Kant as Methodology: Race, White Ignorance, and Intellectual Responsibility

Abstract This article situates Kant’s theories and epistemologies of race within a wider architecture of knowledge production and coloniality, and from there considers how his approach can illuminate our understandings about methodology and scholarly praxis. In doing so, this article seeks to move the conversation beyond Kant’s raciology, which by and large has been “outed,” and to instead draw attention to his methodology and praxis. It argues that by recognizing and articulating Kant’s philosophical and practical incrementalism, dualism, and erasures in knowledge production and dissemination as a methodology, we can better identify, make sense of, and critique those methodologies when they are employed in contemporary scholarship and political action. Additionally, this article attempts to answer the question of what comes next for a racially aware Kantian studies (or at least point toward possibilities) by drawing upon decolonial and postcolonial theories and a necessarily interdisciplinary approach. It then proposes a three-step approach of historicity, citational politics, and contrapuntality to address Kant’s raciology and “white ignorance” as a reflexive method with which Kantian scholars and students may be able to move forward both ethically and intellectually.