 CPR has worked to advance new interpretations of canonical philosophers but has also, at the meta-level, contested standard approaches to interpretation. The interpretation of Kant, for example, has had to contend with his extensive writings on anthropology and geography in which he espoused unambiguously racist claims (Elden and Mendieta 2011; Kant 1798 [2012]). Until recently this large body of writings was considered irrelevant to the understanding of Kant’s ethics or his cosmopolitanism on the grounds of disciplinary distinctions between philosophical work and other writings. But why ignore Kant’s writings about the nature of human difference if we are trying to understand his actual views about the way peoples should interact? Like feminist philosophers who developed an analysis of the subtle ways in which some moral theories assumed a male embodiment, Critical Philosophers of Race have shown that doctrines of self-determination and universal reciprocity developed by modern European philosophers were never intended to apply to all groups: the right to autonomy was based on certain capacities that legitimated the exclusion of children, the disabled, and usually women, but, also, non-Europeans who were viewed as developmentally “behind”. Taking some aspect of a philosophers’ view and giving it the most generous reading possible distorts our understanding of modern philosophy and its conceptual offerings (Basevich 2020; Shorter-Bourhanou forthcoming; Kirkland 2018).