When I worked at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, I had the privileged of meeting Maxi Glamour, a philosopher, digital creator, activist, and mythical genderless fairy creature of many talents. I encourage readers to follow their blog and social media accounts if you don’t already. 

Recently, Glamour published a brief and illuminating genealogy of racism in philosophy, which simultaneouslytraces the conceptual origins of ableist eugenics back to one of philosophy’s canonical “founding fathers”: Aristotle. This analysis follows the evolution of race and racism through the post-Enlightenment era, the Enlightenment, the Medieval and Byzantine periods, back to ancient Greece. While this is an invaluable analysis of the history of race and racism, it also sheds light on the historical origins of ableism and speciesism, which were constructed alongside racism to justify aristocratic institutions (such as slavery) – institution that evolved over the next 2000 years into the modern system of, to adapt bell hooks’ term, white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal-eugenics (WSCPE). Under this system, racism, ableism, and speciesism are central to the production and concentration of capital.  

I want to highlight some excerpts from Glamour’s analysis that illuminate the continuity between racism, ableism, and speciesism, which share a common lineage and (on scrutiny) ontological basis. Indeed, I believe that Galmour’s analysis confirms Aph Ko’s argument that race and animality – to which we can add disability – are not merely intersecting oppressions, but a single axis of oppression – one that Ko calls “zoological.” Zoological oppression operates through a kind of “witchcraft” or mystification to cast certain populations as inherently inferior, thereby justifying violence against them. Racial incarceration, involuntary hospitalization, industrialized farming – these are not discrete systems of oppression, but facets of a single, dispersed continuum of zoological domination.  

To regard race, animality, and disability as “intersecting” oppressions rather than one and the same oppression is, on Ko’s view, politically and epistemically harmful, because it sows divisions, precludes solidarity, and obscures a deeper understanding of domination. “Animal,” she clarifies, “is a label. It’s a social construct the dominant class created to mark certain bodies as disposable without even a second thought. Animal as a term does not exist on its own… it’s relational. It only makes sense in relation to the [nondisabled] white human” (2019, 40). Shelley Tremain, too, argues that disability and animality co-exist in a “mutually constitutive and reinforcing” relationship, meaning that they are not “fundamentally” ontologically distinct. Therefore, to view animality and disability as distinct natural kinds is a category mistake and an epistemic injustice. Capitalism relies on obfuscating scientific taxonomies to prevent zoological subjects from effectively mobilizing.

I believe that Glamour’s genealogy of race supports this argument by tracing (what we commonly refer to as) race, animality, and disability back to Aristotle, revealing a common philosophical lineage. I ask the reader to please read that blog post, from which my own draws heavily. 

Ancient Greece

To begin, Glamour notes that Aristotle, whose philosophy is the cornerstone of the Western canon, justifies slavery by describing enslaved persons as incapable of philosophical inquiry, the sine qua non of personhood: “[Aristotle] asserts that slaves lack the capacity for εὐδαιμονία or being the highest realizations of human existence.” “Slaves,” as such, lack not only the capacity to reason, but, by the same token, the capacity to flourish, to participate in politics, to act responsibly, or to live lives of dignity. Aristotle assigns “slaves” to the same category as “brutes” or nonhuman animals, who, in his view, “cannot [form a state], for they have no share in happiness or in a life of free choice.” Hence, in one stroke, Aristotle builds the conceptual and ontological scaffolding for racism, speciesism, and ableism: racial/animal/disabled zoological others are interpreted through the lens of “incapacity.” 

While Aristotle’s conception of the “slave” predates the invention of modern racial taxonomies, he nonetheless invented the prototype for race by attributing contemplative impairment to enslaved persons: “While Aristotle’s framework was not racial in the modern sense, his hierarchy of contemplation versus incapacity created the structure that Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment thinkers would later racialize, mapping capacity for reason directly onto whiteness” (Glamour 2026; see also Robinson 1983). In short, Aristotle created the template for race through the seminal construction of disability as impairment. 

Indeed, the notion of impairment relative to an idealized rational subject became the mark of subordination for multiple constructed categories – not only “slaves,” but “brutes,” as well as women (whom Aristotle famously described as “mutilated males”), and populations associated with Southern climates, to name a few. While slavery was the template for race, impairment was the template for slavery – and subordination in general – serving to naturalize many hierarchies. Aristotle’s ethics, then, demonstrates how (so-called) racism, ableism, and speciesism were fashioned from the same eugenic cloth. 

The Byzantine Era

Glamour then explains how, during the Byzantine era, Aristotle’s hierarchies of reason and impairment were adopted by “Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Khaldun,” who wrote that “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” While Islamic philosophers did not yet have a full-fledged concept of race as a fixed, heritable biological essence – which would emerge in the Enlightenment era – they nonetheless solidified the Aristotelian associations between contemplative impairment and Southern ancestry, which Glamour calls “geographical essentialism.” 

In Ibn Khaldun’s writing, we again see a conflation of “slaves,” “dumb animals,” and “undeveloped” others as natural subordinates, incapable of social, moral, or political agency. The social construction of “race,” “animality,” and “disability” as distinct yet morally equivalent (inferior) subject positions thus emerged together through the same kind of metaphysical alchemy – or “witchcraft” – that both obfuscates and naturalizes the apparatus of zoological oppression. “Zoological witchcraft,” Ko explains, seeks to “get ‘inside’ the oppressed and metabolize their bodies and souls,” orienting them toward subjugation (2026, 16). 

A critical reading of Aristotle exposes how these three concepts – race, animality, and disability – are different names for one subordinated category: the zoological, the non-human, the impaired. Those who fall under this designation are, as Ytasha L. Womack observes, marked as “‘alien,’ ‘foreign,’ ‘exotic,’ ‘savage’—a wild one to be conquered or a nuisance to be destroyed… You are incapable of creating culture in general, but when you do, it is from an impulse or emotion, never intellect” (2013). Aristotle’s thought was an originating source of this kind of eugenic world-building, using rhetorical sleight of hand to invent three categories out of one. In reality, to be animalized is to be racialized is to be disabled: these social positions cannot be understood – cannot even exist – in isolation. 

The Medieval Era

In the Medieval era, continues Glamour, “Aristotelian rhetoric was made popular by such Aristotelian scholars as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and others.” 

Thomas Aquinas, easily the most influential Medieval philosopher, wrote, 

Now, barbarians for the most part are found to be robust in body and deficient in mind. Hence, the natural order of rule and subjection cannot exist among them… And because there is no natural rule among barbarians but only among those who abound in reason, the poets say that it is fitting that the Greeks, who were endowed with wisdom, should rule over the barbarians, as if to say that it is the same thing by nature to be a barbarian and to be a slave.

In a similar vein, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a Spanish Renaissance Humanist and philosopher, wrote,

The Spaniards have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or women to men, for there exists between the two as great a difference as between savage and cruel races and the most merciful, between the most intemperate and the moderate and temperate and, I might even say, between apes and men.

Once again, we see contemplative impairment invoked to justify slavery alongside other facets of zoological oppression: patriarchy, human supremacy, and adult supremacy. Slaves are to Spaniards what women are to men, what children are to adults, and what apes are to humans. The specter of impairment functions as a justification for zoological power relations.     

The Enlightenment Era

Next, Glamour notes that the Enlightenment “aimed to bring society into modernity through rationalization and reason” – or more precisely, a colonial/eugenic notion of “reason” – leading to white supremacy. Enlightenment philosophers gave racial eugenics the gloss of scientific validity by inventing a putatively objective and impartial “science” of race. This “race science” equated whiteness with rationality, as Glamour notes: “This racialized analysis of cognitive capacity was the founding block of white supremacy that is forever inextricably linked with Enlightenment thinkers whose very constructs of rationality were based upon the concepts that white people were superior due to the capacity to think.” 

Enlightenment philosophers, such as Kant, Hume, and Locke, drew on Aristotelian ethics to justify not merely slavery but racialized slavery, rooted in the conflation of Blackness with contemplative impairment. “Brutes” were similarly referenced to justify the emerging eugenic logic that animalized Blackness, racialized disability, and disablized animality. Hence, Blackness, disability, and animality became inextricably linked in the Enlightenment social imaginary. 

Glamour gives specific examples of this conflation. In 1775, Kant wrote, “the Negro is produced, well suited to his climate; that is, strong, fleshy, supple, but in the midst of the bountiful provision of his motherland, lazy, soft, and dawdling.” Here, Blackness is viewed as a mark of immaturity or incapacity, while whiteness is equated with strength and resilience. 

Kant approvingly cites Hume as a fellow racial eugenicist: 

Mr. Hume challenges anyone to adduce a single example where a Negro has demonstrated talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who have been transported elsewhere from their countries, although very many of them have been set free, nevertheless not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality, while among the whites there are always those who rise up from the lowest rabble and through extraordinary gifts earn respect in the world (1764)

Previously, Hume had gleaned from Aristotle that “there is some reason to think, that all the nations, which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics, are inferior to the rest of the species, and are incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind” (Hume, 1748). 

Through Hume and then Kant, Aristotle’s geographical essentialism was distilled into racism.  

The Post-Enlightenment/Modern Era

Glamour extends this genealogy into the post-Enlightenment era, when G. W. F. Hegel described slavery as necessary for the development of the “rationally mature” West. As Hegel wrote,

We find slavery even in the Greek and Roman States, as we do serfdom down to the latest times. But thus existing in a State, slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence — a phase of education — a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is Freedom; but for this, man must be matured (1837)

Slavery was viewed as a “necessary evil” – a bump on the road to rational maturity. This racist narrative inspired many colonial theorists of the time, including Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who “emerged as leading figures who recoded Aristotle’s ideas of superiority and inferiority into the modern idioms of biology and social theory” (Glamour 2026). Darwin described Western societies as “highly civilized nations, [which] do not supplant and exterminate each other as do Savage tribes” (1871) – despite the fact that, as Indigenous historians like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz document, the West invented genocide. Westerners, moreover, have committed cannibalism, such as when white spectators ate the flesh of lynched Black people, kept it as a souvenir, or fashioned them into purses (Ko 2019). 

Meanwhile, Herbert Spencer laid the foundation for modern eugenics by creating Social Darwinism, the notion that certain groups are inherently inferior and should be culturally abandoned. This ideology provided the philosophical justification for imperial conquest, forced sterilizations, and other practices aimed at “improving” the human population. Hence, the notion that some animals are “fitter” than others was co-opted into “scientific” systems of racism and ableism designed to justify the expansion of early-stage capitalism. 

Professional Philosophy Today

At the end of this genealogy, Glamour explains how the institutionalization of Aristotelian philosophy continues to harm Black scholars: 

To be engaged in philosophy as a Black person is to sit in the face of racist ideologies and use the rhetoric of white supremacy to demand freedom… There is a strong reason why Black people are 1-4% of the professional philosophical field. It often feels counterintuitive and an abrasive act of self-harm as a Black philosopher to exist in these intellectual spaces as they exist…. For a better understanding of the contemporary world and to combat the harms resulting from thousands of years of perceived racial hierarchy, it is not enough to try to make Aristotle’s work fit the cultural amelioration. Authors like Malcom X, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins would better suit the liberation of contemporary people, deviating from the romanticization of Eurocentric knowledge structures, and alleviating the pressure on Black philosophers to force their way into a canon that was never meant for their success.  

As an older philosopher, my memory of studying Ancient Greek philosophy is of being taught about the monumental value of Aristotelianism, with a brief nod to the existence of some problematic passages. None of my professors described Aristotle as a major proponent of the prototype of modern-day racism, because few situated him within the historical context of elitism, eugenics (including the infanticide of disabled infants), and culturally-accepted slavery (including systematic rape), which informed his ethical framework and social ontology. This decontextualized, ahistorical reading of Aristotle dilutes the extent of his glaring bigotry – a bigotry later invoked to justify capitalistic forms of zoological witchcraft.

Similarly, Aristotle’s intellectual elitism and corresponding ableism are rarely discussed in connection to later systems of ableist eugenics and human supremacy. Yet these facets of zoological oppression are visible in his writings and continue to inform modern philosophy (e.g., through arguments for eugenic infanticide and “procreative beneficence”). Sarah Berenstain calls it “structural gaslighting” when people “obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license” (2020, 2). When philosophers discuss Aristotle in isolation from the conditions of elitism and eugenics that informed his work and prefigured 2000 years of exclusionary scholarship, they participate in structural gaslighting. Structural gaslighting functions to discredit subaltern knowledges, alienate marginalized knowers, and reproduce colonial violence. 

Structural ableist gaslighting helps to explain why disabled people and their cripistemologies are underrepresented in the profession. When you only see yourself represented as a problem, a mistake, a clinical case study, a target for elimination, or any of the other ableist stereotypes promulgated by canonic philosophers over the last two millennia, this does not inspire you to pursue a career in philosophy. The underrepresentation problem, moreover, is largely independent of the ongoing defunding of the Humanities, a space where disabled revolutionaries were, by and large, already marginalized and de facto shut out. Divestment, in other words, is nothing new for uppity crips.

Understanding the conceptual roots of ableism in ancient Greek philosophy, and the entanglements between ableism, speciesism, and racism via zoological oppression, illuminates why professional philosophy has never embraced the perspectives of zoological subjects. This is a useful lesson for teachers, researchers, and philosophy enthusiasts alike.