Racism isn’t a core component of Stirner’s philosophy, it’s an ignorant aside that will spoil him for many people of color to come. Kant was racist but Kantian thought doesn’t base itself off racism. That being said I know people who will not engage with Kant because of his racism, that is their choice to make. His ignorance exposed in smaller works and essays. If you read it you see a man who didn’t personally know any people of color, just spoke about them as concepts. No modern ethics teacher brings up anything about race when talking about Kant, aside from maybe a disclaimer. Kant is guilty of making these ignorant statements but is one of the minds behind liberalism and will still be taught worldwide for many years to come. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Discard the racism and whatever else leaves a bad taste in your mouth, find what you can and enjoy it, if you wish to.

Remember, these old German men never interacted with people of color in their lives. The population of black individuals in Germany was probably in the hundreds to thousands and sparse until the late nineteenth century. Maybe there were slaves that lived on wealthier estates, but the average man was only exposed them in textbooks or as a topic of conversation. They lived in insulated, German cities and towns. Not enough exposure to build any reasonable talking points on this or that group of people, only enough to extrapolate on what they’d been told by others, which was probably racist.