Enshrining moral rights are part and parcel of the humanist project to justify imperialism through racialization via a “scientific” morality to distinguish subjects into racial assemblages that discipline humanity into “full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans”.

The humanist paradigm originates in the illustrious knowledge tradition of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment (see Crosson, 2021). By emphasizing human agency over divine authority, asserting the triumphant power of objective and instrumental human reason over natural conditions and superstitions, and marking the rational capacity of the human species as exceptional and superior over all other forms of life, key thinkers of the Enlightenment positioned human reason, potentiality, and achievement at the very center of scientific enterprise, social purpose, and global progress. At the same time, the first declarations of the “Rights of Man” asserted the existence of essential properties and rightful protections unique to human beings as a consequence of their special capacity for rational development. Protective rights against others became perceived as necessary because the philosophers of the Enlightenment also posited a basic competitive human drive, which not only naturalized the rational desire for individual accumulation of property and the nascent capitalist system as the fullest expression of this desire, but also explained the constant progress of civilization through the competitive advance of technologies and other products of human cleverness. Yet, this intellectually and culturally explosive time of the European Enlightenment was also a period of imperial expansion and, in this context, grand claims regarding universal human reason, and the equal “Rights of Man” quickly became scaled down as already-evident gender and race hierarchies within humanity became further entrenched through colonization and associated practices of slavery (see Crosson, 2021). The ostensibly universal character of “human” reason was realigned more particularly as a superior quality claimed by the hetero-patriarchal white subject of the imperial enterprise, whose defining European cultural achievements likewise were assumed as the aspirational markers of any civilization worthy of the name. Indeed, as Edward Said (1978, 1993) famously explained in his seminal analysis of colonial comportment in Orientalism, and subsequently in Culture and Imperialism, European colonial society was able to construct itself as scientific, progressive, and culturally advanced only through an interested contrast against non-Western peoples, who were portrayed at best as superstitious and socially inferior, having inscrutable motives and questionable ethics; or at worst backward, immoral, unproductive, and barely human at all. In this way, by asserting the rational superiority of some divisions of humanity over others, Western humanism came to act as a perverse justification for colonialism. Colonial humanism is, then, closely intertwined with racism (see Bernasconi, 2001). Alexander Weheliye explains: “If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of socio-political relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (2014, 3). The “scientific evidence” for claims about natural European human superiority was supposedly found in the physical differences observable between Indigenous Australian, Native American, African, Asian, and European bodies, and especially by the measurement of crania and their surface characteristics, which were taken to indicate relative differences in natural intelligence (Fforde, 2004). For many, in accordance with Christian orthodoxy, the aim was to collect evidence for underlying principles of unity that showed human difference was the result of environmentally influenced divergence from a single primordial stock. On this view, the various human “races” were all participants in a universal humanity, and colonization was justified on “humanitarian” grounds that aimed to elevate “primitive” peoples to a more advanced (European) standard of human achievement and civilization. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the height of global slave trade, a view prevailed that racial differences were so great as to indicate separate species of human, springing not from a single source but from plural origins. The polygenic insistence on human incommensurability supported claims about the “natural propensity” of the different races to different kinds of activity; thus, European anatomists claimed the typically larger body mass and phrenology of the “inferior black races” made them “naturally suited to slavery” (Fforde, 2004, 20). Produced in the modern era through scientific debates concerning the origin and nature of human diversity, the “racialised assemblages” that discipline humanity into “full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, 3 and above) not only influenced the course of imperial government in Africa and Asia and operations of slavery out of these locales, but also the development of British policy for the “just” treatment and “protection” of Indigenous peoples during the settler-colonization of Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand, Canada, and the Americas. In the most extreme cases – for example, in Canadian British Columbia and across much of Australia – colonial invasion and settlement proceeded on the basis of the imperial “doctrine of discovery” and the associated fantasy that the newly “discovered” lands were Terra Nullius: empty lands without peoples and devoid of preexisting sovereign entitlements, making them freely available for appropriation (see Reynolds, 1996). In fact, the colonial explorers were well aware of the presence of the Indigenous inhabitants of these so-called empty lands. Maintaining the fiction of Terra Nullius therefore at times required the actual elimination of the First Peoples, which indeed is evidenced by the series of genocidal massacres that mark the settler-colonial project. Or, at the very least, colonialism demanded the dehumanization and degradation of Aboriginal people and cultures, the denial of Indigenous systems of law and governance, and the forced dispersal of Indigenous polities so as to assert their inferior, nonsovereign status and provide support for the colonial claim that Indigenous polities effectively counted for nothing and could be disregarded. The imposition of settler-colonial sovereignty could then be justified as a “humanitarian” obligation, which Rudyard Kipling referred to in 1898 as the “White Man’s Burden” to raise nonsovereign “primitive” societies to a higher state of civilization through Christian morality and Western science. This racist imperial agenda, and its attendant Eurocentric notions of progress and civilization, was typically manifest in settler-colonial societies through phased policies of segregation and assimilation. Often informed by Social Darwinism, settler-colonial nations including Australia and Canada initially viewed “backward” Indigenous populations as vulnerable and likely to “die out naturally” and be replaced by a “fitter species” of human. Accordingly, colonial policies of “protection” established mission reserves where Aboriginal communities could be charitably housed, clothed, and educated in “civilised” ways, so as to “smooth the dying pillow” (see Eshet, 2015; Chesterman & Galligan, 1997). Conveniently for settler-colonials, the dispersal and resettlement of Indigenous collectives in mission reserves at the same time vacated land that was traditionally Aboriginal-owned and occupied, which then became more freely available for colonial appropriation (see Reynolds, 1996). When this colonial phase of land acquisition had been largely accomplished, and it became apparent that Indigenous peoples would not simply “die out,” colonial policy changed focus from segregation to assimilation. Especially in light of a burgeoning “half-caste” population, the revised aim of government was to incorporate new generations of Indigenous individuals into white society where (it was claimed) they could eventually be rid of the perceived taint of their Aboriginality, become useful as a labor force, and become absorbed into the nascent colony. Formal policy regimes of child removal or “uplifting” existed across settler-colonial states including Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa-New Zealand. These persisted formally in some places until the 1990s and continue informally today, as is evidenced by the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous children taken into care. For instance, in 2007 there were 9054 Indigenous children identified as wards of the State in Australia. By 2016, this figure had increased to 16816 and continues to climb (see Behrendt, 2017). Under such policies, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families, communities, and traditional lands, stripped of their Aboriginal identities, and placed in institutions as wards of the State or rehomed (often as domestic servants) in white households (Haebich, 2000; Eshet, 2015). Frequently indentured and unwaged, these “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal and Maori children formed a compelled workforce supporting the development of the settler-colony, and many suffered terrible abuse at the hands of their so-called “protectors” (HREOC, 1997; Eshet, 2015). Typically, such children never found their way back to their birth families, and many are only now linking up with the cultures and communities they had lost. This, then, is one of the darkest aspects of the imperial humanist legacy that settler-colonial nations are still struggling to reckon with.