[A]dherence to Anthroposophy and aspects of this pedagogy can lead teachers to make decisions about individual children based on race and disability, which many people would consider to be outright discrimination.

...We can’t afford to be ignorant or to accept Steiner schools on their own terms. The history of Anthroposophy and thereby Steiner Waldorf education is essential reading. That history contains a warning, and we ignore this at our own risk.

...Steiner’s drawing of the “evolution of humankind” through the various stages – Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis — from lower to higher forms (fish to reptiles to mammals etc.), with the top three categories marked “apes,” then (American) “Indians,” then at the very top “Aryans.” Steiner’s 1907 lecture refers to both apes and Indians as “decadent side branches” of evolution.

Pervasive racial assumptions run throughout Rudolf Steiner’s work. Anthroposophy itself is : “built around a racial view of human nature arranged in a hierarchical framework,” and Steiner’s doctrine awards a higher or lower place in the spiritual evolution of mankind for certain races, with their attendant characteristics.

...For those [of Steiner’s followers] who believe they are developing clairvoyant faculties in pursuit of Anthroposophy’s "Higher Worlds", Steiner’s racist doctrines, existing within an anthroposophical structure of reincarnation and karma, can be seen as essentially benevolent and redemptive.

...One of the most authoritative writers about Anthroposophy in English is American historian Peter Staudenmaier. His recent Ph.D. in modern history, written at Cornell, concerns Anthroposophy in Germany and Italy from 1900 to 1945. A fluent German speaker, Staudenmaier had access to Steiner’s untranslated work as well as to original archive material. He stresses that Steiner’s prolific output can be internally contradictory, enabling supporters to claim that anthroposophical race doctrine is incidental or misunderstood. But nevertheless, there’s a dominant and explicable theme, owing much to Steiner’s occult interpretation of German nationalism. Steiner’s attitude to Jewishness is an example of insular preoccupations:

“The nature of Steiner’s hostility to Jewishness was thus both ordinary and anomalous; it incorporated the common misconceptions of the era and simultaneously transcended these within the peculiar framework of ‘occult science’. It was not so much hatred or fear of Jews that animated Steiner’s mature anti-Semitism, but ignorance of contemporary Jewish life, of modern Jewish culture and history, as well as a myopic commitment to German spiritual superiority. What Steiner did know about Judaism, moreover, was generally refracted through a Christian and Germanocentric lens.” [Peter Staudenmaier, “Rudolf Steiner and the Jewish Question’” (Leo Baeck Inst. Yearbook, 2005).]

...“Steiner’s doctrine of racial evolution is more than a biological appendage to his spiritual cosmology. For Anthroposophy as for Theosophy, evolution is the link between the human and the divine, it is a process supervised by higher powers and a vehicle for the soul’s elevation and purification. The guiding thread throughout Steiner’s race mythology is the motif of a small, racially advanced group progressing into the next era while the great mass of backward populations declines. In the current era, the dominant race is the Aryan race, which evolved out of a small number of specially advanced colonists from Atlantis. In Steiner’s words: “Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth.”

...Though potentially spiritually ‘enlightened’ to the initiate, Steiner’s views on race remain reprehensible:

“The white population, then, represent normal human beings who continue to progress, while Asians and Africans are abnormal peoples who were not as capable of evolving. Statements like these can be found throughout Steiner’s works, and may reflect the prejudices prevalent among educated Europeans of his era. Perhaps the most instructive instances are Steiner’s various statements about black people. Addressing the first generation of Waldorf teachers in 1923, Steiner responded to a question about teaching French with the following remarks:

“The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting." [Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s  Anthroposophy”, (Nova Religio 2008).]

Three central racial types as discussed in Steiner’s 1923 lecture “Color and the Races of Humankind”: black ("Schwartz"), yellow ("Gelb"), and white ("Weiss"). The primary traits of each racial type are identified. Blacks, who Steiner says are largely guided by the "rear brain" ("Hinterhirn"), lead “impulsive life” ("Triebleben"). Yellow people, in whom the "middle brain" ("Mittelhirn") predominates, lead an “emotional life” ("Gefühlsleben"). Whites, who have a well-developed "fore-brain" ("Vorderhirn"), lead a "thinking life" ("Denkleben").

...Anthroposophy impacts on real children. Ray Pereira noticed the racist overtones in his child’s ‘Steiner stream’ in an Australian school:

“Mr Pereira, who is from Sri Lanka, said his concerns about Steiner’s racist beliefs were realised when his children were not allowed to use black or brown crayons because they were 'not pure.' He said Steiner teachers at the state-run school recommended they not immunise their children because it would lead to the 'bestialisation of humans.'”

Two years ago, at an established English Steiner school now applying for Free Schools funding; a British couple were alarmed when their 12 year old daughter (who’d been at the school for a year) told them a German teacher had read out the word ‘nigger’ from a book of poems, a standard text in Steiner schools. The mother reports that the teacher did not agree with the children that this is a racist word, indeed it was her daughter who was punished for refusing to back down. As a foster parent for many years and a mentor for Kids’ Company, the mother concerned is used to dealing with challenging situations but the school’s response to this incident (amongst others) shocked her. The staff seemed not to take the family’s concerns seriously and delayed taking action. Looking online for information on Steiner schools’ policies regarding racism, the mother discovered that in the book HOW TO KNOW HIGHER WORLDS, by Rudolf Steiner (an edition last published 2008, Anthroposophic Press), a book on which one of the school trustees was basing workshops, there is an account of ‘reincarnation through the races’: 

“Peoples and races are after all, merely different developmental stages in our evolution toward a pure humanity. The more perfectly that individual members of that race or people express the pure, ideal human type – the more they have worked their way through from the physical and mortal to the super sensible and immortal realm – the ‘higher’ this race or nation is.”

In a formal meeting with the school, the father, who is black, calmly read aloud a quote from Steiner which stated that: “the black man is the child of the races.” There was no response from those present, presumably the trustees convinced themselves it was outside the remit of the discussion. The couple were shown the school’s discrimination document. But they report that when they asked the school’s Education Coordinator if he believed in Steiner’s doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul through racial hierarchies, he reddened with anger and refused to answer.

This critical Steiner mother notes an obvious inconsistency. In reply to a trustee’s defence that individuals chose which bits of Steiner to believe:

“I asked her, how they could do that when Steiner received his knowledge clairvoyantly – if it all came from the spirit world surely it was all true? I also said I didn’t believe that’s where he got his knowledge, unless the spirit world itself is racist.”

The child involved is now at school elsewhere. Her family arranged for a racism awareness day to be conducted at the Steiner school; this is required of every educational setting.

In response to Waldorf supporters’ claims that their teachers are simply not capable of racism and that Steiner schools are both enlightened and benign, Peter Staudenmaier writes:   

“Many forms of racist belief are not intentionally sinister, but are instead embedded in high-minded, benevolent, and compassionate orientations toward the world. It is this type of racist thought, whose historical heritage extends through the White Man’s Burden and many forms of paternalistic racial ideology, that may find a welcome home in some Waldorf schools and other anthroposophical contexts, where it can perpetuate its ideas about race under the banner of spiritual growth and wisdom. This kind of racist thinking spreads more readily precisely because it is not tied to consciously sinister intentions. Seeing through this kind of racism – which, furthermore, often has more widespread and more insidious effects on the real lives of real people than the intentionally sinister variety does – means paying attention to the background beliefs that animate a project like Waldorf, whether among its founding generation or today.”

Staudenmaier is a historian, not primarily a critic of Steiner Waldorf education. But a knowledge of the history of the anthroposophical movement is essential if we are to make any sense of the difficulties the schools face today:

“I would be pleased if my research provided an opportunity for Waldorf admirers to ponder this contentious history and take its lessons seriously. What is worrisome about the Waldorf movement’s continued failure to address anthroposophy’s racial legacy is not that Waldorf schools in the twenty-first century will start churning out little Hitler youths; what is worrisome is that Waldorf advocates and sympathizers may unknowingly help prepare the ideological groundwork for another unforeseen shift in the broader cultural terrain, in which notions of racial and ethnic superiority and inferiority could once again take on a spiritual significance that lends itself all too easily to practical implementation in a changed social and political context. For this reason among others, I strongly encourage those involved in Waldorf endeavors to take another look at the history of their movement and the doctrines at its core.”

AFTERWORD

by Peter Staudenmaier

I.

II.

Steiner's lecture "The Occult Significance of Blood" discusses the purported differences between "civilized" peoples (colonizers) and "uncivilized" peoples (the colonized), with particular attention to the ostensibly racial contrasts between these kinds of people, which he claims is reflected in their blood. Steiner further distinguishes between two different kinds of "uncivilized" peoples: those that are advancing evolutionarily and those that are regressing evolutionarily. He argues that the European colonizers need to discern which kind of "uncivilized" people is which, in order make the process of colonization and "civilization" more effective. This is the context within which he raises the issue of intermarriage and exogamy.

It is crucially important to remember that "intermarriage" in colonial circumstances usually meant violent sexual coercion of women from colonized groups by European men. Throughout the history of European colonialism, many native cultures were destroyed by colonists "intermarrying" with native populations and absorbing what they saw as the more desirable elements into their own colonial cultures. This is a common aspect of colonialism as such. The same notion formed a central motif in Steiner's racial and ethnic theories: The assimilable elements of backward and archaic groups get taken up into forward-moving groups, while the stragglers die out.

This background helps account for Steiner's ambivalent viewpoint on exogamy or intermarriage. "The Occult Significance of Blood" posits an "evolutionary trade-off," in the words of a latter-day Anthroposophist, between endogamy and exogamy, and indeed the basic conception of such polarities and trade-offs runs throughout the text. These ideas are heavily indebted to several of the chief strands within 19th century racist thought. The belief that specific racial traits are carried in the blood and that particular ethnic and racial groups are either advancing or declining evolutionarily was one of the core assumptions of racist thinking in Steiner's day.

To put it in simple terms: What Steiner says in this text is that the colonizers need to determine what evolutionary level particular colonized peoples occupy and what their evolutionary trajectory is (progressing or regressing), in order to know how to civilize them, and that when colonizers interbreed with some "savage" peoples, this will cause the colonized peoples to die out, because their blood can't handle it. Steiner's point is that the colonial imposition of "civilization" onto distant populations will succeed if the colonizers pay attention to the racial constitution of the colonized peoples, and that the racial-evolutionary status of "savage" peoples, reflected in the structure of their blood, is the decisive criterion for determining whether or not the colonizers should interbreed with the colonized.

Steiner delivered the lecture, in Berlin, right in the middle of Germany's genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples in the German colony of South-West Africa, during the run-up to the famous "Hottentot election" in which German colonialism was a central contested issue. Much of Steiner's lecture presents standard theosophical teachings about the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, the relationship between the "I" and the blood, the intertwinement of macrocosm and microcosm, and so forth. The most widely discussed sections of the text are the ones dealing with what Steiner calls "the race question." Those are also the sections of the text that have been repeatedly altered or deleted in published English translations of the work. What gets lost in such whitewashed translations is, among other things, Steiner's equation of black people as such with barbaric savages.

In my view, however, the more important elements in the text concern Steiner's argument that the colonizing civilized Europeans must determine whether the unfortunate savage peoples and races are on the up-grade or down-grade of evolution, so that the colonizers will know how to introduce civilization to these benighted alien races. This notion is crucial to Steiner's theory of racial and ethnic evolution overall. It is especially striking in the German context of 1906 and 1907.

Steiner's lecture is silent about the aggressive violence of colonialism, right in the midst of a genocidal German colonial campaign; it equates black people with utterly barbaric savages and claims that some non-European peoples are on the down-grade of evolution; it says that some non-Europeans had to perish as soon as colonists came to their particular parts of the world; and so forth. None of this seems to register on many Anthroposophist readers.

In some ways, this is a specific instance of a broader Anthroposophical phenomenon, namely reading into Steiner's text what Anthroposophist readers would like to find there. Readers who consider Anthroposophy a source of spiritual wisdom face particular temptations when the content of a given Steiner text departs from the Steiner that they know and love; in many cases they understandably want to read the text in a way that makes it more compatible with what drew them to Anthroposophy in the first place. That gets especially tricky when race comes up, not least because what counted as offensive and strange regarding racial statements has shifted markedly over the past century. In my experience, Anthroposophically inclined readers do not often keep such basic considerations in mind.

Even if latter-day Anthroposophist interpretations of "The Occult Significance of Blood" were accurate, however, the conclusions many Anthroposophists draw from their preferred reading would remain false, due in part to a historically naive approach to the text. The notion that authors who endorse intermarriage and "blood mixing" must be antiracist, as numerous Anthroposophists appear to believe, is quite false. Such claims reflect a lack of awareness of basic historical information about the development of racist thought. To choose merely the most obvious counter-example: Arthur Gobineau is often considered the father of racist ideology. His racial theory was based on the interplay between two drives, a "law of attraction" and a "law of repulsion," both of which contributed to either racial advance or racial decline. To simplify somewhat, the idea was that "higher" races properly go around the world conquering and colonizing and mixing their stock with "lower" races, which spreads civilization, but when the "higher" races spread themselves too thin, then racial decline and eventual disaster is certain. In other words, the idea that proponents of intermarriage must be antiracist is completely wrong and a striking instance of historical naiveté.

Finally, one further crucial factor which many Anthroposophists today entirely overlook is that a number of Anthroposophists historically have explicitly opposed intermarriage between different racial and ethnic groups. Indeed several of Steiner's most prominent followers, including leading Anthroposophist race theorists of the first half of the twentieth century, firmly rejected racial intermarriage and "blood mixing," above all Richard Karutz in Germany and Massimo Scaligero in Italy. Their understanding of Steiner on this point was evidently rather different from the one currently popular among Steiner's admirers today. Other Anthroposophists who openly opposed this sort of interracial and inter-ethnic mixing include Karl Heise and Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

— Peter Staudenmaier

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[R. R., 1996.]

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FROM THE NET

Here is a message posted in August, 2009, responding to someone who had 

defended Steiner against charges of anti-Semitism.

I have edited it slightly for inclusion here. 

To see the full message, please go to

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/11614

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For more on the use of the word "nigger" in a Steiner school,

see "N-Word".

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NOTE

For an interesting perspective from a self-described Anthroposophist, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/11090 . The writer, Tom Mellett, disputes the idea that Steiner repudiated his racist teachings late in life. Mellett cites the Steiner lecture, "Color and the Human Races", delivered in 1923, within two years of Steiner's death. He reports that "Color and the Human Races" was suppressed in the English-language edition of the relevant series of lectures, so he calls this the "Forbidden Lecture".

Here is Mellett's translation, from the German edition, of the summary of this lecture. The bracketed explanations are by Mellett:

"Skin color and other characteristics of the black, white, yellow, brown, and copper-red races of humanity. Malayans, Indians ["Indianer"= Native Americans], and Indians ["Inder" = Hindus]. The white population of America. The European proves, [while] the American asserts. The future of American civilization. Anthroposophy must be developed out of the spirit. In Europe anthroposophy is cultivated in a spiritual way; the American cultivates it in a natural way. Spiritism as an American product. On Wilson's theories. The white race is the race of the future, the race of spiritual creativity. On the first chapter of "die Kernpunkte" [Core Points of the Social Question]."

Mellett ends his message by saying:

"I believe this is enough, not only to refute the erroneous belief that Steiner disavowed or repudiated any of his "earlier root race infections" by the dastardly racist doctrines of Helena P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, but more importantly to open a dialogue here about the racial issue today. To me, the censorship of this lecture by the Rudolf Steiner Press in London is prima facie evidence that the editors themselves must acknowledge and admit that Steiner taught root race doctrines as late as 1923."

•••

A note by an American: myself. When Steiner says Americans cultivate Anthroposophy in a natural way, he is alluding to his teachings that material, physical nature is at best an inferior level of reality, below the spiritual level. At worst, nature is a place of maya, Ahriman, lies, and the loss of spirit. Nature spirits, or elemental beings, reside within nature and lack true spirit. Human beings who degenerate may become subordinate nature spirits. Americans, in any case, live in a materialistic culture determined largely by greed. Americans send anti-spiritual forces abroad in the wide world. I discuss (or should I say confess?) these matters elsewhere at this Web site, Waldorf Watch.

 — Roger Rawlings

To walk through the text of a racist lecture by Steiner,

see "Lecture".

To examine the "Forbidden Lecture" — the German text

and my effort at translation — see "Forbidden".

I have also translated an anti-Semitic lecture delivered by Steiner:

"Also Forbidden".

For Steiner's view of America and Americans,

see "America".

APPENDIX

In April, 2009, I had occasion to write a brief summary of Steiner’s racial views. I’ll append it here, although it repeats some of what we have already seen. [RR]

Steiner often contradicted himself. What he said in public was often inconsistent with what he told his followers in less-public circumstances. And what he said in public one day was often different from what he said publicly on other days. Understanding this is crucial to evaluating his statements. Anthroposophists can easily find Steiner quotations that seem to be full of light and love — and they seem to think that these remarks render Steiner's other, nastier comments null and void. But let's do a thought experiment. We meet someone who says, a hundred times, that he is free of racial prejudice. But then we overhear him affirming the stereotype that blacks are primitive, driven by uncontrollable sexual urges, and we hear him endorsing the stereotype that Jews are purely materialistic, and we listen aghast as he asserts that skin color reflects deep inner qualities. He says these appalling things only occasionally, while continuing to announce his racial broadmindedness on other, more numerous occasions. We would, I think, have reason to doubt his claims that he is free of prejudice. Indeed, the only way a bigot of this sort could clear himself would be to say clearly that he has made many racially bigoted statements in the past, and he realizes now that he was wrong to make them, and he now utterly repudiates them. Until/unless he makes such a confession — and makes no further racially slanderous statements thereafter — his attitudes on race would remain, at best, suspect.

So what did Steiner sometimes say, amidst his protestations of virtue? A few example we have seen here before:

"[T]he aspects which pertain to the body and the metabolism are strongly developed in a Negro. He has a strong sexual urge — as people call it — strong instincts. And as, with him, all that comes from the sun — light and heat — really is at the skin's surface, all of his metabolism works as if the sun itself is boiling in his inside. This causes his passions. Within a Negro, cooking is going on all the time; and the cerebellum kindles the fire...." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS ESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1993) p. 55.

"The Jews have a great gift for materialism, but little for recognition of the spiritual world." — Rudolf Steiner, FROM BEETROOT TO BUDDHISM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), p. 59.

"One can only understand history and all of social life, including today's social life, if one pays attention to people's racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS ESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS, p. 52.

One other point, which also has been made here before: Saying that the differences between races must be eliminated is very different from saying that all races are equal. Steiner taught that racial differences are so important and disturbing that the only way for humans to unite would be for such differences to be eliminated. This is utterly different from accepting all races as equally worthy of respect and honor. The person who made the remarks I quoted, above, did not believe in human equality in the present or past — he only held out a hope that we might unite in the future, when our differences are behind us. He did not, however, teach that all humans will be able to move up to that imagined evolutionary stage. He taught that numerous people will fall out of evolution long before the good humans move to their reward. Steiner said that some people are not really human at all: "Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings." — Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), p. 650. Steiner also said that some people who are human will degenerate to a lower condition: "Beings that stay behind at such stages appear in a later epoch as subordinate nature spirits." — Rudolf Steiner, NATURE SPIRITS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1995), p. 70. Even near the end of our future history, there will still be some people incapable of moving up to the ultimate stages of our perfection. Instead, as an "evil race," they will be cast into the abyss. "The evil race, with its savage impulses, will dwell in animal form in the abyss." — Rudolf Steiner, UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN BEING (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993), p. 103.

The overall pattern of human evolution, as Steiner described it, consists of some people moving ahead to higher and higher stages of consciousness, while others (quite often members of nonwhite races, the descendants of abnormal humans) prove themselves incapable of further evolution. "[I]t was the normal human beings that were ... the most capable of evolving. [Abnormal] peoples whose ego impulse was developed too strongly gradually wandered to the West [from Atlantis] and became ... the Red Indians of America. [Likewise, the abnormal] people whose ego-feeling was too little developed migrated to the East, and became the subsequent Negro population of Africa ... [T]hey deposited too many carbonic constituents in their skin and became black. This is why the Negroes are black. Thus both east of Atlantis in the black population and west of Atlantis in the red population we find survivors of the kind of people who had not developed their ego-feeling in a normal way. The human beings who had developed normally lent themselves best to progress." — Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 118-119. The ones who proved capable of evolution are, according to Steiner, white: "On one side we find the black race, which is earthly at most. If it moves to the West, it becomes extinct. We also have the yellow race, which is in the middle between earth and the cosmos. If it moves to the East, it becomes brown, attaches itself too much to the cosmos, and becomes extinct. The white race is the future, the race that is creating spirit." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS ESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS, p. 62.

Here is an item from the Waldorf Watch "news" page:

Here is a collection of quotations posted by Peter Staudenmaier in October, 2011

[http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/21678].

I have trimmed it slightly and added the names of publishing houses, dates of publication, and GA numbers.

"[C]onsider how different the natural abilities, how different the talents of the individual races are. The one race stands at the level of what we call the highest civilization, while the other stands at what appears to be the most primitive, subordinate level of civilization. This may make it seem odd to us that the human being, who after all has a unified nature, can appear in such a different and imperfect form. People often feel that it is an injustice of nature that some are doomed to an existence in a race that stands far below, while others are raised up to an apparently perfect race. ... [H]uman souls proceed through the different races ... [O]ne is not condemned to live only in a primitive race while another stands at the highly developed stages of racial existence. Each of us passes through the different racial stages, and the passage signifies a progressive development for the individual soul. One who appears today as a member of the European race went through different races in earlier times, and will in later times proceed through races other than ours. The races appear to us as steps in a teaching process, and this variety takes on coherence and purpose." — Rudolf Steiner, DIE WELTRÄTSEL UND DIE ANTHROPOSOPHIE (Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1985), GA 54, pp. 132-3. 

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"Each person proceeds through race after race. Those that are young souls incarnate in the races that have remained behind on earlier racial levels. In this way, the races and souls that live around us take on a physical and spiritual structure. Everything makes sense, everything becomes clear and explicable. We are moving closer and closer to the solution of this puzzle and we can realize that in the future we will have other epochs to go through, we will have other paths to follow than the ones made by race. We must be clear about the difference between soul development and racial development. Our own souls once lived within the Atlantean race, and they then developed themselves upward to a higher race. That gives us an image of the evolution of humankind up until our time. In this way we can comprehend how to justify the principle, the core principle of universal brotherhood without regard to race, color, status, and so forth. I will explain this thought in particular later. Today I simply wanted to show how the same essence appears in different forms, and in fact in a much more correct sense than natural science would have us believe. Our souls march from one level to the next, which is to say from one race to the next, and we come to know the meaning of humanity when we examine these races." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid. pp. 153-4. 

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"That is the reason why there were fewer and fewer descendants in the subordinate races and more and more descendants in the higher races. Thus the lowest strata of the European population gradually died out. This is a very definite process which we must understand. The souls evolve further, the bodies die away. We must therefore carefully distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls then appear in bodies that descend from higher races." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid. p. 93.

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"People who listen to the great leaders of humankind, and preserve their soul with its eternal essence, reincarnate in an advanced race; in the same way he who ignores the great teacher, who rejects the great leader of humankind, will always reincarnate in the same race, because he was only able to develop the one form. This is the deeper meaning of Ahasver [the “wandering Jew”], who must always reappear in the same form because he rejected the hand of the greatest leader, Christ. Thus each person has the opportunity to become caught up in the essence of one incarnation, to push away the leader of humankind, or instead to undergo the transformation into higher races, toward ever higher perfection. Races would never become decadent, never decline, if there weren't souls that are unable to move up and unwilling to move up to a higher racial form. Look at the races that have survived from earlier eras: they only exist because some souls could not climb higher." — Rudolf Steiner, DAS HEREINWIRKEN GEISTIGER WESENHEITEN IN DEN MENSCHEN (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984), GA 102, p. 174. 

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"All of you were once Atlanteans [i.e., you lived on Atlantis], and these Atlantean bodies looked very different, as I have already described. The same soul that was once in an Atlantean body somewhere is now in your body. But not all bodies have been prepared, in the way yours have been, by a small number of colonists who long ago migrated from the West to the East. Those who remained behind, who bound themselves up with their race, they degenerated, while the advanced ones founded new civilizations. The last stragglers on the way to the east, the Mongols, still retain something of the culture of the Atlanteans. In the same way, the bodies of those people who do not develop themselves in a progressive fashion will continue into the next era and will constitute the Chinese of the future. There will once again be decadent peoples. After all, the souls that inhabit Chinese bodies are those that will once again have to incarnate in such races, because they had too strong an attraction to that race. The souls that are today within you will later incarnate in bodies that come from people who work in the way I have indicated, and who beget the bodies of the future, just as the first colonists from Atlantis once did. And those who cling to the ordinary, who do not want to join with the movement toward the future, they will become fused with their race. There are people who want to stick to the familiar, who want nothing to do with progress; they refuse to listen to those who lead the way beyond the race to newer and newer forms of humanity." — Rudolf Steiner, MENSCHHEITSENTWICKELUNG UND CHRISTUS-ERKENNTNIS (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981), GA 100, p. 186. 

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"We have before us in the American race [i.e., Native Americans] a primitive aboriginal people that has remained far, far behind [...] But the Europeans have ascended to a higher level of culture, while the Indians have remained behind and become decadent. One must always pay attention to this evolutionary process. It can be described as follows. In the course of millennia our planet transforms itself, and this transformation also demands a development of humankind. Those side branches that no longer fit in to current conditions become decadent. Thus we have an upright evolutionary trunk as well as side branches which decay." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 244.

◊◊◊◊

"[T]he characteristic of the mission of white humanity in general is to carry down the spirit [from the higher worlds], to impregnate the flesh with the spirit. Man has his white skin that the spirit may work in the skin when it descends to the physical plane ... [W]here the spirit has still to work as spirit, where in a certain way it has to stay behind in its development — because in our time it should descend into the flesh — where it stays behind, taking a demonic character and does not completely permeate the flesh, there the white skin does not appear ... [The next evolutionary] epoch must prepare the knowledge of the spirit in the physical environment ... But these things do not enter the world without the most violent struggles. White humanity is still on the way to take the spirit more and more deeply into its own being. Yellow humanity is on the way to conserve that age in which the spirit is held away from the body, is sought purely outside the human physical organisation. This makes it inevitable that the transition from the fifth culture epoch to the sixth will will bring about a violent struggle of the white and yellow races in the most varied domains. What precedes these struggles will occupy world-history up to the decisive events of the great contests between the white world and the coloured world. Future events are reflected in manifold ways in the events that precede. We are standing in fact, viewed in the light of spiritual science, before something colossal that must necessarily come about in the future." — Rudolf Steiner, "The Christ-Impulse as Bearer of the Union of the Spiritual and the Bodily", typescript "For Members of the Anthroposophical Society", translated by M. Cotterell; the original is in Rudolf Steiner, DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1994), GA 174b, pp. 37-38. 

◊◊◊◊

"Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda: a Negro novel, just as the Negroes in general are entering into European civilization step by step! Everywhere Negro dances are being performed, Negro dances are being hopped. But we even have this Negro novel already. It is utterly boring, dreadfully boring, but people devour it. I am personally convinced that if we get more Negro novels, and give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read during the first phase of pregnancy, when as you know they can sometimes develop such cravings, if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read, then it won’t even be necessary for Negroes to come to Europe in order for mulattoes to appear. Simply through the spiritual effects of reading Negro novels, a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!" — Rudolf Steiner, ÜBER GESUNDHEIT UND KRANKHEIT (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1997), GA 348, p. 189.

◊◊◊◊

"One can only understand history and all of social life, including today's social life, if one pays attention to people's racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1961), GA 349, p. 52. 

◊◊◊◊

"We here in Europe call ourselves the white race. If we go over to Asia, we have mostly the yellow race. And if we go over to Africa, there we have the black race. Those are also the original races. Everything else living in these regions is based on migration. Thus when we ask which race belongs to which part of the earth, we must say: the yellow race, the Mongols, the Mongolian race belongs to Asia, the white race or the Caucasian race belongs to Europe, and the black race or the Negro race belongs to Africa. The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., pp. 52-53. 

◊◊◊◊

"Let us look first at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the peculiar characteristic that they absorb all light and all warmth from space. They take it in. And this light and warmth cannot penetrate through the whole body, because after all a person is always a person, even if he is black. It does not penetrate through the whole body, but lingers on the surface of the skin, and the skin itself thus turns black. So a black in Africa is therefore a person who absorbs as much warmth and light as possible from space and assimilates it within himself. In this way the energies of the cosmos affect the whole person. Everywhere he takes in light and warmth, everywhere. He assimilates it inside of himself. There must be something there that helps him in this assimilation. Now you see, what helps him in this assimilation is his rear-brain. In the Negro the rear-brain is therefore especially developed. It goes through his spinal cord. And this is able to assimilate all the light and warmth that are inside a person. Therefore everything connected to the body and the metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as they say, powerful physical drives, powerful instincts. The Negro has a powerful instinctual life. And because he actually has the sun, light, and warmth on his body surface, in his skin, his whole metabolism operates as if he were being cooked inside by the sun. That is where his instinctual life comes from. The Negro is constantly cooking inside, and what feeds this fire is his rear-brain." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 55. 

◊◊◊◊

"Thus it is really very interesting: on the one hand there is the black race, which is the most earthly. When this race goes toward the West, it dies out. Then there is the yellow race, in the middle between the earth and the cosmos. When this race goes toward the East, it turns brown, it attaches itself too much to the cosmos and dies out. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 67. 

◊◊◊◊

"We are within the great Root Race of humanity that has peopled the earth since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race." — Rudolf Steiner, THE TEMPLE LEGEND: Freemasonry and Related Occult Movements (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985), p. 201.

◊◊◊◊

"The ancestors of the Atlanteans lived in a region which has disappeared, the main part of which lay south of contemporary Asia. In theosophical writings they are called the Lemurians. After they had passed through various stages of development the greatest part of them declined. These became stunted men, whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the earth today as so-called savage tribes. Only a small part of Lemurian humanity was capable of further development. From this part the Atlanteans were formed. Later, something similar again took place. The greatest part of the Atlantean population declined, and from a small portion are descended the so-called Aryans who comprise present-day civilized humanity. According to the nomenclature of the science of the spirit, the Lemurians, Atlanteans and Aryans are root races of mankind." — Rudolf Steiner, COSMIC MEMORY: Prehistory of Earth and Man (SteinerBooks, 1987), pp. 45-46. 

◊◊◊◊

"Each root race has physical and mental characteristics which are quite different from those of the preceding one.” For this reason, “there are always populations which show different stages of development living beside each other on earth.” — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 46. 

◊◊◊◊

"The race may fall behind; the community of people may remain backward, but the souls progress beyond the several races. If we wish to form a true conception of this we must say that all the souls now living in bodies in civilized countries were formerly incarnated in Atlantean bodies. A few developed there in the requisite manner, and did not remain in Atlantean bodies. As they had developed further they could become the souls of the bodies which had also progressed further. Only the souls which as souls had remained backward had to take bodies which as bodies had remained at a lower stage. If all the souls had progressed, the backward races would either have decreased very much in population, or the bodies would be occupied by newly incoming souls at a low stage of development. For there are always souls which can inhabit backward bodies. No soul is bound to a backward body if it does not bind itself to it. The relation between soul-development and race-development is preserved to us in a wonderful myth. Let us imagine race following race, civilization following civilization. The soul going through its earth mission in the right way is incarnated in a certain race; it strives upward in this race, and acquires the capacities of this race in order next time to be incarnated in a higher one. Only the souls which sink in the race and do not work out of the physical materiality, are held back in the race by their own weight, as one might say. They appear a second time in the same race and eventually a third time in bodies in similarly formed races. Such souls hold back the bodies of the race." — Rudolf Steiner, THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN (Anthroposophic Press, 1993), p. 80. 

◊◊◊◊

"Look at the colours to be found in Asia, from the Negroes to the yellow races. Hence you have bodies that are sheaths for every possible level of soul, from the completely passive Negro soul entirely given up the outer world of physical existence, to the other levels of passive souls in every possible part of Asia. Various characteristics of the evolution of the Asiatic and African peoples will now be comprehensible to you: they present various combinations of surrender to the environment and the external manifestation of ego-feeling. So fundamentally we have two groups of people representing combinations: those on European soil, forming the root stock of the white population, who had predominantly developed the feeling of personality [...] On the other hand there are those peoples in Asia with passive, self-effacing natures in whom just this passivity expresses itself in the highest degree. This makes the people dreamy, and the etheric body penetrates very deeply into the physical body. That is the fundamental difference between the European and the Asiatic peoples." — Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 120-121.

Raising the possibility of a breakthrough, in 2012 an Anthroposophical publishing house 

released a book that acknowledges the problematic nature of Steiner's racial teachings.

In seeking to explain those teachings, the author sometimes verges on trying to explain them away.

Still, he admits the existence of the teachings, and he recognizes the need to come to terms with them.

The book is RASSISMUS UND GESCHICHTSMETAPHYSIK [RACISM AND METAPHYSICAL HISTORY], 

by Ansgar Martins (Frankfort: Info3, 2012). 

Here are excerpts of a review by historian Peter Staudenmaier. 

[http://waldorfblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/staudenmaier-rezension/]

Ansgar Martins has written a perceptive and provocative book about a topic many prefer to avoid: Rudolf Steiner’s racial teachings, a perennial bone of contention between anthroposophists and their critics. It is a sober and discerning account, by far the best to appear from an anthroposophist publisher, and a noteworthy contribution to the historical literature on Steiner and his movement. The book’s approach is nuanced, complex, and sophisticated, taking heed of the contrasting motifs in Steiner’s thinking about nation and race, what Martins aptly terms “Steiner’s wavering between universalism, individualism, cultural chauvinism, and racist stereotypes” (143). His method combines critique and empathetic comprehension: The task, as Martins sees it, is “to identify the ambivalent strands in [Steiner’s] thinking, and to understand how Steiner came to make racist statements, without forfeiting a critical perspective.” (141)

...Martins quotes dozens of texts and lectures in which Steiner spelled out his racial views, providing admirably clear explanations of the details of Steiner’s claims about racial evolution: External racial characteristics reflect internal spiritual qualities; different racial groups represent different levels of spiritual development; some racial groups carry evolutionary progress forward, while other racial groups are degenerating and devolving; the “white race” (or “Aryan race” or “Caucasian race” or “European peoples”) are “normal” and “the race of the future,” in contrast to the “colored races”; and the fundamental hierarchy of “lower races” and “higher races” as an expression of spiritual regression or advance. These themes, running throughout Steiner’s published work, are given vivid and informed treatment....

Some of the conclusions are bound to be disconcerting even for more open-minded anthroposophists. Martins notes the apologetic tendency of the vaunted ‘Dutch report’ on anthroposophical race doctrines and observes that its focus on legal issues is not especially helpful from a historical perspective (17). He carefully reviews “the full spectrum of antisemitic clichés” in Steiner’s work (29). He is justly harsh on the threadbare rationalizations for Steiner’s racial teachings put forward by prominent anthroposophists like Lorenzo Ravagli, editor of the flagship journal of Waldorf education...

The core of the book is a detailed reconstruction of Steiner’s evolving racial views from his theosophical period onward and his efforts to build these ideas into his overarching system of esoteric teachings. Martins offers a number of insightful interpretive hypotheses. He draws connections, for example, between Steiner’s depiction of the white race as representing the balanced and harmonious contrast to the black and yellow races, who had developed the ‘I’ either too weakly or too strongly, and Steiner’s model of Christ as the balanced and harmonious contrast to Ahriman and Lucifer....

Martins’ book tries to get to the bottom of the central paradox in Steiner’s thinking about race, its combination of racist and universalist strands, its contrasting biological and spiritual poles, simultaneously opposed to one another and intertwined around one another. If the book does not entirely succeed, the fault lies not with Martins’ analysis but with the irreducible contradictions in Steiner’s thought...

...Throughout the book Martins devotes considerable attention to the anti-Jewish strands in Steiner’s thought and the way they intersected with his racial doctrines. But he does not examine Steiner’s repeated invocations of the antisemitic myth of Ahasver, passages which are important to Steiner’s overarching racial theories. And while Martins quotes extensively from Steiner’s 1911 book on The Apocalypse of St. John, he does not cite the passages about a coming “War of All against All” and the emergence of a “race of good” and a contrasting “race of evil.”

More striking, in his discussion of Steiner’s 1915 lecture on “the mission of white humankind” Martins does not quote Steiner’s insistence that “the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch cannot happen in any other way than as a violent battle of white humankind against colored humankind” (Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, 38). These facets of Steiner’s racial teachings merit attention not least because they represent a sharp counterpoint to the model of a gradual disappearance of racial difference....

Martins has undertaken the demanding job of appraising Steiner’s contentious and sometimes rebarbative views on race in a fair and historically responsible manner. His study stands as a rebuke to anthroposophists who continue to ignore this sizeable portion of their own past and its ongoing repercussions in the present. It also offers challenging but fruitful lessons for critics of anthroposophy tempted to simplify Steiner’s teachings on a volatile theme, lessons that can make a difference to historical evaluation of Steiner and his ideas and the activities of his followers. The intricate relationship between the racist features and the cosmopolitan features of Steiner’s esoteric system defies easy elucidation, but it is not hopelessly inscrutable or eternally enigmatic. This book demonstrates that it is possible to make historical sense of what Steiner taught about race and why it matters.

ALSO FORBIDDEN

Another

ENDNOTES

[1] Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS (Verlag Der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, 1961), GA 349, p. 52.

[2] The headmaster may have misrepresented Steiner’s views slightly. A more accurate reading is that, according to Steiner, blacks are childish, Asians are adolescent, whites are adult, and “red Indians” are senescent. See, e.g., Toos Jeurissen, “Waldorf Salad with Aryan Mayonnaise??” www.waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/waldorf_salad.html 

According to Peter Staudenmaier, some scattered racist remarks can be found in Steiner's work before 1900, which is when Steiner became interested in Theosophy. But Steiner's overt, occultist racism emerged in 1904, when Steiner began elaborating the Theosophical concept of root races (primary races of historical epochs; other races branch off from them). Staudenmaier also identifies three distinct phases in Steiner's view of Jews and Judaism: an anti-Semitic period in the 1880s-1890s, a brief philo-Semitic period late in the 1890s and early 1900s, then another anti-Semitic phase from about 1902 onward. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/10511 

[3] The warning was consistent with Steiner's teachings. “[T]his question of race is one that we can never understand until we understand the mysteries of the blood and of the results accruing from the mingling of the blood of different races." — Rudolf Steiner, THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE OF BLOOD (Health Research Books, 1972), p. 13. Steiner asked "How can a negro [sic] or an utterly barbaric savage become civilized?" — Ibid., p. 13. Steiner said the answer depends on blood and whether a race "be on the up- or down-grade of its evolution...." — Ibid., p. 13. Steiner taught that whites are evolving upwardly while other races, having risen as high as they can, degenerate. "The white race is the future, the race that is creating spirit." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS, p. 62. According to Steiner, whites can advance to higher spiritual levels because they are capable of high clairvoyant abilities. But mingling whites' blood with blood from other races would cut off this possibility. "The physical organism of man survives when strange blood comes in contact with strange blood, but clairvoyant power perishes under the influence of this mixing of blood, or exogamy." — Rudolf Steiner, THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE OF BLOOD, p. 42. Exogamy is sexual pairing outside one's own ethnic group, tribe, or race. It is equivalent to miscegenation, one of the prime bugaboos of racists. In sum, Steiner taught that different races have different blood, and this is reflected in the differences between their racial or folk souls. "[T]he blood of mankind is acted upon in a twofold manner; that two races originate, by the blood of mankind being acted upon; on the one side we have that which we call the Mongolian race, on the other that which we may describe as belonging to the Semitic race. That is a great polarity in humanity, and we shall have to trace much that is of immense importance back to this polarity, if we wish to understand the depths of the Folk-souls."  — Rudolf Steiner, THE MISSION OF FOLK SOULS (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., 1929), lecture 6, GA 121. Note the title. Another translation has the very similar title THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS [emphasis added]. 

[4] VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS, p. 62.

(We saw this quotation in the previous endnote; I will repeat it once more before we are finished.)

[5] Rudolf Steiner, DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), GA 174b, p. 38.

[6] Rudolf Steiner, THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN: THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY, Lectures from 1909-1916 (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), p. 75.

[7] Rudolf Steiner, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT (Anthroposophic Press, 1944), p. 149.

[8] Rudolf Steiner, HEALTH AND ILLNESS, Vol. 1 (Anthroposophic Press, 1981), pp. 85-86.

[9] E.g., Rudolf Steiner, COSMIC MEMORY (SteinerBooks, 1987), p. 46.

[10] E.g., Rudolf Steiner, THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005), p. 17.

[11] E.g., Rudolf Steiner, THE CHALLENGE OF OUR TIMES (SteinerBooks, 1979), pp. 207-209. 

[12] Rudolf Steiner, FROM BEETROOT TO BUDDHISM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), p. 59.

Racism doesn't have to be hate-filled. It may be "innocent" — yet deplorable nonetheless. "Everything artistic that approaches humankind divides into two streams; the stream of culture and images and the stream of music and poetry. These two artistic streams are really polar opposites, but there is also a real capacity for synthesis to higher unity precisely because of this polarity. You surely realise that this duality in the artistic realm finds expression even in the world’s evolution of the races ... [E]verything that has arisen from the being of the Greeks in the way most suited to them, in the most exalted sense, has a tendency towards sculpture and images, and all that emanates from the Jewish people tends towards music ... [W]e find these two streams divided, even racially." — Rudolf Steiner, PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS, Foundations of Waldorf Education (Anthroposophic Press, 2000), pp. 31-32.

[13] THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, pp. 108-109.

[14] Rudolf Steiner, THE TEMPLE LEGEND (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997), p. 201.

[15] Rudolf Steiner, COSMIC MEMORY (Garber Communications, 1990), pp. 45-46.

[16] Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 118-119.

[17] THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, p. 75.

[18] Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), pp. 558-559.

[19] Rudolf Steiner, quoted by an investigative commission of the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands, which labeled the quote “unobjectionable.”

[20] Rudolf Steiner, "Die Sehnsucht der Juden nach Palästina," Magazin für Literatur, vol. 66 no. 38, 1897.

[21] Rudolf Steiner, ÜBER GESUNDHEIT UND KRANKHEIT (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1994), GA 348, p. 189.

[22] Rudolf Steiner, READING THE PICTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE (SteinerBooks, 1993), pp. 49-50.

[23] Rudolf Steiner, THE SPIRITUAL FOUNDATION OF MORALITY (SteinerBooks, 1995), p. 30.

[24] Richard Seddon, THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY AND OF THE EARTH AS FORESEEN BY RUDOLF STEINER (The Temple Lodge, 2002), p. 53.

[25] Rudolf Steiner, INVESTIGATIONS IN OCCULTISM SHOWING ITS PRACTICAL VALUE IN DAILY LIFE (Kessinger Publishing, 1996) p. 138 —  reproduction of a 1920 edition. 

The final, parenthetical phrase, "(i.e., bad souls)" was apparently added by the editor, H. Collison.

[26] KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS, pp. 141-142.

[27] Rudolf Steiner, THE SPIRITUAL HIERARCHIES (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p. 92.

[28] Steiner called the third phase of human evolution "Old Moon." We lived on the Moon, then, although the Moon of that time was very different from the Moon we see in the sky today. See "Everything" and "Steiner Static."

[29] Rudolf Steiner, ROSICRUCIAN WISDOM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2000), p. 113.

[30] Ibid., pp 144-145.

[31] Ibid., p. 171.

[32] I develop this argument further in a message I posted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/12185. This is what I wrote:

Here is Steiner's basic defense, in Steiner's own words. It hinges on the doctrine or reincarnation: “As all persons in their different incarnations pass through the various races, therefore, although it may be argued that the European has the advantage over the black and the yellow races, we should not be prejudiced thereby." — Rudolf Steiner, THE MISSION OF FOLK SOULS, lecture 4, GA 121.

What does this amount to? All humans are basically alike, since we incarnate in the various races — we all incarnate in the lower races and, eventually, we may later incarnate in the higher racial forms. So we are all alike, basically. Hence, Steiner's teachings are free of prejudice: Steiner was simply pointing out an objective fact, which is that all good humans move upward, from membership in low races to membership in high races. 

To give a modest example, I am white. Thus, I am almost certainly good. For sure, I am highly evolved. And also for sure, in my previous earthly lives I incarnated in low races, gradually working my way upward in succeeding incarnations until I arrived at my present wonderful whiteness.

No prejudice in any of this, wouldn't you agree?

But I have left out one component in Steiner's racial schema. Good humans evolve upwards. But evil humans move in the opposite direction.

I invite everyone to try a thought experiment: A white is standing next to a black. You've never met either of them, never talked to them, have no information about them except that one is white and one is black. What can you conclude?

According to Steiner, you can know that the white is more highly evolved — spiritually and probably ethically — than the black. People evolve to higher racial forms because they are good. Thus, the white person you see before you is either morally superior to the black or s/he has been morally superior. Perhaps s/he is making moral errors in this life and therefore s/he will slip down a rung or two in the next life — s/he may incarnate in a lower race next time around. Still, even if s/he is morally wobbly just now, s/he is currently superior to any black person in an important sense: S/he occupies a higher level; S/he is a member of a higher race.

Let's take this further. What can you conclude about the black person standing beside the white? Well, s/he is a member of a low race, which means s/he is evil or at least spiritually retarded. According to Steiner, evil people move downward through the races until, in the end, they cease to be human at all. So any black person you see is quite likely an evil soul headed to deeper and deeper levels of depravity OR s/he is a soul that is becoming good but for some reason is far behind in humanity's upward evolutionary march. Perhaps s/he started out in a low race, as we all do; s/he later evolved to higher racial forms; but then s/he became evil and sank to blackness before turning around again and starting to evolve upward again. That's one possibility. Another is that s/he is abnormal in some sense — s/he is spiritually an infant who didn't start evolving until very recently, so she is far behind all the good, mature whites who inhabit the Earth today.

No matter how we cut it, according to Steiner the black is currently lower than the white in an important sense: S/he occupies a lower level; S/he is a member of a lower race.

In sum, you know a lot about the two strangers you see standing side by side. The white is more highly evolved than the black; the black is either evil or s/he spiritually retarded.

Now, ending the thought experiment, ask yourself whether Steiner's views on race are helpful in the real world. What if reincarnation is a crock? What if we are all now living our one and only earthly lives? Then any future epoch of racial harmony is just pie in the sky by and by — it ain't gonna happen. In the real world, here and now, labeling anyone inferior due to race is a permanent judgment: The white is higher, the black is lower, and that's it. Period.

In the real world, in other words, Steiner's views are invidious, discriminatory, prejudicial — they are racist. Presumably Steiner didn't mean to be a racist. Presumably he didn't understand the implications of his own teachings. But that is no excuse. His teachings reek of racism. Period.

[33] Rudolf Steiner, THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1964), pp. 203-207.

This book is often cited by Anthroposophists attempting to justify Steiner's political, social, and racial views.

[34] "Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element.” — Rudolf Steiner, THE CYCLE OF THE YEAR AS BREATHING PROCESS OF THE EARTH (Anthroposophic Press, 1984), p. 68. 

[35] In Steiner's interpretation of Norse myths, the occult significance of blood and race is the responsibility of the high god/archangel Lodur: “Archangels are to be found amongst the companions of Odin: Hönir who gave the power of thought and Lodur who gave that which is intimately connected with race, namely pigmentation and the character of the blood.” — Rudolf Steiner, THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS  (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005), p. 133.