He further wrote that Indigenous peoples lived in ‘a condition of savagery and unfreedom’. He believed, for example, that Black Africans were a ‘race of children that remain immersed in a state of naiveté’.

Let’s consider in some detail the case of Hegel, arguably the creator of the most systematic philosophy in modern thought. Is there any risk that something like this has happened in philosophy – that in focusing on condemning the individual racism of philosophers we have allowed systemic philosophical racism to remain intact? While laws in the United States, for example, may no longer overtly disenfranchise people of colour, they still enable oppression through mass incarceration. But if we have learned anything about racism over the past few decades, it is that a focus on individual racist statements can obscure the ways in which racism continues to persist in systems.

Hegel might have been wrong for his racist writings about Africans and others, but that doesn’t tell us anything about his speculative metaphysics. In order to hold on to the philosophical insights, scholars tend to make a distinction between the individual racism and the philosophical systems. No serious philosopher today defends these explicitly racist views but, with good reason, they continue to study the writings of these authors. John Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-76), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and many others believed that Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European enlightenment. It is by now well known that some of the greatest modern philosophers held racist views.

Hegelian dialectic meaning