The Enlightenment saw the birth of ideas like freedom, equality and human rights. But how did its thinkers come to terms with the highly profitable exploitation of non-European peoples? And what impact do racial theories from that period still have?
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00:00The term race is totally taboo. You won't find it anywhere. Nobody says it anymore.
00:05Instead, we talk about culture, people, society.
00:13People are always trying to set themselves apart from others.
00:17But before we get to that, let's look back hundreds of years,
00:21when widespread concepts of race began to emerge.
00:26Around 1800, what are called color models developed first.
00:31There were the white Europeans and those who had settled in North America
00:35who were to a certain extent considered to be at the apex.
00:38Then there were what were called brown peoples or Orientals
00:42and what we now call the Middle East.
00:44Then there were Asians who were placed a little higher
00:47because certain civilizational achievements could be attributed to them.
00:51And the group that was to some extent on the bottom rung were the Africans.
00:56The reason they were placed at the bottom of this hierarchical model
01:02was justification for the fact that for centuries,
01:06Africans had been treated not as human beings, but as subhumans.
01:14This is Christian Goilen.
01:16He's a professor of modern history who's studied racism for years.
01:20The reasons for why Africans were on the lowest rung
01:24involved the Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade,
01:27where millions of black people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas.
01:32Europeans sold the goods that enslaved people were forced to produce
01:36back to their home countries and invested high profits in more enslavement.
01:42The system didn't change even after the Age of Enlightenment.
01:49It'd be nice to say that after Universalism and the Enlightenment arrived,
01:53equality, freedom, fraternity, these basic values,
01:56that racism disappeared.
01:58But the opposite happened.
02:00That's when racism became a justifying ideology
02:03providing specific hierarchies of superiority and inferiority.
02:07On the one hand, racism, at least since the 18th century,
02:11says very clearly, of course, all people are members of humanity,
02:15no one is excluded.
02:17But the cultures outside Europe have less biological value,
02:20and that was why it was legitimate to exploit them.
02:24Racial theories like these were widespread among Enlightenment thinkers
02:28like Kant, Voltaire, Schiller and Goethe.
02:32I'd say 99% of all intellectuals or politicians believed it.
02:37That's how people thought.
02:40But the theory of evolution and scientists like Darwin and Lamarck
02:44altered the intellectual landscape.
02:47Their ideas made it clear that nature was constantly changing,
02:51so there could be no such thing as a natural, unchangeable order,
02:56not even among humans.
03:00That rolled over Europe like a shockwave.
03:03It meant Africa could pose a challenge,
03:05South America could pose a challenge,
03:07that we were all in a fight for survival and had to prove our supremacy,
03:11which until then had been a given.
03:15Racial theories propagated by the Nazi party in Germany
03:20emerged in the 20th century.
03:23Hitler and his followers laid out the ideas in his book Mein Kampf,
03:28but they also focused the whole problem on a racial contrast,
03:32namely that between Aryans and Semites, so Germans and Jews,
03:37with the latter declared a kind of counter-race.
03:41That's not a Darwinian concept.
03:44With Darwin, the fight for survival is taking place everywhere.
03:48But Hitler could have cared less about what biology or scientists were saying.
03:52For him, Judaism was the enemy racially, biologically, politically and culturally,
03:57and if the German was to survive as a culture and state,
04:01then it would have to be destroyed.
04:04The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews,
04:07industrialized genocide on a scale that remains unique in history.
04:12Theories of race have long since been refuted.
04:16There are no human races.
04:18So what does racism look like today?
04:21Like we said at the start,
04:23people still constantly seek to distance themselves from others.
04:27Many will take to the streets to protest against immigrants
04:30because they feel threatened by them.
04:33Even political movements claim they'll free people from the threat.
04:38The whole thing, the whole shebang, no longer requires the concept of race.
04:43Biology doesn't play a big role either.
04:46Instead, we talk about culture, about people, about society.
04:49It's a bit different in the US because race has a different status there.
04:54But even there, if you look at how Trump talks about these things,
04:58he doesn't repeat classic racial theories and ideologies from the 19th century.
05:03Instead, he's developed his own language to talk about it,
05:06one that clearly has a racist undertone.
05:09But it's difficult to detect if you believe there's only racism
05:12where you have the concept of race.
05:14However, there are common themes that you can follow,
05:17and I think it's important to keep an eye on them.
05:20And that's only possible if we don't focus on the future,
05:23wondering, when will the bad thing come back?
05:26I think it's taking on new forms,
05:28and we have to watch out for what's disappearing and what's carried forward.
05:32That's what you have to keep an eye on.