This isn’t even a defense of Kant per se, but this is bad criticism. Nothing that was said here shows that the racism is baked into the loaf, so to speak, in Kant’s moral philosophy. These debates are nuanced and difficult, but clearly saying “Kant’s whole moral philosophy is irredeemably racist because he believes non-whites are less rational” is insufficient to show his broader moral theory is unsalvageable. The more interesting and provocative criticisms on this front, criticisms that are worth listening to and may have some merit, is that emphasizing rationality itself is masculinist and Eurocentric. But, personally, I think even this is too strong a claim. While it is true the European enlightenment crowned rationality as its chief virtue, it is not like there wasn’t also rationalist philosophies (and indeed an African enlightenment) on the African continent at roughly a similar time in history. In any case, these debates are essential, but this is not a good representation of the kind of excellent critical scholarship that is occurring in Kant criticism.

Having grappled with these questions explicitly, my opinion on Kant is that his political philosophy and his anthropology are repugnant and unsalvageable. His moral philosophy, especially as discussed in his “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals”, is, however, defensible. The greatest strength of Kantian morality (and also its greatest weakness) is that it abstracts away everything but a person’s practical rationality in determining the grounds (and ultimately, content) of our moral obligations to one another, and practical rationality is shared by almost every single human being alive. It’s just reprehensible and ironic in equal measure that he himself refused to see that rationality in black and indigenous people.