happy birthday, immanuel kant—boy you sure were racist. so racist. super racist. like if racism were lsd you’d have been tripping all the time, which come to think of it you must have been to be that racist. still though, happy birthday immanuel kant.

see i actually don’t hate you because you were racist, and no it’s not because “it was a different time and everybody was racist”—even if that were true (and there’s no evidence it is), of the entire world’s population almost no one *formalized* their ideas about race.

almost no one on the eighteenth-century world preserved their racism in writing, shared it publicly. you were among the most elite racists, the ones with access to education and an audience, an audience that still reads you *a quarter of a millennium* later (happy birthday!)

sincerely: happy birthday. the truth is, kant, i love you without forgiving your racism. love is complicated that way, isn't it? i love your quirkiness. you're kind of adorkable. and it's not the quirks that everyone talks about--mine is no common love.

it's not the whole thing about the neighbors being able to set their watch according to your daily walks or your calculated jokes at the end of dinner, designed to promote your guests' digestion (you were very conscientious!)

(of course your guests were all white--would you have dined with a brown man? would you have invited me into your home? would your cosmopolitan hospitality have extended to dinner or did it stop at the right to not be killed in a foreign space?)

i love your love of crustaceans. how out of nowhere you decided that crustaceans present a kind of self-sufficient beauty. that's some weird shit, my man. must be the lsd? but it's sweet. i mean, for all the ugliness you saw in darker peoples that you found pure beauty in crabs.

and i love that this beauty, the beauty of the crustacean, is nestled within a broader discussion of man's social sense, his search for a community of like-feeling peoples--how, when he encounters beauty he wants others to agree on the beauty of the, say, crab.

i love the radical potential of the crustacean, how the promise of agreement is at the same time the hope of a different social order, one where even those you never fully counted as people might commune with one another over the beauty of the crab.

we never will, of course, and you knew that, too--that universal agreement in matters of taste was a telos we could never reach. i think you settled in the end for the liberalism we credit you with because you knew that radical reordering was essentially unrealizable.

you were right. almost three centuries later (happy birthday!) we still don't consider darker peoples fully human--they remain at the edges of our imagined universalities. no amount of aesthetic encounter will change that. there are not enough crustaceans in the world.

but i love the *hope*, delusional as it is--it gives us something to live for and to fight for. and i love you for showing me that. for showing me that the weird shit i love (you, for example!) can serve a fundamentally social function, that it can motivate me reach outward.

that my taste can *do* something--i love you for getting me to believe that. which is why i wanted to write this little note to you, this wish: happy birthday, my man. rest in perpetual piece.

*peace