  The historical context in which the debates and discussions emerged and in which they were waged was conditioned thoroughly by European colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples rationalized through rank-ordering racial characterizations. This rationalizing work was aided significantly by the intellectual efforts of canonical European philosophers. David Hume, in a footnote in his “Of National Characters,” philosophized about the “natural inferiority” of Negroes to White people (Hume 1742) and was supported by Immanuel Kant (1764), who elaborated his own theory of inferior and superior racial types in his writings on anthropology (Kant 1798). Since successive generations of European and Euro-American White people had been educated into widely-shared common senses of their racial superiority to inferior Africans by such supposedly philosophically well-reasoned, science-verified, and theologically sanctioned teachings, the claim that there were Africans capable of producing thought of the caliber of Philosophy was regarded by most of them as utterly preposterous.