Idea of Race Book

This book tracks the concept of race from the dawn of colonialism/imperlialism/empiricism in the 17th century up to modern theorists. The real content of the book begins with Kant. Apparently, our favorite philosopher from Konigsberg thought long and hard about skin color, and he expressly states that it is skin color, and not, say, facial formation, which he is talking about when he formulates the idea of race. Kant claimed that the unfailing heredity of skin color, that blacks in Germany produced blacks, proved that the environment, while it may have elicited the black "germ" to "unfold" itself, had not itself a causal role. As a result, though Kant admits that all people come from the same human phylum, the human essence teleologically unfolded into four main predisposed branches - white, black, red, and yellow skins. These exterior forms, for Kant, are reflections of the inner worth of the various groups, and so whites are praised as the purest, the ones closest to the original human phylum, and so, what is a big duh for his readers, the most culturally talented (ironic to think that we now know that we all came from Africa) - but he doesn't draw the opposite conclusion about black people, as one might expect; he, rather, asserts the red-skinned people to be the least talented and most worthless (Hegel picked this up and concluded, not incorrectly, that they would simply "vanish" from the face of the earth). Kant's student Herder, on the other hand, points out that the reason why Kant is so fixated on this is because he is a materialist in some sense, one who privileges biological information over cultural/social information. And the entire book from thereon passes back and forth between these two points of view, up until the present when no one is really defending Kant's side; but that may be simply because this book was compiled by a professor at the University of Memphis.