and Indigenous peoples by unjust, racist environmental conditions (often characterized by pollution or toxicity) over the past centuries of US history. Even so, a tenant of most literature on environmental racism is its inherently global nature, and many studies of environmentally racist arrangements of human life take a non-US focus, often toward the so-called “third world.” Hence, despite the linkage of the concept of environmental racism to a paradigmatically US geographic, historical, and institutional context, from its inception in the literature, it has promised global application, and hence a certain conceptual generality.
2By and large, though, extant treatments of environmental racism seem neither interested in nor positioned to inquire into the conceptual background of the phenomena. I take it to be non-controversial that environmentally racist institutions (arrangements that exhibit environmental racism, if you like) do have conceptual roots and histories, insofar as all institutions have conceptual roots and histories. And yet, any account of these conceptual roots has remained undeveloped in a literature focused predominantly on specific historical cases and not on general concepts.
- 1 The conceptual roots of environmental racism might also be sought in any number of Enlightenment-er (...)
3Turning to the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant as a progenitor of environmental racism, as this essay proposes to do, contributes towards the spelling out of a more generalized conceptual account of environmental racism. This turn also helps us to better understand Kant, and specifically how his views of race and his views of the place of humans in the natural world intersect. This essay suggests to those interested in environmental racism beyond Kant studies (certainly the vast majority of those interested in the idea) that the conceptual roots of environmental racism can be traced back (at least) as far as the late-eighteenth century, and to the genesis of race-thinking in Enlightenment-era anthropology, philosophy, and natural science (of which Kant is here taken as representative, though by no means as the only representative1).
- 2 A truly global and historically comprehensive conceptual genealogy of environmental racism would ha (...)
- 3 Given that the concept of “the environment” in use today only emerged in the mid-to-late twentieth (...)
4While acknowledging that nothing like a comprehensive conceptual history of environmental racism can be attempted in a piece of this size,2 I submit that an ideal historical starting point for this broader conceptual history is Kant’s race theory. Sometimes referred to as an “inventor” of modern race theory, Kant was writing and teaching during the critical infancy of “scientific” approaches to human racial difference in the late eighteenth century. His theory of race is characterized by attention to the causal interplay between humans and their natural environments, combined with a doctrine of racial irreversibility whereby each race is indefinitely and permanently (though accidentally) fitted for its own corresponding set of “ideal” environment conditions, and cannot properly belong to others. The cocktail of post-Linnaean anthropological naturalism, white supremacist racial hierarchy, and racial-environmental determinism found in Kant’s account amounts to an important conceptual forbearer of the institutional relations characteristic of environmental racism today. All of this makes Kant’s contribution to the conceptual history of environmental racism a worthy object of study for those interested to understand, perhaps so as to dismantle, the institution of environmental racism today. As Lucy Allais has written, “rather than trying to make Kant consistent, we can use the example of Kant’s racism to tell us something about the nature of racism” (2016: 5). Rephrased for purposes of this essay: we can use the example of the “environmental”3 features of Kant’s race theory to tell us something about the nature of environmental racism, historically and today.
5At the same time, by approaching Kant’s race theory through the lens of environmental racism, we stand to understand something new about that theory in its own right, and about the interplay of the “environmental” and the “racial” in Kant’s thought as a whole. And so, while this essay is written with an interdisciplinary audience centered beyond Kant studies (and indeed beyond philosophy) in mind, for whom little background with Kant can be presumed, it also operates at a distinct crossroads within Kant studies. Attention to Kant’s race theory and the relationship of his work to modern and present-day racism has increased exponentially in recent years. Simultaneously, there exists a growing body of scholarship exploring Kant’s relevance for our thinking of the non-human environment and of present-day environmental crises. These conversations have largely developed independently of one another, even though at times individual scholars have contributed to both. A result of this parallel and infrequently overlapping state of the literature is that Kant’s place at the intersection of racial and environmental histories, concepts, or institutions has largely been overlooked. This essay does not attempt to explore all significant areas of overlap between the racial and environmental aspects of Kant’s work, nor to define or delimit the intersection in any exhaustive way. Instead, eyed for its contribution to Kant scholarship, the essay can be understood as a preliminary to future research on Kant’s thought that might unfold at this juncture. It is hoped that, by offering an account of Kant’s contribution to environmental racism, the enterprise of bringing these two vantage points together will become more plausible, hence inviting further explorations in the years ahead.
- 4 This critique of the “individualistic approach” to Kant and race draws upon Lu-Adler 2023. Lu-Adler (...)
6It should be established that the approach adopted in this essay does not entail the claim that Kant himself was an “environmental racist” – particularly if that might mean that he held “racist views or beliefs,” environmental or otherwise. Rather, the idea is to highlight salient features of Kant’s theory of race in order to illuminate the conceptual (or conceptual-ideological) pre-history of environmental racism. The sort of “racism” at issue here operates on a level distinct from the contents of the mind of the one human being (Kant) who is taken as one of its representative conceptual forbearers. It is historically and socially embedded. It emerges into view when we consider not Kant the (racist or non-racist) individual but instead Kant the progenitor of racist ideology.4
7The essay unfolds as follows. In the first section, I explore several prominent definitions of environmental racism, highlighting how any conceptual history of environmental racism is usually neglected in such definitions in favor of legal, political, or, above all, institutional forms. In section two, I put forth Kant as a pivotal early figure in the (so-far mostly unwritten) conceptual history of environmental racism. Balancing exegesis of Kant’s writings with commentary from scholars of Kant’s race theory, I focus on two key features of Kant’s theory that, taken together, provide a conceptual recipe for environmental racism: a) environmental determinism regarding human racial formation, and b) the doctrine of irreversible fitness to specific racially proper environmental conditions. I conclude by reflecting on what significance the framing of Kant and other historical thinkers as conceptual progenitors of environmental racism may have for the environmental justice movement today.
8Scholars generally trace the emergence of the term “environmental racism” to the rise of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, and particularly the work of civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis Jr. and environmental sociologist Robert Bullard. In his preface to the 1994 volume Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, Chavis offers the following definition:
- 5 Interestingly for present purposes, Chavis goes on to dismiss philosophical approaches to environme (...)
Environmental racism impacts the quality of life where people live, work, and play. Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking. It is racial discrimination in the enforcement of regulations and law. It is racial discrimination in the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries. It is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of color. And it is racial discrimination in the history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental groups, decision making boards, commissions and regulatory bodies. (1994: xi–xii)5
9For Chavis, environmental racism is primarily a particular form of racial discrimination. Note the emphasis placed on policymaking, law, and the composition and interests of institutional groups, including mainstream environmental groups. While such a formulation no doubt involves the circulation of concepts at some level (for concepts underly law and policy, at the least), by and large the form of racism considered is non-conceptual insofar as it is manifest in concrete discriminatory practices and directly impactful on “quality of life”.
10Bullard offers a definition that is close to Chavis’ in substance, while being more explicitly “institutional” in its formulation. He defines the concept this way (also in 1994):
Environmental racism refers to any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Racism is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions. Environmental racism is not just a domestic practice. It is global. Environmental racism extends to the export of hazardous waste, risky technologies, and pesticides and the application of nonsustainable and exploited development models to the Third World just as it has been targeted toward people of color, working class people, and poor people in this country (1994: 1037, italics in original).
11Note the stress placed upon the global nature of environmental racism, and on the breath of its possible forms of appearance. It can be a “policy, practice or directive” and is reinforced by multiple overlapping institutions. In later work, Bullard further develops this institutional sense of the term, explaining that “[e]nvironmental racism is a form of institutionalized discrimination” operating both intranationally (i.e. discriminating between groups within nations) and internationally (discriminating across national boundaries)” (2003: 50). We can already anticipate how such institutionally oriented ways of conceiving environmental racism, however accurate in naming contemporary and recent forms of the broader phenomenon, pose a barrier to the sort of conceptual and intellectual-historical approach adopted here. For if environmental racism is defined in these ways, what role might a centuries-old philosophical system of racial thinking have to play? After all, historically distant philosophies would seem to have little (direct) bearing on the quality of life of people living under conditions of environmental racism today.
12More recent scholarship has framed environmental racism in somewhat different terms, even when referring to the circumstances that gave rise to the concept in the 1980s and 1990s. In her 2014 book Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility, environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor explains that, within the early 80s/90s phase of the environmental justice movement, environmental justice “activists coined the term ‘environmental racism’ to describe processes that resulted in minority and low-income communities facing disproportionate environmental harms and limited environmental benefits” (2014: 2). Taylor’s reference to “harms” and “benefits” is a departure from the speak of “discrimination” and “disadvantage” that had characterized Chavis and Bullard’s approaches, though it has in common with these characterizations a focus on present-day sedimented practices or processes (one way of defining institutions), according to or by virtue of which these harms, benefits, discriminations, or disadvantages are meted out. Taylor’s language is echoed (perhaps intentionally) by even more recent scholars of the idea, such as the philosopher Ariela Tubert, who proposes that environmental racism be “understood in terms of the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits according to race, when that distribution is caused by a history of racism,” whereby environmental racism itself can be defined as the “unequal distribution of environmental burdens caused by a history of racism” (2021: 554).
13Attention to historically emergent and racially divergent environmental harms, burdens, benefits, disadvantage, and discrimination: such approaches characterize what can be called, if somewhat roughly, the institutional approach to environmental racism. My point is not to dispute the validity of this institutional approach. Certainly, environmental racism is most powerfully felt in the lives of concrete human beings on this institutional level – it is here that it plays out as a matter of “life and death.” Even so, a solely or primarily institutional approach cannot really do justice to the depth of historical antecedents that gave raise to environmental racism over time. Such antecedents are often themselves institutional or institutionalized (the transatlantic slave trade, for instance), but environmental racism also emerged as a result of conceptual forces and histories playing out on an intellectual-historical level across the same historical background.
14There is some precedent for pursuing a conceptual and not just institutional approach to environmental racism. The environmental historian Carl Zimring adopts Chavis’ policy-oriented definition of the idea, but adds to it greater historical and conceptual depth. While Zimring’s account extends back to the eighteenth century and Thomas Jefferson (a rough contemporary of Kant’s), he restricts himself to the United States, and so does not broach the more general European Enlightenment against which Kant’s thought must be understood. Ziering’s historical methodology is helpful for us, though, as it portrays environmental racism as a historical emergent and evolving phenomenon, one decisively shaped by what Zimring calls “changing constructions.” For Zimring, “[c]onsidering changing constructions of race allows for a greater understanding of how environmental racism has evolved over time” (2015: 3) At the same time, Zimring’s is not a merely construction-centered or conceptual view. The constructed/conceptual must here be understood more broadly in its overlap with the corporeal, bodily, material, and natural: “Historical analysis of environmental racism should consider how boundaries between the body and environment need to become foci for our historical inquiry” (2015: 3). The salient conceptual constructs (to blend terms) produced by Kant and others in this domain (those that contributed to the emergence of environmental racism) had then and continue to have now an impact on concrete human lives and on the interaction of racialized human bodies and the non-human natural environment.
15Situating Kant in the history of environmental racism requires that the concept of environmental racism itself be thought more expansively than is typically done. Environmental racism must be approached conceptually (though never only conceptually) and its nestedness within the broader history of modern racial ideology must be acknowledged. This allows us to make out Kant’s specific contribution to the history of environmental racism, which I argue can be traced in the environmentally charged features of Kant’s account of race examined next.
- 6 For instance, Pauline Kleingeld has influentially argued that Kant had “second thoughts on race” du (...)
16Kant published three essays intended to explain and defend his original account of human racial differentiation (in 1775, 1785, and 1788), each of which was working at the forefront of European thinking on race at the time. He also explored the topic in numerous lecture courses on geography and anthropology, as well as in the his book-length presentation of his anthropological theory, the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Though there is ongoing debate regarding whether and, if so, to what extent, Kant’s commitments regarding racial hierarchy and, relatedly, colonialism shifted over his decades of engagement with the topic,6 his underlying account of what race is, how many basal races there are, and how races come into being was consistent. His enduring commitment to some form of human racial hierarchy is also clear.
17In what follows, my goal is not to present a comprehensive or in-depth treatment of Kant’s theory of race, for which other, lengthier treatments are available, but rather to highlight how several features of this theory constitute a conceptual contribution to the emergence of environmental racism in and after Kant’s time. The two features of the theory examined below – selected for their salience as conceptual ingredients for environmental racism – are: a form of environmental determinism in the formation of human races (specifically through the unfolding of racially relevant “germs” in response to particular natural environments) and the irreversibility of racial differentiation. Though Kant was not the first thinker to commit themselves to these ideas, he combined them in a way that was both novel and influential, and which leveraged the legitimacy of his broader philosophical system, in particular that system’s sprawling vision of human nature, of the rootedness of human life in natural processes (with some human groups being more rooted than others), and of the scope and promise of anthropology as a field of study.
18Recourse to various forms of environmental determinism to explain the observed physical and cultural differences of distinct human populations is common across Western intellectual history, going back at least as far as Hippocrates in the fourth century BCE (albeit there in terms of variations in human character and not in terms of race; Smith 2015: 116). Numerous of Kant’s predecessors earlier in the eighteenth century, such as Buffon, Diderot, and Leibniz, took environmental difference (in particular climatic difference) to underly human racial difference, and some linkage of environment and race can be said to have been characteristic of the European Enlightenment as a whole (Smith 2015: 101; 119; 161). Nonetheless, Kant’s environmental determinism regarding race has certain unique aspects and, particularly when taken in conjunction with the doctrine of irreversibility examined below, prefigures environmental racism in a striking way.
19In the first of Kant’s race essays, from 1775, we find the idea of “race” introduced not with reference to humans in particular, but to “organic bodies” as such, which Kant identifies with both plants and animals (including human animals). Kant’s account of racial differentiation turns on the idea that all such bodies are implanted with certain “germs” [Keime] or “natural dispositions” [natürliche Anlagen] by which nature prepares them for survival under diverse environmental conditions. Kant illustrates this with reference to certain (albeit unspecified) species of birds and of wheat. In these birds “lie germs for the unfolding of a new layer of feathers if they live in a cold climate, which, however, are held back if they should reside in a temperate one,” whereas, in the case of the wheat, “there lies in it a previously determined capacity or a natural predisposition to gradually produce a thicker skin [when in a cold country]” (Kant 1775: 89). Kant’s introduction of the notion of the “germ” in the context not just of race or even of human beings, but of the fittingness of any sort of life form to its natural environment, is significant. This reveals the sense in which Kant’s race theory is not just about race, but about how living organisms of all kinds fit with their respective natural environments. From the beginning, Kant understands race in environmental terms, in terms of the developmental fitness of organisms to their environments, understood as an achievement of the differential and triggered unfolding of germs or predispositions.
- 7 The emergence in such organisms of new traits, spurred on by new different environmental factors, d (...)
20While Kant rejects the possibility of the emergence of new species through environmental adaptation,7 he insists that individual species can and do, through the differential development of their in-built germs and predispositions in response to novel environmental conditions, become differentiated into various sub-species-level groupings, which Kant calls “variations” – or “races.” As Kant puts it, “[i]n the migration and transplanting of animals and plants, [nature] creates the semblance of new kinds [Arten]; yet they are nothing other than variations [Abartungen] and races [Rassen] of the same species, the germs and natural predispositions of which have merely developed on occasion in various ways over long periods of time” (Kant 1775: 89). Plants and animals alike can, to the extent permitted by their in-built germs and predispositions, adapt themselves to different environments, gradually and over successive generations. Indeed, for Kant, a “race” is nothing other than the result of such differential adaptation. Different races remain members of a unified species – a membership that Kant equates with the ability to produce fertile offspring with another member of the same species, regardless of the race of the individuals involved (cf. Kant 1775: 84; 1785a: 155-156; 1788: 200).
21Note how, on Kant’s view, racial differentiation is a thoroughly natural occurrence. Racial distinctions map onto divisions taken to be extant within nature itself. In this sense, Kant’s theory is essentialist, and the stability and unity of any racial grouping (by definition a sub-species grouping) over time amounts to a sort of essence, which all members or representatives of that grouping manifest or instantiate. But at the same time, there is also a certain constructivism to Kant’s account of racial difference, insofar as races are things that emerge. Races “develop on occasion in various ways” and do so “over long periods of time.” The emergence of a race is not something binary: first it was not and now it is. It is processive, it takes time to come into being. And unlike a static, entirely essentialist theory of racial differentiation whereby all races were, for instance, created by God as they are from the very beginning of time, Kant’s theory is dynamic, and sets race and racial difference in a field of natural movement and unfolding, one of “migration and transplanting.” There is, one might say, a certain contingency to racial differentiation on Kant’s account. Races emerge not because they had to or because there is any essential reason that species must be divided up this way, even if, once they have been formed, they have something essential, something unshakable and in that way necessary, about them. They emerge “merely” because the relevant germs and natural predispositions happened to develop (“developed on occasion”) as they did.
- 8 For some indication of this more “extra-natural” dimension of Kant’s race theory, take the infamous (...)
22Hence, an initial conclusion about Kant’s race theory – which is fundamentally a theory of processes of racial differentiation across the whole spectrum of plant and animal life – can be drawn: it is ambiguous, in tension with itself. Races are both essential and constructed phenomena. Races are necessary and contingent. Races are both human and non-human. And, as other moments in Kant’s account show, race will be understood to have an impact both on the more “natural” aspects of a racialized creature’s life, such as how it looks and behaves in its environment, as well as, in the case of human beings, on the more “extra-natural” aspects of that same creature’s life, such as its intelligence, its ability to think rationally, and its ability to act freely.8
23I propose that in this ambiguous morass (which, again, is not unique to Kant, but of which Kant is especially representative) lies the conceptual origins of environmental racism. For, to again quote Carl Zimring, environmental racism itself “has evolved over time” (2015: 3), and across its span, it has also been marked by a similar ambiguity. Particular races have been condemned to life in environmentally degraded situations, and that condemnation, institutionally perpetuated, is accompanied, and on some level justified or strengthened, by the idea that such races are so condemned both contingently and essentially. In other words, environmental racism, approached institutionally by theorists like Chavis or Bullard, has an ambiguous conceptual core, which is evident in the race theory of Kant, but which has evolved over time to become the self-perpetuating contemporary edifice it is. This ambiguous core cannot easily be pinned down, which may account for its endurance across the history of racialized politics and community construction in, among other places, the United States. For today, much of the apparent intransigency of environmentally racist institutions and patterns of life seems to rest in the insidious public perception that, while racial groups may end up in environmentally differentiated circumstances as a matter of contingent circumstance, we seem unable (or unwilling) to change those circumstances – perhaps because the connection between race and environment continues to be thought, on a largely unexamined conceptual level, not only as contingent, but as essential.
24We see further evidence of this ambiguity in Kant’s understanding of the power of germs and predispositions in human beings. Kant holds that nature has supplied human beings with germs and predispositions potentially suitable to all planetary environments. And so, unlike other organisms, whom nature has suited for only particular locations,
the human being was destined for all climates and for every soil; consequently, various germs and natural predispositions had to lie ready in him to be on occasion either unfolded or restrained, so that he would become suited to his place in the world and over the course of the generations would appear to be as it were native to and made for that place (Kant 1775: 90).
- 9 It is important here to note how, on Kant’s account, the particular set of germs and predisposition (...)
25On this view, when, in some primordial time, human beings first encountered new sets of environmental conditions, their in-built germs and predispositions stood ready to be activated so as to best adapt them to their new surroundings. And so, just as feathers or thick skins appeared in such cases in various species of birds or wheat, for Kant, the human species underwent differentiation across a range of environmentally suitable characteristics, such as stature, hair growth, facial features, and, most emblematic of all, skin color (Kant 1775: 90-95).9
26Despite the spectrum-like diversity of such characteristics taken globally, Kant argued that the set of germs nature has placed within human beings is limited and that there are in fact exactly four broad avenues of differentiation possible for human beings – four modes of sub-species adaptation or four “human races.” While Kant would alter his typology of races slightly over the decades, the basal nature of the divisions, and their numbering exactly four would never change. The typology from the 1775 essay lists the following races and corresponding climates, each of which are said to stem from an original (but now non-existent) “phyletic species” that Kant describes as “Whites of brunette color”:
First race High blondes (Northern Europeans) from humid cold
Second race Copper-reds (Americans) from dry cold.
Third race Blacks (Senegambia) from humid heat.
Fourth race Olive-yellows (Indians) from dry heat.
(Kant 1775: 95)
27Much more could of course be said about this and the other racial typologies Kant offers. Important here is to stress that, despite the appearance of pseudo-scientific neutrality in Kant’s division of human races in this way, a normative hierarchy is clearly also at play. The contingency of natural development “on occasion” is paired with the essentialist view that certain races are, in various ways, “better” than one another. While a theory like Kant’s could in principle have avoided ranking the races, holding instead that each race is “separate but equal,” or “each perfectly adapted in its own way,” Kant clearly holds the white race in a position of superiority relative to the others. As Inder Marwah explains, Kant’s
phyletic ranking clearly carries an evaluative weight: the white European is, here, least deviated from the original human form (itself white) and so most adaptable. Kant’s further cogitations on Amerindians’ stuntedness, Negroes’ ‘lazy, soft and trifling’ nature, and the white race’s superior ‘talent’ and ‘perfection’ make it particularly difficult to sustain the equiprimordial view (2019: 103).
- 10 While not wanting to dwell on such remarks here, for the sake of illustration to those unfamiliar, (...)
28Add to this the numerous remarks variously elevating the white race and denigrating non-white races to be found in other of Kant’s published and unpublished writings, and Kant’s enduring commitment to racial hierarchy (which may of course come to be articulated in multiple ways) appears undeniable.10 Such hierarchy, embedded within or imposed against a more dynamic naturalism, again links Kant’s theory of race with present-day institutional environmental racism. For both involve divisions that, superficially at least, may appear to be “race neutral” or to be racist in only “accidental” ways. But just as Kant’s at-first-glance merely descriptive account of racial difference is in fact laced with a normative hierarchy, institutions and policies not explicitly or advertently racist in design or aim can in many cases perpetuate or instantiate environmental racism, with harmful or fatal consequences for the (paradigmatically non-white) populations most affected by them.
- 11 Kant in this way differs, for instance, from Buffon, for whom, in the absence of germs or predispos (...)
29Stepping back, we see that Kant’s “racism” (that is, his race theory taken on both its descriptive and normative registers) is also a form of “environmental racism,” and in its own particular way. Environments do not determine the organisms within them entirely on their own. There are limits to the malleability and adaptability of any species, and the environment is not the only active force involved. In order to adapt, organisms must first have the requisite germs within them, and then they can only adapt in the specific ways that these germs allow. For this reason, while on Kant’s account racial differentiation is natural through and through (insofar as nature both supplies the germs and constitutes the environment), racial differentiation is environmental only in part.11 Environments, one might say, merely occasion or trigger the development of organisms’ in-built germs, and then only to pre-configured extents.
30Nonetheless, while environments do not, on Kant’s view, fully drive human racial differentiation, the interplay of germ and environment we see in Kant’s race theory in fact has a strong affinity with what we today conceptualize as environmental racism. For, by insisting that there exist, by pre-arrangement of nature, only a small number of possible racial groupings, and that, moreover, each grouping “belongs to” just one set of environmental conditions, Kant prefigures the way in which racist institutions and policies would, in later centuries, constrict the lives of certain racialized groups (especially non-white racialized groups) to the degraded and detrimental environmental spaces where they were taken to “belong.” Once again, part of the perniciousness and intractability of environmental racism is how it can initially appear to be merely accidental or coincidental, given that the institutions in question are almost never explicitly racist in design or intent. Seen from this vantage, Kant’s race theory provides a glimpse of the deeper racist logic running beneath and within such institutions – a logic whereby racial groupings find themselves in the environmental circumstances they do not by chance, but as the consequence of a deeper natural order. Environmental racism reflects both the contingency and the essentialism of modern formations of race and racism, which Kant’s theory, as one among others, represents.
31Environmental racism involves not just the placing of certain differentiated racial groups in certain environments – with, generally speaking, non-white groups placed and kept in harmful, disadvantaged, or degraded environments – but the keeping of them there. Kant’s race theory can be understood as providing a conceptual groundwork for this sort of placement and keeping. The account of racial differentiation via germ-triggering environmental determinism provides part of the picture – Kant has here established how human racial groupings are naturally fitted for, or suitable for placement within, certain environments. If this were all there was to it, we might hold that races can, going forward, be unlinked from their generative and fitting environments, and made to fit new, perhaps healthier and less polluted, environments. But Kant’s race theory, and in particular his doctrine of racial irreversibility, forestalls this possibility, and in this reveals something about the endurance of environmental racism. The irreversibility of racial differentiation – the fact that, once a race is “occasioned” to one environment or another, they cannot be “re-occasioned” to another – supplies a conceptual justification for keeping racial groups in the circumstances that they are, however degraded and harmful.
32This doctrine of irreversibility is evident in the following passage from the 1785 essay on race:
Thus the germs which were originally placed in the phylum of the human species for the generation of the races must have developed already in most ancient times according to the needs of the climate, if the residence there lasted a long time; and after one of these predispositions was developed in a people, it extinguished all the others entirely. For that reason one also cannot assume that a mixing of different races according to a certain proportion could restore still the shape of the human phylum (Kant 1785a: 158).
33For Kant, human racial differentiation is an ancient and irreversible process. The four basal races emerged when the germs or predispositions corresponding to each race were developed in four distinct sets of environmental conditions. If environmental exposure were the only contributing factor, then one might conclude that some degree of (re)-“mixing” of the races, combined with gradual exposure to different environments over successive generations, could lead either to a restoration of the original, pre-differentiated (pre-racial) human form, or else to the becoming of one racial grouping into another. But such after-the-fact plasticity is, for Kant, impossible. When a human race becomes established, the other racially relevant germs or predispositions are “extinguished” entirely. There is then no possibility of one race becoming another. The fate of each race is, in effect, sealed, their adapted fitness to the environmental conditions corresponding to their initial emergence forever clinging to them.
- 12 Or, as he puts it elsewhere in the same essay: “The present theory, which assumes certain original (...)
- 13 Marwah explains this distinctiveness this way: “While climate-based explanations were a staple of e (...)
34Of course, Kant admits the possibility of racial mixing since, as mentioned above, different races still belong to the same species, which is evident in the ability of differentially raced individuals to produce fertile offspring. But, for Kant, such mixing produces only hybrid racial forms – derivations of the four basal essences where the basic characters of each race are carried over into offspring – and not new races in their own right. In Kant’s words, “[i]n heterogeneous mixing the character of the classes is unfailingly hereditary, and there are no exceptions to this” (Kant 1785a: 149, italics in original).12 Kant’s theory is distinguished by its insistence upon the unfailingly hereditary nature of racial difference.13 Once a race has been established, that race’s characteristics (including, first of all for Kant, skin color) will unfailingly be passed along over successive generations.
35Seen as a contribution to the history of environmental racism, what is pernicious about Kant’s doctrine of irreversibility is that it in effect marks the members of any given race as permanently and unchangeably proper to the environmental conditions of their origin. The doctrine of irreversibility adds gravity and weight to the deterministic placing of races in particular environments discussed above. For, on Kant’s view, no matter what members of particular races might do, and no matter where in the world they might come to live, they are still naturally predisposed to their proper place. There is an unshakable association between each race and its generative environment. In the 1788 essay on race, Kant finds confirmation of this association in the geographic distribution of peoples over the world in his time:
the races that have developed from [the original phylum] are not spread sporadically (in all parts of the world, in one and the same climate, in the same way), but cycladically in unified heaps which are to be found distributed within the confines of a country in which each of them was able to form itself. Thus the pure phyletic origin of the yellow-colored race is confined in the boundaries of Hindustan, while Arabia, not far from there, which for the most part occupies the same part of the earth, contains nothing thereof. But neither of them contains any Negroes, who are only to be found in Africa between the Senegal river and Cape Negro (and so on in the interior of this part of the world) […]. Each of these races is, as it were, isolated and, while being in the same climate, they are distinguished from each through a character that adheres inseparably to the generative faculty of each of them (Kant 1788: 211-212).
36Kant’s commitment to the irreversibility of racial differentiation leads to a picture where different races are fated to live out different environmental futures. On this view, it is natural that each race live in isolation from one another, that each be kept to the environments to which, as a matter of pre-determined germ-environment alignment, they belong. This essentialist view of fixed racial-environmental propriety is problematic enough in itself, precluding as it does the belonging (let alone thriving) of racial groups in any environment apart from that to which they “naturally belong” – to which they were “on occasion” fitted for. But taken in the context of environmental racism, this feature of Kant’s view is all the more dangerous. It provides conceptual justification for the institutional segregation of racial communities into distinct environmental spaces. It suggests that there can be no legitimate “mixing” of racial communities, since the proper place for each racial grouping is its own exclusive environment, and not that of others. It supports that idea that people “deserve” to live in the environments that history and nature have led them to inhabit.
37Approaching Kant as a conceptual progenitor of environmental racism might seem capable of contributing little to present-day scholarly or activist struggles to identify, resist, and dismantle the phenomenon. Perhaps environmental justice scholars, let alone activists, can proceed effectively without paying regard to the conceptual genealogy of their target phenomenon, which itself manifests most readily on institutional, and not conceptual, levels. Nonetheless, the sort of conceptual root-tracing work performed in this essay vis-a-vis Kant’s theory of race has, I think, the potential to be a powerful tool not just for scholarly or theoretical work related to either environmental racism or to the history of theories of race, but for the contemporary environmental justice movement more generally. For by exposing and understanding the conceptual history of environmental racism (whether via Kant or other representative conceptual progenitors), we understand the phenomenon anew, and see just how tenuous it actually is. This history could have been otherwise: there is no logical necessity in Kant’s having conceptualized human racial difference in the particular environmentally charged way that he did. To examine and contest Kant on this score is to cast light on the ambiguous conceptual infrastructure of environmental racism itself – in its historical emergence and in its persistence today.