Kant: "Humanity has achieved its greatest perfection in the white race."
Hume: "I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites."
Voltaire: "Whites are superior to Negroes, just as Negroes are superior to monkeys."
Defenders have argued "that statements like the ones quotes above were unrepresentative of their authors' works. They were simply men of their time who occasionally and thoughtlessly recycled common prejudices." The statements should not "cancel out their far better developed arguments in favor of freedom of thought, popular sovereignty, the rule of reason, and much else that we today take for granted as foundations of our culture and politics. Many Enlightenment thinkers forcefully condemned colonialism and slavery. Moreover, as the philosopjher Susan Neiman has put it, Enlightenment writers 'laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand.'"
However, see the work of William Max Nelson, whose Enlightenment Biopolitics "links the Enlightenment to modern racism, but in a sophisticated manner that involves more than simply stringing together quotations"
it examines the "intertwining of the life sciences and political economy," (Nelson) or, in other words, how "[p]olitical problems came to be seen as biological ones" (NYRB)
"If France was in decline, losing wars and territory to its rivals, perhaps the reason was the physical degeneration of the country's human stock. French thinkers of the Enlightenment era saw this degeneration at work everywhere: in the increasing number of vagabonds on French roads, in the racial mixing between enslavers and enslaved in France's Caribbean colonies, and in the physical qualities of French Jews"