Ethics along the Color Line 9781501717703

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgnents
Introduction
1.History In Black: The Construction Of Black Identity And White Supremacy
2.Does The Reality Of Race Really Matter?
3.Taking Race Into Account
4.Anti-Black Oppression And White Supremacy
5.Races As Families
References
Index

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ETHICS ALONG THE COLOR LINE

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ETHICS ALONG THE COLOR

LINE

ANNA STUBBLEFIELD

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca & London

Copyright © 2005 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2005 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2005 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stubblefield, Anna. Ethics along the color line / Anna Stubblefield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-4267-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8014-8976-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) i. Race awareness—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Blacks—Race identity—United States. 3. Whites—Race identity—United States. I. Title. HTi52i.S78 2005 305.8—dc22

2005010390

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10987654321 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Howard McGary, Jr.

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Philosophy is the interpretation of a people's past for the purpose of solving specific problems presently confronting the cultural way of life from which the people come. . . . Afro-American philosophy is the interpretation of Afro-American history, highlighting the cultural heritage and political struggles, which provides desirable norms that should regulate responses to particular challenges presently confronting Afro-Americans. —Cornel West, "Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience" There was much to cry for, much to mourn, but in my heart I felt exalted knowing there was much to celebrate. Although separated from our languages, our families and customs, we had dared to continue to live. . . . Through the centuries of despair and dislocation, we had been creative, because we faced down death by daring to hope. —Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1 History in Black: The Construction of Black Identity and White Supremacy

21

2 Does the Reality of Race Really Matter?

70

3 Taking Race into Account

90

4 Anti-Black Oppression and White Supremacy

112

5 Races as Families

144

References

179

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGNENTS

F irst and foremost, I must express my profound gratitude to my husband and best friend, Roger Stubblefield. Thank you for your steadfast commitment to my professional development, for putting up with my irritability when I am under stress, for encouraging me when I am discouraged and celebrating with me when things go well. Thank you also for your general skepticism and refusal to endorse my ideas unless I provide you with rigorous proof. I know if I've convinced you that I have a point, I'm making a pretty good argument. Thank you especially for making it possible for me to be both a philosopher and a mother by being an equal partner in raising our children and by stepping in and taking over my share of the responsibilities when work pressures mount. Thank you to my children, Seth and Zoe Stubblefield, for being patient and understanding when "Mom has to work." Being worthy of your love—and your father's—is my highest aspiration in life. Thank you to my parents, Sandra and Douglas McClennen, for raising me well, for being so supportive in so many ways over all these years, and for your hands-on interest in my work, expressed in your willingness to read and make suggestions. Special thanks to Mom for being my best woman friend and for hours and hours of expert copyediting and writing advice on all my work. I can always count on you to talk me through my

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writing dilemmas when I just can't quite figure out exactly how to express what I want to say. This book would not exist without Howard McGary, Jr., to whom it is dedicated. Howard introduced me to Africana philosophy and mentored me through graduate school and beyond. His belief in me has kept me going at crucial moments when I doubted myself. His discreet intervention has provided me with the opportunities necessary to advance my philosophical career, and it is through his efforts that I have been welcomed so warmly into the Africana philosophy community. I'm still not quite sure why you've done so much for me, Howard, but I am eternally grateful. Thank you to Nancy Holmstrom and Pheroze Wadia, who have chaired the philosophy department at Rutgers-Newark during my years here. You have both gone out of your way to provide opportunities for me to produce the quantity and quality of scholarship expected at Rutgers, including this book. You took me seriously as a colleague right from the start, despite my junior status, and have nurtured me, rather than leaving me to sink or swim, as happens to so many junior faculty. Thank you especially to Nancy for mentoring me through these pre-tenure years. I must also express my gratitude to Clem Price, for his encouragement, interventions on my behalf, and feedback on my work. Thank you to all my colleagues at Rutgers-Newark who have been my friends and allies over the past few years. I thank Catherine Rice, formerly of Cornell University Press, for her enthusiasm about this book when she first read my submission and for guiding it expertly through the review process. I thank Sheri Englund for picking up where Catherine left off and for her patience as I have completed revisions. I am grateful to Eric Schramm and Teresa Jesionowski for their helpful editing. Very special acknowledgment must go to my research assistant, Laura Renavitz, a perfectionist in the best sense of the word, for her many hours of hard work and attention to detail. I wish to express my appreciation to the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark and the Bildner Foundation for providing me with release time to work on this book, and to the

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Journal of Social Philosophy for publishing an earlier version of "Races as Families" in Spring 2001 (vol. 32, no. 1). I thank all my colleagues in the Africana philosophy community for their encouragement. I am grateful to Charles Mills, Bill Lawson, Howard McGary, Jr., Jorge Garcia, and Frank Kirkland for reading and commenting extensively on work that became part of this book at various stages in its development. Thanks to members of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy for crucial feedback at an early stage. Thanks to members of the philosophy department at Howard University and participants in the Alain Locke conference series held there. Thank you to Everet Green, Leonard Harris, Lucius Outlaw, Anita Allen, and Lewis Gordon for making me feel welcome. Finally, this book would not be the book it is without the influence of the comments and questions from students in my Africana philosophy courses at Temple University and Rutgers-Newark over the years. Special thanks to Jose Velazquez for his comments.

A.S.

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ETHICS ALONG THE COLOR LINE

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INTRODUCTION

Whalat is race? What role, if any, should race play in our moral obligations to others and to ourselves? These are not traditional questions within European and American philosophy. They are not studied, for example, in typical "Introduction to Philosophy" courses at American universities. If philosophy in the broadest sense, however, is about determining what the world is like and how we ought to live in it, then in American life, past and present, there are few other philosophical questions that rival these in profundity and importance. In this book, I address the question of whether black Americans should take race into account by thinking of each other as members of an extended racial family and basing their treatment of each other on this consideration. I respond to those who argue that we should not take race into account when we decide how to treat other people, because all human beings are members of the human family. I also address the question of whether white Americans should think of each other as members of an extended racial family and base their treatment of each other on this consideration. Many people reject this proposal without further consideration on the grounds that white people treating each other as family is the cause of anti-black oppression and that anyone who would even consider it must be a card-carrying member of the KKK. I argue, however, that thinking of races as families and acting upon that belief is crucial for both

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black Americans and white Americans in combating white supremacy. For both black and white people, treating members of one's race as family, if practiced in accord with responsibilities that I discuss, actually encourages rather than undermines a recognition of the common humanity of all people. Allow me to offer a few words of clarification about (i) what I mean by taking race into account; (2) what I mean by treating people like family; (3) my understanding of "race"; and (4) my conception of "white supremacy." First, instances of people taking race into account fall into two categories. Some people take race into account in discriminatory ways: the employer who hires only white people, the headwaiter who seats a black couple at the table near the kitchen. Alternatively, some people take race into account for the purpose of solidarity, protection from white supremacy, or in celebration of their racial heritage: black faculty and staff at a university who form an organization for networking and support, black parents who choose a school with a predominantly black or racially balanced population because they do not want their children to face being the only black students at an otherwise all-white school, black families who attend black churches, or celebrate Kwanzaa, or participate in "Jack and Jill" clubs. Some people believe that both ways of taking race into account are equally problematic; they believe that people should never think in terms of race. Others believe that taking race into account for discriminatory purposes is wrong, but that taking race into account for purposes of solidarity and celebration of heritage is good. Many people who believe the latter believe that taking race into account for purposes of solidarity and heritage is desirable for black and other non-white people, but not for white people: "Jack and Jill" clubs are desirable, "Daughters of the Confederacy" is not. This suggests a double standard, which I will address in the last chapter. I believe that taking race into account for discriminatory purposes that uphold white supremacy is wrong. I argue that black and other non-white people should take race into account for purposes of solidarity, protection against white supremacy, and celebration of racial heritage. I also believe that white people should take whiteness into account, but in ways that challenge white supremacy. Treating members of one's race as family is a form of taking race into account. Again, some people believe that there is no basis for members of

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the same racial group to treat each other as family, so that doing so is always wrong. Others believe that for black or other non-white people, treating members of one's race as family is an important part of solidarity and protection against white supremacy. Again, there seems to be a double standard here, in which it is acceptable for black people to treat each other as family, but not acceptable for white people to treat each other as family. Suggesting that people treat each other as family does not always or only mean preferential treatment in the sense of favoritism, however. It may also mean concentrating one's energies on people in one's own family, but that might have to do with helping them to be better people, not necessarily with giving them some advantage over people outside the family. Thinking in terms of family also involves recognizing responsibilities that families have as families toward people outside the family. There are ways in which an entire family may be obligated that transcend or determine the obligations of individuals within the family. Third, I cannot stress enough that readers must understand that the racial terminology employed in this book ("black," "white," etc.), while reflecting widespread, contemporary usage in the United States, does not refer to fixed, natural (biologically based) categories of human beings. No one is "white" by nature or "black" by nature. What makes a person count to other people around him in a particular place at a particular time as being of a particular race is a matter of social custom particular to that time and place and its history. Many readers will understand that when I make this claim, I am endorsing the idea that race is a social construction. Far too many people believe erroneously that if race is a social construction, then race is not real. I argue throughout this book that although race is a social construction, it is nonetheless very real. I also argue against the false conclusion that if race is real, it cannot be a social construction. To the contrary, when we carefully consider the ways in which the notion of race is employed and the history of the concept of race, it is clear that race, while very real, is a social construction. For example, a colleague of mine appears "black" by contemporary United States standards for skin color and hair texture. But he was born in Puerto Rico in the 19505, when a law was passed designating all children born there as white. So his birth certificate identifies him as "white." What does that mean for him? Had he tried to marry a "white"

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person prior to the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia that overturned state laws that prevented people of different races from marrying, he could have legally married a "white" person, while a person whose appearance was more "white" but who was legally "black" because of a single great-great-grandparent could not. On the other hand, my colleague is still subject to racial discrimination due to his appearance, but if he tried to sue an employer on the grounds of racial discrimination, they might be able to block his suit by pointing out that, legally, he is "white." He has to deal with the repercussions of the fact that to those people in the United States who consider themselves to be "white" and with whom he interacts on a daily basis, he is not one of them. At the same time, he is not accepted as "one of us" by many who consider themselves to be "black." Because their families have been living in the United States for many generations and speak English as a first or only language, many people who identify themselves as "black" and "American" classify those with Hispanic names from Puerto Rico as "foreigners," despite the fact that since 1917, all people born in Puerto Rico count as United States citizens. Furthermore, the concept of race in the United States has been created, reinforced, and developed over time primarily through legal actions: laws such as those that drew distinctions between slaves (chattel laborers abducted from or descended from people abducted from the African continent) and indentured servants (chattel laborers of European ancestry); laws that drew distinctions between "Negro" and "white" people in regard to voting rights, property ownership, who was permitted to testify against whom in a court of law, and so on; laws that restricted immigration from some parts of the world while favoring immigrants from other parts; and laws that defined who was eligible to be naturalized as a United States citizen. In its very first decree on citizenship following the founding of the United States, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to "white persons," a restriction that remained in force until 1952 (Haney-Lopez, i). In a number of cases, including In re Ah Yup, Ozawa v. United States, and United States v. Thind, members of different groups (in these three cases, Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Indian, respectively) petitioned the courts to count them as "white" by U.S. law and thereby allow them to become

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citizens of the United States, and the decisions reached in these and other cases shaped the legal construction of whiteness (Haney-Lopez, 5-8). As Ian Haney-Lopez argues, the social impact of legal construction is profound and far-reaching for three reasons. First, the legal construction of race has shaped the physical appearance of people in the United States by preventing those from some geographic regions from entering the country, or by allowing them to enter only in small numbers, while encouraging large numbers of immigrants with different physical appearances. Furthermore, by restricting who could marry whom, legal decisions in the United States have somewhat limited (although obviously, due to extramarital births, not precluded) the reproduction of offspring from certain combinations of parents with varying physical features. Second, the legal construction of race has ascribed racialized meanings to physical appearance and ancestry, both reflecting but also shaping "popular" understandings of who counts as what and why. Third, the law trans forms legal understandings of race into material societal conditions that confirm and entrench those understandings. For example, laws that restricted people who counted legally as "black" from owning property prevented them from acquiring wealth and passing it on to future generations, and laws that restricted "black" people to menial occupations prevented them from developing and profiting from their talents; these laws resulted in disproportionate poverty among "black" people and reinforced the equation of blackness with poverty and with a lack of skill and endeavor [my example] (Haney-Lopez, 14-17). It is also important to keep in mind, as Haney-Lopez stresses, that it is not just non-whiteness that has been socially constructed. The concept of "race" has been constructed in the United States in such a way that white people often do not think of themselves as being "raced." This is due to the way .in which the American courts constructed the idea of "whiteness." At no time did any court set forth a complete, freestanding definition of "whiteness." Rather, they created the concept of whiteness over time, through a process of negation in which they established the different ways in which people could fail to be white (Haney-Lopez, 27). This process reified non-white identities while rendering whiteness itself invisible. Moreover, it made non-white identities seem monolithic, so that all "Asian" or "black" or "American Indian" people came to be thought of

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by others as essentially the same, rather than as people who, even if they share the same racial designation, come from or have parents or ancestors from varying parts of the world, speak different languages, grow up with different cultures in their homes or neighborhoods, and so on. It has also meant that people with racial designations that have been constructed as "foreign" ("Asian" or "Latino" people, for example) are not perceived by many other Americans as "true" Americans, even if their families have lived in the United States for generations, served the country in times of war, paid taxes, and contributed to the economy. Furthermore, because "whiteness" has meant better treatment under the law, the process of excluding group after group from "whiteness" was at the same time a process of establishing those who were "not white" as inferior, while those whose "whiteness" was upheld by the rulings were established as superior (Haney-Lopez, 28). This leads to my fourth point of clarification, which concerns my definition of the term "white supremacy." I argue in this book that the United States is a "white supremacist" society. A white supremacist culture is one in which whiteness is normal, the standard against which other ways of being are evaluated. Thus, to people who hold white supremacist beliefs (whether they are fully aware of them or not), white people are normal: everyone else is deviant. White culture is definitive: other cultural forms are primitive. White appearance defines normal beauty: different hair or different skin color is ugly, or frightening, or exotic. White perspectives, white "worldviews," are correct: alternative perspectives, particularly those that critique the white perspective, are baseless, reactionary, wrong. People of all races can be white supremacists, and within a white supremacist culture, upholding white supremacy (a common phrase is "assimilating to white supremacy," meaning "going along with or living one's life in accord with the values of white supremacy") is usually (although not consistently) rewarded. More to the point, perhaps, in a white supremacist culture, challenging white supremacy is always punished in some way or another. People can uphold white supremacy without ever intentionally or explicitly harming non-white people, which is part of the reason why white supremacy is so intractable. In particular, to be white in a white supremacist society is to be constantly reassured that, whatever else

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might be wrong with you (your gender, your economic class, your sexual orientation, your disability), you are a good person insofar as you are white. Even people who look out from their whiteness and see that discrimination against non-white people causes harm may still accept whiteness as normality. As Maria Lugones observes, even when well-meaning white parents try to teach their children not to be racist, they often tell their children that "black children are just like you." Lugones asks, however, why they do not say "you are just like them" (Lugones, 41). White people who believe that "common humanity" should be extended from white people to all people are still establishing themselves as the standard of normality. Contributors to the struggle for black emancipation in the United States, from David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Maria Stewart to Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. Ella Baker, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and Charles Hamilton, to Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Patricia Williams, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks (to name just a few), have wrestled with the question of whether we should take race into account when we decide how to treat other people. The earliest black liberation leaders fought against white politicians, scientists, religious leaders, and academicians who spread the myth that there is a substantial biological basis for racial classification. Black liberation leaders have fought against the myth that the genes that determine skin color, hair texture, and facial features also determine intelligence and virtue. Throughout the struggle for black liberation, however, these thinkers have also affirmed and reaffirmed that one's race nonetheless significantly influences the outcome of one's life in the United States and that solidarity based on strong black identification is crucial for the success of black struggle against oppression. This duality bears close examination. It is tempting to decide either that there is no such thing as "race," because it is not a natural classification, and so to resist racial identification, or to decide that "race" really is an unquestionable, natural way of classifying people so as to move without further ado to calls for racial solidarity. Either move is too quick. At the same time, however, to get caught endlessly within debates about the duality is also to evade and postpone action. I have endeavored,

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therefore, to keep this book short and to the point in order to help resolve the paradox so that we can proceed toward the goal of ending white supremacy. An idea that has surfaced repeatedly within debates about taking race into account is that "races are like families/7 Alexander Crummell used this analogy, as did W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. The language of "brothers and sisters/7 used since the time of enslavement within African American communities and central to the civil rights and Black Power movements, reflects this way of thinking. Those who emphasize the mythical nature and socially constructed origins of the concept of "race,77 however, are quick to dismiss the "races as families77 analogy, to argue that races are not, in fact, anything like families. I argue that the "races as families'7 analogy is powerful and useful but needs to be developed carefully. It is important to recognize that the analogy can be used descriptively or prescriptively. To use it descriptively means that we are saying that there is something called "race77 and something called "family77 and that they are similar in ways that help to show what "race77 really is. To use the analogy prescriptively is to say that when we think of "race,77 we ought to think of it as being like family, that thinking of "races as families77 shows us what we should do in regard to race. Description involves saying what something is. Prescription involves saying what it ought to be. In this book, I argue that thinking prescriptively of races as families is helpful for the purpose of combating white supremacy. Prescriptive use of the analogy requires considering what is the ideal model of family on which we ought to base thinking of race in terms of family. One of the limitations of previous uses of the analogy is that those invoking it used the word "family77 without defining it. Some models of the family are more useful than others, however, and I will suggest and defend a particular model. Thinking of races as families in the right way helps us to understand our racial obligations and commitments. It helps us to see what needs to be done to overthrow white supremacy. Those who have criticized taking race into account argue that the appropriate default in moral reasoning is strict impartiality in regard to characteristics over which we have no control. That is, they believe that we should never take factors over which people have no control into

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account when we decide how to treat them, unless there is a very strong, special reason to do so. They argue that taking race into account violates that principle. Those who have advocated taking race into account for the purpose of combating white supremacy have all too often accepted the same premise, but have argued that the deviation from strict impartiality in the case of race can be justified when the end is the elimination of antiblack oppression. This needlessly puts them on the defensive. I argue that "family" has been generally accepted as a special category in eurocentric ethics: the rules of impartiality that apply to those outside one's family do not apply in the case of family members. If racial identity is analogous to family identity in the relevant way, as I argue it is, then taking race into account should not have to be justified as a deviation. It is prima facie acceptable, as long as it does not cause "harm" (which I will define). The important question about taking race into account is whether it can be done in a way that is socially responsible. I argue that this is possible and delineate the responsibilities involved. I also look at some different issues that arise in the particular cases of black identity and white identity. In the case of black identity, one particular problem is how to encourage black solidarity without internal pressures for all black people to be the same or think the same. Basing the idea of black people as a family on an ideal model of the family in which members respect the intersectionality of each others' various social identities allows for black solidarity without the internal pressures of a homogenous identity. In the case of white identity, the problem is that white people thinking of themselves as family and treating each other with partiality in comparison with how they treat black people is a significant contribution to anti-black oppression. In order to combat white supremacy, white people should continue to think of themselves as members of a family, but in ethically appropriate, responsible ways (which I will define). Well-intentioned white people who repudiate white identity, who do not acknowledge their connection to and responsibility for those members of the white family who continue in racist practice and belief, are not helping to end white supremacy. Thinking of races as families is the best way to craft both an ethics of white identification that advances the cause of black liberation and an ethics of black identification that reinforces solidarity while avoiding forced homogenization.

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Overview This book follows the traditional formula of a critical first half in which I examine an existing debate and discuss where it goes wrong, followed by a constructive second half in which I suggest an approach that avoids the problems that I have criticized. I begin with the debates between Lucius Outlaw and Anthony Appiah from the early 19905 about taking race into account in our moral reasoning. Both Outlaw and Appiah are academic philosophers, trained in and working with the methodologies taught as philosophy within the eurocentric academic tradition. There are many versions of the debate over taking race into account within the black American intellectual tradition. I focus on Outlaw and Appiah's debate because their version emphasizes the issues I wish to scrutinize. The issues they raise are reflective of similar debates made in other frameworks and forums, so I write with the hope that what I say about their debate will be useful for analyzing similar debates made in other intellectual, social, and political contexts. Appiah argues that "race" is not real, because it is based on biological notions that have been demonstrated to be defunct. It is a classification invented by humans, unjustifiable in genetic terms, and therefore mythological. He also argues that taking race into account in our moral reasoning is a deviation from the requirement of moral impartiality and is thus highly suspect. Outlaw, on the other hand, believes that even if racial classification is not warranted by genetics, it is nonetheless real, reflecting historical social constructions and reinforced by people's choices about reproduction and community. He argues that within societies that have emphasized race, racial identity is a central part of each person's self-conception as well as determinative of life chances. Race, according to Outlaw, should be taken into account in our moral reasoning. Notice that in both these descriptions, I refrain from saying "therefore." Most people read Appiah as arguing that "race is not real; therefore we should not take race into account in our moral reasoning." Most people read Outlaw as arguing that "race is central to self-conception and determinative of life chances in societies that emphasize race; therefore we should take race into account in our moral reasoning." These interpretations have led philosophers to conclude that the primary concern in the

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debate between Appiah and Outlaw is the ontology of race—whether "race" is real or not and what the word "race" really means. I argue that reading the Appiah/Outlaw debate as primarily an ontological debate is wrong, however. On the contrary, Appiah's and Outlaw's respective positions on the morality of taking race into account are prior to and more fundamental than their respective positions on the ontology of race. Even if they were convinced to abandon their ontological beliefs about race, they would still maintain their moral positions. Why is this distinction important? Why does it matter which of their beliefs—the ontological belief or the moral belief—comes first? There are two reasons. First, because the question of whether or not to take race into account has stalled at the ontological level: academic philosophers and other thinkers within the black intellectual tradition end up going around and around on the question of what race is and whether it is real and never get to the heart of the matter, which is the moral question. If we are going to progress toward the elimination of white supremacy, we cannot afford to get hung up on the ontological question. The second reason why the distinction is important is that there is yet a prior issue in the debate that needs to be revealed. Behind the moral con cerns that are behind the ontological arguments are prior assumptions about the nature of anti-black oppression. The most basic distinction between Appiah and Outlaw is in their respective understandings of antiblack oppression. If, as I argue, this debate is really a debate about how to address the problem of anti-black oppression, it is not the case that they have different approaches to addressing the same problem. Rather, they have different conceptions of the problem itself. Furthermore, once we reach this level of analysis, it becomes apparent that neither Outlaw nor Appiah is working with an adequately developed conception of anti-black oppression. At the core of their reasoning, both are relying upon undefended assumptions about the nature of anti-black oppression. So here is where the starting point really needs to be located. We need a defensible understanding of anti-black oppression, so that we know what we are struggling against. We need an ethics that provides a way to carry out that struggle. As part of this, we need an understanding of what race is, but not merely a descriptive understanding. We need a

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defensible prescriptive conception of race that helps us to understand anti-black oppression and that allows for the construction of an ethical approach that will be useful in combating anti-black oppression. My project in this book is, therefore, a pragmatic project. My intent is not to develop a "grand theory" of race, an account that would say what race is and how we ought to think about it in all contexts and for all purposes. I doubt such a theory would be possible, given how context-sensitive and dynamic the concept of race is. Even if such a theory were possible, however, I would not attempt it. I prefer a more practical approach. As Iris Young argues, describing her similar approach to theorizing gender: By being "pragmatic" I mean categorizing, explaining, developing accounts and arguments that are tied to specific practical and political problems, where the purpose of the theoretical activity is clearly related to those problems. Pragmatic theorizing in this sense is not necessarily any less complex or sophisticated than totalizing theory, but rather it is driven by some problem that has ultimate practical importance and is not concerned to give an account of a whole. (Young 1997,17) Furthermore, although the specific practical problem that drives my work in this book is the problem of white supremacy and its relation to anti-black oppression, it is important to keep in mind the need to simultaneously struggle against all other forms of oppression. Ultimately, we cannot end anti-black oppression without ending class oppression, gender oppression, disability oppression, sexual oppression, and so on. There are two equally important reasons why this is the case. One is that black people are also workers, women, people with disabilities, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people, and so on. To suggest that "black liberation" should mean only the emancipation of black people from specifically anti-black oppression, while failing to attend to the other forms of oppression that many black people experience, is disingenuous. The other reason is that the hierarchies on which all forms of oppression in our society are based are theoretically linked: the notion of human hierarchies, of some humans as better than others, of some as destined to

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serve others, of some as more important, more special, more central, more normal than others, is the pre-condition for all forms of human oppression. Until we recognize this clearly, we cannot end any of them. The preservation of any hierarchy is the preservation of hierarchy itself: we must eliminate all hierarchization of human beings in order to end oppression of any particular form. Attending to any one form of oppression in a way that excludes or makes impossible attending to the rest is ultimately self-defeating. At the same time, however, we need to understand the particularities of each form of oppression if we are to defeat them all. I have tried to carry out my work on anti-black oppression in a way that meets the latter goal while also meeting the former. Finally, some theorists have challenged the "black-white paradigm": ways of theorizing race that make blackness and whiteness definitive while ignoring or insufficiently acknowledging the particularities of other racial and ethnic identities. It is not within the scope of this book for me to engage the interesting theoretical questions raised by this challenge, so I will simply say a few words in defense of my approach in this book. This book grew out of my interest in and work on issues of the relation between white supremacy and anti-black oppression in the United States, and, in keeping with my argument that it is important to attend to the particularities of each form of oppression, I have chosen to concentrate exclusively on that. I hope that the approach I use here will inspire others to undertake similar explorations of other forms of racial oppression, as I may do myself in the future. Some very good work of this sort concentrating on different races and ethnicities is already available, and the more, the better. Looking at how racial oppression plays out in a variety of situations is crucial to the construction of a foundation upon which comparative and intersectional studies of these issues can be built.

Outline of the Chapters My purpose in writing this book is threefold: to make a contribution to ongoing debates within Africana philosophy, to create a resource for teaching Africana philosophy, and to produce a work of philosophy about an issue that has widespread social and political implications. Although

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these are not incompatible aims, readers with different backgrounds and interests may find it best to approach the book slightly differently, and so, following the summaries of the chapters below, I offer suggestions for reading order. The first chapter is a black-centered history of the construction of "blackness" and "whiteness" in the United States. In this chapter, I describe the ways in which the wealthy elites who ultimately constructed themselves as "white" have used the concept of race to justify the massacre, enslavement, and exploitation of people who they came to construct as "black." At the same time, these elites have effectively struck political bargains with other workers in which the latter were offered the status of "whiteness" in exchange for their tacit agreement to refrain from thoroughly challenging the capitalistic structures that maintained the dominance of the wealthy elites. One of the most significant ways in which the concept of race has been used by white elites has been to put a spin on history, whitewashing it in order to deceive present and future generations about the extent of the horrors carried out. Thus, European elites depict themselves within eurocentric history as geniuses—great rulers and discoverers—who singlehandedly pulled themselves out of the dark ages and, through their talent and hard work, became the most powerful people in the world. They conveniently leave out the crucial scientific, technological, and political advances of the great African civilizations, to which ancient Greece (which Europeans consider "the cradle of Western civilization") owed so much. They fail to give credit to the Moors of North Africa, who built libraries in Spain during their occupation that were repositories for the knowledge of Africa and the Middle East as well as the ancient Mediterranean cultures, libraries that provided the means out of the Middle Ages for the rest of Europe. (I learned as a child and adolescent only that the Europeans "rediscovered" the science and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, not that people from the African continent, people we would now consider "black," were responsible for bringing it to Europe and preserving it.) European elites depict themselves as the first great navigators, burying the evidence that people from the African continent sailed to South America and China well before the Common Era. Eurocentric history does not teach that the wealth required for the development of capitalism was stolen first from the Middle East

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during the Crusades and then from Africa and South America beginning around the fifteenth century, nor that the enslavement and sale of peoples of South America and Africa was a necessary source of wealth as Europe strove to dominate the rest of the world. Furthermore, eurocentric history fails to inform us that many African cities at the time that Europeans began to abduct and enslave people from the African continent surpassed the technology and standards of Europe, that their citizens were captured off city streets and forced into ships at the docks of beautiful and bustling ports. Eurocentric history does not hold Europeans accountable for the death of millions upon millions of people from the Americas and millions upon millions of people from Africa. Through all this history, beginning at the end of the fourteenth century, the concept of race has been used to uphold a conception of Europeans as progressive giants of intellect and discernment and everyone else as unremittingly primitive. When we turn to the history of the United States, with the whitewash peeled off, we learn that the North American colonists would not have survived without the assistance of the numerous people already living here, whom they intentionally decimated with diseases brought from Europe and massacred, from whom they then stole the land, which they could make productive and profitable only by bringing in millions of enslaved people from the African continent. The incredible riches that make the United States the wealthiest nation in the world today—bearing in mind that 10 percent of the population of the United States owns 85 percent of that wealth (Draffan, i)—were made off the backs and lives of black Americans, on land stolen from the original inhabitants. The elites who have thereby profited have sold working class white people on the rhetoric of racial superiority, convinced them that individual hard work at ridiculously low wages is the means to economic success and that poverty bespeaks a lack of effort and intelligence rather than policies created by and for the elites. I include this chapter because grasping even the tip of the iceberg of how the concept of race has operated and the harm it has been used to justify is crucial to understanding white supremacy as it continues in contemporary American life. Understanding at least a bit of the history of Africa, South America, Europe, and North America is crucial to

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understanding the importance of black liberation in the United States. Understanding the struggle for black American liberation is crucial to understanding the terms of the debate over taking race into account in our moral reasoning and its importance. I turn to the debate over taking race into account in Chapter 2, where I examine the details as they have played out between Appiah and Outlaw. I conclude, as described above, that interpreting this debate as ontological—a debate about the nature and reality of race—distracts us from attending to the more crucial prior moral assumptions made by both Appiah and Outlaw. In Chapter 3, I explore the debate as a specifically moral debate. First, I discuss the assumption within eurocentric philosophy that strict impartiality in moral reasoning is the appropriate default. I argue that this puts people who want to take race into account for the purpose of fighting anti-black oppression on the defensive. They should not accept strict impartiality as the terms of the debate. In the latter half of Chapter 3,1 look at the different understandings of anti-black oppression operating in Appiah's and Outlaw's arguments. I show how they reflect the different understandings of anti-black oppression held by integrationists and black separatists within black American intellectual and political traditions. I argue that one's conception of the problem determines one's approach to solving it, and I show how the difference in Appiah's and Outlaw's moral arguments reflects their different understandings of anti-black oppression. I also argue that neither Appiah nor Outlaw is working with a well-developed theory of antiblack oppression. In Chapter 4, I introduce my theory of anti-black oppression. First, I discuss what it means to define race as a social construction, because within philosophical writing on race, those who argue that race is a social construction have tended to stop short of saying what that really means: it has been more a case of saying what race is not, and then "social construction" is what is left over. I argue that to be a particular "race" (for example, to be "black" or "white") is to occupy a social location in which people pressure you to behave in accordance with "social norms" (expectations) that are specific to your "race" (keeping in mind that "races" are not natural, fixed properties of people). I argue that a society is white supremacist and therefore oppressive to black people if

INTRODUCTION

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most of the people in positions of social power over black people in that environment (teachers, employers, government representatives, for example) "stigmatize" black people: perceive black people as inferior in comparison with "normal" people (in U.S. society, "normal" people means white people) and expect black people to behave deviantly. Fur thermore, I argue that black people cannot change the attitudes and behaviors of stigmatizers simply by proving to them that black people are not deviant. I argue that a crucial aspect of stigmatization (one not explored by Glenn Loury, who has also written about stigmatization as a way of theorizing anti-black oppression) is that people who stigmatize others resent being proved wrong. White people who stigmatize black people are more likely to censure black people for defying their expectations than they are to applaud and reward black people for proving themselves equal or superior to white people. Finally, I argue that white supremacy is so entrenched in our society because the social norms that most white people hold for each other pressure them to stigmatize black people. A "good" white person in American society, one who lives up to the expectations of most other white people, perceives and treats black people as inferior and deviant. In Chapter 5, I return to the question of whether or not we should grant ethical significance to race. First, I argue that given the centrality of white supremacy in American culture, black solidarity is crucial for black liberation and for supporting black people until that day when white supremacy is laid to rest. I do not make this argument as a justification for taking race into account, however. As I proceed to argue, taking race into account is prima facie morally acceptable. It is not morally deviant and does not require special justification. Rather, what is important is to delineate the responsibilities involved in taking race into account. Here, I argue that the best way to approach this question is to think of races as families, look at the responsibilities entailed by an ideal family, and apply these to taking race into account. Finally, because the principal objection to thinking of races as families is often the argument that white people should not think of themselves as a family, that this is paradigmatically white supremacist, I argue to the contrary that it is crucial for white people to recognize themselves as a family if they are to bring an end to white supremacy.

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After completing Chapter i on the history of "blackness" and "whiteness" in the United States, readers may wish to approach the rest of the book differently, depending on their reasons for reading it in the first place. Philosophers and scholars who study race should read the chapters in order. Those teaching undergraduate courses that cover the Appiah and Outlaw debate may find Chapters 2 and 3 useful. Appiah's and Outlaw's approaches to philosophizing, as well as their writing styles, are very sophisticated, making them rich and nuanced reading for trained philosophers but frustrating for most undergraduates. Readers who find theoretical work overly abstract should skip Chapter 2 and the first half of Chapter 3, although I hope they will return to these sections after finishing the rest of the book. They should begin reading again in the middle of Chapter 3, where I discuss the differing ways in which integrationists and black separatists understand anti-black oppression. This serves as a preamble to my discussion of white supremacy and the importance of taking race into account in Chapters 4 and 5. If the reader feels that he is slogging a bit even in the second half of Chapter 3, however, he may want to jump ahead to Chapter 4.

Why Philosophy?

I come to the issues addressed in this book as a scholar trained in the eurocentric philosophical framework that defines philosophy as an academic discipline within the universities of the United States. I was fortunate as a graduate student to study with Howard McGary, one of the leaders of a movement in academic philosophy to combine the questions long studied in the black intellectual tradition with the methodologies of academic philosophy in the United States. This movement, which challenges traditional conceptions of academic philosophy as to what questions are important to study, has led to the development of what is now called Africana philosophy, encompassing work in African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African philosophy. Furthermore, because great black intellectuals who did not think of themselves and were not employed as academic philosophers carried out so much important work on these questions, engaging the questions within academic philosophical

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frameworks has led to a retrospective canon creation. Scholars such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois are now read and taught by Africana philosophers qua philosophers, although they are still not accepted as philosophers within eurocentric philosophy canons. It is important, however, to acknowledge the artificiality of distinctions between academic disciplines in the universities of the United States. The academic disciplines as they are currently defined are contingent, reflecting particular histories and social agendas that have themselves been shaped by issues of class, race, gender, and so on. My purpose in explanation here is to position myself. I take what I am doing to be a contribution to black studies as well as to philosophy, but I come to black studies through academic philosophy, in particular through analytic philosophy. The approaches I use are those I learned in my analytic philosophy training, although modified enough, due to the demands of the subject matter, that at least some of my colleagues in analytic philosophy might object that I am no longer doing "real" philosophy Meanwhile, some or many of my colleagues in black studies may object that my approach is too grounded in eurocentric philosophical methods. Analytic philosophical methods, despite their eurocentric origins, are nonetheless very useful in approaching questions traditionally addressed within the black intellectual tradition. Analytic philosophy's focus on conceptual analysis (understanding what we mean when we use certain terms) and careful attention to rules of logic and sound argumentation can heighten our understanding of the nuances of traditional black studies debates, help us to think through problems raised by differing or controversial usage of racial terminology, and help us to see where theorists are relying on unsupported assumptions or are employing brilliant argumentation. Furthermore, over the years that I have been writing this book, it has moved from being entirely a work of Africana philosophy to including some material that might be called "philosophy of whiteness." Charles Mills has argued that white academic philosophers in the eurocentric tradition have simply taken their whiteness and the "theoretical whiteness" of eurocentric philosophy for granted (Mills 1998, 2-6, 9-10). The white ness of philosophy has been explored and critiqued by philosophers working from a consciously black perspective, and eurocentric philosophy methods have been used by Africana philosophers to explore issues

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of importance within the black American intellectual and political tradition. What remains to be done, however, is to use insights drawn from Africana philosophy, black studies, and eurocentric philosophy together to think about the nature and ethics of whiteness as a means of examining philosophically the role that white people play in maintaining white supremacy and what they must do to end it.

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HISTORY IN BLACK THE CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK IDENTITY AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Whlen e I began writing this book, I was not planning to include a chapter on the construction of black racial identity and white supremacy in the United States. Upon reading Lawrence Blum's book "I'm Not a Racist, But . . . ," however, I was struck by the way in which his understanding of the history of racial construction clearly shapes his philosophical thinking on how to define the concept of "racism." I began to reflect on my own beliefs about the history of racial construction in Europe and the United States over the past 500 years and to become aware of the extent to which my philosophy of race is based on my historical beliefs. Thus, for readers to understand where I am coming from, so to speak, they need exposure to my understanding of history. They may then find that they agree with my version of history and my philosophical conclusions, or that they agree with my version of history but not my philosophical conclusions (or vice versa), or that they agree with neither. I am not a historian. I have pulled together information from readily accessible and generally creditable sources. Much of the material in this chapter is controversial in the sense that it contradicts the history often taught in public schools or spread through the mainstream media, but it is not controversial to historians. I have stayed away from material that is more controversial, even (or maybe especially) when it is material that I suspect is correct.

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As noted in the introduction, although I use terms like "black" and "white" throughout this chapter, I do not take these to be fixed, natural categories. I employ them in the context of discussing how they came to have the meanings they currently have in the United States. There is much more to be said about the construction of black racial identity and white supremacy than I has been able to include in this chapter, and I refer readers to the work of Ian Haney-Lopez, F. James Davis, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and Theodore Allen, among others, for more depth and detail. Moreover, the construction of racial identities other than black and white have been a crucial part of this history, but to include these aspects of the history of race would shift the entire enterprise. Finally, my main purpose in this chapter is to give readers an impression of what people who came to be considered black have faced in this country and what they continue to face today. I have tried to help readers appreciate how the concept of "whiteness" has been constructed through laws and policies that marked off whiteness as separate from and better than blackness and other non-white identities by extending protection of social and political rights to people who were allowed to count as white at the expense of the rights of people who were constructed as non-white. In particular, I am concerned with the material impact that the development of notions of race has had on the lives of people who came to be understood as white and black. I do not believe that the history of race is primarily a history of ideas. Rather, I am concerned with the ways in which ideas about race were put into practice and even more with the ways that practices shaped the formation of racial ideas. Although a full argument is not within the scope of this book, I do not believe that antiblack oppression reduces to being fundamentally a manifestation or result of class oppression within the development of the present capitalistic economic system in the United States. To the contrary, I believe that capitalism developed the way it did in large measure because of the development of notions of race and racially discriminatory practice. But we also cannot adequately understand racial oppression without understanding capitalistic oppression. Because I am cramming an entire history of more than 500 years into one chapter, I could not include everything I wanted. Undoubtedly, I have left out aspects of black history in the United States that many readers

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believe are crucial. Furthermore, given that my focus is on anti-black oppression, I also could not attend to other forms of oppression as much as I would have liked. Although this is primarily a chapter about the construction of black racial identity in the United States and the continuation of white supremacy in contemporary American life, I begin with ancient times. The basis of white supremacy is the master narrative that depicts Europeans as progressive and the peoples of Africa as primitive, so to tell history properly, it is important to show that the master narrative is wrong.

Ancient Times The African historian Cheikh Anta Diop dates the beginning of Egyptian civilization to about 17,000 B.C.E. (Diop, 22). Peoples of Africa domesticated animals and developed agriculture by 7,000 B.C.E. (J. Harris, 32-35). The Egyptians developed a calendar in 4241 B.C.E., and their culture included musical instruments, furniture, jewelry, and art, as well as science and technology such as architecture, astronomy, and mathematics (Du Bois 1971, 101-105). Other ancient African civilizations included Nubia, Kush, and Axum. Nubia, located in the region now known as the Sudan, with bustling ports on the Red Sea, attracted travelers from Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The kingdom of Kush, located on the Blue Nile in the interior of the African continent, was an urban, materially advanced, and literate society that also attracted international visitors. Axum, in ancient Ethiopia, brought together people from Egypt, the eastern Roman Empire, Persia, and India. The Ethiopians developed a written language, were skilled architects and builders, and produced bronze, silver, and gold currency (J. Harris, 39-46). The ancient Greeks acknowledged Egyptian civilization as the source of ideas and knowledge that modern Europeans have attributed to ancient Greece: geometry, the solar calendar, sculpture, medicine (including setting bones, removing tumors, and stitching wounds), astronomy, and democratic approaches to government (Poe, 97-105). Yet too often, scholars and others continue to portray ancient Greece, rather than Egypt, as the "cradle of Western civilization." Furthermore, those with a typical

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European or American history education learn only about the Europeans who made worldwide sailing voyages, the voyages of "discovery" of the "New World/' not about the people from Africa who traversed the same oceans thousands of years earlier. By 1500 B.C.E., Egyptian ships roamed the globe. The descendants of people from Africa lived on the eastern coast of South America for hundreds of years and interacted with the Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations of Mexico and Central America as far back as 2700 years ago. People from Africa traveled to China as early as 206 B.C.E. (Poe, 241-253; Van Sertima, 23-24,148-157; J. Harris, 92).

Medieval Times The fall of the Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages of Europe. Cut off from the intellectual and economic resources of Africa and the Middle East, Europe was doomed to over 500 years of squalor. Filth, disease, starvation, violence, and almost total illiteracy were the standards of life, while "nobles" fought with each other and with the Catholic Church, and plagues swept across the continent every few years killing as much as 75 percent of the population at a time. Witch-hunts and executions were so popular that in many towns a third of the population was accused of witchcraft within any year and a tenth executed for it (Stannard, 57-61). Meanwhile, the civilizations of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai flourished in West Africa, and the civilization of Zimbabwe thrived on the eastern coast of the African continent, where the ruins of its enormous medieval stone walls still stand (J. Harris, 70; see also Davidson 1959). In the mid7005, the Moors of North Africa occupied the Iberian peninsula (now Spain and Portugal). Although medieval Spain was as primitive as the rest of Europe when the Moors first arrived, within 200 years they transformed the region into a bastion of culture, commerce, and beauty (Burke 1985, 32-38). The European elites, led by the Catholic Church, coveted the wealth of the African and Islamic world. By the late eleventh century they were driving the Moors from Spain. The first Crusade, made up of 15,000 Europeans, departed for Constantinople and Palestine in 1096, plundering and burning towns and cities throughout Hungary and Bulgaria along the

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way, raping and slaughtering the residents. Upon reaching Constantinople, they were patiently and kindly received by Emperor Alexius, but rewarded his welcome by pillaging and looting the surrounding countryside, even butchering Christian Greeks. The Turks had no choice but to swiftly repel the invasion (J. Williams, 34-35). Europeans continued to wage crusades for the next 200 years, however, until Palestine was definitively conquered by the Turks in 1291. The Europeans were driven back to the north soon thereafter by the Ottomans (J. Williams, 35). Although the Europeans were defeated time and again by the Turks, they nonetheless amassed tremendous wealth from plunder. They also developed a taste for the finer culture of Africa and the Middle East, including spices, furnishings such as carpeting and sofas, and beautiful fabrics. When Europeans drove the Moors from Toledo in 1105, they discovered in its libraries works by Arab, African, Greek, and Roman scholars. Exposure to the knowledge of math, logic, science, and medicine contained therein, as well as to philosophical approaches other than that of the Catholic Church, was the necessary foundation for the European renaissance that would not fully develop until a few centuries later (Burke 1978). By the fifteenth century, Europeans had launched a new assault on Africa, funded by the wealth they had stolen from the Middle East during the Crusades. Their success came from using the science and technology they had learned from the people of these lands against them, including shipbuilding, navigation sciences, and gunpowder (Arab and African people had known about the substance for centuries, as had the Chinese, but did not employ it as a weapon). Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish invaders began to occupy North and West Africa. Their motivation was the gold, diamonds, and other natural resources of the continent, and they did not hesitate in slaughtering and enslaving African people in order to acquire them. Indeed, European invaders quickly realized that African bodies could be as valuable as African gold. In 1444, fifty years before Columbus's fateful voyage, Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator sent the first slaving expedition to Africa (J. Williams, 63; Bennett, 34). The African continent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was no cultural backwater. The empire of Mali, for example, was experiencing a golden age during this time. The University of Sankore, in the capital city

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of Timbuktu, was renowned for law and medicine. Delicate cataract operations were routinely performed by its surgeons (Bennett, 13-16, 18-19). In the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, "The level of culture among the masses o f . . . West Africa in the fifteenth century was higher than that of northern Europe, by any standard of measurement—homes, clothes, artistic creation and appreciation, political organization and religious consistency" (Du Bois 1971,163). Randall Robinson writes that in 1526, King Affonso of Kongo (Congo) wrote to King Joao of Portugal . . /'Each day the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family [King Alfonso's nephews and grandchildren had been kidnapped while en route to Portugal for religious education and sent into slavery in Brazil]. . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. . . . It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves/7 King Joao wrote back: "You . . . tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because this trade is depopulating your country. . . . The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it seems as if no slave has ever left." According to Robinson, when Affonso sent emissaries to Rome via Portugal to appeal to the pope, they were arrested upon their arrival in Lisbon (Robinson, 26). The people of Africa resisted the European invasion. For example, Queen Nzinga of Angola led her armies time and again into battle against the Portuguese, until she was well into her eighties. The people of Mbanza rose up against Portuguese invaders (Jao and da Gama. KhoiKhoin people killed the Portuguese Viceroy of the East Indies, d'Almeida, in 1509, and Portuguese forts were destroyed at Kilwe and Mombasa in 1529. A mass armed Islamic uprising against the Portuguese drove them out of Ethiopia in 1540. According to historian Hosea Jaffe, "Resistance saved whole villages, untold millions of lives, engineered many escapes,

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frightened off many slaving expeditions" (Jaffe, 48). But Europeans were brutal: they colonized by overrunning cities, towns, and villages, slaughtering, raping, and torturing the inhabitants, just as they had done during the crusades (Stannard, 72-76). Although African military leaders fought back with courage, their skill in the practice of warfare without the use of firearms was no match for thousands of rifles and cannon, the European weapons of mass destruction.

European Conquest of the Americas Following Columbus's fateful expedition in 1492—which was a quest for sources of gold, not a voyage of scientific discovery—Europeans embarked on the conquest of the lands now called North and South America. Columbus himself was responsible for the massacre, enslavement, and ultimate devastation of the Arawak people of what is now the West Indies (Zinn, 1-7; Loewen, 61-63). Europeans, including the Pilgrims who invaded what is now New England, destroyed the peoples of the Americas through massacres designed to decrease resistance by demoralizing the population and through enslavement. For example, the Pilgrims conquered the Pequot people by slaughtering entire communities and then sold the survivors into slavery in Bermuda in 1637, and the French shipped nearly the entire Natchez nation into slavery in the West Indies in 1731. The Europeans succeeded in their conquest in large measure because of the spread of smallpox, which resistant Europeans carried to the Americas. The societies destroyed by Europeans included ones that were in many ways more advanced than Europe. For example, the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, rivaled European cities in architecture and amenities (Stannard, 3-8, 69-76; Galeano, 29; Loewen, 64-65, 81; Zinn, 12-14). The constitution of the Iroquois League of Nations provided the model for the United States constitution (Loewen, 111). The boost to Europe's economy from the invasion of the Americas was incredible. Gold and silver from South America, along with profits from large-scale agriculture and the trade in slaves, fueled a 400 percent inflation that eroded the economies of the Muslim nations, Europe's competitor for dominance of the lands around the Mediterranean. Gold replaced

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land as the basis for wealth and fueled the continuing ascendance of capitalism over feudalism (Loewen, 69). But Europe profited from the Americas in other ways. Almost half of all the major crops now grown throughout the world originally came from the Americas, including corn and potatoes. Scholars have argued that the introduction of corn into Africa led to a significant population increase that fueled the European trade in enslaved Africans. The introduction of the potato into northern Europe produced a similar increase in the population of that region, which ultimately shifted the balance of power away from the Mediterranean basin to Britain, Germany, and Russia. Furthermore, more than two hundred drugs derive from plants whose pharmacological uses were discovered by American Indians (Loewen, 68).

Euro-American Enslavement of African People

Within a decade of Columbus's second voyage to the Bahamas, he found he was running short of Indians to enslave for plantation labor. In 1505, Columbus's son began importing enslaved Africans to Haiti (Loewen, 65). By 1619, over a million enslaved Africans had been brought to South America and the Caribbean (Zinn, 25-26). European invaders of North America did not want land merely to have a place to live and feed themselves. The founding of Jamestown was a business venture. In order to grow tobacco, a cash crop, the British needed a large supply of labor, so they turned to Africa. Slave traders began bringing abducted Africans to Jamestown in 1619 (Zinn, 24-25). By 1700, in Virginia alone, there were 6,000 enslaved Africans, making up one-twelfth of the population. By 1763, there were 170,000 enslaved Africans, half the population (Zinn, 32). Some argue, as if this legitimizes the Euro-American slave trade and institution of chattel slavery, that slavery was practiced in Africa at that time. This is true, as it is also true that slavery has been a part of many human civilizations throughout the world and throughout the history of human existence. One response to the claim that American chattel slavery was "not so bad" because slavery was also practiced in Africa at the time has been to contrast the forms that slavery took in Africa and America. As

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Basil Davidson observes, many of those enslaved by Africans were treated like serfs, who were the majority of the population of Europe. In the Ashanti Kingdom of West Africa, for example, slaves could marry, own property (including slaves), swear legal oaths, be witnesses in trials, and inherit from their masters. Africans enslaved in America had none of these rights. John Newton, a slave trader who later became an anti-slavery leader, observed that slavery practiced in Sierra Leone differed in crucial ways from chattel slavery. First, there were no large-scale, cash-crop plantations, so slaves were not subjected to "excessive, unintermitted labour": they were not worked to the point of exhaustion and death. Second, "no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave" (Zinn, 28). The enslavers of people of African descent in America could rape them, beat them, mutilate them, murder them, work them to death, and sell their loved ones. Enslaved Africans in the United States, and, by the iSoos, all black Americans enslaved or "free," had "no rights which the white man is bound to respect," in the words of the Supreme Court decision handed down in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Yet slavery in Africa was often motivated by hatred or disdain based on religious or ethnic differences, enslaved women (like female serfs in Europe) were considered the sexual property of their masters, and while some enslaved people in some areas of Africa were granted various human rights, others were treated brutally. A better response to the claim that American slavery was "not so bad" because slavery was also practiced in Africa begins with the recognition that Europe and the United States came to dominate the world economically through the financial growth made possible by the slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery. In 1600, Africa and Europe had populations of about 55 million and 100 million, respectively. Between 1600 and 1850, Europe's population doubled, while Africa's grew by only 30 percent as a result of the slave trade. The loss of population contributed to the stagnation of African economic growth and made Africa vulnerable to colonization by Europeans. At the same time, the trade in enslaved Africans and African labor fueled the economic growth of Europe and North America (Graves, 29). The "triangular trade," in which slavers took manufactured goods from Britain to Africa, exchanged them at a profit for abducted Africans, brought the

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cargo of enslaved people to the Americas, traded them again at a profit for colonial produce, and brought the produce back to England, produced so much wealth for Britain that "by 1750 there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution" (E. Williams, 52). The enslavement of people of African descent by white people was also central to the political and economic development of the United States. Chattel slavery has often been presented in history textbooks and popular media as an aberrant practice carried out by immoral Southerners, who were later thoroughly chastised by their defeat in the Civil War. This representation could not be farther from the truth. Slavery was legal in all the original thirteen colonies until well after the time of the American Revolution. Many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Wall Street in New York City was originally the marketplace where enslavers could hire out the people they had enslaved by the day or week (Loewen, 142,146). The original colonies, northern and southern, profited tremendously from the slave trade and chattel slavery, profits that were not limited to the sale of enslaved people or the value of their labor in producing crops. As Paul Finkelman observes, "With the exception of real estate, slaves were the most valuable form of privately held property in the United States at the end of the Revolution" (Finkelman, x). The colonies and later the states and federal government collected tax revenues both on enslaved people and also on the profits of slave trading and enslaved labor. Shipping and shipbuilding industries also profited. Insurance companies insured slaves to protect their owners from property loss (the Aetna insurance company, one of the largest in the country today, was started for this purpose). The textile industries in the North depended on the cotton grown by enslaved black people in the South. Throughout the colonies, small business owners of all kinds profited from the unpaid labor of enslaved people, and later, when slavery had dwindled away or been banned in the northern states, business owners continued to profit from the underpaid labor of people of African descent.

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As an indication of the centrality of slavery to the United States economy, consider these figures. In the five years before the Civil War, the value of cotton exports amounted to nearly $750 million, more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Banks in New York were major suppliers of the credit necessary for financing the production and export of cotton crops, so they profited from the interest they earned on their loans. Furthermore, northern states supplied a large variety of products to the southern states. Estimates at the time of the Civil War placed northern profit from commercial transactions with the South at $231.5 million (Allen 1994, 161-62). All the while, unpaid and later poorly paid black people, particularly black women, maintained the comfort of middle- and upper-class white homes. Black women who labored long hours in the fields and in the homes of white people were prevented thereby from attending to the needs of their own children and were continually vulnerable to the sexual predation of white men. In short, the United States flourished on the backs of its black citizens. By 1800, between 10 and 15 million Africans had been transported to the Americas. About 50 million African lives altogether were lost to slavery and death at the hands of slave traders (Zinn, 28-29). Moreover, European devastation of African peoples did not end with the slave trade. Europeans colonized Africa during the nineteenth century by massacring Africans. In just one example, King Leopold II of Belgium led the plundering of the Congo (now Zaire) from the late 18005 into the twentieth century, overseeing the murder of 10 million African people in the name of harvesting rubber (A. Hochschild, 124). Revenue amassed in the United States and Europe from the slave trade and chattel slavery made possible the eventual colonization of almost the entire globe, and interest on debt and continued exploitation of resources and people in the formerly colonized world keep the United States at the top of the hierarchy today. People of the United States who enjoy the highest standard of living within the United States, that is, high middle to upper class people of all races, are continuing to reap the benefits of the slave trade and chattel slavery. To the extent that most of the people in the world, namely the non-elite peoples of all the formerly colonized areas, are still suffering as a result of the economic and political inequalities made possible by the Euro-American slave trade, those who have

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benefited are indebted to those who are suffering. Furthermore, because black Americans are in many ways still afflicted by the ongoing repercussions of centuries of American denial of the full humanity of black people, people in the United States who continue to benefit from that legacy are indebted to black Americans. Any people in any part of the world who continue to benefit from a legacy or ongoing practices of slavery and exploitation of others should recognize and act on their indebtedness. Slavery in the United States may or may not have been worse than slavery practiced in other times and places, but the legacy of that institution is still with us and still benefiting some at the expense of others. Hence we have an obligation as a society to recognize that legacy as a moral stain and source of ongoing suffering and to rectify it.

Distinctions between "black" and "white" It is unclear when the concept of race as a way of categorizing human beings first arose. Some scholars argue that the beginnings of the notion of race should be identified with the "Purity of Blood" statutes employed by Christian rulers in Spain in the fifteenth century against the converses, Jews who had converted to Christianity but to whom the rulers did not want to accord equal status with Christians. Others argue that the race concept originated in the debates in sixteenth-century Spain over the mistreatment of the American Indian peoples, debates in which proponents of enslavement argued that this was acceptable because the Indians were not fully human (Bernasconi and Lott, vii-viii). It is clear, however, that as the Portuguese and Italian trade in enslaved Africans increased during the fourteenth century, the readily available supply of enslaved Africans in Europe meant that prices dropped considerably. As an inexpensive commodity, enslaved Africans in Europe were expendable and therefore treated brutally. Europeans perceived them as being particularly well suited to rigorous agricultural labor, taking the protection from the sun afforded by darker skin as a sign that God had created them for this purpose. According to Graves, this led rapidly to widespread European belief in the inferiority of black people (Graves, 24-25).

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In 1520, Paracelcus, a Swiss physician, alchemist, and chemist, argued that the children of Adam occupied only a small portion of the earth, while Negroes and other peoples were of a different origin. In 1591, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno offered a similar theory, in which he argued that Ethiopians (a term used generally for anyone of African descent) were descendants of pre-Adamite races. Another Italian, Lucilio Vanini, argued that because of their color, Ethiopians must have descended from apes and that they had once walked on all fours. Graves argues that notions of African inferiority had spread to England by the end of the 15005, as Elizabethan drama before Shakespeare's Othello (1604) presented Moors uniformly as either foolish or wicked (Graves, 25-26). Theodore Allen argues that during the seventeenth century, the notion of race as the primary justification for the enslavement of some people rather than others had not yet developed (though I would argue that it had not yet fully developed). Poor English people were tricked and kidnapped in England and sold to "servant traders/' who transported them to North America and sold them into indentured servitude (young women in England were also sold into indenture by their parents). While in legal terms indentured servitude was not servitude for life, Allen argues that that mattered little in reality, as many indentured servants died before their term was up and masters commonly extended the period of servitude as a means of punishment (the period of indenture of a bondswoman who became pregnant, for example, was typically extended for two and a half years to make up for the "lost work" due to the pregnancy). Indentured servitude was as much a chattel system as slavery until nearly the end of the i6oos: for example, bond-laborers could be sold from one master to another, masters and mistresses could beat them to death with impunity, masters could rape female bond-laborers without repercussion, and bond-laborers could marry only with the consent of their masters and were severely punished for "fornication" (Allen 1997, Chapter 7). Allen argues that Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, marked a turning point after which legal distinctions were drawn between people who came to count as "white" and people who came to count as "black." Nathaniel Bacon Jr., a young planter, raised an army of 500 white and black laborers to support him in his grievances against the governor of Virginia.

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Although Bacon's Rebellion was not a class-based protest, as Bacon himself was a member of the wealthy elite, the specter of white and black workers joining together against colonial authority alarmed the ruling class. Increasingly, laws were enacted to distinguish between white and black people, laws that created "whiteness" as a legal category through the imposition of a white supremacist system. As Allen argues, the most important social distinction in the colonies at the end of the seventeenth century was whether or not one was in a position to own bond-labor (either slaves or indentured servants). The cost of lifetime bond-labor (the purchase of slaves) "presented a threshold that few non-owners of bond-labor could reach/' The cash-crop focus (first tobacco, later cotton) glutted the market so that the small producer who had no bond-labor faced debt, which drained his ability to accumulate enough capital to buy slaves and change his social position (Allen 1997, 248). The laws enacted by the colonial rulers, however, who were primarily bond-labor owners themselves, did not actually do anything to help poor white people. Rather, the new laws threw them a few crumbs that encouraged them to think of themselves as better than non-white people. Referring to these "white-skin privilege" laws, Edmund S. Morgan notes, "The answer to the problem [of preventing a replay of Bacon's Rebellion] . . . was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.. .. The [Virginia] assembly deliberately did what it could to foster contempt of whites for blacks and Indians" (quoted in Allen 1997, 248-249). Philip Alexander Bruce, a historian writing in 1902, observed that "toward the end of the seventeenth century there occurred a marked tendency to promote a pride of race among the members of every class of white people; to be white gave the distinction of color even to the agricultural [European-American bond-]servants, whose condition, in some respects, was not much removed from that of actual slavery; to be white and also to be free, combined the distinction of liberty" (quoted in Allen 1997,249). Laws enacted in Virginia following Bacon's Rebellion provide just one example of the many similar laws enacted throughout the colonies. In a law enacted in 1691, owners of enslaved African Americans were no longer allowed to free them (owners could still legally abuse them and dispose of them by gift, bequest, sale, or rental). In the revised Virginia

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code of 1705, however, masters were forbidden to "whip a Christian, white servant naked, without an order from the justice of the peace." The code of 1705 also formalized "freedom dues" for limited-term (white) servants (corn, money, or equivalent goods, and a gun for men). In laws enacted in 1692 and reaffirmed in 1705, however, life-time bond-laborers (enslaved people of African descent), who had previously been permitted by law to raise and sell livestock, were denied this means to earn money. In 1723, new legislation prevented non-Europeans from owning European bond-laborers, denied black Americans the right to hold public office, barred "Negroes" from testifying in any case against a white person, subjected free black people to thirty lashes at a public whipping post for "lifting his or her hand" against any white person, excluded free black people from the armed militia, and forbade free black people from possessing firearms. Among other consequences, these laws made it illegal for a free black woman to defend herself against rape by a white man or to bring charges against him (Allen 1997, 250-252).

Slavery in the Revolutionary Era and the Early Republic By the time of the American Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution, there was contention about slavery among the colonial elites who were establishing the new federal government. Most of the disagreement was politically and economically motivated, as the northern and southern colonies jockeyed for dominance within the union and protection of their respective commercial interests. The revolution against Britain, carried out in the name of liberty and democracy (although the wealthiest colonists were to directly benefit the most), at least drew some people's attention to the hypocrisy of fighting for "freedom" while permitting the enslavement of human beings. As Abigail Adams wrote in 1774 to her husband, John, who later became the second president of the United States, how could the colonists "fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have"? (Loewen, 148). At the same time, however, the enslavement of others was necessary for colonial elites to maintain their way of life, their comfort and status within society.

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Patrick Henry (who gave the famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech) wrote that slavery is "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty," yet he enslaved a large number of people, admitting "I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them" (Loewen, 146). The numbers of black people enslaved by white people in the North were nowhere near as large as in the southern colonies, because the economy was different (for a variety of reasons, Northerners did not develop the sort of large-scale plantations that were common in the South). To the extent that there were some anti-slavery voices within the colonies, they were in the North more than the South, but they were certainly not dominant. The demise of slavery in the North began with the American Revolution itself. British troops freed enslaved black people within British lines as a means of breaking the economy of the rebelling colonies and encouraged black people to fight on the British side. Because most of the war took place in the northern colonies, more enslaved people were freed there through British intervention than in the South. By the end of the war, the number of free black people in the North had significantly increased. At the time the federal Constitution was drafted, there was enough anti-slavery sentiment in the North to make the northern delegates to the Constitutional Convention squeamish about mentioning slavery in the Constitution itself. Nonetheless, in return for concessions by the southern delegates that protected various northern commercial interests, they supported the inclusion of a number of clauses that protected the interests of slaveholders. For example, the clause that counts enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining the population of each state was a compromise between the southern and northern delegates. The slaveholding colonies wanted everyone, including enslaved people, to count fully in order to increase their numbers in the House of Representatives. The delegates from the northern colonies argued that enslaved people should not count at all, because they did not want the South to gain added political clout. Thus, the United States ended up with a pro-slavery Constitution that does not include the word "slavery" (Finkelman, chap. i). The northern colonies officially ended the practice of slavery within their borders around the time of the Constitution, but the process was

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gradual. Except for Vermont, none of the northern states provided for immediate emancipation and none interfered with existing property interests (e.g., an enslaver could no longer purchase additional people, but people already enslaved could be retained until they died). For example, New York officially ended slavery in 1799, but enslaved people were still recorded there until 1827. In Connecticut, the official end of slavery was in 1784, but there were still enslaved black people there in 1848. In New Jersey, the practice of enslaving black people officially ended in 1804 through legislation that merely reclassified enslaved people as "apprentices for life/' a category that persisted as late as the beginning of the Civil War (McManus, 180-181). Gradual emancipation allowed northern enslavers to find loopholes through which to wring final profits from the people they enslaved, for example by manumitting them to long periods of indenture and then selling them to buyers in other states (McManus, 181). Furthermore, the northern states offered compensation to enslavers for the loss of their human property, in some states so much that emancipation brought them a windfall (McManus, 197). The decline of slavery in the North did not mean life was easy for free black people in those states. Throughout colonial times, as a result of laws such as those passed in Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion, the freedom of free black people was very restricted. In some places, they had to carry passes in order to travel from place to place. They often could not own property. Punishments for certain crimes included reenslavement. They could not vote in many places, and even where they were legally allowed to vote, they were prevented—by harassment and intimidation—from exercising their right. In the Pennsylvania colony, the children of free black people, without exception, were bound out to indentured servitude by the local justices of the peace until age twenty-four (if male) or twentyone (if female). The end of the institution of chattel slavery in the northern United States was accompanied by increases in restrictions on the rights of black people and by their severe economic displacement. Most northern states disenfranchised black people entirely during the early i8oos, even those states in which free black people had once been granted the right to vote. New Jersey adopted a law in 1807 that stated that no one was eligible to vote "unless such person be a free, white, male citizen." In 1814, legislators in

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Connecticut amended the state constitution to restrict suffrage to white male citizens. In an 1837 decision, the supreme court of Pennsylvania ruled that black men were not "freemen" by the state's definition and therefore ineligible to vote. Rhode Island simply barred black people from the freemanship status required for them to vote in local and state elections (McManus, 184). Beginning in the 17805, any white or free black man in New York could vote, though only if he paid taxes, owned property worth at least fifty dollars, or paid annual rent of five dollars. Beginning in 1821, however, free black Americans were effectively disenfranchised by the requirement that they own land worth $250, while property ownership requirements were dropped entirely for white people (Allen 1994,187). As if disenfranchisement were not oppressive enough, white workers pushed black workers (often newly freed men and women) out of employment opportunities by successfully demanding restrictions on the kinds and numbers of jobs open to black people (McManus, 184). Frederick Douglass observed, "Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him better title" (McManus, 184-185). By 1838, many black residents of Philadelphia lived in "grinding poverty/' and in New York at that time, "the main employment open to blacks was domestic service. . . . Those who sought employment in Boston were insulted, threatened, and even attacked on the streets by gangs of ruffians. . . . They became pariahs in the North, isolated from the mainstream of life, economically proscribed, and subject everywhere to restrictions that mocked their alleged freedom" (McManus, 185). Meanwhile, in the South, the lives of enslaved black people changed dramatically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The catalyst of this change was the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. The cotton gin increased raw cotton production twelvefold in the United States within ten years, followed by another threefold gain by 1820. As a result, the price of enslaved black people rose sixfold relative to the price of cotton between 1805 and 1860, with a concomitant increase in pressure on the productivity of enslaved black people (Allen 1994, 160). Slave traders abducted and sold more African people in the United States between 1778 and 1807 than in all previous years combined. Furthermore, although the U.S. government banned the slave trade in

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1808—the earliest date possible under a twenty-year protection clause in the Constitution—traders continued to import abducted African people illegally up until the Civil War. During a three-month period at the end of 1860, U.S. naval cruisers took more than three thousand Africans from New York-based ships, an indication of the extent of the illegal importation (Allen 1994,162). Even so, enslavers were unable to completely subdue the people they enslaved. During the first half of the 18005, about a thousand African Americans escaped from slavery each year, with the support of the Underground Railroad. There were a number of armed rebellions, including those led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 and by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. The coastal slave ship Creole left Norfolk, Virginia, in 1841 bound for New Orleans, but arrived a week later in the British West Indies with its formerly enslaved "cargo" now in control and free. Black Americans joined with white Americans under the leadership of John Brown in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859 (Allen 1994,165). The success of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, in which the black people of Haiti under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture rose up and overthrew the French colonial government, and the revolution of enslaved people in the British West Indies in 1833 inspired black Americans and struck fear in the hearts of enslavers in the United States (Allen 1994,161).

Territorial Expansion and Slavery During the period from the end of the American Revolution through the Civil War, political leaders wrestled over who would control the continuing expansion of the United States into western territories. White politicians tossed around the lives of black people and Indian people in ongoing debates over the legal status of members of these groups, which were actually turf wars for political control. Thomas Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana territory from France in 1803 prompted bitter debate over whether the states created from that territory would be slaveholding states or not—again, not because of concern over the institution of slavery per se for many politicians, but because of the potential increase in the

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political power of the slaveholding states over the northern states. The eventual compromise (known as the Missouri Compromise) was that for each state created as a slaveholding state, another state was created that banned slavery. The major wars fought by the United States during the first half of the iSoos, beginning with the War of 1812, were motivated by slaveholders' desires to expand territory that allowed slavery and to occupy areas controlled by Indian peoples into which enslaved people could escape. The Seminoles, a group composed of Creek Indians, Indians from smaller tribes, and escaped people of African descent, lived in what is now Florida and welcomed newly escaped black people. The United States annexed Florida as a result of the War of 1812, but the Seminole people continued to provide a haven for those who had escaped from slavery. The United States began the First Seminole War in 1816 under the leadership of Andrew Jackson when he attacked a fort that harbored hundreds of escaped people of African descent. As a result of the Seminole Wars of 1816-18 and 1835-42, the Seminoles were pushed west, eventually across the Mississippi. The Second Seminole War, however, was the longest and costliest of all the wars the United States fought with Indian peoples, a testament to the military skill and courage of the Seminoles. The Texas War of 1835-36 (the origin of the cry "Remember the Alamo") led to the creation of the slaveholding Republic of Texas, whose new legislature immediately ordered all free black people out of the state. The Mexican War of 1846-48 was similarly motivated by slaveholders who wanted to push the borders of the nearest free land further from the slave states (Loewen, 151-152). The expansion of the United States, with white people moving further west and deeper into the south to acquire land, was made possible through a series of wars, treaties, and policy decisions in which the U.S. government massacred some Indian peoples and pushed others further and further west, imprisoning them on reservations. Throughout the iSoos, Indian people continued to rebel bravely against the United States, but by the end of the iSoos, there were fewer than 300,000 American Indians left in the country, out of the tens of millions who lived there before the European invasion (Zinn, 524). The results of continuing oppressive policies by the government against American Indians can be seen in the impoverished conditions of

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Indian reservations today (Zinn, 525-526). When reflecting on the extent to which the United States has flourished at the expense of black people, it is important to also remember the atrocities committed by white people against American Indians and to support their continuing liberation struggles.

Immigrants and Anti-Black Oppression

As discussed previously in this chapter, the concepts of "white" and "black" were reified in the United States through laws that classified residents of the colonies and later the states into racial groups and then established differential treatment of members of these groups. Legal decisions regarding the "whiteness" of immigrants from around the globe and who counted as or could become a citizen also played a significant role in the ongoing construction of race in the United States. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States Constitution did not define who counted as a citizen. Under English common law, all persons born within a nation's jurisdiction count as citizens, but black Americans did not have citizenship status until after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The status of children born in the United States to parents who were not citizens was in question until 1898, when the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark that these children were citizens by birth (although there have been debates in California in recent years about whether to refuse citizenship by birth to children of undocumented immigrants). Citizenship was not fully guaranteed to American Indians until the Nationality Act of 1940 (Haney-Lopez, 39-41). The Constitution grants Congress the power to determine who may become a citizen through naturalization. In 1790, Congress limited naturalization to free (non-indentured) white people. In 1870, the right to naturalize was extended to "persons of African nativity, or African descent," but discrimination against other immigrants continued. An explicit ban on the eligibility of Chinese immigrants for naturalization was instituted in 1882 and not lifted until 1943. "Descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere" were not eligible for naturalization until 1940, and people from India and the Philippines were not eligible for naturalization

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until 1946. In 1952, Congress finally declared that "the right of a person to become a naturalized citizen of the United States shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race" (Haney-Lopez, 42-46). Finally, restrictions on who could immigrate into the United States affected the construction of the idea of race by limiting the numbers of people who counted as non-white while allowing greater numbers of "white" immigrants. By 1884, Congress had banned all Chinese immigration. In 1917, all persons from Asia were barred. In 1924, the National Origin Act confined legal immigration almost exclusively to "western and northern European stock/' During the Depression, about 500,000 people of Mexican descent—half of whom were U.S. citizens—were forcibly returned to Mexico. These actions were repeated again in the 19505. In 1954 alone, more then one million people of Mexican descent were deported. Racial restrictions on immigration were dismantled in 1965, but Congress is still constitutionally permitted to restrict immigration on the basis of race, and current policy still encourages immigration of white people over people from other racial groups (Haney-Lopez, 37-39). Which race is the majority and which races are "minorities" is not accidental. By giving legal advantages to "white" people, the government of the United States gave incentive to immigrants to establish themselves as "white." One example of this is the case of Irish immigrants in the midi8oos. Each year from 1820 until 1855, between 43 percent and 47 percent of immigrants were from Ireland, more than from any other single nation (Roediger, 141). After the Irish famine of 1845, over 1.5 million Irish people came to the United States (Roediger, 139). Many of these were unskilled laborers, coming from rural areas to live in crowded city conditions. Irish immigrants were commonly compared (occasionally unfavorably) to black people, with similar depictions as simian, bestial, and lazy. The work open to them, such as domestic servitude, unskilled labor, and work as longshoremen and coachmen, was the same work that had traditionally been available to black Americans, and it was work that was associated with blackness. To labor in those jobs was to "slave like a nigger" (Roediger, 144-147). Although some Irish immigrants allied themselves with black Americans, the vast majority of Irish immigrants reacted by distancing themselves from blackness. They pushed black people out of work traditionally

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available to them by offering to work for lower wages, through violence against black workers, and by appealing to fears of "race mixing" if (white) Irish people and black people had to work or live side-by-side. The term "miscegenation" was coined in 1863 by an Irish immigrant named D. G. Croly and his coauthor George Wakeman who produced a sensational pamphlet warning of the imminent "mongrelization" of the United States (Roediger, 155-156). Irish people succeeded in dissociating many categories of labor from blackness, as employers and the society at large did not usually come to the aid of black Americans in these struggles. By 1855, there were 23,386 Irish, 6,084 non-Irish white, and only 1,025 black domestic servants working in New York City; 17,426 Irish, 2,357 non-Irish white, and only 536 black laborers; 805 Irish, 167 non-Irish white, and only 102 black coachmen, and so on (Allen 1994, 93-95). Furthermore, the support of white workers became critical to political success during the mid-i8oos. Both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists courted the growing Irish immigrant population. Daniel O'Connell, the leader of the Irish independence movement against Britain, was a champion of emancipation for black Americans, recognizing the oppression of his own people as akin to and linked with theirs. He advocated relentlessly against United States policies that upheld the interests of enslavers, worked closely with Irish and British abolition groups, and welcomed black American abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond to Ireland as honored guests (Allen 1994, 177-178). Abolitionists in America recognized the link between class and racial oppression in the United States, and tried to convince white workers that, in the words of a resolution adopted in 1849 by the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, "The rights of the laborer in the North are identified with those of the Southern slave, and cannot be obtained as long as chattel slavery rears its hydra head in our land" (Allen 1994, 166). Pro-slavery politicians, however, had long fashioned their arguments in terms of appeals to white workers about how they were treated worse than enslaved black people and how black people (whether enslaved or free) were the cause of white unemployment. (It is always striking how much these early arguments continue to be mirrored in current rhetoric against affirmative action and reparations.) Pro-slavery elites, anxious to deflect white workers from criticizing policies that maintained class privilege through the oppression

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of the working class, found that scapegoating black Americans was effective (Allen 1994,163-165). The Irish Catholic leadership in New York, under archbishop John Hughes, was willing to woo the pro-slavery Democratic Party in order to diminish anti-Irish Catholic sentiment. Although Pope Gregory XVI had denounced slavery in his Apostolic Letter of 1839, Hughes chose to interpret this as a denunciation only of the international slave trade, and urged Irish immigrants to respect the pro-slavery "authority" of the United States government in order to "merge socially and politically with the American people." He also opposed the establishment of Catholic colonies for the relief of the congested living conditions experienced by the former Irish peasants crowded into New York City, on the grounds that the New York diocese needed to remain united (Allen 1994, 179-182). This created a strong voter base for Tammany Hall, the New York political machine that galvanized the Democratic Party. In return, the Tammany machine facilitated the naturalization of Irish immigrants, awarded government contracts to Irish-American ward heelers, who also were in charge of police appointments in their wards, and handed out favors to Irish voters, including outright payments for their votes (Allen 1994,187). Anti-black oppression in the iSoos also took the form of repeated mob violence by white rioters against black communities. Describing only a few examples, Du Bois wrote: For three days in Cincinnati in 1829, a mob of whites wounded and killed free Negroes and fugitive slaves and destroyed property. Most of the black population numbering over two thousand, left the city and trekked to Canada. In Philadelphia, 1828-1840, a series of riots took place which thereafter extended until after the Civil War. The riot of 1834 took the dimensions of a pitched battle and lasted for three days. Thirty-one houses and two churches were destroyed. Other riots took place in 1835 and 1838, and a two days' riot in 1842 caused the calling out of the militia with artillery. (Du Bois 1977,18) The Philadelphia riot of 1842 began when white workers attacked a demonstration by a black temperance society that paraded through south

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Philadelphia toward the banks of the Schuylkill River for a celebration of Jamaican Emancipation Day. The white mob chased the black marchers back to their community where the black residents fought back. For two days, white gangs "contented themselves with chasing and beating with sticks, staves, and iron bars any . . . Negro who had the misfortune to come into the district" (Warner, 140). When southern states seceded from the Union following the election of Lincoln in 1860 and the Civil War broke out soon after, pro-slavery, antiblack leaders in the North intensified their appeals to the "Catholic-Irish" and "white workers." In January 1861, the Democratic mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, expressing the "common sympathy" of the people of New York for the slaveholders, proposed that the city secede from the United States. In May 1861, Archbishop Hughes declared that any effort by the government to abolish slavery would be a violation of the Constitution (Allen 1994,189-190). When Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, it was a military move that gave the South four months to stop rebelling on pain of the emancipation of their slaves. Thus, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January i, 1863, it freed enslaved black people only in those areas still fighting against the Union, but not enslaved black people behind Union lines. As the war dragged on, resentment grew among poor white people in the North, who were drafted under a law that allowed wealthier white people to buy their way out for $300. Turning their anger against black people rather than against the white elites, mobs in Detroit and New York went on a frenzy of lynching in the summer of 1863. According to Zinn: "A black man in Detroit described what he saw: a mob, with kegs of beer on wagons, armed with clubs and bricks, marching through the city, attacking black men, women, children. He heard one man say: 'If we are got to be killed up for Negroes then we will kill every one of them in this town'" (Zinn, 191-192). Describing the riots in New York, Du Bois wrote: Driven by the fear of death at the hands of the mob, who the week previous had, as you remember, brutally murdered by hanging on trees and lampposts, several of their number, and cruelly beaten and robbed many others, burning and sacking their houses, and driving

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nearly all from the street and alleys and docks upon which they had previously obtained an honest though humble living, these people had been forced to take refuge on Blackwell's Island, at police stations, on the outskirts of the city in the swamps and woods . . . and in the barns and outhouses of farmers of Long Island and Morrisania. At these places were scattered some 5,000 homeless men, women and children. (Du Bois 1977,103-104) Many northern white workers did not want to fight against the Confederacy, but many black people did, and their dedication was crucial in bringing about the end of the war, with the surrender of the South, in 1865. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, stating that neither "slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States/' ushered in the era of Reconstruction in the South, a brief period of hope for black Americans. As we shall see, however, the wording of the Thirteenth Amendment, allowing for involuntary penal servitude, all too quickly came back to haunt black Americans and continues to undermine social justice in America to this day.

The Reconstruction Era The surrender of the Confederate forces brought the Civil War to a close and legal emancipation to black Americans. To some, it seemed right that the "logic of Emancipation" be fulfilled by dividing the land that belonged to plantation owners and had been worked by enslaved black people into smaller parcels that could be distributed to the freedmen so that they could become small independent farmers in their own right. As a black North Carolinian wrote in 1863, "If tne strict law of right and justice is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and yoke of tyranny" (quoted in Zinn, 196). Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, declared, "We must see that the freedmen are established on the soil, and that they may become

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proprietors The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces" (Allen 1994, 140). Senator Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania proposed that every male formerly enslaved should receive forty acres of land and that black Americans who had sufficient resources could bid for moderate plots at ten dollars per acre. Although some politicians supported redistribution as a matter of justice, to others, redistribution of land seemed the logical approach to worries that the freedmen might flood the labor market and lower wages for industrial work (Allen 1994,140). In January 1865, General Sherman issued Field Order No. 15, which set aside land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for formerly enslaved people who had worked those lands. In the South as a whole, 800,000 acres of confiscated land were worked by freedmen families as renters under the administration of the Freedmen's Bureau. Along with the franchise and public education, the issue of land redistribution was crucial during the Reconstruction period. The vast majority of emancipated black people never received title to any land, however, despite amply documented government admission that they had a valid claim. Furthermore, in many cases, titles originally granted to black people were eventually stripped away from them (Allen 1994,142; Zinn, 197). Although opposition to proposals for across-the-board redistribution of land ultimately proved insurmountable, the Radical Republicans did pass the Southern Homestead Law in June 1866, providing 47 million acres of public land (often land that had been stolen from American Indians) to be opened for eighty-acre homesteads. Some 40,000 entries were filed for these homesteads, although many were fronts for land and timber companies, rather than legitimate claims by individuals for themselves. The Southern Homestead Law was repudiated by 1876, along with the other accomplishments of the Reconstruction Era (Allen 1994,140). For a little over a decade following the end of the Civil War, black people were able to exercise political power in the South, during the period known as Reconstruction. Congress passed laws during the late i86os and early 18705 that protected the rights of black people and allowed them to enter into legal contracts and buy property. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 banned the exclusion of black people from public facilities including hotels, theaters, and railroad cars (Zinn, 198).

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With their enfranchisement temporarily protected somewhat, black voters helped elect two black U.S. senators, twenty congressmen, and numerous state representatives, although they remained a minority in state legislatures in every state except in the lower house of the South Carolina legislature (Zinn, 198-200). During Reconstruction, southern state governments with strong black leadership created public school systems, established more equitable tax structures, created public social services, and built railroads (Foster, 316). In South Carolina, the new, racially mixed legislature created a free, racially integrated public school system for the first time in that state. By 1876, 70,000 black children were going to school where none had before, and 30,000 more white children were going to school than had before the Civil War (Zinn, 200). Outside of legislative arenas, black southerners organized trade unions, established newspapers, and built "freedom schools/7 The first black colleges were established during Reconstruction, including Fisk University in Tennessee, the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Howard University in Washington, D.C. By 1869, only four years after the end of enslavement, black men and women outnumbered white people as teachers throughout the southern states (Foster, 321; Foner and Mahoney, 44-48). The progress of Reconstruction was hampered, however, by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln's assassination in 1865, vetoed bills designed to help black people. He allowed Confederate states to rejoin the Union without guaranteeing equal rights for their black citizens, and those states subsequently enacted "black codes" that made freed black people into serfs still bound to the plantations. Johnson was impeached by the House, but efforts to remove him from office fell one vote short in the Senate. Johnson subsequently lost the 1868 presidential election to Ulysses Grant by 300,000 votes, in part due to Grant's wide support from 700,000 black voters (Zinn, 199). Reconstruction was also marred by white violence. In the spring and summer of 1866, white mobs lynched 46 black men, women, and children in Memphis, Tennessee, and 45 black people in New Orleans. White gangs murdered 2,000 black people in Louisiana during the 1868 elections. Furthermore, post-Civil War assaults by white people on black

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people were not confined to the southern states. On election day in Philadelphia in 1871, for example, at least four black people were killed, including schoolteacher and rising black community leader Octavius V. Catto (Shapiro, 16). The Ku Klux Klan, and hundreds of similar organizations, flourished. As violence by white terrorists against black people intensified during the 18705, President Grant turned his back on the people who had helped him win the election. No more than 10 percent of lynchers were ever brought to trial, and when several KKK terrorists were convicted in South Carolina in 1871, Grant pardoned them within months (Zinn, 204; Shapiro, 15). In the presidential election of 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden received 184 electoral college votes and needed one more to be elected; he led in the popular vote by 250,000. The Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, had 166 electoral votes. The 19 electoral votes of three states, however, had not been officially tallied because of disputed ballots. If all three states went to Hayes, he would win by a margin of one vote. A special commission, appointed by Congress to resolve the dispute, voted along party lines in favor of Hayes. Democrats threatened to filibuster the results in the Senate, but instead cut a deal with Republicans in which the Democrats would accept Hayes's victory in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South. With the troops' departure, the last obstacle to the full reestablishment of white supremacy in the South fell, and Reconstruction ended. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed discrimination against black people's use of public facilities, ruling that "individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the [Fourteenth] amendment." In 1896, upholding the right of railroads to segregate black customers and white customers as long as the separate accommodations were equal, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. (Zinn, 204-205)

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The Plessy ruling held until the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas in 1954. By the end of the iSoos, "Jim Crow" laws were in full effect throughout the South, with substantial segregation of housing, employment, and public accommodations such as theaters and hotels in the North as well. The name Jim Crow came from a derogatory black character created by a white minstrel showman, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, in the 18305. Rice blackened his face and danced a ridiculous jig to the lyrics: Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

By the 18505, the Jim Crow character had become standard fare in minstrel shows, one of many disparaging images of black people in popular white American culture. The term "Jim Crow" came to be used as a racial slur against black people by many white people and later was applied to laws that discriminated against black people (R. Davis, i). In addition to segregation of schools and public facilities, black people were disenfranchised first by white mobs who forced black voters away from the polls or coerced them to vote for white Democrats, later by laws that set poll taxes and literacy requirements for black people, often through "grandfather clauses" that required only those men whose grandfathers had not been eligible to vote to pay the taxes and pass the tests. Interracial marriages were banned throughout the South in order to protect the "purity" of the white race. The Supreme Court did not strike down these laws until 1967. The "black codes" prevented black people from renting or leasing land. Sharecropping replaced outright slavery as the means by which white people continued to exploit black people. In this practice, black people with no resources were extended credit by plantation owners to purchase seeds and tools from them at exorbitant rates so that the black people could farm the plantation owner's land and then sell the produce to him, minus what was owed for the seeds and tools, which left barely enough for the sharecropper to sustain himself through the winter. The peonage system, in which a black person who had been jailed could be hired out by local authorities to anyone willing to "rent" him for no pay, was another means of legally enslaving black

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people, allowed by the wording of the Thirteenth Amendment that bans slavery except when it is used as a form of punishment. Similarly, the chain gang became a common sight during these years. Because black people could be convicted of vagrancy simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having no white employer to vouch for them, there was a steady supply of peon labor available to white southerners (R. Davis, 3-5). Jim Crow policies were often justified by reference to the scientifically established inferiority of black people to white people. White supremacist beliefs were based on science dating back to the 17005. Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78), who developed the system of biological classification still used today, divided homo sapiens into four varieties: H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens afer, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens americanus. He presented these clearly hierarchically, with H. sapiens europaeus at the apex and H. sapiens afer at the bottom. Overwhelmingly, the naturalists of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and to some extent Samuel Thomas Sommering, perceived and classified people of African descent as substantially inferior to people of European descent (Graves, 38-40). Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722-89) was the first scientist of the time to attempt to quantitatively analyze racial differences by measuring human skulls and comparing them with animal skulls. He argued that the skull measurements of Negroes were closer to those of apes than were the measurements of European skulls. He drew his conclusion from a very small sample of skulls, however, and was criticized by his contemporaries, including Blumenbach (Graves, 40-41). French surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca, working a century later, compared the ratio of the length of the lower arm bone to the length of the upper arm bone in Europeans and Africans, believing that people of African descent, the more "apelike" race, would have a higher ratio. His measurements in fact demonstrated the opposite (Graves, 44-45). Yet this failure to find evidence to support the hypothesis that black people were inferior to white people did not deter scientists from continuing to try Biologist Louis Agassiz (1807-73), one of the most respected scientists of his day, argued strongly that Europeans and Africans did not share a common origin (a theory called polygenesis) and that interbreeding between

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the races would degrade Europeans. Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician, offered data to support Agassiz's views: he measured the cranial volume of different races by filling skulls with birdseed or lead shot and seeing how much each could hold. In his important 1981 work, The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated how Morton, predisposed to believe in the inferiority of people of African descent, made systematic errors in his measurements that rendered his evidence of smaller African skulls, and thus inferior African intelligence, null and void (nowadays, the vast majority of biologists understand that neither skull size nor brain size has any bearing on human intelligence, although as recently as 1995, J. Philippe Rushton challenged Gould's recalculation of Morton's measurements and suggested that slight differences in average skull size do explain the slight differences in average performance on I.Q. tests) (Graves, 45-46). Nonetheless, Agassiz's and Morton's beliefs were widespread and their views popularized by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon in their 1854 pro-slavery treatise Types of Mankind. It is well worth noting that one of the best critiques of Nott and Gliddon's work was Frederick Douglass's 'The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," an address that he delivered at Western Reserve College on July 12, 1854. Anticipating the conclusions now drawn by biologists with access to modern genetic and evolutionary theory, Douglass argued (among other points) that the innate abilities of racial groups in the United States could not be legitimately measured given the disparity of physical conditions in which members of the white and black races lived (Graves, 48-49).

Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century Following World War I, black soldiers who had risked their lives during the war and black families who had lost loved ones became increasingly resistant to the injustice they faced at the hands of white people in the United States. Jim Crow segregation was in full force in the South and the toll of victims of lynching continued to rise. Black people who left the south to seek a better life in the north were disillusioned when they reached northern cities by the rigid segregation, poor housing conditions, low wages, and demeaning treatment to which they were still subject. A

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number of black rebellions erupted during these years, especially during the "Red Summer" of 1919. There was a pattern to many of these rebellions: white people committed or were prepared to commit violence against a black person, black people resisted, and white people crushed the resistance with excessive force. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, a young white woman named Sarah Page accused Dick Rowland, a black man, of assaulting her, although she never formally pressed charges and no evidence supported her accusation. A group of 400 white people went to the jail where he was being held intent on lynching him. Seventy-five black men armed with guns went to defend him. Although the police sent the white lynchers away, one tried to disarm a black man. Shots were fired, and when the initial fighting ceased, two black and ten white people were dead. The government sent in Air Force bombers and 10,000 troops armed with machine guns, killing 300 black people before they were called off (Shapiro, 181-183). These years saw the rise of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). The Jamaican-born Garvey's slogan was "Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad," and he invented the red, black, and green African flag that continues as the symbol of Pan-Africanism and a united and liberated Africa today. Garvey's newspaper Negro World circulated worldwide, and UNIA developed collectively owned black business enterprises, including the Black Star Steamship Line, a moving firm, a laundry, a hat factory, and a record company. At its height, the movement had three million followers worldwide. The movement was socialist and internationalist, and Garvey associated with revolutionary leaders from South America and Asia as well as Africa. Like all the black leaders of resistance movements who would follow him during the twentieth century, Garvey was watched closely by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the leadership of the newly appointed J. Edgar Hoover. He was arrested and tried for mail fraud in 1923. He spent three months in the Tombs Prison in New York until he was released on bail. In 1925 he was incarcerated in the Atlanta Federal Prison, and in 1927, he was deported. Robbed of his leadership, UNIA was destroyed, the Black Star Line dissolved, and UNIA's Liberty Hall in New York mortgaged. Garvey died in London in 1940 at the age of fifty-three (Hill and Bair, 199-299).

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Beginning in the 19305, the federal government adopted housing policies that encouraged residential segregation by race. These policies supported the de facto segregation of public education and other public services that contribute to anti-black oppression today, long after the end of de jure racial segregation. These policies also prevented the vast majority of black Americans from employing home ownership as a tool of wealth accumulation over generations, as many working- and middleclass white Americans were able to do over the course of the twentieth century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act on June 27, 1934, creating the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). This expanded the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which had been created the year before. The HOLC introduced, and the FHA continued, the longterm, self-amortizing loan with uniform payments spread over the whole life of the debt. On the rationale that the federal government was undertaking risk in backing these loans, the HOLC devised an appraisal system, continued under the FHA, in which neighborhoods were ranked as First, Second, Third, or Fourth quality, with corresponding code colors of green, blue, yellow, and red. A primary qualification for a neighborhood to achieve a green rating, in addition to being new and well-kept, was that it must be all-white. The presence of even a few black families earned the neighborhood a red rating, as being "in decline." Although the HOLC insisted that "There is no implication that good mortgages do not exist or cannot be made in Third and Fourth grade areas," in practice these neighborhoods were "red-lined" (Jackson, 196-198; 203-204). Mortgages for these areas were significantly less likely to be approved, and when they were, rates were higher. Housing prices declined because these homes were in less demand, so homes in these areas did not increase in value over the lifetime of the owners as did homes in more highly ranked neighborhoods. The FHA policies encouraged white people to buy in all-white neighborhoods. Indeed, the FHA Underwriting Manual of 1939 openly recommended the use of restrictive covenants, which prevented original owners of houses from selling to black or other "undesirable" buyers (Jackson, 208). Other major legislation passed during the 19305 also increased disparities between black and white Americans. The Social Security Act, which

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created a work-related entitlement to an old-age pension and unemployment compensation, explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers from coverage. Given the disproportionate percentage of black Americans in these categories, three-fifths of the black labor force was denied coverage. If self-employed sharecroppers are added to these figures, three-quarters or more of black Americans were denied benefits. Black women, of whom 90 percent were domestic workers, were especially disadvantaged. The same groups of workers were also excluded from coverage provided by the Wagner Act (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act), which protected workers' right to unionize, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (Brown et al., 27-28). As the United States entered World War II, nothing had improved for black people. Indeed, black people were not particularly interested in general in supporting the war effort. They argued that even if Hitler were to invade the United States, it would not make things any worse for them, given how they were already being treated. Walter White, at that time executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told of his horror at hearing from a teacher in a well-known black southern college that a student had argued that even under Hitler, conditions could not "possibly be any worse than they are for Negroes in the South right now. The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?" When White reported this story to a midwestern audience soon after, expecting them to share his frustration at the student's "shortsighted thinking," they applauded the student's words (Twombly, 305; Zinn, 419). Toward the end of World War II, the FHA was supplemented by the GI Bill, which helped many of the 16 million returning veterans to purchase homes. Between the FHA and the GI Bill, it became less expensive to buy a home than to rent a modest apartment (Jackson, 204-206). Many of the new suburban developments into which veterans bought, however, refused to sell to black people, so black veterans could not take full advantage of the GI Bill. When they did purchase houses, the values of their homes did not increase (because black presence in a neighborhood lowered its ranking) and therefore did not contribute to the upward economic

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mobility of their families in the way that home ownership did for white veterans. Even after the Supreme Court struck down the use of restrictive covenants in 1948, it took two more years before the FHA stopped insuring new mortgages on real estate subject to covenants (Jackson, 208). Furthermore, real estate agents preyed on white fears that the value of their homes would decline when black families moved into their neighborhoods. Engaging in "blockbusting" practices, they encouraged white families to sell out at low prices and then resold at high prices to black families. Other benefits provided by the GI Bill also helped white Americans much more than black Americans. The readjustment benefits provided by the Bill made possible a major shift of white men from working-class jobs into high-income professional and managerial occupations. Discrimination against black inductees accounted for some of the difference: 48 percent of black inductees were rejected by the armed services compared to 28 percent of white inductees, so a smaller percentage of black Americans became veterans. Moreover, black veterans experienced discrimination in the distribution of veterans' benefits. The Veterans' Employment Service and United States Employment Service (USES) funneled black veterans into low-skilled jobs. This form of discrimination was especially blatant in the South, where one-third of the veterans were black. In Mississippi, for example, white veterans were granted 86 percent of the professional jobs filled by USES, while black veterans were granted 92 percent of the low-wage, unskilled jobs. Furthermore, black veterans who pursued a college education under the GI Bill found that it did not increase their income relative to that of white veterans. The median income of black college-educated veterans was only 65 percent of the median income of white college-educated veterans. In comparison, the median income of black high school dropouts in the years after the war was 67 percent of the median income of white high school dropouts. In a comparison of incomes twenty-five years after the end of the war, black veterans were earning substantially less than white veterans (Brown et al., 78-79). Again, as after World War I, black soldiers who had served in World War II and the families of black soldiers who had died expressed increasing rage against the people and governments who had denied them

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rights. The challenges to school segregation, the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, and the voter registration drives that marked the beginning of the civil rights movement began. The history of the civil rights movement of the 19505 and 19605 is more widely disseminated than the history of other black liberation movements of the twentieth century, so I will not repeat those details. There are, however, two points that are important to keep in mind about the civil rights movement. First, there was the powerful effect of television images of police with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses attacking unarmed, nonviolent protesters; of white mothers screaming racial epithets at black children quietly and courageously marching up the front steps of previously allwhite schools; and of young white people murdered for participating in voter registration drives. These images made it hard for white citizens and politicians to look the other way, as they had done so often in the past when murders of black people who had defended themselves and their rights were not so vividly documented. Second, due to the civil rights movement and subsequent protest movements, such as against the Vietnam War, Americans have become more complacent about the idea of civil disobedience. We remember more readily the positive results, to the extent that they have occurred, and less readily the attempts by government officials and individuals to suppress the protest. It is easy to forget, for example, that the NAACP, a primarily white-controlled organization in its earlier years that has been the least radical among groups supporting the rights of black people, was nonetheless banned in many parts of the South at the time of the civil rights movement and that black people had to sneak to clandestine meetings in order to avoid loss of employment and physical violence at the hands of white people. Throughout the civil rights movement, those involved risked their lives and the safety of their homes and families. The civil rights movement brought about many important changes, ending much of the most blatant segregation and disenfranchisement of black people in the south, although progress toward these goals was often painfully slow. The advances brought about by the civil rights movement were not enough to break the back of white supremacy outside of issues of blatantly anti-black law, however. The civil rights movement did not bring an end to the residential segregation that was reinforced nationwide by

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the FHA. The civil rights movement, developed to fight de jure segregation and disenfranchisement, could not effectively lead the struggle against the disproportionate poverty and unemployment, lack of access to healthcare, and unhealthy living environments experienced by black people in comparison to white people. Beginning in the late 19408, city governments used urban renewal programs to bulldoze black homes and businesses in downtown areas that developers coveted and move the former residents into racially segregated public housing, built on sites abandoned by industry or by white homeowners who had fled to the suburbs. In Philadelphia, for example, the proportion of black census tracts containing public housing rose from 40 percent in 1950 to almost 70 percent by 1980. Furthermore, not enoug public housing was built to replace the homes destroyed: by 1961, for example, 126,000 housing units had been destroyed, but only 28,000 units built. Many black Americans found themselves crowded together into slums. Urban renewal also eroded the economic base of urban black communities. Some businesses were plowed under along with the homes that were destroyed. Those that remained did not have enough customers left to sustain them. Furthermore, as white people left cities for the suburbs, services such as hospitals (which were also employers) left, too. In neighborhoods where more than 75 percent of the residents were black, 47 percent of the hospitals either closed or relocated between 1937 and 1977. B comparison, in neighborhoods that were less than 25 percent black, only 14 percent of hospitals closed or relocated during those years (Brown et al., 93-94)In the 19505, plant closures and automation in the meatpacking, chemical, steel, tobacco, and coal industries displaced a disproportionate number of black workers. For example, black employment in coal mining, an industry that had historically employed large numbers of black workers, decreased by 73 percent. Black workers had been restricted to the lowest level jobs, which were the ones most likely to be automated. They were all too often prevented from using their seniority to move into all-white departments, so when their jobs were eliminated, they were let go (Brown et al., 90-91). The Black Power movement took a different approach from that of the civil rights movement. Especially through the leadership of Malcolm X

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and the creation of the Black Panther Party, the Black Power movement sought complete liberation for black people in the United States, with a focus on the needs of those black people who were worst off in terms of income and living conditions. Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in 1925, grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. His parents were active in Marcus Garvey's UNIA movement, and his father was killed by white terrorists from a Klan-type organization when Malcolm was six years old. A precocious student who graduated at the top of his junior high class, Malcolm dropped out of high school after a favorite teacher told him that his dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger/' In his late teens, Malcolm X moved to Boston, where he became involved in street crime and ended up in prison. There he began to study the Islamic teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who later became his mentor, although they ultimately parted ways. During his years in prison, Malcolm decided to drop his "slave name" of Little and adopted the surname "X" to stand for his lost African ancestry. Malcolm X's time of political leadership was brief. He came to national attention in the late 19505, left the Nation of Islam in 1964 to build the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and was assassinated in 1965. Malcolm X challenged the nonviolent approach of the civil rights movement espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead advocating armed selfdefense for black Americans, and he pushed King on issues of living and working conditions for black people and on black unemployment and poverty. He called for black control of the political and economic life of black communities as opposed to the integrationist approaches advocated by King. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in 1960 and organized many of the activities within the civil rights movement, such as sit-ins, voter registration drives, freedom schools (to provide education to black students expelled from public schools for civil rights organizing and to educate black children about their history and the civil rights movement), and the Freedom Rides that protested segregation on interstate bus lines. As time went on, SNCC became increasingly revolutionary. In 1966, during the march that accompanied the matriculation of the first black student at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith, SNCC members raised Black Power signs.

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That same year, the organization voted to expel its white members. The late Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, argued: I have said that most liberal whites react to "black power" with the question, What about me?, rather than saying: Tell me what you want and I'll see if I can do i t . . . . One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—that is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley and tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community. They come to teach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open freedom schools for whites. Let them work to stop America's racist foreign policy. (Churchill and Vander Wall, 173) In 1966, the Black Panther Party was organized by Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California. The Black Panthers advocated anti-colonial and anticapitalistic black economic and political self-determination. They trained their members in armed self-defense, surveilled police who stopped black people to ensure that the officers read the detainees their rights and did not commit undue violence against them, organized free clinics and breakfast programs for black children in working class communities, and opened freedom schools (Foner, 61). Also in 1966, the U.S. government, through the office of the FBI, launched COINTELPRO (an acronym for "counterintelligence program"). Revealed in the 19705 through documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the stated objectives of COINTELPRO were to prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups; prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement; prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups; prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability; and prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations especially among the youth. (Foner, xxvi).

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The release of COINTELPRO documents has raised questions about government involvement in the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, more than thirty Black Panther Party leaders and members, and the legitimacy of charges on the basis of which numerous Black Panther and other Black Power activists were incarcerated. The government has denied its role in all these cases except one, the execution of twentyone-year-old Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, which it was forced to admit as a result of documents revealed in a lawsuit by Hampton's family. By 1969, every other major Panther leader was in prison, in exile, or assassinated. William O'Neal was an FBI informant who infiltrated the Chicago Black Panthers and spied on Hampton in exchange for a reduction of theft charges against him. O'Neal provided Chicago police with a sketch of the floor plan of Hampton's apartment and drugged Hampton with Seconal in his Kool-Aid the night before December 4,1969. In the early morning hours of December 4, police burst into Hampton's apartment. Panther Mark Clark, who had fallen asleep with a shotgun across his lap while on guard in the front room of the apartment, barely had time to stand up before he was shot point-blank in the chest and killed. His gun discharged as he went down, hitting no one; it was the only round fired by the Panthers during the raid. The police shot eighteen-year-old Brenda J. Harris, who was lying unarmed in bed, then opened fire through the bedroom wall. All forty-two shots converged on the head of Hampton's bed, as indicated in the floor plan supplied by O'Neal, and one struck Hampton in the left shoulder, seriously wounding him (he was still lying in bed asleep). The police officers burst into the bedroom and grabbed Hampton's wife, Akua Njeri (then known as Deborah Johnson), who was nine months pregnant and lying in bed beside Hampton, and shoved her into the kitchen. While this was going on, more police crashed in through the back door of the apartment. There was a brief lull in the shooting and Njeri heard the exchange: "That's Fred Hampton . . . Is he dead? . . . Bring him out. He's barely alive; he'll make it." She then heard two shots, which were later revealed to have been fired point blank into Hampton's head as he lay prone, followed by police officer Edward Carmody's voice stating, "He's good and dead now" (Churchill and Vander Wall, 71, 73). The death of Fred Hampton brought the Black Panther Party to an end.

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Where Are We Today? There is a "100 years later" cycle in American history on the question of anti-black oppression. At the end of the Civil War, in the emancipation amendments, black people were guaranteed, on paper, equal protection under the law. Within a few years, however, policies that took advantage of loopholes in the law had rendered equal protection null and void. Nearly a hundred years and a civil rights movement later, laws were again written to grant black people full citizenship. But anti-black oppression continues to undermine legal equality. I do not want to say that the situation for black people in the United States in the early twenty-first century is identical to the situation in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow law was in full force in the South, housing and school segregation were fixtures in the North, black people all over the country were pushed into the lowest status jobs with the lowest pay and kept there despite years of work experience, and white people lynched thousands of black people. Due to the tremendous sacrifices of the participants in the civil rights movement, there has been undeniable improvement in some aspects of many black Americans' lives. Public accommodations, transportation, and spaces are no longer legally segregated. Public schools and universities have been integrated de jure, although in many ways not de facto. The most blatant voting restrictions have been eliminated. The number of black elected officials rose from thirty-three in 1941 to over eight thousand in 1993, changing the proportion of elected officials who were black from a minute fraction to almost 2 percent (J. Hochschild, 40). Black Americans have attended college and professional and graduate school, getting good jobs that are commensurate with their education level (rather than, as was so often the case until the mid-twentieth century, being forced into blue-collar jobs or domestic work even with a college degree), opportunities that were once flatly denied to all but a very few black people in this country. On the other hand, it is equally important to take note of the deep inequalities that still exist, inequalities that fall hardest on those black people with the fewest resources and also inequalities that lower the economic security of middle-class black people, such as the ongoing and significant disparities in wealth between white and black Americans.

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Federal social policies during the Johnson administration (1963-1969) allocated some resources directly to the inner-city communities that were created by the displacement of black people through urban renewal, but these policies were reversed during the Nixon administration (1969-1974), which switched to distributing federal funding through block grants with few restrictions on how local officials allocated federal aid. Federal funding to inner cities was reduced even more sharply during the Reagan administration (1981-1989), when federal grants to cities were reduced by 46 percent (Brown et al., 97-98). Service sector jobs created in the 19705 and 19805 as deindustrialization took its most serious toll went overwhelmingly to white workers. This was due partly to outright discrimination and partly to the fact that companies located these jobs outside of inner cities and away from black communities, so that few black workers could reach them (Brown et al., 94-95). Furthermore, when black workers who had lost blue-collar jobs found employment in white-collar sales jobs, they were lower-paying jobs that brought the black workers an average 13 percent pay cut. White workers who moved from manufacturing jobs to sales jobs experienced an average 36 percent pay increase: employers gave them the better jobs (Darity and Myers, 47-48). College-educated black workers fared no better during these years. At the end of the 19605, the unemployment rates of college-educated black workers and college-educated white workers were even. By 1980, however, college-educated black workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as college-educated white workers. Furthermore, during the 19808, the income of college-educated black men dropped from 80 percent of the white median income to 72 percent of the white median income (Brown et al., 80). The 19805 witnessed an explosion of wealth for the richest Americans, fueled by Reagan administration tax cuts and appreciation in the value of existing financial assets (Oliver and Shapiro, 63). Black Americans in general did not benefit. At the end of the 19805, black Americans controlled only 1.3 percent of the nation's financial assets. White Americans, who made up approximately 82.5 percent of the population at that time, owned 95 percent of the nation's financial assets. Sixty-three percent of black households had zero or negative net financial assets (the total of

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assets excluding home and vehicles minus debt). Only 28 percent of white households were in similar straits (Oliver and Shapiro, 103). Furthermore, poverty-level white Americans owned, on average, $26,683 in net financial assets, almost as much as the $28,310 in net financial assets owned, on average, by the highest-earning black Americans (Oliver and Shapiro, 101). Much of the discrepancy in wealth between white and black Americans is the result of discrimination against black Americans in the housing market. Due to the policies encouraged by the FHA beginning in the 19305, fewer black Americans than white Americans owned their own homes at the end of the 19805. Houses owned by black people were worth on average barely more than half the value of houses owned by white people. Black Americans were about half as likely as Latino Americans or Asian Americans to live in suburbs, and black people in almost all central cities were highly segregated from non-Hispanic white people. High incomes or levels of education made it no easier for African Americans to move into white neighborhoods. Black people have been turned down for loans more frequently than white people, even when factors of income, assets, and credit history are matched. Subprime lenders, those with higher interest rates and predatory foreclosure practices, have lent much more to black people than to white people. On average, black people have paid a one-half point higher interest rate on their mortgages than white people, which has translated into billions of dollars over the twentieth century being drained from black hands into primarily white-owned lending corporations (Oliver and Shapiro, chap. 6; J. Hochschild, 42; Brown et al., 14). Furthermore, the removal of jobs from black communities increased black poverty. By the end of the 19808, there were about four million fewer poor white Americans than at the end of the 19605, but 686,000 more poor black Americans. One-quarter of black children, compared with 6 percent of white children, lived in households with incomes below one-half of the poverty line. One-third of poor black households, compared with one-seventh of poor white households, lived in substandard housing (criteria include evidence of rats, holes in the floor, and exposed wiring) in 1985 (J. Hochschild, 45-46). Finally, although black Americans' per capita income rose from the end of the 19605 to the early 19905, the discrepancy in per capita income

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between black and white Americans increased from $4,700 in 1967 to $6,700 in 1992 (amounts in 1992 dollars) (J. Hochschild, 40-41). In addition, at the end of the 19805, 60 percent of black households making between $25,000 and $50,000, compared to 37 percent of white households in the same income bracket, were only able to achieve that income level with two incomes (Oliver and Shapiro, 96). The discrepancies in income and wealth between white and black households continued to grow during the 19905. By 2001, white households made, on average, $20,469 more than black households (U.S. Bureau of the Census). The mean net worth for white households in 1991 was $112,000 compared to $27,900 for black households (J. Hochschild, 40-41). By 1998, the mean net worth for white households was $335,132, while the mean net worth for black households had risen to only $64,193 (Montalto). In addition to significant inequalities in income and wealth, black Americans are considerably worse off than white Americans in terms of health. In 1995, black age-adjusted mortality rates were 1.61 times that of whites, a difference essentially unchanged since 1950. Black Americans, Latino Americans, and members of other non-white groups accounted for 75 percent of active cases of tuberculosis. Black Americans are five times as likely to die of asthma as white Americans. One-fifth to one-third of black American children are anemic, and black children constitute a disproportionate number of the children exposed to lead poisoning. Both of these conditions impair cognitive function and school performance (Brown et al., 14-15, 24). Black Americans are also more likely to die from cancer than white Americans. Black women are more likely than white women to die of breast cancer, even though the incidence of the disease is lower among black women. Studies show that the discrepancy is due to black women not being diagnosed until the disease has reached an advanced stage. Racial differences in mortality rates for cervical cancer remain significant even after adjusting for age and poverty. Black men have a cancer-death rate about 44 percent higher than that for white men. Black men between the ages of fifty and seventy are almost three times as likely to die from prostate cancer as white men, and their prostate cancer rate is more than double that of white men.

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Rates of death from lung cancer are higher for black Americans than for white Americans, and studies show that this is not due to smoking rates, but rather to exposure to environmental toxins and carcinogens that are disproportionately located in poor, predominantly black communities. Furthermore, a study of operable lung cancer found that the rate of surgery for black patients was 12.7 percent lower than that for white patients with the same diagnosis. The black mortality rate for strokes is 80 percent higher than the white rate and the black mortality rate for coronary heart disease is 40 percent higher. Black Americans are also more likely than white Americans to have lower limbs amputated due to hypertension and diabetes, lastresort procedures that can often be avoided with early detection and treatment. Income and social class do not adequately explain these differences in mortality rate and treatment. Race is a crucial variable. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, for example, found that income inequality between racial groups, rather than income inequality within racial groups, explains the differences in mortality rates (Brown et al., 45-47). Furthermore, in addition to the waste of black lives due to inadequate health care, "health crises and the staggering costs they impose are critical underlying causes of poverty, homelessness, and bankruptcy" (Brown et al., 24). Finally, one of the most notable manifestations of how anti-black oppression continues today can be seen in the mind-boggling growth of the prison-industrial complex in the United States. During the last twenty years, the disproportionate incarceration of black Americans has increasingly become a way for private prisons and for towns in which prisons are located to benefit economically from the internment of black citizens and has also created an enslaved black workforce, just as peonage practices did after emancipation. There are currently about two million people incarcerated in the United States, more than in any other country in the world (Russia runs a close second). The state of California alone incarcerates more people than either Brazil or India. The number of prisoners has grown almost sixfold since the 19705 and doubled between 1989 and 1999, although the crime rate has dropped steadily since 1992.

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Black people constitute over half the prisoners in the United States, although they make up only about 15 percent of the total population. In California, five black men are behind bars for every one in a state university (Egan, 334). Yet white people are the vast majority of drug users, and white people also commit the majority of rapes, robberies, and assaults. Black people make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population because they are sentenced to prison for drug use, drug sales, rape, robbery, and assaults more frequently and for longer periods of time than white people, not because they are more likely to be criminals. Black men go to prison on charges of rape, robbery, and assault seventeen times more often than white men charged with the same crimes, who are more likely to get "time-served/' probation, or significantly shorter sentences (M. Davis, 417). White people sell most of the nation's cocaine and account for 80 percent of its users. Separate studies by the FBI and the National Institute for Drug Abuse in 1988 showed that black people make up only 12 percent of the nation's drug users and that slightly lower percentages of black and Latino people use drugs than do whites in every age category. Yet 74 percent of both federal and state prisoners convicted on drug charges are black (R. Harris; Mauer, 124-125). Under mandatory sentencing laws, people convicted for selling five grams of crack cocaine, 96 percent of whom are people of color, receive five-year sentences, while powder cocaine dealers, who are predominantly white, have to sell 500 grams to receive the same sentence (Mauer, 155). The high rates of incarceration in the United States generate a lot of profit. Nationwide, prison construction is a five-billion-dollar-a-year business. Rural towns that have lost mining and factory jobs welcome prisons, because a typical maximum security prison provides about 1,200 jobs. Furthermore, people incarcerated in prisons add to the population count of the towns and counties in which the prisons are located, enabling them to obtain increased per capita state funding. This increased funding does not benefit the incarcerated people themselves, however, and when prisons are located in rural towns, the prisoners, who disproportionately come from urban areas, are separated from their families by long distances that make visits difficult (Morain; Schlosser 54-58; De Bare). Moreover, prisons are increasingly built and operated for profit by private corporations, who also profit, along with state and federal governments,

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from contracts in which they "employ" prisoners at an average wage of thirty-five cents per hour (Jaffe and Brooks; Silverstein, 21; Morain). The number of women incarcerated is increasing astronomically, and these women are disproportionately black. Forty-four percent of incarcerated women in 1995 were black. Black women are seven times more likely than white women to be sentenced to prison for the same kinds of crimes. They are more likely to be incarcerated for victimless crimes, to be denied bail, and to be returned to prison for parole violation (Watterson, 38). From 1980 to 1990, the number of women in prison increased by 256 percent, compared with a 140 percent increase in male prisoners. In 1995, more than 108,000 women were in prison or jail. Yet between 1986 and 1991, Bureau of Justice statistics show that the proportion of women serving time for violent offences fell from 41 percent to 32 percent and rates of drug use by women have decreased (Watterson, xviii). The number of incarcerated women has increased not due to increasing criminal activity on the part of women, but rather primarily due to mandatory sentencing laws for drug convictions and also due to harsher sentencing for petty crimes such as shoplifting, writing bad checks, and vagrancy. Furthermore, in 1975, nearly 66 percent of women convicted of federal felonies were placed on probation, but in 1991 only 28 percent were (Watterson, 41-43). The majority of women in prison have experienced battery and/or sexual abuse. In a Massachusetts study in 1988, 88 percent of the women incarcerated in that state had experienced abuse (Watterson, 36). Threefourths of women imprisoned for crimes involving violence are there for having committed a first-time offense directed against an abusive partner or husband. While abusive men who kill their partners serve an average of two to six years in prison, women who kill their partners and claim self-defense serve an average of fifteen years (Watterson, 41-43). Women prisoners are routinely subjected to rape and sexual molestation by corrections officers, including frequent, routine body cavity searches. Incarcerated women (like incarcerated men) receive very poor health care, and incarcerated women who are pregnant receive inadequate prenatal medical care and nutrition and no preparation for childbirth. When they go into labor they are transported to the hospital in handcuffs, handcuffed to the delivery table, and the baby is taken away

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upon birth and turned over to a family member if available or put into foster care (A. Davis, 77-81; Watterson, chap. 13). Rehabilitative programs are largely non-existent in today's prisons, and prisoners are routinely denied everything from college correspondence courses to weightlifting. Fifty-seven maximum security units in forty-two states now hold about twenty thousand prisoners, who are restricted to their cells for twenty-three hours or more a day and move outside the cell only with leg irons, handcuffs, and an escort of two or three guards. These prisoners are deprived of reading material, radio, and television while in their cells. Many are placed under these solitary confinement conditions for years at a time, despite clear evidence that such harsh treatment is not warranted by their actions. Furthermore, reports surface regularly across the nation of extreme brutality by corrections officers (Human Rights Watch; Parenti, 11; Phillips; Holding 1996 and 1998).

A Brief Conclusion Discussions of whether or not we should take race into account in our moral reasoning must be grounded in the history and contemporary manifestation of white supremacy. The question of taking race into account is not an ahistorical question. When the question of taking race into account is discussed in the context of considering black and white racial identity in the United States, the development of the concepts of whiteness and blackness in the U.S. and the past and ongoing material impact of those concepts on people's lives are essential considerations. Furthermore, a discussion of the merits and problems of taking race into account in moral reasoning should not be an end in itself. As I argue in this book, the discussion of taking race into account is and should be understood as being intrinsically linked to the question of how the people of the United States can and should fight against antiblack oppression. The injustices I have described are those against which black Americans have struggled in their battle for liberation. If all Americans, and especially white Americans, are to challenge white supremacy in the United States, they must join in and challenge these injustices.

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DOES THE REALITY OF RACE REALLY NATTER?

IIn the early 19908, two philosophers, Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw, began to debate the question of whether or not we should take race into account in our moral reasoning about how to treat other people, what obligations we have to other people, and what obligations we have to ourselves. This was not a new question. Anti-black racism has long been criticized on the grounds that it involves white people taking race into account in morally unacceptable ways. Discussions of affirmative action policies, which involve taking race into account, have focused on whether this is morally acceptable or not. Many black scholars and activists have urged black people to strongly identify with each other— which involves taking race into account—for emancipatory purposes. Others have argued that the only way to bring an end to racism in the world is for people to move away from taking race into account, by treating all human beings the same regardless of race. The debate between Appiah and Outlaw was central to the development of the area of philosophy now known as Africana philosophy. Furthermore, their approach to the question, which focused on the morality of individuals taking race into account in their treatment of others, differed from previous discussions within academic philosophy that focused on the morality of taking race into account in the realm of public policy. Their debate also differs from previous debates on this question undertaken

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outside the realm of Euro-American philosophy insofar as they have addressed the question in specifically Euro-American philosophical terms. The debate between Appiah and Outlaw is interesting because many people, including, I would argue, Appiah and Outlaw themselves, have taken their debate to be primarily a dispute about the nature of race and how to define it. How does a discussion of whether or not it is acceptable to take race into account in our moral reasoning—clearly a moral debate—become a debate over the nature of race? The answer is that for both Appiah and Outlaw, it is only acceptable to take race into account in our moral reasoning if race is real. Well into the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans took it for granted that racial categories divided people into groups based on significant natural differences and that race was therefore real. To say that a person was "white/7 for example, was to say that he is fundamentally and significantly different at the biological or genetic level from a person whom we would call "black/7 Many Americans still believe this to be true. During the twentieth century, however, many scientists increasingly questioned whether there were significant genetic differences between people whom we classify as belonging to different races. It seemed likely to these scientists that any racial differences were very superficial, merely questions of insignificant differences in skin color, hair texture, and so on that did not indicate any more significant differences between people. Toward the end of the twentieth century, scholars began to speak of race as a "social construction": a way of classifying people that is entirely artificial, reinforced by law and social practice, that some people created to serve their social/political purposes, but that has no basis in biology People who believe that race is a social construction point to the fact that in different societies, in different times and different places, race is defined differently A person who counts as white in one society might not count as white in another. In many times and places, people have not thought of each other in terms of race at all. According to this view, race is a made-up classification, not a natural one. Both Appiah and Outlaw believe that race is a social construction, but because they have different criteria for "reality," they draw differing conclusions about the reality of race. Appiah believes that race would be real only if there were significant genetic differences between members of

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different races. If race is a social construction, race does not meet this criterion, so Appiah concludes that race is not real. Outlaw, on the other hand, believes that race is real as long as it (i) reflects natural tendencies on the part of human beings to classify each other according to appearance and ancestry; (2) has social, political, and historical importance, such that one's race makes a difference in one's life and how one relates to the world; and (3) reflects cultural differences between members of the groups we call races. Outlaw believes that race understood as a social construction meets these conditions and, therefore, that race is real. Charles Mills, a third philosopher who has figured importantly in the recent philosophical debate over the reality of race, agrees that race is a social construction but argues, contrary to Appiah, that social constructions are nonetheless real (Mills draws his conclusions in terms of the "objectivity" rather than the "reality" of race, a distinction that I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter). My goal in this chapter is twofold. I explicate Appiah's, Outlaw's, and Mills's respective arguments about the nature and reality of race. I also examine the extent to which their arguments about the reality of race help or hinder us in answering the moral question of whether to take race into account in our treatment of others. In the first section, "Race and Biology," I analyze debates about the claim that race is real due to significant genetic differences between members of different races. I discuss Appiah's objections to this claim and Outlaw's arguments for why, although he agrees with Appiah that there are no significant genetic differences between members of different races, he nonetheless believes that race has a biological basis. I argue that those who believe that we should take race into account should argue their position on grounds that will hold up even if there is not a significant genetic basis for racial distinctions. Outlaw's argument that racial classification is somehow natural or inevitable does not hold up well, however. His argument that race is real enough to take into account, given its social, political, and historical impact, is much stronger. I grant that this argument is unlikely to persuade Appiah but argue that Appiah should not be permitted to set the terms of the debate with his overly rigorous criterion for the reality of race. In the second section, "Race and Culture," I discuss W. E. B. Du Bois's attempt to define race in terms of culture. I begin with Appiah's arguments

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for why Du Bois was not successful and why any approach to defining race in terms of culture is misguided. Then I consider Outlaw's defense and development of Du Bois's project. Du Bois defined race in cultural terms in his classic essay 'The Conservation of Races/' because he was aware that race could not be accurately defined in strictly biological terms. I argue that Outlaw's important contribution to the project of defining race in terms of culture is his proposal that defining race should be a creative, political project. In keeping with the distinction I drew in the introduction to this book, Outlaw's proposal is that we should define race prescriptively rather than descriptively. We should focus on how race should be defined, not on what it is. If race is a social construction, rather than something that exists naturally, then we are free to construct it or deconstruct it in ways that achieve morally sound social goals. Again, as I reiterate throughout the chapter, the debate over whether to take race into account should be addressed on specifically moral grounds. Quarrels over descriptive definitions of race are unhelpful in this debate and hinder forward movement toward resolving the important moral issues that are involved. Finally, in "Race, Reality, and Objectivity," I examine Mills's arguments for why, contrary to Appiah's beliefs, social constructions are nonetheless real. Mills argues that Appiah is confusing "objectivity" and "reality" when he discusses the nature of race. Mills argues that although race is not "real" by Appiah's definition of "reality," it is nonetheless objective (the meaning of which I explain), and all that is needed for race to be taken into account is that it be an objective property. I argue that Appiah would be unlikely to be swayed by Mills's arguments, because Appiah's main concern, as I interpret it, is that the harm done by the concept of race has been done by people treating race as if it were real when in fact it is not. This, I argue, is why Appiah is determined to withhold granting reality to race. But this concern on Appiah's part is not, fundamentally, a concern about the nature of race. It is a prior, specifically moral concern, and should be addressed as such.

Race and Biology One way to argue that race is "real" is to argue that there are significant natural differences between people of different races. According to this

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view, members of racial groups share certain fundamental and heritable physical, moral, and intellectual characteristics with one another—racial "essences''—that differentiate them from members of other races. Appiah refers to this view as "racialism," and argues that it is false (Appiah 1990, 5; Appiah 1996,54). According to Appiah, the racialist understanding of race that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and America has been debunked by modern genetic theory: Once you have the modern theory of inheritance, you can see why there is less correlation than everyone expected between skin color and things we care about: people are the product not of essences but of genes interacting with one another and with environments, and there is little systematic correlation between the genes that fix color and the like and the genes that shape courage or literary genius. (Appiah 1996, 72) Furthermore, Appiah argues, even if we leave aside the notion of racial essences, there is nearly as much genetic variation between members of the same "race" as between members of different "races." He quotes Paul Hoffman from "The Science of Race," which appeared in Discover in 1994: On average there's [a] 0.2 percent difference in genetic material between any two randomly chosen people on Earth. Of that diversity, 85 percent will be found within any local group of people—say, between you and your neighbor. More than half (9 percent) of the remaining 15 percent will be represented by differences between ethnic and linguistic groups within a given race (for example, between Italians and French). Only 6 percent represents differences between races (for example, between Europeans and Asians). And remember that's 6 percent of 0.2 percent. In other words, race accounts for only a minuscule 0.012 percent difference in our genetic material. (Appiah 1996, 69 n. 53) Two alternative definitions of race have been suggested by those who accept that racialism is false but who nonetheless want to define race in

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biological terms. One approach is to define race in terms of population, "the community of potentially interbreeding individuals at a given locality/7 Appiah argues that "population" is not an adequate referent for "race." While there are various human populations that are and have been for some time relatively reproductively isolated, the social subgroups of the United States to which we refer in racial terms are not populations in this sense (Appiah 1996, 73). For example, black people in the United States have never reproduced only with each other. Appiah cites evidence that perhaps as many as two-thirds of African Americans have some European ancestors; up to two-fifths may have Native American ancestors; and at least 5 percent of white Americans are thought to have black ancestors (Appiah 1996, 70). Another nonracialist approach to defining race in biological terms is to define "races" as groups determined solely by appearance: skin color, hair, and gross morphology, corresponding to the dominant pattern for these characteristics in the major subcontinental regions—Europe, Africa, East and South Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. Appiah argues that groups defined by skin color, hair, and gross morphology are not an adequate referent for races because there is too much variation in these features. For example, a person can have dark skin with straight hair. Furthermore, "races" defined in terms of appearance alone do not match up closely enough with the social groups that we call "races" in the United States, which refer to ancestry as well as appearance (a light-skinned, blueeyed person with a black grandmother counts as black) (Appiah 1996,74). One response to Appiah's arguments about biology is to argue that he has his facts wrong and that there is a more substantial genetic basis to racial distinctions than he allows. Albert Mosely argues, for example, that Appiah's use of data from genetic studies has been biased. Mosely asserts that in In My Father's House, Appiah cites evidence from a paper by biologists Masatoshi Nei and A. K. Roychoudhury to the effect that interracial genetic variation is small when compared to intraracial genetic variation, while relegating to a footnote the authors' conclusion that the "genetic differentiation is real and generally statistically highly significant" (Mosely, 80). Mosely is correct in pointing out that it has not been established as certainly as Appiah suggests that the groups Americans think of as races do

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not match up with any significant genetic variation. Appiah is correct, however, in arguing that we should not simply accept that racial distinctions do reflect significant genetic variations. There are two problems with Mosely's response to Appiah's arguments. First, to argue against Appiah on the basis of disparate biological data is to leave unchallenged Appiah's insistence that the only way to show that race is real is to show that it has a genetic basis. Second, we should not wait for biologists to verify or disprove that race reflects significant genetic variation before we address the issue of whether or not to take race into account in our moral reasoning. Those who believe that we should take race into account should argue their position on grounds that will hold up even if there is not a significant genetic basis for racial distinctions. Lucius Outlaw challenges Appiah's rigorous requirements for the reality of race. He argues that race has both social and natural dimensions, and the fact that race is partly a social concept does not make it any less real. Outlaw believes that race is real as long as it reflects naturally occurring, biologically based distinctions and motivations among people, with the understanding that there is a sociopolitical aspect to how these distinctions and motivations are understood and employed. Outlaw agrees with Appiah that racialism is false. He agrees that there are no racial essences and that genes for phenotypical features do not determine characteristics such as intelligence, courage, and so forth. He asserts that "there are no 'pure' races, nor are there unique characteristics that [define particular races in contrast to others]; nor is raciality the function of an invariant, trans-historical, trans-geographical, biological essence that makes races natural, unchanging kinds" (Outlaw 1996, 12). He maintains, however, that racial groups are nonetheless partly biological in nature and that this should be recognized. He argues that it is natural for human beings to divide themselves into self-reproducing subgroups based on "culture"—different approaches to living—and on standards of physical beauty by which members of each group distinguish themselves from strangers and on the basis of which they choose reproductive mates (Outlaw 1996,16). He asks rhetorically: Why is it, after thousands of years, that human beings are not all "light khaki" instead of exhibiting the variety of skin tones (and

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other features) more or less characteristic of various populations called races? Are these developments only to be accounted for as resulting from boundary-setting projects motivated by racism and invidious ethnocentrism? Might these populations not be the result of bio-cultural group attachments and practices that are conducive to human survival and well-being, and hence must be understood, appreciated, and provided for in the principles and practices of, say, a liberal, democratic society? If bio-diversity is thought good for other species and for the global ecosystem, why not for the human species and its bio-cultural ecosystems? (Outlaw 1996,13) He goes on to note that subgroups or populations, not individuals, are the units of survival and the bearers of group-defining cultural, as well as physical, traits (Outlaw 1996,16). According to Outlaw: Raciality is not wholly and completely fixed by biological factors, but only partially so. Biological factors do not determine raciality, but in complex interactions with environmental, cultural, and social factors and processes they provide certain boundary conditions and possibilities that affect raciation in terms of the developments of distinctive gene pools from which are derived physical and biologically conditioned characteristics shared in certain frequencies by members of various groups. (Outlaw 1996,170) Outlaw is correct in arguing that even if there were a substantive genetic basis for racial classification, it would not necessarily follow that racialism is true. He does not, however, prove that race is real (even by his own, less strict criteria for "reality")/ and his arguments about the "biology" of race are actually, upon close inspection, prescriptive rather than descriptive claims—they are claims about how we ought to think about race rather than claims about what race is. Outlaw's argument—that populations rather than individuals are the units of survival and that racial distinctions may have developed because maintaining these distinctions contributed to the well-being of racial groups—is based on the assumption that racial groups are genetically relevant populations. This is exactly what Appiah questions, however, so

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that Outlaw is presupposing what needs to be proved. To disprove Appiah's claim, one must establish not only that there are genetic distinctions upon which we can classify humans into races, but that races understood in this way match up with the groups to which we refer when we talk about races. Proving this is greatly complicated by cultural variations in racial talk. For example, Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda consider themselves to be different races, but Americans would not draw this distinction. Part of the difficulty with debating the reality of race in terms of genetic studies of race is in the inconsistent uses of the word "race." According to Mosely, Nei and Roychoudhury state that "the races of each of Caucasoid, Asian, Mongoloid, and Negroid form a separate cluster/7 which seems to suggest a match with contemporary American understandings of race. But Mosely mentions that Nei and Roychoudhury also warn that two populations that look alike, such as the Australian aborigines and South African Bushmen, might nonetheless be strikingly dissimilar in terms of protein and blood-type frequencies, such that "genetic distance between populations is not always correlated with morphological difference" (Mosely, 80). What Nei and Roychoudhury are acknowledging is that people whom we might count as a race because they look alike may nonetheless have important genetic dissimilarities. Furthermore, groups of people who share significant genetic similarities might not exactly match with the groups that any particular society counts as being racial groups (see also Bamshad and Olson). Mosely is not clear in his discussion how all this plays out, and Outlaw does not address this issue. These oversights seriously undermine their attempts to dispute Appiah's claim that there is no defensible biological basis for racial distinctions. The second problem with Outlaw's argument arises when he argues that maintaining racial distinctions is important for biodiversity and human survival. Again, there is the problem of a lack of consistency in racial classification between cultures. A group that counts as a race in one society might not count as a race in a different society, so that there is no way to determine which racial distinctions made by whom are the ones that are important for biodiversity and human survival. Furthermore, this argument presupposes that racial groups are genetically relevant populations. Outlaw does not offer evidence to show that maintaining

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racial distinctions as opposed to other sorts of distinctions contributes to human biodiversity and survival, however. Moreover, if Ian HaneyLopez is correct, the reason why there are not more light khaki people in the United States may be due to U.S. laws concerning miscegenation and naturalization (laws that prohibited people of different races from marrying and laws that stripped women of their citizenship if they married men who, due to their race, were ineligible for citizenship), rather than to supposed natural tendencies for people to choose people who look like themselves as reproductive partners (Haney-Lopez, 14-15). Finally, this is really a prescriptive argument that appears superficially to be descriptive. The claim that we should preserve biodiversity is prescriptive and does not necessarily follow from the claim that there is biodiversity: "is" does not imply "ought." Outlaw's arguments raise the issue of sociobiology and its relation to the debate over taking race into account in our moral reasoning. Outlaw invokes sociobiological arguments as if they substantiate the claim that race is real. Invoking sociobiology is not useful in resolving the debate over whether or not to take race into account, however. Sociobiologists argue that taking race into account is an extension of nepotism (kin altruism), the propensity for animals to display altruistic behavior to those who share their genes. Sociobiologists acknowledge that taking race into account, where "race"' refers to the groups that are popularly called races, is a warping of this propensity. A member of my race does not necessarily have much in common with me genetically, but the use of physical appearance as a "marker" for kinship has been extended culturally in ways that do not make sense genetically anymore but have their roots in propensities that helped genetic survival at some earlier stage of human evolution (see van den Berghe, for example). Even if it is natural for human beings to divide into groups, that does not establish that they ought to be racial groups defined in the way that race has been defined. If race is contingent, as Outlaw acknowledges, not trans-historical or transgeographic, then we must take seriously that it could have been otherwise, that nothing about what actually occurred proves that this is what ought to be. The argument that does establish Outlaw's claim that we should take race into account is that thinking in terms of race as it has come to be

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classified and preserving existing racial groups is beneficial now and will continue to be in the future. It is important to draw a distinction in Outlaw's work between the weak argument that racial classification is somehow natural or inevitable and the much stronger argument that racial classification in a world in which it exists and has social, political, and historical impact is real enough to be taken into account when we make decisions about how to behave toward each other. Outlaw is correct to challenge Appiah's rigid distinction between the biological and the social, but he should not have stopped there. What really needs to be challenged is the assumption that the morality of taking race into account is dependent upon whether or not race is somehow real. Appiah is wrong in believing that race should only be taken into account if there is a substantive genetic basis for race. There are independent reasons to take race into account, which I will discuss in Chapters 3 and 5. Outlaw believes that if race is real by his definition, meaning that it is not entirely a social construction but is based on "natural" distinctions, then race should be taken into account in our moral reasoning. Thus, his project is to prove that race is real in order to show that race should be taken into account. Outlaw does not suggest, however, that the reality of race as he defines it is a necessary condition for taking race into account, and he provides many arguments for taking race into account that are valid even if race is entirely a social construction (as I will argue in Chapter 3). Nonetheless, his emphasis on establishing that race is at least partly natural represents a failure to fundamentally challenge the assumptions about "reality" that limit Appiah's moral vision in regard to race. First, we need to take seriously the idea that the concept of race might never have come into existence, that human beings might have classified themselves in the modern era in very different ways. What matters for resolving the question of whether or not to take race into account in our moral reasoning is that we have developed the concept of race and used it in various ways. It does not matter whether or not this is somehow part of our biological make-up. Second, Outlaw asserts that an important part of his motivation in arguing that race is real is because he is concerned with acknowledging and respecting the feelings of those black people in whose lives race has been a decisive factor, conditioning life experiences, determining obligations, and playing a significant role in their sense of self. Discussion of

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race should incorporate and reflect "the lived experiences of persons within racial/ethnic groups for whom raciality or ethnicity is a fundamental and positive element of their identity . . . in ways that are far from detrimental to the social whole" (Outlaw 1996,177). I question, however, why race must be shown to have a "natural/' biological basis in order to respond to this concern. These feelings and self-perceptions are worthy of respect even if they have not been "validated" by biological science.

Race and Culture

A second approach that has been used to show that race is real, even if there is not a substantial genetic basis for racial classification, is the argument that race is based on culture. According to this argument, the difference between members of different races is not genetic, but cultural. Different races have different histories, different heritages, different ways of life. Perhaps the most famous version of the "race as culture" argument is that of Du Bois. In "The Conservation of Races," Du Bois defines a race as "a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life" (Du Bois 1997, 230). In "The Uncompleted Argument," Appiah argues that Du Bois's attempt in "The Conservation of Races" to replace a biological basis for race with a sociohistorical one fails. Appiah suggests that by retaining the notion of "common blood" in his definition, Du Bois is holding onto nineteenth-century racialist biology and that none of his additional criteria— common history, traditions, impulses, or strivings—are sound. Appiah claims that if we think of family in terms of common descent, then the biological notion of race is not fully transcended. He argues that this is exactly how Du Bois was using the notion of family: not in the sense of choice or adoption, but in the sense of biological reproduction (Appiah 1995, 64). Furthermore, because not all groups of people who share common descent (in one sense, we all share common descent) count as races in Du Bois's view, the part about common history must play a crucial role. Appiah argues, however, that appealing to common history

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in this case brings in circularity: we can only recognize what counts as the common history of a group if we have previously defined certain people as members of that group (Appiah 1995, 66). Appiah argues that Du Bois's references to common traditions, impulses, and strivings are similarly unsound due to circularity: you can only identify traditions, impulses, and strivings as common to members of groups if you have already identified the groups (Appiah 1995, 67). Thus, Appiah argues, the only part of Du Bois's definition that is not circular is the appeal to common descent, that is, the appeal to biology. In Color Conscious, Appiah addresses the question of defining race in terms of culture in a different way. He defines a common culture as a coherent structure of beliefs, values, and practices and suggests that the United States is a society of many common cultures (Appiah 1996,86-87). He then argues that although it might be natural to assume that these "subcultures" are attached to ethnic and racial groups, this is not so. He thinks it is doubtful that black Americans, taken as a group, have a common culture in the sense of values, beliefs, and practices that they share with each other and do not share with other Americans. Racial identity and cultural identity are not the same. As an example of the difference, he suggests that it is possible for a black and a white American to grow up together in a shared adoptive family—with the same practices, beliefs, and values, and therefore the same culture—and still consider themselves to have separate racial identities (Appiah 1996, 88-89). Outlaw defends Du Bois against Appiah's criticism. He argues, correctly, that Du Bois was not engaged solely or even primarily in a descriptive project when he defined race in "Conservation of Races." Rather, Du Bois was engaged in a political—a prescriptive—project. Yet Outlaw undermines himself when he proceeds to argue that Du Bois did, in fact, manage to define "race" in a way that captures what we mean when we use the term while managing to avoid racialism. Outlaw does not succeed in contradicting Appiah's claim that Du Bois's definition in "Conservation of Races" is circular. Outlaw's important contribution is to argue that defining race is a creative, political project that should not be limited by Appiah's insistence on "reality" as Appiah defines it. Outlaw should have forcefully resisted the idea that he needed to defend Du Bois's definition of race on Appiah's terms.

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Outlaw argues that the four elements of Du Bois's definition (physical characteristics, geography, cultural practices, and traditions) would be circular only if each were the sole or a necessary criterion for determining racial group membership. Outlaw argues that Appiah is reading Du Bois's definition as if the elements in the definition were essential (such that the physical characteristics determine the other three) and invariant in terms of being severally necessary, connected conjunctively, and jointly sufficient (such that a person is a member of a racial group if and only if he shares all four elements with all the other members of the group). According to Outlaw, however, what Du Bois was suggesting was a "cluster concept" in which the four elements are not essential (none determines another) and are disjunctively part of what determines racial group membership such that "each property is severally sufficient and the possession of at least one of the properties is necessary" (Outlaw 1995, 92). For example, given four elements—element A, heritable physical features, element B, shared cultural practices, by way of element C, linked if not quite common histories and traditions, which have their beginnings in element D, a common site of origin that accounts, in significant part, for the shared physical features—that are shared by members of a group in a limited number of patterned combinations, then necessarily one element (B, for example) plus one or more of the others (C or A or D) would be sufficient to identify a person as a member of a particular race (Outlaw 1995,101 n. 29). This defense, taken by itself, is not adequate to answer Appiah's challenge. While it does avoid the essentialism charge, these four elements cannot be defined in such a way as to usefully establish group membership without presuppositions that involve presupposing the validity of dividing people into races in the first place. We concentrate on certain heritable physical features as ways of distinguishing people to the exclusion of others, for example, based on having already granted social significance to those features. We focus on hair type, facial features, and skin color, but not on the roundness or lankiness of bodies, because we have already attributed social significance to hair type, facial features, and skin color. As a further example, indigenous inhabitants of India were referred to as "blacks" in England in the nineteenth century, along with indigenous inhabitants of Africa, but we no longer consider these peoples to be

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members of the same race and would perceive significant physical differences between them that were not part of distinctions commonly drawn in British culture at that time. Again, we see differences when we have already decided that they are important. Finally, the element that Outlaw refers to as the "common site of origin" is problematic, given that it depends on what point in time we use for determining a common site of origin. Contemporary consensus is that all people originated on what was then roughly the African continent, and any physical differences attributable to evolution in differing geographical settings developed later, after groups had migrated to other parts of the globe. So element D becomes a distinguishing factor only if we look to groups taken at a certain moment in time. But why that particular moment in time? Because it determined the groups that we now consider to be important: racial groups defined in particular ways. Outlaw's defense of Du Bois works only if we add an additional element, Outlaw's claim that Du Bois was neither solely nor primarily engaged in a descriptive project, but rather in a prescriptive (what Outlaw refers to as a "political") project. According to Outlaw, Du Bois worried that black Americans were too quickly accepting America's supposed ideals of race-neutral human brotherhood. He worried that they were forgetting that groups, rather than individuals acting alone, make history and that they should therefore act as a group if they wanted to have any impact. He also worried that pressures to be "only" American, when there continued to be conflict between American and Negro identities, led too many black Americans to hesitate and question themselves when they should instead be uniting together to act on behalf of themselves as a group (Outlaw 1995, 95). Outlaw argues that Du Bois was attempting to forge a group identity out of some generally shared characteristics that could be used as a basis for people identifying themselves as a group as part of a process of self-liberation (Outlaw 1995, 93). This defense of Du Bois is not going to convince Appiah that Du Bois's definition is not circular, however. It moves the debate between Outlaw and Appiah to a different, more useful arena: the prescriptive rather than the descriptive arena. The debate between Appiah and Outlaw about how to define race and whether or not race is real is actually, fundamentally, a prescriptive debate. The best arguments on both sides are the prescriptive

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ones, and these are the arguments that we should compare if we are to resolve the question of whether or not to take race into account. In On Race and Philosophy, Outlaw offers his own definition of race, inspired by Du Bois's definition from "The Conservation of Races'7 but somewhat more carefully phrased. Outlaw defines a "race" as "a group of persons who share, more or less, biologically transmitted physical characteristics that, under the influence of endogenous [internal] cultural and geographical factors as well as exogenous [external] social and political factors, contribute to the characterization of the group as a distinct, selfreproducing, encultured population" (Outlaw 1996,136). I suspect, however, that Appiah would not accept this definition, either. He would likely argue that the members of the groups that we refer to as "races" in the contemporary United States cannot be accurately described as "distinct, encultured populations" because they are not sufficiently "distinct" and do not share unique cultures. The important point that Outlaw makes is that it is morally, socially, and politically useful for black people in the contemporary United States to think of themselves as a distinct, self-reproducing, encultured population. This is a prescriptive rather than a descriptive claim, however, and should be made and addressed as such. I return to this claim in Chapter 3.

Race, Reality, and Objectivity

Mills takes an entirely different approach in arguing against Appiah's claim that race is not real. Mills argues that theories about the reality of race can be divided into two categories, objectivism and anti-objectivism. He describes objectivism about race to be the general claim that "race" and racial categories exist independently of individual choice or belief. He further subdivides objectivism about race into two categories, realism and constructivism. He defines realism about race as the belief that races are natural kinds. He suggests furthermore that racial realists tend to believe that the differences between races are not confined to superficial phenotypical characteristics, but extend to significant moral, intellectual, characterological, and/or spiritual differences (Mills 1998, 45-46). Mills's definition of racial realism coincides with Appiah's definition of racialism.

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Mills argues that because Appiah believes racialism is not true, Appiah concludes that race is not objective (that is, Appiah concludes that race belongs in the anti-objectivism category). In opposition to Appiah, Mills argues that even if race is not real in the racialist sense, it is nonetheless objective. Mills defines constructivism about race as the belief that although racial distinctions do not exist independently of human perception and belief, these distinctions nevertheless are objective. The concept of race has a contingently deep reality, arising from our particular social and political history. Because people have come to think of themselves and others in racial terms and have used these concepts to differentiate between each other in ways that have had significant impacts on individual lives and on history, the concept of race has acquired an objective status, a social reality, that arises from intersubjectivity (Mills 1998,48). Mills argues that race is objective by demonstrating that it is neither subjective nor relativistic (if race were subjective or relativistic, it would belong in the anti-objectivism category). According to Mills, race is not subjective because individuals can neither choose their race nor decide not to have one. Moreover, race is not strictly relativistic: while different cultures have different criteria for racial group membership and divide races in different ways, such that one's race is contextually relative to place and time, race is not relativistic in the sense that a sub-community of a particular society or culture can choose to change its race. The concept of race may be a construction of human beings, and it may be true that the concept could have developed very differently or not at all, but it has taken on a life of its own and must be dealt with in these terms. One way to think about Mills's arguments about race is to think about money. Human beings worldwide, with the exception of a handful of isolated, indigenous groups, take money to have exchange value in accordance with certain customs and agreements. Monetary exchange is so much a part of almost all cultures that individuals or subgroups cannot refuse to recognize the meaning of money nor value it according to different rules than those that prevail in the culture in which they live. Money has no meaning and no value apart from the meaning and the value that human beings have assigned to it, yet it is neither subjective nor relativistic.

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I suspect that Appiah would reject the analogy that race is like money because of his concern that harm has been done by treating race as if it were real when in fact it is not. He would argue that the use of money has not involved similar abuses. A person who tried to argue that money has meaning and value other than the value that human beings have assigned to it would have a hard time convincing nearly everyone else in the world. We may not think about it a lot, but if we do, we recognize right away that the use of money and what counts as money are social conventions. Human beings did not discover money; rather, we invented it, and it is safe to say that almost all of us recognize that fact. Appiah would argue that throughout most of the history of the race concept, most people believed that race was a naturally occurring property, one that human beings discovered, rather than one that human beings invented. The so-called sciences of phrenology and craniology that developed in the nineteenth century were understood as measuring and cataloging natural differences between different groups of people, not as inventing a social hierarchy. Even today, vast numbers of people believe that race exists entirely independently of human ascription of meaning to it, and even today, some scientists continue to measure and catalogue what they take to be inherent differences among members of different races. Appiah would argue that the harm from the concept of race has come from treating a social convention as if it were a naturally occurring property and using that belief to justify atrocities. So he believes that the first priority is to be absolutely clear that race is a human invention and to resist granting race a life of its own: "In our social lives away from the text-world of the academy, we too easily take reference for granted. . . . The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask 'race7 to do for us. The evil that is done is done by the concept and by easy—yet impossible—assumptions as to its application" (Appiah 1995, 75). Again, close inspection reveals moral concerns underlying a descriptive argument about the nature of race. Appiah's fundamental concern is with how the concept of race has been used. Although the concept of race has been used in ways that have been harmful, however, it does not follow that it is morally unacceptable to take race into account if it can be done in ways that are helpful. Even Appiah himself finds it necessary to

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allow for "race talk" in order to make possible public policies designed to mitigate anti-black oppression. In order to accomplish this, he argues in Color Conscious that racial designations should be understood in terms of racial ascription and identification as a label, R, associated with ascriptions by most people (where ascription involves descriptive criteria for applying the label); and identifications by those that fall under it (where identification implies a shaping role for the label in the intentional acts of the possessors, so that they sometimes act as an R), where there is a history of associating possessors of the label with an inherited racial essence (even if some who use the label no longer believe in racial essences). (Appiah 1996, 81-82) The concept of racial identity allows for the continued usage of "race talk/7 while serving as a reminder that in fact race is not real. Appiah runs into an interesting difficulty with his notion of "racial identity" As I discuss in Chapter 3, he argues for public policies that would provide certain sorts of assistance to black people (and other "minorities") to acquire skills necessary to even out average economic disparities between racial groups. Providing assistance to people on the basis of their racial identity means taking racial identity into account. This implies that Appiah thinks that racial identity is real, because, as I argue in this chapter, he believes that we should only take properties that are real into account in our moral reasoning. Because racial identity is specifically a social construction, however, then this implies that social constructions are, in fact, real. Because Appiah does not want to admit this, however, he is contradicting himself. Demonstrating that race is, in fact, real in the sense of being an objective property—that although it is a social construction, it has taken on a life of its own—does not resolve the debate about whether or not we should take race into account, however. It is important to challenge Appiah's conclusion that race is a myth or illusion, because racial concepts need to refer to something in order for it to be meaningful to take race into account. Having established that it is meaningful to refer to race,

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the next step is to consider the specifically moral arguments for and against taking race into account. Those who believe, contrary to Appiah, that we should take race into account in our moral reasoning should note that Appiah argues that even if race were real by his definition (that is, even if there were a significant genetic basis for race), it still should not be taken into account. For Appiah, the reality of race is a necessary but not sufficient condition for taking race into account (Appiah 1990,14). Thus, while it is a useful strategy for Appiah to demonstrate that race is not real, which resolves the issue as far as he is concerned, those who advocate taking race into account must do more than simply establish that race is real. They must give further arguments for why it is morally acceptable or advisable to take race into account. When the debate over taking race into account is approached as if it were primarily a debate about whether or not race is real, we lose sight of the important issues and arguments that we ought to be considering. I turn to these in the next chapter.

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I In the last chapter, I argued that the debate over whether or not to take race into account in our moral reasoning has stalled at the level of debating the reality of race. I observed that, for Appiah, the reality of race is a necessary but not sufficient condition for taking race into account. According to Appiah, even if race were real—which by his criterion would mean that there were significant genetic differences between members of different races—further proof would still be needed to establish that it is morally acceptable to take race into account. Appiah believes that further proof is not forthcoming. He argues that unless a causal connection can be established between race and how people act—such that a person's race determines how he acts—race is still not a relevant basis for drawing moral distinctions between people. According to Appiah, this kind of causal connection between race and behavior is not supported by contemporary genetic science (Appiah 1996, 68-72). Therefore, even if race were real in the sense of reflecting significant genetic differences among people, we still should not treat people differently on the basis of race. The only reason to treat people differently is when they act differently. What does this mean? According to Appiah, we should not treat people differently on the basis of characteristics over which they have no control (Appiah 1990,12,14). For example, suppose I am a teacher and have two

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students who scored perfectly on a test. If I decide to give a sticker to one of these children, I should give a sticker to the other child, too. It is acceptable to give these children stickers while not giving a sticker to a child who did not score perfectly, because the sticker is a reward for scoring perfectly. It is not acceptable, however, to give a sticker to the white child who scored perfectly but not to the black child who scored perfectly (or vice versa), because this turns a feature of the child over which he has no control, namely his race, into something that makes a difference in how I treat him. Two related moral imperatives are captured in this example. The first is a version of the requirement of universalizability. According to this requirement, any moral judgment must apply equally to all relevantly identical situations. That is, if two situations share all the relevant features, we violate the requirement of universalizability by acting differently or making different decisions in each situation. If both children in the example scored perfectly on the test, we would violate the requirement of universalizability if we rewarded one child but not the other with a sticker. The only relevant feature of each child's situation in regard to the question of whether or not to give him a sticker is how he performed on the test. The second, related moral imperative captured in the example is the requirement of impartiality. According to this requirement, we should make moral decisions without personal involvement or interest and without favoritism. If I feel more attached to one or the other child, because of his race or any other feature, or if I treat one child better than the other for some reason over which he has no control (perhaps I am intimidated by the parents of one child, or I think it is a waste of time to encourage children of a particular race to succeed), then I am violating the impartiality requirement. The two imperatives are related, because if I violate the impartiality requirement, I am thereby violating the universalizability requirement. If we accept the validity of the universalizability and impartiality requirements, it seems to follow that we cannot take race into account when we decide how to treat people, because doing so always involves violating these moral requirements. Some people who have argued in favor of taking race into account for purposes of black solidarity, selfempowerment, and emancipation have responded to this dilemma by

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invoking the analogy that races are like families. Most philosophers in the Euro-American philosophy tradition have agreed that it is acceptable to grant moral priority to members of one's own family—to place somewhat greater importance on the needs of one's family in comparison with the needs of those outside one's family. This does not mean that it is morally acceptable to completely disregard the interests of people outside our families, but rather that it is acceptable to give members of one's family some extra concern in our moral reasoning. To argue that races are like families is to argue that it is acceptable to grant moral priority to members of one's race in a similar sense. I begin this chapter by briefly discussing Appiah's disagreement with the races-as-families analogy (I examine his arguments in more detail in Chapter 5). Appiah takes this analogy to be an attempt at justifying the suspension of the impartiality requirement in cases that involve taking race into account for the purpose of black solidarity, but argues that it does not hold up because races are not sufficiently like families. Next, I turn to Outlaw, who offers two responses to Appiah. First, Outlaw argues that to interpret the impartiality requirement so strictly that it is never morally acceptable to take race into account, as Appiah does, is to cling to a Kantian moral framework that is flawed and should be discarded. Second, Outlaw argues that the races-as-families analogy is not a descriptive analogy intended as a justification for modifying the impartiality requirement. Rather, it is a prescriptive analogy, in which what is being claimed is that black people should think of each other as a family because doing so will make it possible for them to better combat anti-black oppression and preserve and further develop a distinctive black cultural heritage. This response shifts the debate onto consequentialist ground. As I interpret him, Outlaw is arguing in effect that the question of whether to take race into account is not, for him, resolvable at the level of principle without a consideration of consequences. Interestingly, although Appiah might disagree with my interpretation of his arguments, I nonetheless maintain that he, like Outlaw, is motivated by concern over the consequences of taking race into account. Looking at the debate between Outlaw and Appiah as fundamentally a consequentialist debate, it becomes clear that their opposing positions on the question of whether to take race into account reflect their differing

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beliefs about anti-black oppression. Appiah, I argue, believes that it is wrong to take race into account because in his view, doing so is precisely what causes anti-black oppression in the first place. In this, he reflects the point of view generally held by people whom we might characterize as integrationists. Outlaw, on the other hand, believes that the continuation of anti-black oppression is due not only to anti-black discrimination but also to pressures on black people to refrain from taking race into account by refraining from strongly identifying with each other on the basis of race. In this, he reflects the point of view generally held by people whom we might characterize as black separatists. So it would seem that the real, prior difference between Appiah and Outlaw is between their differing understandings of anti-black oppression. Although this is an issue to which they both allude, it is not an issue that either has addressed specifically. In the second part of this chapter, I examine the different understandings of anti-black oppression held by integrationists and black separatists. I present these differing points of view in order both to elucidate Appiah's and Outlaw's differing concerns regarding anti-black oppression and also as a backdrop to my own arguments about the nature of anti-black oppression, which I present in Chapter 4. My aim in this chapter is to highlight three issues that have been obscured in the debate over taking race into account. First, because those who oppose taking race into account, like Appiah, assume that doing so violates impartiality requirements for moral reasoning, they believe that the burden is upon those who favor taking race into account to prove that doing so either does not violate impartiality requirements or, if it does, that the violation is justified. Outlaw lays important groundwork for challenging the burden of proof in this case. I believe that this is the correct move but that Outlaw does not carry out the argument to the necessary extent. Second, because Appiah and Outlaw have very different conceptions of anti-black oppression, it is important to keep in mind that the strategies they advance for mitigating anti-black oppression—strategies that involve either taking race into account or refraining from doing so— are not differing solutions to the same problem. Rather, they are differing solutions to different problems. Yet neither Appiah nor Outlaw offers an adequate analysis of anti-black oppression to support his claims, which is a necessary step toward resolving the debate over whether to take race

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into account. Finally, I identify an important paradox in the position adopted by those, like Appiah, who favor integration but nonetheless believe that taking race into account is morally suspect. Most believe that institutions that adopt policies that take race into account, such as affirmative action policies, are justified in doing so, because these policies further integration. At the same time, however, they argue that black people who take race into account in order to further black solidarity, selfempowerment, and emancipation are violating the impartiality requirement in a way that cannot be justified. In effect, they argue that it is acceptable for institutions to take race into account to help black people, but not acceptable for black people to take race into account to help themselves. This is wrong.

Impartiality in Moral Reasoning In his argument that taking race into account violates the impartiality requirement, Appiah draws a distinction between what he refers to as "morality" and "ethical thought/7 By morality he means Kantian moral reasoning, which he believes represents the mainstream of modern and contemporary Western moral thought (Appiah 1987). Appiah associates Kantian morality with public life and with a narrow focus on obligation (Appiah 1990,14), although he does not specify what he means by this. It seems plausible, however, that he believes that morality has to do with universal principles of how to treat others, regardless of those properties that do not refer to actions or choices they have made (such as race and gender) and regardless of our relation to them (whether they are family or strangers, for example). Such principles would, by necessity, be limited to obligations to refrain from harming people in various ways: they could not encompass acknowledging and providing for the particular needs of other people. Appiah contrasts Kantian morality with what he calls "ethical thought/' which he describes, quoting from Bernard Williams, as taking seriously "the demands, needs, claims, desires, and generally, the lives of other people" (Williams 1985,12). Appiah suggests that "ethical thought," unlike Kantian morality, allows for and endorses a defense of family relations as morally relevant (as justifying differential

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treatment between members of one's family and people who are not members of one's family), thereby challenging the Kantian requirement of impartiality. Appiah believes that when Du Bois or others who grant ethical significance to race describe races as families, they are using the analogy to justify people granting moral priority to members of their own race. He rejects this justification, however. He argues that a defense of the family starts at a point which already makes the analogy to race implausible: with the family as the center of private life and intimate relations. Differential treatment of family members as opposed to people outside one's immediate family is justifiable by reference to parental responsibility toward children and by reference to the "common life" of the domestic unit, not by "the brute fact of biological relatedness" (Appiah 1990, 14). Differential treatment in the form of acknowledging and meeting the specific needs of one's close family members as opposed to others, so long as the others are not harmed in ways that go against the dictates of Kantian morality, is justifiable. Differential treatment in the form of acknowledging and meeting the specific needs of members of a particular race is not. Outlaw offers two important responses to Appiah's objection to the races-as-families analogy. First, he challenges Appiah's Kantian orientation and his rigid distinction between "morality" and "ethical thought." Second, he argues that Du Bois's discussion of races as families is best interpreted not as a justificatory analogy but as a prescriptive claim. Justice, on Appiah's view, is defined in terms of the impartiality requirements of Kantian morality and excludes attention to the particular needs of particular groups of people. According to Outlaw, however, justice in a contemporary, pluralistic society requires attending to the particular needs of particular groups. Outlaw suggests that philosophers who deny ethical significance to race are reasoning from the point of view of a Kantian moral agent who, by Kant's definition, thinks of himself as an autonomous individual and who, in his moral reasoning, must exclude all attachments to others. This point of view, however, denies crucial parts of who we are: we are not, in fact, completely independent individuals, but rather are constituted in part by our relationships and interdependence with others. A Kantian agent would simply fail to recognize the importance of factors such as race and gender in our sense of self.

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According to Outlaw, however, race is an essential part of who we are, not in the "natural" sense that other qualities are predicated on physical ones, but rather in the sense that our identity is essentially determined by race as a social factor. Outlaw argues: The inadequacy—some would say the failure—of the universalist principles of modern liberalism is not just that they have not been fully applied, but that the conception of the human being as an autonomous individual that serves as the normative anchor of the principles is insufficient since this conception deliberately excludes such aspects of the person as race and ethnicity (and gender). This notion of the human being is thought to be inadequate to the task of providing a foundation conception for diverse societies: it cannot encompass the concrete being of the person who is intimately and inextricably related to others by substantive factors, among them raciality and/or ethnicity, that are themselves essential (not "accidental") aspects of who we are. (Outlaw 1996,149) Outlaw believes that justice requires helping people to preserve their sense of racial identification and culture without negative repercussions rather than having to "trade them in" for full participation in and enjoyment of the benefits of democratic society. If Kantian morality means that people have to give up strong racial attachments (acted upon in ways that do not harm or abridge the rights of others) as part of participating in a system that requires respect for all, then they are being asked to make a trade-off they should not have to make. Outlaw wants respect for all to include respect for people's strong group identifications. He argues that racial and ethnic differences "must be explicitly acknowledged in principles formulated to provide the bases for social order and for determining what is right and just in societies that have continuing histories of racial and ethnic oppression" (Outlaw 1996,137). Outlaw does not specifically defend the races-as-families analogy against Appiah's objections. Rather, he defends the concept of racial culture against Appiah's objection that in no case do all members of a race share a common culture. This defense provides a model for how the

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races-as-families analogy should be understood. Outlaw's argument is not that all black people share a common culture, but rather that identifying certain cultural practices as black and developing them is an important part of creating a strong group identity for black people. The project of defining race partly in terms of culture is a prescriptive project, not a descriptive one. Similarly, it is not the case that all black people presently identify themselves as an extended family or that the term "family" should simply be extended to race without further discussion. Rethinking the meaning of family (in ways that I discuss in Chapter 5) and extending it to races, however, would be beneficial in the same way that rethinking and extending notions of black culture would be. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Appiah argues that Du Bois's description of racial groups as vast families that share common blood and also common history, traditions, and impulses fails due to circularity. Although I argued that Outlaw does not succeed in defending Du Bois against this criticism, Outlaw's claim that Appiah is overlooking the prescriptive import of Du Bois's discussion of race is valid and important. According to Outlaw, Du Bois's intent was to mobilize and galvanize black folk, whose oppression was rationalized using oppositions that had been inscribed in the notion of race. Crucial to this mobilization, for Du Bois, would be a shared sense of identity growing out of a recognition and appreciation of commonalities of a geographic race, including those of history, language, and culture more generally. (Outlaw 1995,94) Following in Du Bois's footsteps, Outlaw describes races as "encultured populations." Outlaw is not presupposing that all members of a race share a common culture, however. Rather, he is suggesting that to the extent that the cultural output—arts, behavior patterns, values, institutions—of black people, for example, differs from other cultural output, the former should be understood specifically as black culture, rather than as American culture or European culture or human culture. This does not mean that what constitutes black culture is predetermined or in any way essential. Rather, if certain of the cultural products of black people are understood, by their authors and by others, as part of a group culture

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rather than as an individual cultural message, a body of cultural output will develop over time that can be identified as black (Outlaw 1996, 153-154). Outlaw argues that his understanding of a race as an encultured population, like Du Bois's understanding of race in terms of culture as Outlaw interprets it, is part of a decidedly political project that involves prescribing norms for the social construction of reality and identity, for self-appropriation and world making.. . . Peoples of African descent, of the African "race," can share their message with the world only through organized group efforts while taking themselves to be a particular group. (Outlaw 1996,154) According to Outlaw, the emancipation of black people in the contemporary United States requires a shared sense of identity forged out of a concept of race redefined in a way that would allow for the positive evaluation and appreciation of the cultural achievements of peoples of African descent (Outlaw 1996, 154). So when Outlaw describes a race as an "encultured population/' I interpret him as arguing that part (but only part) of what makes a group of people a race is that members of that group have produced cultural output (i) that differs in some significant way from the cultural output of members of other groups, (2) that both they and others understand as contributions to the cultural output of the group rather than as contributions to a more general body of cultural output, and (3) that when further developed, plays an important role in the preservation of the group's identity. The fact that all black people do not actively participate in a common culture does not invalidate Outlaw's project of rethinking race. Similarly, the fact that all black people do not constitute the sort of close, intimate family that Appiah describes does not invalidate the project of rethinking the notion of family and extending it to race. If we interpret the analogy of races as families as a prescriptive claim that black people should think of each other as members of an extended family because doing so is beneficial for black people, this shifts the debate over taking race into account onto consequentialist ground. The

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question then becomes whether taking race into account is more likely to bring about a desired goal. In the case at hand, the goal is the end of antiblack oppression.

The Consequentialist Debate

Those who favor taking race into account argue that in order to combat anti-black oppression, it is necessary for black people to partially or completely separate from white people. This separation would include some or all of the following: black people maintaining economic independence from white people, black people preserving and contributing to the growth of a cultural heritage distinct from that of white people, black people living in separate communities from white people, black people attending separate schools and universities from white people, and black people marrying and producing children only with other black people. Some of these proposals, of course, are superficially similar to policies mandated by white racist (Jim Crow) legislation. The difference, when they are proposed by black separatists, is that they are undertaken voluntarily to further the goals of black economic independence and cultural preservation and development and are not intended to harm anyone. Those who oppose taking race into account support racial integration. They argue that in order to combat anti-black oppression, barriers to interaction between black people and white people must be broken down. Black people must have equal access to all the opportunities available to white people and vice versa, and laws and institutional policies must be changed to make this possible. Furthermore, black people and white people must acknowledge and respect each other's common humanity. For those who oppose taking race into account, what is most important about people is the ways in which they are similar rather than the ways in which they are different. Although both separatists and integrationists want to end anti-black oppression, they are working with very different conceptions of what it is. An important part of anti-black oppression, according to Du Bois and Outlaw, is when black people are prevented or discouraged from identifying strongly as members of a group. They identify anti-black oppression with

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conditions that negatively affect the well-being of the group as a whole, including pressures to abandon group identifications and cultural practices that differentiate the group from other groups. Du Bois and Outlaw believe that the well-being of each member of a group is tied to the wellbeing of the group itself. Furthermore, the well-being of the group does not reduce to the opportunity of its members to realize their potential based on their individual merit. The group as an entity in itself flourishes or fails to flourish depending on how strongly people identify with the group and on whether the group functions as a focal point for the creation and preservation of group-specific culture (Outlaw 1996,157; Du Bois 1997). Du Bois's and Outlaw's basic understanding of anti-black oppression reflects that of black separatists generally, but there are two different approaches to separatism derived from emphasizing different aspects of anti-black oppression. Some separatists, such as Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam, perceive black economic dependence upon white people as the most significant consequence of anti-black oppression. They believe that the talents and energy of black people should be used to further their own economic development, rather than contributing to the financial prosperity of white people. Furthermore, they argue that when black people are economically dependent upon white people, they are vulnerable to mistreatment by white people and that a major part of antiblack oppression occurs in this way Therefore, they stress economic selfdetermination for black people as the means to mitigating anti-black oppression (Garvey, Muhammad). Other separatists, such as Maulana Karenga and Molefi Asante, believe that the most significant consequences of anti-black oppression are the loss of African heritage and cultural practices among black people in the United States and an accompanying loss of self-respect when black people identify with European cultural practices. These separatists believe that black people in America suffer because economic and professional success requires them to identify with and pursue activities relating to European culture, which means that they must reject their black identity and African heritage, thereby denying their own creative possibilities. The primary reason for separation, in this view, is so that black people can identify with and invest in an African (Afrocentric) heritage, which is considered crucial for self-respect. Some cultural separatists believe that

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complete separation of the races is necessary (not sufficient) for black people to achieve strong self-concepts, whereas others believe that complete separation is unnecessary, but that what is required is that black people be aware of their heritage and culture, take pride in them, contribute to them, and keep them free from contamination by European cultural practices (Karenga, Asante). Those who have advocated integrationism as a way to achieve a world in which race is no longer taken into account include Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Contemporary philosophers who have advocated integrationism include Bernard Boxill, Richard Wasserstrom, Ronald Dworkin, Amy Gutmann, and, of course, Appiah. Integrationists perceive laws and institutional policies that discriminate against black people and hostile behavior by white people toward black people as the most significant results of anti-black oppression. They believe that anti-black oppression will end if white people are legally prevented from discriminating against black people and if white people and black people share communities, schools, and public services and institutions, thereby learning to live together peacefully while discovering their similarities and mutual interests. Integrationists are also opposed to separatism for moral reasons related to their understanding of anti-black oppression. They believe that anti-black oppression involves white people not respecting the humanity of black people. They believe that black separatism, by emphasizing differences between white and black people, also involves overlooking or not adequately emphasizing the common humanity of all people. Much of the criticism leveled by each side against the other relates to these differing understandings of anti-black oppression. Black separatists have argued that the strategy of integrating black people into white communities and public settings (such as neighborhoods and schools) sends the message to black and white people alike "that the closer you get to whiteness, the better you are" (Carmichael and Hamilton, 157). According to black separatists, this undermines black self-respect. Howard McGary identifies three arguments in support of black separatism that invoke, respectively, the concepts of self-respect, self-esteem, and self-determination. McGary suggests that an important feature of self-respect is that there are certain acts that the self-respecting person

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will not do. Those who advocate black separatism on the grounds that it is necessary for black self-respect argue that denying one's African identity and cultural practices, or acquiescing in the belief that European identity and cultural practices are superior, is such an act. Even if that act is necessary for one's survival or the survival of loved ones, it undermines self-respect. A different argument in support of black separatism is Garvey's, which emphasizes self-esteem, the recognition of one's talents and abilities. Garvey argued that black people should not expend their energies and utilize their talents contributing to the economic and cultural development of the United States, because their achievements would not be acknowledged or appreciated. His solution was the total separation of the races, with people of African heritage returning to Africa and developing a great nation there. A more moderate separatist could argue, however, that black people should develop and control cultural institutions and businesses wherever they live, such that black achievement can gain proper recognition. A third variation of these arguments is that black people were brought to this country by force and brutally stripped of their culture, language, and religion. This has created a situation in which black people have too little influence over shaping their lives in comparison to the influence of others. Given this, what black people need is selfdetermination: they must decide their own destinies and be aware that this could entail a radical departure from Euro-American traditions and values (McGary, 203-205). Integrationists agree with separatists that enslaved black people were robbed of their heritage, but they believe that black people can integrate into American society without losing self-respect and self-esteem. In fact, they believe that such integration is crucial for self-respect and selfesteem. For example, when he argued before the Supreme Court in favor of the desegregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall based his argument on research by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, charging that being barred from attending the same schools as white children adversely affected the self-esteem of even very young black children. Integrationists emphasize the welfare of black people. They believe that people need to do well economically, to have equal access to opportunities and good education, and fully enjoy the benefits of citizenship in a democracy. They believe that these commodities will

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lead to self-determination for black people as individuals and that an ideal of group determination that involves a rejection of European culture is not necessary. On the contrary, they believe that an important aspect of modern European culture, namely Kantian notions of common humanity coupled with democracy, provide all the self-determination needed. As Mills, Outlaw, and Young have argued, however, the notion of the "common humanity" of all men that developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe was developed by white men as a way of thinking about themselves and was not inclusive of members of other races (or of white women) (Mills 1997, Outlaw 1996, Young 1990) To appeal to the concept of common humanity, therefore, is to suggest that this concept be extended beyond the original group of people for whom it was developed in order to include people of all races. As Mills argues, however, the original concept developed in part by marking off non-white people as those to whom the concept did not apply because they were deviant and did not have the necessary qualification of rationality. Therefore, non-white people who demand inclusion must do so by showing that they are in fact not deviant, that they are, in the relevant way, "just the same as white people." Integrationists contend, however, that separatism is not the best approach because it compromises individual autonomy. Appiah argues that when black people adopt a separatist approach, they are demanding to be respected not as people, but as blacks. This is problematic for Appiah, however, because he worries that this involves the creation of new scripts for black people: proper ways of being black, expected by other members of the group. He states that he is sympathetic to the feelings that prompt people to move in the direction of creating a positive sense of racial identity. He concedes that it may even be historically necessary for this step to occur. He believes, however, that black people need to move on to the next step, which is to question whether the identities constructed in this way are ones with which they can be happy in the long run: It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will want to ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another. If I had to choose between Uncle Tom and Black Power, I

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would, of course, choose the latter. But I would like not to have to choose. I would like other options. The politics of recognition requires that one's skin color, one's sexual body, should be politically acknowledged in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self. And "personal" doesn't mean "secret" but "not too tightly scripted," "not too constrained by the demands and expectations of others." (Appiah 1996, 99) He suggests that instead, Americans should take collective responsibility, as a society, to rid themselves of discrimination based on false beliefs about average capacities of racial groups and to eliminate differences in average capacities where they do exist. Separatists would respond that Appiah's arguments presuppose two questionable assumptions. First, Appiah assumes that the obligation to act in ways that display strong identification with a group and that foster unity within the group constitutes a reduction in individual autonomy. He equates strong group identification with being forced to follow scripts for lifestyle and behavior, but it does not follow that having a strong group requires that members of the group follow scripts. It does require that people have obligations to avoid actions that are detrimental to the group as a whole, but that is not the same as scripting, nor does it abridge autonomy. Thinking in terms of a group's interest and refraining from taking opportunities for individual advancement that are costly to members of the group do not compromise autonomy. Rather, they involve exercising choice in ways that keep the group in mind. We do this with any group of people to whom we feel a sense of obligation: families, coworkers, and so forth. Certainly there will always be disagreement between members of a group about what is in the interest of the group. It does not follow, however, that some members of a group will impose their point of view on other members. Indeed, in a society in which groups cannot harm or abridge the rights of members who do not go along with their agenda, those who participate in setting the agenda for the group cannot force others to follow their will. Second, Appiah assumes that a strong, united group effort on the part of people of African descent is not required for reducing anti-black

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oppression. His suggestions for reducing anti-black oppression are based on the notion of American citizens taking collective responsibility for reducing anti-black oppression through programs that would clearly require funding and policy commitments. It is unlikely, however, that Americans as a whole would undertake these commitments without a great deal of pressure from black Americans. Even if these approaches were an appropriate and adequate response to anti-black oppression (which in itself is questionable), the political pressure necessary to bring them about would require black people to join together as a strong group. Appiah has an additional consequentialist concern. He believes that a negative consequence stemming from a person's emphasis on her racial identity is a decrease in her sense of herself as an individual and in her identification with members of other races who nonetheless share her other identities and interests. Appiah suggests that one persistent feature of ethnoracial identities is that they risk becoming the obsessive focus, the be-all and end-all, of the lives of those who identify with them. They lead people to forget that their individual identities are complex and multifarious—that they have enthusiasms that do not flow from their race or ethnicity, interests and tastes that cross ethnoracial boundaries, that they have occupations or professions, are fans of clubs and groups. And they then lead them, in obliterating the identities they share with people outside their race or ethnicity, away from the possibility of identification with Others. Collective identities have a tendency, if I may coin a phrase, to "go imperial/' dominating not only people of other identities, but the other identities, whose shape is exactly what makes each of us what we individually and distinctively are. (Appiah 1996,103) For Appiah, an emphasis on racial identity means that people do not think of themselves as individuals with a variety of interests not necessarily related to their race, and they are thus less likely to appreciate others as individuals with mutual interests apart from their racial identity. Appiah finds this undesirable for two reasons. First, as discussed above, he places a premium on individual autonomy, which requires, in

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part, recognizing oneself first and foremost as an individual and as therefore free to make individual choices. Second, he believes that a polarization of racial identities leads to increased hostility among racial groups. His assumption is that encouraging people to think in terms of race and sanctioning partiality to members of one's own race inevitably (or very likely) leads to conflict between racial groups and discrimination by members of some racial groups toward members of other racial groups. He finds it implausible that racial thinking can ever do more good than harm. No matter how attractive "racial solidarity" might sound, he believes that there cannot be racial solidarity without racism (Appiah 1992,175). Furthermore, he fears that the social fragmentation he believes is a likely result of strong racial identification plays into, rather than challenges, the continuation of racism against black people (Appiah 1992, 179). We are better off, according to Appiah, not taking race into account at all. From his point of view, people cannot keep racial identification positive and nondiscriminatory, so we have to move away from it entirely. On one hand, integrationists believe that the worst effect of anti-black oppression is for black people to be barred from full participation in (predominantly white) American institutions and economic life. They also believe that strengthening racial identity and adopting separatist approaches compromise individual autonomy and exacerbate interracial hostility, thereby replacing one sort of oppression with another. On the other hand, separatists argue that integrationist approaches compromise black self-respect and the preservation and development of a specifically black heritage. Lacking from this debate is a clear analysis of anti-black oppression. Without such an analysis, there is simply no way to evaluate which strategy is more appropriate. We need to step back one more level, however, to another assumption that is underlying this debate. That is the belief that because taking race into account is a deviation from impartiality requirements, it requires justification. Outlaw questions Appiah's Kantian orientation to this question, but does not question the need for justification. Outlaw argues instead that the justification is provided through consequentialist reasoning about the benefits that taking race into account can bring to black people (consequentialist reasoning that, as I just argued, requires a supportive analysis of anti-black oppression in order to be convincing).

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The assumption that taking race into account requires justification seriously undermines the integrationist position adopted by those who oppose taking race into account. Those who oppose taking race into account while supporting integration in the hope that this will lead to a world in which race disappears face the dilemma that integration requires taking race into account. It is not a fair criticism to say that this is a blatant contradiction. There are many instances in which the use of certain means are justified if they will bring about an end in which they are no longer needed—for example, the use of violence to bring about peace. And it is not as if those who oppose taking race into account while advocating integration are ignorant of the dilemma. Gutmann, for example, criticizes "any color blind perspective that collapses the fundamental principle of fairness into a commitment to color blindness. In so doing, a color blind perspective fails to leave room for according moral relevance to the fact that we do not yet live in a land of fair equality of opportunity for all American citizens" (Gutmann, 125). She argues that preferential treatment, which involves taking race into account, is necessary because "it paves the way for a society in which fair equality of opportunity is a reality rather than merely an abstract promise" (Gutmann, 131). The real problem with the dilemma is that it leads to the following recommendation, which is wrong. It leads these theorists to condone taking race into account in certain tightly proscribed institutional and business situations, such as affirmative action programs, while discouraging black people from taking race into account for purposes of political solidarity, self-empowerment, and so on. This amounts to concluding, in effect, that people in certain positions of power (such as hiring or admissions), most of whom are white, should take race into account in order to help out black people, but that black people should not help themselves by taking race into account in their interactions with each other. Black people who are not presently in positions of social power must therefore rely upon people who are in positions of social power (whether black or white) to open the door for them. They should not create their own opportunities or empower themselves. As McGary points out, for all that integrationists tend to be concerned with individual autonomy, this is an abridgment of individual autonomy (McGary, 209).

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The position of theorists such as Thomas Sowell and Dinesh D'Souza, who oppose laws that prevent integration but who also oppose affirmative action and similar programs aimed at encouraging integration, is not, nor is it intended to be, a solution to this dilemma. Sowell and D'Souza neither oppose nor favor taking race into account. Depending on which of their arguments one considers, they appear to share concerns with those on both sides of the debate. This is illusory, however. Sowell and D'Souza understand racial oppression as existing only when there are legal barriers to full participation in economic and political life based on race. Now that these barriers have been removed, they argue that continuing average disparities in economic success between black and white people are not indicative of racial oppression and are attributable to two factors: (i) barriers to achieving success through hard work due to overregulation of the market; and (2) lack of effort and proper values on the part of those black people who do not succeed. Sowell and D'Souza take the responsibility of the government to be the protection of fundamental rights, which includes not making any laws that discriminate on the basis of race (thereby precluding race-conscious programs such as affirmative action), and non-interference with the working of the marketplace. According to Sowell, genuine racism usually does not make good business sense, and historically, the worst cases of racial discrimination in employment have been the result of government policies (either outright racist policies or policies that have not had racist intent but have interfered with the unfettered functioning of the marketplace, such as minimum wage laws), rather than the choice of individual employers (Sowell, 84-100). Sowell argues that employment practices that are frequently attacked as discriminatory are in fact reasonable from the point of view of a cost/benefit analysis and are not necessarily the result of employers' racism. He argues that assumptions about members of groups that discourage employers from hiring them should not be attacked as racism, when often it is simply too costly to determine whether a particular applicant differs from accurate generalizations about the group as a whole (Sowell, 89-90). D'Souza refers to these sorts of practices as "rational discrimination" (D'Souza, 286). According to Sowell, denying credit to members of groups who are accurately generalized as bad risks or charging

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higher rates to offset greater numbers of defaults is not racism but good business. When government policies set limits on rates, it may make lenders who would otherwise loan to high-risk groups—at higher rates to offset the risk—not loan to them at all, thus creating more rather than less discrimination (Sowell, 109-113). Sowell argues furthermore that segregation in housing may in many cases be attributable to self-segregation by black people and that government policies that try to achieve a random or proportional mix of the population are going against individual preference (Sowell, 103-108). Sowell's and D'Souza'a views rely heavily on a concept of racial culture combined with Wilsonian sociobiology which suggests that statistical correlations between performance on intelligence tests, tendencies for people to pursue certain lines of work, and other behaviors are indicative of values and skills (or lack thereof) that are passed from generation to generation but are subject to evolution as new values and skills are introduced (Sowell, 156-172; D'Souza, 472). Sowell argues that what are often dismissed as stereotypes about groups are general group proclivities and patterns of behavior that have been transmitted culturally over centuries in some cases, even as groups of people have migrated around the world (Sowell, 11-14). Furthermore, he argues that economic differences among ethnic groups are linked to cultural differences much more than to environment, although he stresses that 'Vast differences between the economic productivity of peoples from different cultures do not imply that these differences are permanent, much less hereditary" (Sowell, 16). Unlike black separatists, Sowell and D'Souza do not understand racial culture to involve moral commitment to the preservation of racial identity. On the contrary, Sowell and D'Souza believe that people ought to assimilate into more economically successful cultures in order to improve their conditions of life. The result will be that black Americans will become similar to those members of the larger society whose values they adopt. They will lose in the process many aspects of their heritage that made them different from the groups to which they assimilate, but the disappearance of traditional cultural forms and lifestyles is part of the price we pay for progress. To deplore these losses is to deplore the very process of cultural diffusion that has enabled human beings to advance (Sowell, 226). Overemphasizing cultural identity as values and customs

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distinct from those of more successful cultures stifles the cultural advancement of lagging groups by sealing them off from the cultural advantages of the larger society around them and leads to intergroup hostilities (Sowell, 28-31). The idealized notion of group unity projected by political leaders has seldom existed among racial or ethnic minorities anywhere and the economic progress of racial or ethnic groups is not correlated with that sort of unity. Economic advancement for a group is more likely with a variety of ideas and influences; insistence on a monolithic group ideology is likely to hamper progress (Sowell, 147). Unlike integrationists, however, Sowell and D'Souza are not concerned with achieving a completely color-neutral society and do not define justice in those terms. For Sowell and D'Souza, justice means color-neutral laws and color-neutral protection of rights. The American legacy of racial injustice is a tradition of laws that discriminated against black people and denied them protection of their rights. With these laws reversed, there is no more racial injustice. People may still make judgments about people based on race, choose where they live based on race, and treat people differentially on the basis of race. So long as these behaviors do not violate basic rights, they do not contribute to injustice and are not the concern of the government. If black people do not like stereotypes that are made about them, it is up to them to prove that the stereotypes are wrong. If they wish American society were more integrated, it is up to them to prove that they belong in the ''mainstream." The point of view of theorists such as Sowell and D'Souza does not contribute to resolving the debate between those who oppose and those who favor taking race into account, because neither Sowell nor D'Souza advocate a position on the morality of taking race into account. For someone to oppose taking race into account, but also to oppose public policies that will help to bring about an integrated society in which there is no need to take race into account, is inconsistent, as Gutmann and Wasserstrom have argued. As I argued above, however, this leads to suggesting that it is acceptable for white people to take race into account in order to help black people, but that it is not acceptable for black people to take race into account in order to empower themselves. Integrationists who oppose taking race into account are effectively impaled on the horns of this dilemma. This does not establish that the separatist strategy is preferable, however.

TAKING RACE INTO ACCOUNT

I II

Those who favor taking race into account for purposes of black solidarity and emancipation still must respond to the concerns that separatist strategies compromise individual autonomy in other ways and are inconsistent with respecting the common humanity of all people. I argue in Chapter 5 that taking race into account is prima facie morally acceptable, not morally deviant. What is required is not justification for the practice of taking race into account, but a discussion of limitations and responsibilities to establish boundaries within which the practice is morally acceptable. The important question is whether we can take race into account in ways that do not abridge the rights of others, either through compromising individual autonomy or failing to respect the common humanity of all people. I argue in Chapter 5 that thinking of races as families, when based on an appropriate ideal of the family, provides a model for granting moral priority to members of one's own race without thereby denying the shared human identity of all people. First, however, I offer in Chapter 4 an analysis of anti-black oppression to support my belief that taking race into account is necessary for fighting antiblack oppression. I do not offer this analysis as a justification for taking race into account, because I do not believe that the practice requires justification. Rather, I present it in order to persuade those who oppose taking race into account to reconsider their position.

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ANTI-BLACK OPPRESSION AND WHITE SUPREMACY

In this chapter, I set forth a conception of racial identity and build a conception of anti-black oppression and white supremacy upon it. First, I argue that racial identity amounts to occupying a "social location" in which one experiences normative pressures that are specific to one's race, intersected with one's class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Then I argue that anti-black oppression is best understood in terms of the stigmatization of black people by people in positions of social power over them and that a society in which anti-black oppression occurs is white supremacist. Finally, I argue that white social identity develops as a response to pressure to stigmatize black people. In order to fully understand the dynamics of anti-black oppression, we need to understand that what it means to be white, at least in part, is to be someone who experiences social pressure to uphold white supremacy.

Understanding Racial Identity in Terms of Social Norms

Race is a social construction. Human beings invented the concept of race and it has come to be used globally (although in some times and places more prominently than others) as a schema for classifying people. As I discussed in Chapter 2, there is continuing debate about the extent to which there is a

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genetic basis for racial classification. For the purpose of this book, I am working with the assumption that there is not. Even if it turns out that there is more of a genetic basis to race than there appears to be now, that will not change the need to understand racial identity as a social construct, because our lived experience of race is of how it has been constructed socially. If we accept that race is a social construction, this leads to further questions. One is about the reality of social constructions. Another asks how we think about racial identity when we think about our lives. If saying "I'm black" or "I'm white" is not a claim about my genetic make-up, then what is it a claim about? What does it mean to identify oneself (or another person) as belonging to a race? Some thinkers have argued that if race is a social construction, if it is something that human beings invented, if it is not a valid way to talk about human genetics, then it is not real: it is a myth. This is not a useful way to think about race. Unicorns are myths: they are an idea, we can see pictures of unicorns in our minds, we can talk about unicorns, but they do not exist in real life. Although human beings invented race, it is not like unicorns. As I observed in Chapter 2, race is like money, which is something else that human beings invented. Money does not exist naturally, but it is very real, now that we have invented it, and the use of money shapes our world in profound ways. Now that we have invented race, it has become real, and the use of race to categorize people shapes our world in profound ways. If we had never invented unicorns, our world would not be significantly different. If we had never invented race, our world would be significantly different. It is important to understand that race is a human invention, and that it is not a biologically justifiable way to categorize human beings. It is equally important to understand that now that we have used race with farreaching consequences for over 500 years, we cannot simply undo what has been done, nor can we simply let it go. It would be nice if it were that easy, but it is not. So we have to cope with race and its legacy. If being a race does not mean that I share a lot of genetic material and characteristics with other people of my race that we do not share with people of different races, then what does it mean to belong to a racial group? I argue that belonging to a racial group means occupying a social location, based on your and others' beliefs about your appearance and ancestry, in which you experience particular expectations from others and

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yourself about how you will behave, your values, your attitudes, and your motivations. I refer to these expectations as "social norms." To be a member of a race is to have certain social norms, specific to your race, to which you have to respond (and these expectations differ depending on the social locations of the people who are holding these expectations of you). It does not follow from the fact that someone has an expectation about you that you will conform to that expectation, however. The expectation puts pressure on you, and it means that you will be judged by how much or little you conform to it. What it means to be a certain kind of person, to occupy that location, is that you have to respond to those expectations. You have choices about how you respond to them, but you cannot escape dealing with them. Even if you can hide from them by passing as someone different, YOU know you are passing. Passing is a way of responding to anticipated expectations, not a way of avoiding them. No one is simply "raced/7 however. We also experience social norms that relate to our gender, our age, our economic status, our ethnicity, our sexual orientation, our abilities and disabilities, our lifestyle, our work, and so on. Social norms are not additive, however. If you are a middleaged, white, lesbian who uses a wheelchair and works as a veterinarian, for example, you do not experience social norms for middle-aged people plus social norms for white people plus social norms for women and for every other attribute. A better analogy is a chemical reaction, in which the interaction of social norms, how they react with each other, means that you will experience social norms specific for middle-aged, white lesbians who use wheelchairs and are professionals. You occupy a location at which expectations converge. This does not mean that you do not share experiences of social norms with other people who share some but not all of your social categories, however. The social norms for women overlap, but are different for white women, black women, old women, young women, and so on. Social norms about race overlap, but are different for men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals, workers, professionals, and so on. In order to understand all this, we need to analyze the ways in which social norms relating to one category are similar but also change in reaction with social norms relating to other categories. Understanding race (and other social categories) in terms of experiencing social expectations is a non-essentialist approach. There is no racial

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essence: there is nothing inherent in people that makes them "raced." Race is all about beliefs that others have about you (and that you have about yourself) in a particular social context. Just because beliefs about a person's race are most often formed because of that person's skin color, for example, does not mean that race is the same thing as skin color. To say that a person is white is simply to say that in the social context (the time and place) she occupies, there is a concept of whiteness that is based on assumptions about skin color and people typically apply it to her. In a different social context, without the same conception of whiteness, she would not be white. Again, the analogy with money is helpful in understanding this. In a particular culture, seashells might be used as money and therefore highly valued. If you take the same shells to another place, where shells are not used as money, they will be seen as having no monetary value. The shells themselves have not changed: they look the same, they feel the same, they are made of the same substance. There is nothing inherent in the shells that gives them value or deprives them of it. It all has to do with what people believe about them, and this changes from culture to culture, from place to place, from time to time. If there is no essential basis to race and if the experiences of people of the same race (with the many intersecting social categories in which they find themselves) are very different, on what basis can members of a race join together or believe that they actually have anything in common? Where is the basis for racial solidarity among black people, particularly in response to anti-black oppression, if there is no essence to being black and if being black is not the same for every black person? I return to this issue in Chapter 5; in the current chapter, I explore the kinds of social expectations that people experience on the basis of being perceived as black and as white in the contemporary United States and discuss how these expectations contribute to white supremacy.

Social Norms, Stigma, and Anti-Black Oppression

As I discussed in Chapter 3, both those who oppose and those who favor taking race into account offer consequentialist reasons for their positions. Advocates on both sides are concerned with ending injustice

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against black people in the contemporary United States. They have very different conceptions of anti-black oppression, however. Those who oppose taking race into account, like Appiah, equate racial oppression with individuals being refused, on the basis of race, opportunities that they deserve on the basis of merit. Those who favor taking race into account, like Outlaw, identify anti-black oppression with conditions that negatively affect the well-being of black people as a group (not just as individuals), including pressures to abandon strong black identification and black cultural practices. Without an adequate analysis of anti-black oppression, there is no useful way to evaluate these claims. The best starting point for an exploration of anti-black oppression is Iris Marion Young's now classic theory of social group oppression. Young describes social group oppression in terms of five conditions: (i) exploitation; (2) marginalization; (3) powerlessness; (4) cultural imperialism; and (5) violence. Some argue, however, that although many black people do experience these aspects of oppression, others—middle- and upper-class black people—do not. They conclude from this either that the exploitation and marginalization experienced by some black people is due to their own lack of effort or that those black people who experience Young's conditions are actually experiencing class oppression rather than racial oppression. I respond to these objections in two ways. First, I argue that we must bear in mind that an environment may still be oppressive to people even when they are flourishing. Second, I argue that the reason why black people in the United States experience oppression is because people in positions of social power over black Americans (for example, teachers, employers, government representatives) stigmatize black people. Black people experience oppression in the United States specifically because they are black.

Young's Theory of Social Group Oppression

The first three conditions of oppression described by Young—exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness—refer to relations of power and oppression that stem from the social division of labor. They are based on who benefits from whom, who is dispensable, and how one's work defines

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one's institutional position relative to others. The first condition identified by Young is exploitation. Young defines exploitation as the oppression that occurs "through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another'' (Young 1990,49). According to Young, "Exploitation enacts a structural relation between social groups.... These relations are produced and reproduced through a systematic process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of the haves" (Young 1990, 49-50). Exploitation names not only the relation between the working class and the capitalist, but also the relation between women who perform the traditional role of the wife and their husbands, the relation between servants and those whom they serve, and the relation between menial laborers and their supervisors. In a racist society like the United States, Young observes, black and Latino people are typically perceived as appropriate candidates only for servant and menial labor jobs, and these jobs are predominantly filled with members of these social groups (Young 1990, 52). The second condition described by Young is marginalization. People who are marginalized are people who have been expelled from useful participation in social life because they are perceived as unemployable and/or incapable of independent living. As I argue later in the chapter, stigmatization occurs when people perceive others as deviant. Yet people who perceive others as deviant may still perceive them as being socially useful. Marginalization occurs when people perceive others as being so deviant or lacking in ability that they are no longer useful. Young observes that the harm involved in marginalization is not limited to the material deprivation often caused by it. People who are marginalized in a welfare state are also harmed by the way in which the provision of welfare often deprives them of rights to privacy, respect, and individual choice that are protected for those not dependent on welfare. People who are marginalized are deprived of the opportunity to exercise their capacities in socially defined and recognized ways (Young 1990, 53-55). The third condition indicative of oppression that Young discusses is what she calls powerlessness. Young equates powerlessness with the experiences of nonprofessional workers in contrast to professional workers. While professionals are not capitalists, they are privileged in relation to

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nonprofessionals. Acquiring and practicing a profession involves developing one's intellectual capacities, while nonprofessionals have limited opportunities for pursuing knowledge and expanding their capabilities. Most professionals have considerable work autonomy and exercise creativity and judgment in their work. Nonprofessionals take orders from others and are excluded from decision-making processes. Professionals set the standards by which respectability—the extent to which others grant one respect and recognize one's authority—is measured. Professional dress, speech, tastes, and demeanor all connote respectability. Men of color and all women frequently experience powerlessness, even if they are professionals, because they are often not perceived as professionals and not treated with the respect accorded people perceived as professionals until they verify that they are (Young 1990,56-58). The fourth condition identified by Young is cultural imperialism. Under conditions of cultural imperialism, the dominant group's culture, experiences, and perspective on the world set the norm by which other groups are judged. Alternative cultures are rendered deviant and inferior, while alternative experiences and perspectives are rendered invisible. People living under cultural imperialism suffer from being stereotyped and treated with contempt by a dominant group that, because it admits no perspective but its own, fails to recognize the validity of their claim that they are being treated unjustly (Young 1990, 59-60). Finally, Young associates oppression with violence targeted at people because of their membership in a particular social group. Such violence is systematic because: (i) members of social groups who are targeted in this way know that they are liable to be the victims of such attacks, especially in certain circumstances; (2) many people tolerate the occurrence of such violence because it happens so frequently; and (3) perpetrators of this sort of violence are often only lightly punished, if at all (Young 1990, 61-62).

Answering the Causality Question

Young's project is to provide criteria for identifying which social groups are oppressed and which are not. She argues that a group that is experiencing at least one of the five conditions described above is

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oppressed. A group is said to be experiencing one or more of these conditions if they apply to most members of the group or to the group as a whole, even if some members are not experiencing them (Young 1990,64). Thinking in terms of the five conditions of oppression is a crucial start to the project of understanding anti-black oppression. Black people in the United States, as a group, experience all five conditions of oppression. More needs to be said, however, about why black people in the United States experience oppression. If we stop at the point of saying that they do, without investigating why they do, we leave ourselves open to two possible objections. The first is that black people who are experiencing one or more of the five conditions described by Young are not actually experiencing anti-black oppression, because their experiences are due to a lack of effort or character flaws on their part rather than to oppression on the basis of race. Proponents of this argument point to those middle- and upper-class black people who appear not to individually experience Young's conditions of oppression as proof. They argue that if black people were oppressed on the basis of race, all black people would individually experience at least some of Young's conditions. The second possible objection is that the oppression experienced by many black people is actually class oppression, not racial oppression. According to this argument, only working-class black people experience Young's conditions of oppression and middle- and upper-class people do not (or not in great enough numbers to consider them to be an oppressed group taken separately from working-class black people). Therefore, the oppression experienced by working-class black people is class-related, not race-related. Interestingly, although these objections are typically made by people with otherwise very different political views, they are both based on the same underlying assumption. This assumption is that the oppression faced by middle- and upper-class black people, if they face oppression at all, is very different from and significantly less problematic than that faced by workingclass black people. In order to defend against both challenges, therefore, a complete analysis of anti-black oppression must show how it is possible for someone to be flourishing but still experience oppression, thereby allowing for the possibility of middle- and upper-class black people experiencing oppression, and also that there is a relationship or continuum between the

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oppression experienced by middle- and upper-class black people and the oppression experienced by working-class black people.

Thinking in Terms of Oppressive Environments

Shifting from analyzing oppression as a quality of people to analyzing it as a quality of environments provides a partial response to the argument that the existence of economically well-off black people means that there is no anti-black oppression. When we think of people as being oppressed, we tend to think of them as being prevented from flourishing. The fact that a person is flourishing, however, does not entail that he has not faced an oppressive environment. Thus, black people who are doing well financially may nonetheless have experienced and may still be experiencing oppression. The problem with analyzing oppression in terms of what makes a group count as oppressed is that doing so implies that what is wrong with racism and other "isms'7 is that they cause people to be blighted: to have their hopes and ambitions withered, their growth impaired, their prosperity halted. This suggests that if people are able to overcome the obstacles that result from racism and flourish in spite of them, then racism is not particularly problematic. If we shift our focus away from thinking about oppression in terms of oppressed people and toward thinking about oppressive environments, we avoid these difficulties and find ourselves on firmer ground. The existence of environments that are oppressive to certain social groups is not dependent on all (or even most) members of these groups failing to flourish. The effects of racism and other "isms" create restraints and barriers for certain people on the basis of social group categorization that are not experienced by others within the same environment. If people who are affected by these restraints and barriers flourish, they do so in the face of difficulties and dilemmas that are not experienced by people for whom the environment in question is not oppressive. When we understand oppression as a feature of environments rather than as a description of people, we can challenge the moral acceptability of environments that are oppressive to some people but not others on the

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basis of social group categorization, even if it is possible for many people to overcome those barriers and restraints. Oppression is an unwarranted obstacle, and people should not have to expend energy overcoming it. Oppression is wrong because it makes life more difficult for people in ways that are unfair, even if it does not ultimately cause psychological damage or prevent flourishing. Thus, the existence of a black middleand upper-class, or of black people who enjoy material prosperity, does not prove that the environment in which they live is not oppressive, nor does it prove that anti-black oppression is not a pressing moral problem. An accurate analysis of oppression distinguishes oppressive conditions from the psychological and material damage that they may (but not inevitably) cause. A person can experience oppression without being rendered helpless, losing self-esteem, or losing the will to fight back. The will not only to survive but to live life joyously, and the tremendous courage and determination in fighting oppression that have been demonstrated by many black people living in the United States, despite the oppression of slavery and apartheid conditions, illustrates this. We need to talk about oppression because we need to understand it in order to fight it. But we need to understand it for what it is: a feature of environments, not a state of being or consciousness of those who are targeted by it. There is nothing wrong with people who experience oppression, but rather something wrong with the world in which they live. Even if every black person flourished in spite of racism, it is not morally acceptable for a black person to have to overcome significantly more obstacles than a white person in the same environment in order to flourish. It is not morally acceptable that one's categorization in a racial group should make such a difference in one's life. The claim that oppression is a feature of environments, however, is not the same as the claim that oppression is institutional. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton developed the concept of institutional racism in the 19605. The most widely invoked concept of racism at that time was the concept of racism presented by Gordon Allport in the 19505. Allport defined racism in terms of individual prejudice and hostility. Carmichael and Hamilton argued that defining racism in this way did not capture the fact that institutional structures and policies could be oppressive to black people even when people within the institutions were not individually

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prejudiced. For example, a policy of "last hired, first fired/' while not overtly racially discriminatory, nonetheless had oppressive results for black people who, at the time Carmichael and Hamilton were writing, had only recently begun to be hired for certain kinds of jobs due to changes in laws resulting from the civil rights movement. Recently, J. L. A. Garcia has challenged the notion that institutional racism is of prime moral and explanatory importance. Rather, he argues, racism on the part of individuals is "of prime moral and explanatory import, and institutional racism occurs and matters because racist attitudes (desires, aims, hopes, fears, plans) infect the reasoning, decision-making, and action of individuals not only in their private behavior, but also when they make and execute the policies of those institutions in which they operate" (Garcia, 11). In this chapter, I argue similarly that anti-black oppression stems from individual attitudes and behaviors that maintain institutional and structural oppression, rather than the other way around. Carmichael and Hamilton's theory is now so widely understood that failure to correct instances of institutional racism reflects on the individual failure of decision makers within the institution in question.

Thinking in Terms of Stigmatization Some people argue that the oppression experienced by less-well-off black people is class oppression, not racial oppression. As proof, they argue that middle- and upper-class black people do not experience the hardships and frustrations that working-class black people experience. I argue in response that the oppressive experiences faced by working-class and middle- and upper-class black people share a common cause and therefore represent a continuum of oppressive experiences. The material anti-black oppression experienced by working-class black people is significantly more burdensome than the social anti-black oppression experienced by middle- and upper-class black people, but they are inextricably linked. The common cause of all forms of anti-black oppression, the causal connection between racial categorization and racial oppression, is racial Stigmatization. When a person stigmatizes another person, the former expects the latter to be deviant—to behave in ways that differ from

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accepted social and moral standards. In the contemporary United States, a significant majority of white people stigmatize black people and a significant percentage of widely circulated cultural products (e.g., film, television) represent black people in stigmatized terms. (Members of other racial groups in addition to white people stigmatize black identity, as do some black people. In the interest of simplicity, however, I refer only to the case of white people stigmatizing black people, which I take to be the central and foundational case. It is arguable that members of other racial groups in the United States, including some black people, stigmatize black identity as a way of aligning themselves, consciously or not, with white privilege and power at the expense of black people. I leave it to the reader to extrapolate further conclusions.) When white people stigmatize black people, the former perceive the latter as discounted and tainted because of the stigma, while perceiving themselves as embodying normalcy. Furthermore, white people who stigmatize black people expect black people to deviate from the standards that these white people hold for themselves. Deviance, although stigmatizers expect it of stigmatized people, is not socially rewarded. So conforming to expectations of deviance means social powerlessness, poverty, and loss of opportunity for those who are stigmatized by people in positions of power over them. It is the fact that a significant majority of white people in the contemporary United States continue to stigmatize black identity while having social power over black people (as, e.g., teachers, school administrators, employers, government officials, creditors, health care providers) that accounts for why many black people experience the conditions of oppression described by Young. At the same time, however, when black people succeed according to the standards white people hold for themselves, the white people who stigmatize them respond by censuring them for deviating from deviance. Black people in this situation may do better financially than black people who conform to expectations of deviance, but they experience significant negative social repercussions nonetheless. In The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, economist Glen Loury presents an analysis of anti-black oppression in terms of stigmatization. His discussion resonates with and supports my analysis, but I take the approach further with the concept of deviating from deviance. In addition to the fact that

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professional and financial achievement does not protect middle- and upper-class black people from white stigmatizers who expect them to be deviant, I argue that white people who stigmatize black people tend to censure middle- and upper-class black people for having deviated from the deviance the stigmatizers expected of them. Rather then welcoming black people who go against their expectations by being professionally successful, white stigmatizers often resent being proved wrong. Thus, black people cannot necessarily change white stigmatizers' attitudes just by proving that the stigmatizers' negative expectations were incorrect.

Anti-Black Oppression and Stigmatization In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman developed a theory of social stigma to describe interaction between people with and without physical disabilities. The concept of Stigmatization, when applied to the case of interaction between black people in the contemporary United States and the majority of white people they are likely to find in positions of social power over them, provides an explanation for why some experiences of oppression are specifically racial and based on racial group membership. I want to stress, however, that I am only borrowing insights from Goffman's work, not importing his theory wholesale. In particular, Goffman's work is useful for the insights it provides into the attitudes and behavior of people who are members of a dominant group in a particular society and are in positions of social power over people whom they consider to be abnormal in relation to themselves. Since the type of interaction between white and black people that is oppressive to the black people involved falls under this model, understanding these attitudes and behaviors is crucial for understanding antiblack oppression. The concept of Stigmatization, adapted from Goffman's theoretical project, provides a means for identifying an environment as oppressive to black people on the basis of race. An environment is oppressive to black people on the basis of race when people in positions of social power over black people in that environment stigmatize black identity. The Greeks originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs cut or burnt into the body to mark something unusual or negative about the

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moral status of the signifier: that he was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor, for example. Goffman uses the term to denote an attribute that discredits the possessor. When a person stigmatizes another person, the former perceives the latter as being deviant due to possession of the relevant attribute (Goffman, 4-5). To stigmatize a person or an attribute is to disvalue it, but disvaluation occurs at two levels. At the first level, a person may stigmatize another person because the latter possesses a particular social identity. Typically, stigmatization on the basis of social identity is comparative. When a person stigmatizes another person due to the latter's social identity, it is in reference to a different social identity that the former considers to be normal (Goffman, 5). When a white person stigmatizes black identity, he takes white identity to be normal and black identity to be abnormal in comparison to white identity. For the stigmatizer in this case, the abnormality he attributes to black identity reinforces the normality he attributes to white identity. At the second level, people disvalue other types of attributes based on the social identities of the people possessing them (Goffman, 6). People hold expectations of each other based on the social categories to which they perceive each other as belonging. As discussed above, I call these expectations "social norms/' We tend to perceive an attribute in a person as discrediting to that person if it is contrary to the social norms that we hold for that type of individual. Thus, an attribute is only disvalued in relation to a particular social identity. The same attribute may be disvalued in a person of one social identity, but not in a person of another social identity. Furthermore, the relation has to do with the perceiver's expectations. Having a doctoral degree may be valued for a black person in the eyes of other college-educated black people. For some working-class black people, however, it may be disvalued as a sign of "selling out" or trying to be white. For white anti-black stigmatizers, it may be disvalued as an indication that the black person who has achieved it does not know his place in society. There are two crucial points I want to make about stigmatization. First, although individuals are stigmatizers (the holders of expectations), stigmatization is a fundamentally social phenomenon. White people, for example, learn to stigmatize black people when they live in a social context in which

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white people stigmatizing black people is a common and widespread practice, reflected in political discourse, the popular media, and educational forums, which must be controlled by white people who stigmatize black people in order for the practice to thrive. A single individual or small group of individuals can expect certain people to be deviant, but their beliefs and expectations do not count as "stigmatization" by my definition if they are not common in a society or if the people who hold them do not have the social power to spread them around. Stigmatization has the force it does, the powerful effects it does, because it is a widespread practice in a society. Second, stigmatization involves expecting someone to be deviant. Having a negative expectation of someone is not the same as expecting that person to be deviant. Expectations of deviance require a contrasting expectation of normality, and normality is established at a social level. An individual cannot just set his own standard of normality and then count other people as deviant in relation to it. If his standard of normality is not reflected in the wider society, he simply appears eccentric. This is an important point because one must understand that stigmatization only goes in one direction in any given society. Black people in the United States often have negative expectations of white people. It has been argued that black people should not be considered racist if they hold a negative view of white people, because that assessment can be justified. I am amenable to this claim, although the difficulties that arise in making it are ultimately additional reasons to think in terms of stigmatization rather than racism (I agree with Loury that racism is an overly crude concept that does not capture all the nuances of stigmatization [Loury, 88], an issue to which I return). More to the point, however, I want to stress that black people in the United States cannot and do not stigmatize white people. First, black people do not currently have the social power (control of political discourse, popular media, and education) necessary to establish a standard of normality that would render white people deviant. While most black and some white people agree that the racism they expect most white people to feel toward black people is in fact a deviant attitude in the sense of being morally unacceptable, anti-racist beliefs are not widespread enough in American society to set the standard (I discuss this further in the section below on white identity). Even in a black-controlled setting, where a white person might feel distrusted or be greeted with hostility, the white person does not count as

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stigmatized because he is not stigmatized in American society as a whole: he can always leave the black-controlled environment. Second, and most important, although black people might have negative expectations of white people, they do not pressure white people to conform to those expectations. This is why the phenomenon of stigmatizers censuring those they stigmatize for deviating from deviance is a crucial part of the stigmatization account. For example, white people who expect black people to do poorly academically will all too often resent black people who defy their expectations. Black people who expect white people to be racist will not censure them for genuinely being anti-racist (although it may take a lot for the white person in question to prove that he is, in fact, reliably anti-racist). There are two different senses of expectation involved. The first is "you had better conform to my expectation or else." The second is "it's likely he will be what I expect, but if he isn't, that's great." Stigmatization involves the first kind of expectation, not the second (I discuss this more below in the section on the difference between stereotypes and normative expectations). Stigmatization involves the belief that there is one set of standards for one group of people and a deviant set of standards for the other. White people are supposed to behave one way, which is the right way, and black people are supposed to behave the wrong way (to be deviant). This means that a "good white person" is also a good person in general (he behaves the right way). A "good black person," however, is a bad person in general (he is deviant). If a black person is a good person in general (he behaves the right way, which is the way that white people expect each other to behave), he is being a "bad black person" (he is not behaving as a black person should). This puts black people in a bind vis-a-vis white stigmatizers. A common misunderstanding is that white people perceive black people negatively because they perceive them as failing to live up to the social norms that white people generally hold for themselves. For example, Young posits that middle- and upper-class white people hold for themselves the "norms of respectability" that developed within nineteenth-century bourgeois culture and that are associated today with professionalism: norms of appropriate attire and levels of cleanliness, appropriate diction and vocabulary, appropriate manners, and so forth. She suggests that white people categorized black people as being unable

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in general to meet these standards and that this led to white people treating black people with aversion (Young 1990,140). This oversimplifies the role of social norms, however. It is not the case that social norms simply establish one standard and either a person meets it and is accepted or does not and is rejected. If this were the case, then black people who met the norms of respectability described by Young would have been accepted by white people, not treated with aversion. Instead, as Goffman argues, social norms establish different standards for members of different groups. A black person who meets standards of respectability established by and for white people is not thereby acceptable to white people. Interactions between white and black people throughout American history yield unlimited examples. A black woman who violated any number of the standards for middle- and upper-class white women—a woman who was large and strong, who did not dress fashionably, who was illiterate, who used slang expressions—was readily welcomed into white people's homes as a slave or servant in the role of cook, housekeeper, or nursemaid, intimately involved in the most personal aspects of white people's lives. A black woman who was educated, dressed well, and had upper-class manners was not invited to tea by white people, courted by white men, asked to head the fundraising campaign for the local library, and so forth. In other words, white people who stigmatize black people never accept black people as being respectable. When a black person meets the standards of respectability that white people hold for themselves, she violates the social norms that white stigmatizers hold for black people. If she conforms to the social norms that white stigmatizers hold for black people, she does not meet standards of respectability. I argue that a significant percentage of white people in positions of social power over black people in the contemporary United States continue to stigmatize black identity and, therefore, expect black people to deviate from the standards that they hold for themselves. In these cases, white stigmatizers resent black people for deviating from the deviancy that the stigmatizers expect of them. A black person who emulates the standards that white stigmatizers hold for themselves does not thereby achieve acceptability in the eyes of the stigmatizers. When we talk about people having expectations of each other based on race, and about the social norms that white stigmatizers hold for black

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people as being expectations of deviance in relation to standards for white people, we generally think in terms of racial stereotypes. The social norms of deviance that white stigmatizers hold for black people are based on stereotypes of black people, but they are not the same thing as racial stereotypes. Social norms arise when "we lean on these anticipations [stereotypes] that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands" (Goffman, 2). A racial stereotype is a belief about a person based on generalizations about members of his race. When we hold stereotypes about members of a particular race, we may expect those stereotypes to hold true in the case of a person we meet who belongs to that race, in the sense that we consider it likely that the person will confirm our stereotypes. Racially specific social norms, on the other hand, are normative expectations: not the belief that the person will confirm our stereotypes, but the belief that the person should conform to them. Failing to distinguish between stereotypes and social norms leads to much confusion. For example, some suggest that black people should simply shrug off stereotypes about themselves ("sticks and stones may break my bones ..."). They are correct in the sense that there is no reason to worry particularly about what people think about you. But in most cases, white people do not merely hold stereotypes about black people: they expect in a normative sense that black people should conform to their expectations based on the stereotypes. If the black people in question do not conform, the white people who stereotype them respond negatively. It is not so much the stereotypes themselves but rather the social norms, the normative expectations based on the stereotypes and the repercussions of resisting them, that contribute more specifically to making an environment oppressive on the basis of race. When a significant percentage of white people in positions of social power over black people stigmatize black identity, the social norms they hold for black people are common knowledge in the general culture. People (both white and black, both potential stigmatizers of black identity and potential targets of stigmatization) learn the content of these social norms in a variety of ways: (i) we learn about them directly from people who hold them; (2) sometimes we learn about them after the fact by experiencing the consequences of going against a norm we did not

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know about; (3) we may learn about norms from people who do not personally hold those norms, but who want to inform us about the fact that others may hold those norms (parents warning their children, colleagues warning a new hire); (4) we learn about norms from the mass media: television, movies, magazines, newspapers (it is important to note that even when a movie, for example, shows people resisting norms, it still communicates to us that the norms exist—in this way, norms resist efforts to discredit them); (5) laws can reflect and reinforce norms. Laws can also challenge norms, by protecting people who go against the norm and punishing those who inflict consequences against those who go against the norm. Laws cannot stamp out norms altogether, but they send powerful messages about them. In a democratic society, they suggest that the majority of people either do or do not agree with a norm. But we also learn about norms by hearing what people have to say about laws. When white people in positions of social power over black people stigmatize black identity and hold normative expectations that black people should deviate in a variety of ways from the standards the white stigmatizers hold for themselves, this contributes to making the United States an oppressive environment for black people in three ways. First, when white stigmatizers in positions of social power over black people base their interactions with black people on what they expect black people to be, they pressure black people to become what they expect of them. Second, white stigmatizers in positions of social power over black people perceive deviance in black people (such as doing poorly in school or having high unemployment rates) as normal, rather than as a problem that needs to be addressed. Third, white people who stigmatize black identity and are in positions of social power over black people may censure black people who deviate from the deviance that they expect of them (by doing well in school, for example, or having interests or preferences that white people in general associate with themselves) for going against social norms. When white people in positions of social power over black people expect black people to be deviant, they treat them as if they are deviant, with the result that the black people in question experience pressure to conform to deviancy. When teachers stigmatize black identity, they expect black children to perform less well academically than their white

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peers and to have behavioral problems that interfere with learning. Consciously or unconsciously, they expend less effort in trying to teach black children and are quicker to discipline them summarily rather than make an effort to find causes for behavior problems and address them (Connolly, 21). Being treated in this way encourages black children to give up on learning, unless they are supported by very aware and informed parents who stand up for them and work carefully and insightfully with them to undo the damage that was done. When white people in positions of social power over black people stigmatize black identity, they perceive situations in which black people conform to their expectations of deviancy as normal. Even if being deviant is to the detriment of black people, such as doing poorly in school or being unemployed, and even if measures could be taken to remedy the situation, white stigmatizers in positions of social power will not adopt these measures because the situation is perceived as normal and therefore unproblematic. When white people in positions of social power over black people stigmatize black identity, they censure or discriminate against black people who display attributes that do not conform to the social norms that they hold for them. They penalize black people for deviating from deviance. Adrian Piper uses the term "higher-order discrimination" to describe discrimination against people on the basis of deviance from deviance (although she does not refer to Goffman). She argues that higher-order discrimination occurs when we evaluate the same characteristic or behavior differently in a person of one race than in a person of another. According to Piper, "first-order discrimination" is what we ordinarily think of as discrimination against people on the basis of attributes such as race, gender, sexual preference, or economic class that lead us to disvalue them (Piper, 286). Piper argues that even when people have come to believe that firstorder discrimination is wrong, they may still engage in "second-order discrimination." In this type, an attribute that in and of itself is not disvalued comes to be seen as undesirable when it appears in someone I disvalue (Piper, 289). I may admire outspokenness in white men, but perceive an outspoken black man as pushy or aggressive. Furthermore, I may carry my discrimination to additional levels. A black man who becomes a successful politician due to his outspokenness is considered an opportunist, whereas a white man who does the same is a great leader.

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According to Piper, higher-order discriminators who recognize the wrongness of first-order discrimination may experience conflicts of conscience about their higher-order discriminatory attitudes. They may respond by trying to avoid the people against whom they discriminate or by avoiding acknowledgment of their presence or contributions in a work setting (Piper, 298). Or they engage in pseudorationality by bringing in additional irrelevant justifications for their discriminatory behavior in order to deflect the charge of higher-order discrimination ("It's not that I think he's too pushy, it's just that he doesn't fit in") (Piper, 303). Piper's discussion emphasizes the subtle responses that white people who do not perceive themselves as consciously racist may have in situations in which they perceive black people as deviating from deviance. Higher-order discrimination is frequently more overt, however. Much of the violence perpetrated by white people against black men, for example, is "punishment" for black men transgressing racially specific social norms by challenging rather than submitting to the abusive behavior of white people or by pursuing economic independence from white people. When we understand that white stigmatizers in positions of social power over black people may censure them for deviating from the deviance the white stigmatizers expect, it becomes apparent that people cannot simply overcome stereotypes by proving them wrong. This strategy for dealing with stereotypes overlooks the fact that people may experience more negative discrimination when they defy stereotypes than when they conform to them.

Stigmatization and Young's Conditions of Oppression

When we analyze how people who stigmatize black identity and who are in positions of social power over black people perceive and treat them, it becomes clear why the oppression in question is specifically racial. The concept of stigmatization enables us to define what we mean when we say that an environment is oppressive to black people on the basis of race. Young identifies a group as "oppressed" if a majority of its members experience at least one of the conditions of oppression. But that does not answer the question of why they are experiencing these conditions and what it has to do with their group membership. What makes the conditions of oppression

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identified by Young (e.g., exploitation, marginalization) conditions of antiblack oppression (as opposed to some other sort of oppression) is that these conditions are created by people in positions of social power over black people stigmatizing black identity. In the case of exploitation, employers who stigmatize black identity believe that black people are best suited for menial jobs, because menial work is for deviants. Or they believe that black people should be grateful to have a job at all, even if they receive lower wages on average than white people for comparable work. In the case of marginalization, people in positions of social power over black people who stigmatize black identity thereby perceive black people as having less intrinsic worth than white people, so stigmatizers feel less or no compunction about abandoning, ignoring, or pushing aside black people whom they perceive as useless to society. Furthermore, stigmatizers consider conditions that contribute to people becoming marginalized, such as chronic unemployment, substance-abuse problems, and untreated or inappropriately treated health problems, as deviant states of affairs that are normal for black people. Thus, stigmatizers do not see these conditions as causes for concern. In the case of powerlessness, those in positions of social power who stigmatize black identity do not treat black professionals with the immediate respect they extend to white professionals: they require black professionals to first prove themselves. Because stigmatizers perceive black professionals as deviating from the deviance that they expect of them, they may also subject black professionals to higher-order discrimination or other forms of censure that undermine black people's use and enjoyment of their professional power. In the case of cultural imperialism, people in positions of social power over black people who stigmatize black identity define their own worldview as normal, while evaluating differing views, when expressed by black people, as deviant. People who stigmatize black identity may direct violence toward black people who deviate from the deviance expected of them, as a reminder that they expect black people to stay in their place and not challenge the norms others hold for them. Furthermore, because people who stigmatize black identity perceive black people as having less value than white people, they

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are not as morally outraged by violence against them as they would be by violence against white people.

Thinking in Terms of Racism vs.Thinking in Terms of Stigmatization and White Supremacy J. L. A. Garcia and Lawrence Blum, two philosophers who have written in recent years on the question of racism, define it in terms of motivation. According to Garcia, racism is "a vicious kind of racially based disregard for the welfare of certain people" (Garcia, 6). Blum defines racism as involving either "inferiorization" (the belief that members of a particular race are inferior in some way) or "antipathy" (hatred for members of a particular race). He argues that we should distinguish between racist people and racist acts, such that an act might be racist if it conveys inferiorization or antipathy, but a person who performs a racist act (by telling a racist joke, for example) is not racist unless inferiorization of or antipathy for the target group is deeply imbedded in the person's character (Blum, 8,14-15). I argue in response that it is more accurate to assess racism by looking at effects rather than motivation. Because we cannot adequately assess effects without bringing in the concept of Stigmatization, however, it becomes clear that thinking in terms of racism is too narrow and should be abandoned in favor of thinking in terms of Stigmatization. To illustrate the problem of defining racism in terms of motivation without taking Stigmatization into account, imagine a society in which few if any people stigmatize black identity. An eccentric person in this society who believes black people are inferior or who hates black people or who viciously disregards the welfare of black people and who therefore refuses to hire a black man because he is black does not thereby make the society an oppressive environment for black people. Even though both the act and the person in this case are racist by both Garcia's and Blum's definitions, he is anomalous. The perpetrator will be perceived as entirely unjust and unreasonable in his action, because in a society in which few if any people stigmatize black identity, a person's black identity would not be perceived as a reasonable excuse for refusing to hire him. In the society in question, the eccentric person's racist behavior

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would be just that: eccentric. In a society in which many people stigmatize black identity, however, the discriminatory behavior is part of a larger problem. In a society in which anti-black stigmatization is rampant, the fact that a black person is the victim of discrimination is both a repercussion of stigmatization and also a forceful reminder of it. Furthermore, in a society in which anti-black stigmatization is rampant, behavior that contributes to anti-black stigmatization without intention to do so on the part of the agent is no less a problem than intentionally stigmatizing behavior. In a society in which anti-black stigmatization is rampant, if people are not consciously working against anti-black stigmatization, they are part of the problem. Finally, it is important to describe an environment in which anti-black oppression is occurring as white supremacist. This serves as a reminder that by oppressing black people through stigmatization, white people give themselves advantages at the expense of black (and other non-white) people. The value of whiteness in the United States, as Cheryl Harris has pointed out, lies in the until very recently completely legally protected right of white people to accumulate wealth, power, and opportunity at the expense of people excluded from counting as white and the fact that this advantage continues de facto if not de jure in the ways discussed in Chapter i. Blum distinguishes between racist acts and racist people, between unintentional and intentional racist behavior, because he believes that the word "racism" is flung around too much: he wants to preserve it for situations in which bad people are doing bad things for bad reasons. I understand his reluctance to throw charges of racism at well-meaning people who have blundered. Doing so often makes them feel defensive and does not necessarily help them to understand how their behavior contributes to anti-black oppression. The solution is not to redefine racism, however, but to move away from thinking in terms of racism, move away from worrying about intentionality, and to simply focus on the real problem, which is white supremacy. Genuinely well-meaning people who come to understand the ways in which their behaviors contribute to maintaining white supremacy will not want to continue those behaviors. In order to get at the heart of how even well-intentioned white people contribute to anti-black oppression, however, we need to look at the role that anti-black stigmatization plays in the maintenance of white identity.

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Norms of Whiteness In the preceding section, I defined anti-black oppression, and therefore white supremacy, as the widespread stigmatization of black identity by people in positions of social power over black people. In most cases, the people with social power over black people who are doing the stigmatizing are white people. In order to thoroughly understand white supremacy in the contemporary United States, we need to explore the role that antiblack stigmatization plays in the experience of white identity. In keeping with my earlier arguments that what it means to be "raced" is to occupy a social location at which racialized social norms converge, what it means to be "white" is to experience social expectations for white people. I argue that social expectations that white people hold for other white people in the contemporary United States pressure them to stigmatize black people. There is a "code of honor" for white people in the United States according to which they are not responsible for the plight of black people in American society and do not benefit in any way from the oppression faced by black people. Upholding the code requires different behaviors in different social settings. In some settings, upholding the code requires engaging in, or at least not expressing disagreement with, "color-conscious" talk that constructs black people as inferior to white people and suggests that they ought to keep to their place in society. In settings in which notions of politeness dictate against color-conscious racist talk, upholding the code requires acquiescence to the "color-evasive" belief that the United States is a land of equal opportunity for everyone and that people who succeed in the United States—when not the beneficiaries of affirmative action, which goes against the principle of equal opportunity—do so entirely through hard work and talent, while those who do not have only themselves to blame. In both cases, of course, upholding the code includes not only agreeing with or contributing to the ideology expressed, but also behaving in ways that uphold it materially. "Good" white people support other white people by upholding the code, thereby stigmatizing black people. To challenge the code—to raise the possibility that maybe ordinary white people do contribute to anti-black oppression, that maybe white people succeed in part through helping each other out, and that

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maybe white people have benefited from exploiting black labor and reducing competition from black people—is to fail as a white person. I find this conclusion implicit in the data and in interviews in the growing body of sociological literature that has come to be called "whiteness studies/7 In the next section, I briefly explore how white people pressure each other to uphold the code of honor in both settings described above.

Color-Conscious Racism

Toni Morrison defines "racetalk" as "the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy" (Morrison, 57). Kristin Myers divides racetalk into "categorization" and "surveillance." Categorization racetalk dehumanizes black people (and other non-white people), reinforcing the notion that they are "other" and that white people are "normal" (Myers, 132-133). For example: "We were watching a chimpanzee on T.V. and Sam said, 'Shit! Look at that monkey!' So we all did and the chimp was running around and did a back flip and climbed a tree. Sam said, 'How'd they get that Black guy to do that?' We all laughed" (Myers, 135). Surveillance racetalk conveys the message that black people are liable to want to take over and diminish the quality of life of white people. Surveillance racetalk suggests that black people should keep to and be kept in their place. Many of Myers's examples of surveillance racetalk include language of second-order discrimination (imparting a negative message about black people without using overtly racist language and while denying racist motivation). For example, one of Myers's informants overheard the following exchange: Nothing against Black people, but it's like they have to have something of everything, you know. Like BET [Black Entertainment Television]: "we have to have our own TV station." (Myers, 139)

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Although Ruth Frankenberg does not use the term "racetalk," the white women whom she interviewed about their childhood formation of white identity make clear that racetalk was a primary tool by which they learned that they were white and what was expected of them as white people. Frankenberg's subjects provide examples of ways in which they were taught to fear black people, ways in which clear demarcations in social space and status reinforced to them the notion that black people are "other/' and instructions about how to behave around black people. For example, one informant, Pat, remembered that "we were kind of told that it wasn't safe to walk down the Black street." She also described her grandmother's relationship with black women, remembering her grandmother saying "proudly" that she would stop at their houses and chat, but would not sit down (Pat also pointed out that when black women came to her grandmother's house, they came to the back door). Pat recalled being told by her uncle not to apologize to a black person she had bumped into on the street: "'If you bump into them or they bump into you, it's always their fault.'" Finally, she relates an incident when she was twelve years old in which two friends, one black and one white, were visiting her. Her black friend drank from a can of Coke and then passed it to Pat's white friend, who refused to drink from it; all three girls understood that the white friend would not put her mouth where a black person's mouth had been (Frankenberg, 52-54). This last incident suggests that to the category of "racetalk" we must add a category of "race actions," which speak as loud as, if not louder than, words. Frankenberg also adds to the notions of racetalk and race action the effect of striking material differences between black and white people on white women's developing sense of racial identification. Most of the interview subjects had had little or no exposure to economically well-off black people, and they equated blackness with poverty. The black people they knew best were domestic workers, and black neighborhoods were visibly neighborhoods in which people lived in conditions of poverty. When, as one subject described, even poor whites live on the "white side" of town (Frankenberg, 49), these perceptions teach white people to stigmatize black people even without accompanying verbal and action-based messages. I have suggested that what it means to be "black" or "white" is to occupy a social location in which you experience racially specific social

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norms, expectations from others (and yourself) of how you should behave. Exposure to race talk pressures white people to uphold "norms of whiteness" in three ways. First, the fact that a white person engages in racetalk in front of another person is an acknowledgment of the latter's whiteness, as many white people censure their racetalk in racially mixed company. That a person is comfortable engaging in racetalk with another person suggests that the former expects the latter not to object. The message is that "I feel comfortable saying this to you because I expect that you agree with me/' Because the talk occurs in private, those on the receiving end are pressured to not rupture or destroy an intimate moment, ruin a friendly get-together, disrupt a family gathering, or create tension with a friend or family member. They experience pressure to uphold the intimacy and confidence extended to them as white people. To the extent that they conform to those pressures by upholding that intimacy and confidence, they assert their status as "good" white people. Second, exposure to surveillance racetalk puts pressure on white listeners to choose sides and thereby uphold boundaries. If a white listener were to protest against the suggestion that black people should "stay in their place," the likely response would be, "Whose side are you on, anyway?" White people prove that they are upholding white identity (that they are "good" white people) by being on the right side. Finally, in the cases of both categorization and surveillance racetalk, the judgment of white people who object to or disagree with racetalk is called into question. That is, a white person shows she has good judgment by agreeing with racetalk. And, of course, popularity, friendship, and other relationships are all jeopardized by disagreement with racetalk. This may put extra pressure on white women, who are traditionally socialized to be peacemakers, noncontroversial, the builders and upholders of relationships. It also puts pressure on white people who identify with other stigmatized groups to not jeopardize those identities (e.g., a white person with a disability who does not want to jeopardize her solidarity with other people with disabilities may decide not to challenge their racism). Last, it may put extra pressure on those who are trying to convince others that they belong in a dominant social group (e.g., a gay person who is trying to pass as straight and therefore does not challenge racism in the straight men with whom he associates).

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It is important to keep in mind that the pressure experienced by white people is not only to acquiesce to racetalk or race actions when they occur, but also to make choices or engage in behaviors that indicate that one agrees with the attitudes expressed. As Frankenberg's respondents make clear, racetalk is often not just an end in itself, but a way of conveying to white people how they should behave in regard to black people.

Color-Evasive Racism

Color-evasive racism (also called color-blind racism, the new racism, and laissez-faire racism) has been the subject of numerous sociological studies (including Frankenberg; Bobo et al.; Bonilla-Silva; Carr). As DiTomaso and her colleagues observe, white people who are color-evasive believe that they are not racist because they do not think in terms of color and that, because they are not themselves racists, they are thereby contributing to reducing racism in the world (DiTomaso et al., 192-193). White people who are color-evasive racists define racism very narrowly, in terms of simply noticing or paying attention to race, or, at most, in terms of hostility toward or discrimination against members of a race. They oppose race-conscious policies that attempt to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination by taking race into account, perceiving them as reverse discrimination. White people who are color-evasive do not acknowledge the ways in which they are privileged by being white in our society and the ways in which their individual behaviors and choices contribute to the oppression of black people. Although white people who are color-evasive purport not to notice or think in terms of race, color evasion in fact involves stigmatizing black people and also pressures other people to do the same. DiTomaso and her colleagues argue that color-evasive white people fail to appreciate the extent to which white favoritism helps them. Color-evasive white people emphasize the importance of equal opportunity, advocating that jobs and access to higher education be given to the best qualified candidate regardless of race, while obscuring from themselves the extent to which their white privilege has protected them from really having to face equal opportunity. White people fail to see that their own

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achievements were due not strictly to hard work but to white privilege (Pettigrew; Jackman). Many of those interviewed by DiTomaso and her colleagues explicitly stated that no one had helped them in life, although their life stories provided clear evidence to the contrary. For example: "A working-class male from New Jersey who had been helped into a construction union by his father and then into a more stable job through help from his friends, said when asked whether he earned his place in life: 'Did I earn it? Yeah, I worked for what I've got. Definitely. Nobody gave me nothing. Nothing'" (DiTomaso et al., 196). Another working-class male from New Jersey, who had received help with every job he had obtained throughout his life, including a crib sheet for a test he needed to pass to qualify for one job, was asked about the reasons for the problems of the inner city: "Bunch of fucking lazy people . . . they think the government owes them something. If you want something . . . you've got to go out and get it. It's not handed to me . .. They just. . . to me, they're lazy. I mean, point blank. They're looking for the easy way out" (DiTomaso et al., 196). A middle-class man from Ohio argued that it is not fair if the person with the highest test score is not the one who gets the job. He himself had flunked out of college, been fired from several jobs, and failed at several businesses, always relying on help from family and friends to get back on his feet: "I'm not the greatest student in the world, but I happen to think I'm a pretty good person. If you just looked at my grades, no, I'm not equal to a lot of people . . . It's more than just my grades, my scores" (DiTomaso et al., 194). The white people in this study who attributed their achievement entirely to their own hard work while ignoring ways in which they had been helped and given second chances clearly stigmatized black people, whom they saw as failing, when they failed, due to their lack of effort. Attitudes such as theirs also pressure other white people to stigmatize black people. The notions of equal opportunity, jobs and higher education admissions as rewards for merit, and individual success as the result of individual effort are an especially American set of values (DiTomaso et al., 190-191). To challenge this rhetoric, then, is to sound un-American. Furthermore, given the pride Americans take in individual achievement through hard work and talent, to suggest to a white co-worker, friend, or loved one that her success

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is most likely due in part to her racial advantage is probably the ultimate slap in the face (I return to these issues in the next chapter). Furthermore, white people pressure other white people to make highly racialized choices by constructing them in terms of good judgment rather than racism. For example, Heather Johnson and Thomas Shapiro conducted a study examining the ways in which white parents thought about decisions they had made about where to live and send their children to school. Although the parents interviewed in this study were explicit about race as a highly significant factor in their choice of public schools and hence neighborhoods, and therefore did not count as color-evasive as such, their reasoning is indicative of the way that thinking in racialized terms can be easily euphemized. White parents who had moved to all or nearly all white neighborhoods with higher tax bases and correspondingly better schools, cleaner streets, and nicer playgrounds described their choices in terms of "wanting a good school district for my kids" and "wanting a nice neighborhood for them to grow up in." Their thinking was racist, because they identified a "good neighborhood" as one without too many black people. They contributed to anti-black oppression by participating in the ongoing residential segregation that rewards real estate agents and mortgage lenders for racial discrimination, makes it more difficult for black people to invest in homes, and diminishes the tax bases of predominantly black communities. They set their children up for a racist future by sending them the message that white places are the best places to live. But they did all this in the name of doing the best for one's children. This suggests that any parent who decides not to contribute to antiblack oppression in this way is not acting in the best interest of his children. As with acquiescence to racetalk, there is implicit (and often explicit) pressure to demonstrate good judgment and common sense through racist behavior: a white parent proves he is a good parent by choosing to live in a mostly white neighborhood.

Conclusion

In order to assess the likelihood that either taking race into account or not taking race into account will help to end anti-black oppression, it is

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necessary to establish what anti-black oppression is. In this chapter, I began by offering a theory of racial identity, arguing that what it means to be a member of a racial group is to occupy a site at which "norms"—pressures to behave in certain ways based on one's perceived race—converge. I then argued that a society is white supremacist—that black people experience oppression in a society—if the majority of people in positions of social power over black people in that society stigmatize black identity. Finally, I linked white supremacy to white identity, in the sense that the social norms experienced by white people in American society pressure white people to prove that they are "good" white people by stigmatizing black people. If this is an accurate conception of anti-black oppression, then it gives us a basis for returning to the question of whether or not it is acceptable and advisable to take race into account. This is the project to which I turn in the final chapter, in which I examine the ethics of both black identification and what might be called anti-racist white identification.

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RACES AS FAMILIES

I n the epigraph, I quoted Cornel West, who argues that the goal of "Afro-American philosophy" should be the interpretation of black American history for the purpose of conceiving morally appropriate responses to challenges presently confronting black Americans. Having examined black American history and current challenges facing black Americans in Chapters i and 4, I argue that we should conceptualize race in a way that both captures that history and provides tools for liberatory struggle against those challenges. The best way to do so is to think of races as families. I begin by arguing that, given the effects of anti-black stigmatization in the United States, strong black identification is crucial for liberatory struggle. In a climate in which black people are subject to stigmatization, individual black people cannot contribute to the emancipation of the group as a whole, nor can they escape completely from stigmatization themselves, by defying anti-black stereotypes on an individual basis. They may prove that they are "exceptions" to stigmatizers' beliefs about black people's supposed failings, but that will not alter stigmatizers' beliefs. Furthermore, success in the face of the stereotypes often requires not actively challenging anti-black racism and stigmatization, so in the pursuit of individual success, people often have to choose to move away from liberatory struggle. In order to achieve emancipation, black people

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will have to struggle as a group, which requires a strong sense of group identification. Showing that strong black identification is crucial for black emancipation does not, however, prove that thinking of races as families is the best way to think about race. Two other ways of conceptualizing race have been suggested. One is to think of race very minimally, as a label that people have chosen to apply to themselves and others, a "bare" social construction. Another way to conceptualize race for the purpose of black solidarity is in terms of the shared experience of anti-black oppression. I argue that neither of these approaches is as effective for the purpose of black emancipation as thinking of races as families. Finally, I defend thinking of races as families against various objections, beginning with Appiah's claim that races are not like families. I argue that his understanding of the analogy differs from mine and that his definition of family is inaccurate. Next, I defend thinking of races as families against his objection that this discourages people from recognizing what they share in common with all human beings. I argue that if we think about races as families based on an appropriate ideal of the family, this problem is avoidable. Furthermore, thinking of races as families based on the appropriate ideal of the family responds to Appiah's third concern, which is that strong racial identification puts too much pressure on members of racial groups to conform to the expectations of the group. I conclude by addressing the concern that conceptualizing races as families means that white people are a family too, and that this is a problem because white people thinking of themselves as a family and granting moral priority to each other at the expense of black people is a central part of white supremacy. I argue, in response, that thinking of races as families does not entail that it is acceptable for white people to grant moral priority to each other in ways that harm black people. Furthermore, contrary to what many people may think, I argue that it is important for white people to think of themselves as a family if they are to combat white supremacy. Disproving Negative Expectations Does Not End Stigmatization There are three reasons why fighting anti-black Stigmatization is so challenging. One reason, which I discussed in the previous chapter, is that

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white identity is tied up with stigmatizing black people. I return to this issue in the discussion of what white people must do to fight anti-black oppression. The second reason is that when black people disprove stigmatizers' expectations, it does not usually change those expectations and may, in fact, bring censure. The third reason is that core American values such as individualism and hard work have contributed to and helped to maintain the stigmatization of black people. Therefore, to question that stigmatization is to question American values. Challenging anti-black stigmatization is, within our society's current discourse, anti-American. Black people who disprove the negative expectations held by anti-black stigmatizers by being academically, professionally, and financially successful find that they still experience stigmatization. In their interviews with black graduates from high-ranking universities, most of whom expressed less satisfaction with their lives than white graduates from the same schools, William Bowen and Derek Bok collected numerous examples of experiences of what I refer to as racial stigmatization. For example, a black doctor related: I've actually seen events where I felt black people were treated differently in the ER. A black woman with right lower quadrant abdominal pain is assumed to have a sexually transmitted disease whereas a white woman is presumed to have appendicitis until proven otherwise. I've seen it. And I know that if I were rolled in there, nobody knows I'm a Bryn Mawr graduate, a Case Western graduate; I'm a young black woman and they're going to assume that I have a sexually transmitted disease. So that makes me angry at times. . . . Or I've been in medical records and people ask me to pull their charts even though I'm wearing a white coat and a beeper and a stethoscope. But all they see is a black female face and they just assume that I'm a clerk. (Bowen and Bok, 189) Jennifer Hochschild reports, from a compilation of several different studies of black managers, that they and other black people with whom they work experience "inhospitable personnel officers, informal social ostracism, excessive penalties for mistakes, exclusion from communication

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networks, resistance from subordinates, assumptions about cultural and personal inferiority, lower ratings from white bosses, and 'ghettoized' assignments" (J. Hochschild, 115). Furthermore, in his interviews with black upper-class professionals and businesspeople, Ellis Cose frequently heard stories of people experiencing censure for speaking out about racism. For example, a subject whom Cose describes as "on the verge of retiring from his position as personnel vice president for one of America's largest companies" told Cose that "early in his career, he had been moderately outspoken about what he saw as racism within and outside his former corporation. He had learned, however, that his modest attempts at advocacy got him typecast as an undesirable. So when he changed jobs, he decided to disassociate himself from any hint of a racial agenda" (Cose, 66). Bowen and Bok found that satisfaction with their lives converged for black and white graduates who were making more than $150,000 a year, suggesting that at the highest income levels, stigmatization, if it continues, becomes less of a factor in how people perceive their lives (Bowen and Bok, 191). Because it would be unrealistic for all people to expect to attain those income levels, however, we need to address the possibility that doing well academically, having a profession, and being middle to upper class do not necessarily protect black Americans from stigmatization, and may bring more. Black graduates of high-ranking universities reveal in interviews that they experience being treated poorly often and in contexts that lead them to believe it is due to their race (Bowen and Bok, 188). Support for the existence of an "educated black malaise" also comes from survey research by Schuman and colleagues. They observe that "given the existence of some continuing real discrimination, middle-class blacks have no way of knowing whether what seems to be unfair treatment (the taxi that speeds by, the poor seating in a restaurant) is, in fact, due to deliberate discrimination or to something more innocuous" (Schuman et al., 277). In survey after survey, black people attach more importance than white people to racial discrimination, and higher levels of education are associated with more, rather than less, belief in the continued prevalence and importance of racial discrimination (Schuman et al., 276-277; J. Hochschild, 72).

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Stigmatization and American Values

The intractability of anti-black Stigmatization is also due to the fact that anti-black Stigmatization is grounded in and buttressed by the core values of American culture. Although she does not use the term "Stigmatization/' Hochschild argues that in order to fully understand racism and racial oppression in the contemporary United States, we must understand how they are conditioned by and built into the ideology of the American dream. The American dream is the dream of achieving, through virtuous effort and the exercise of one's talents, at least enough financial success to enable one to own a home, enjoy material comforts, and get one's children off to a good start in life. Thomas Powell argues that the roots of the American dream can be traced to the view, developed in eighteenth-century America under the influence of Arminian Protestantism, that people have the right to self-development and the pursuit of happiness and also that failure to develop or be successful is indicative of a lack of virtue and effort (Powell, 35). Howard Zinn argues that this view was promoted by the American colonial elites, the Founding Fathers, in the second half of the 17005. The North American colonies that eventually rebelled against British rule and became the United States were first established in such a way that a small number of wealthy people owned most of the land and controlled the government, resources, and commerce (people who did not own land could not participate in town meetings, where public policy decisions were debated and made, nor could they choose government representatives). The landowning elites resented British taxation and control of exports. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, they also became increasingly concerned about rebellion from the indentured servants who worked for them, the small farmers who rented land from them, the laborers who worked long hours for minimal wages, and the unemployed and destitute people who lived on the streets. They also worried, as they always had, about slave rebellions. Because there was a history of poor white people rebelling alongside enslaved black people, the elites needed to convince poor white people to think of themselves as allied with wealthy white people, rather than as the logical allies of enslaved

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people of African descent. They needed to convince poor white people to support and join in the struggle against Britain. By promoting the rhetoric that "all [white] men are created equal" and are entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness/' the Founding Fathers encouraged working-class white men to dream the American dream, to believe that, with Britain out of the way, they too might someday join the elite. This rhetoric served the joint purpose of making working-class people allies in the fight against Britain, while reducing working-class resentment against the elite: it was not, according to the rhetoric, the elitist policies of the colonial government that kept poor people poor. It was the British, who took away their liberty. With the British overthrown, all a decent, hardworking white man needed was the "freedom" to prove himself. If he did not succeed, it was because he had not worked hard enough (Zinn, chapter 4). Hochschild identifies four tenets of the contemporary version of the American dream, of which two are particularly relevant to the present discussion, and offers evidence as to the strength of many Americans' belief in these tenets. The first tenet, with the rhetoric of the dream repackaged so that its racist and sexist origin is left out, is that the dream is for everyone. Everyone may pursue success regardless of background, race, gender, and so on. Everyone should be able to start fresh if they get off track. According to Hochschild, even two-thirds of poor Americans believe that Americans like themselves "have a good chance of improving our standard of living" and up to three times as many Americans as Europeans make that claim (J. Hochschild, 18-19). The second tenet is that the reason for success or failure lies in one's talents and accomplishments or lack thereof. Background does not matter, but hard work (if ultimately successful) does. If you do not succeed, it is because you did not work hard enough to accomplish success. If you do succeed, it is a reward for your hard work and therefore an indication of your virtue. The corollary is that people should be rewarded financially for talents and accomplishments, rather than being financially compensated for needs, fruitless hard work, or simple existence. Half of American adolescents compared with one-fourth of British adolescents agreed in 1972 that "people get to be poor . . . [because] they don't work hard enough." Americans also believe more than Europeans that people ought not to be buffered from the consequences of their actions so long as they

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have a fair start in life. Up to four times as many Americans as Europeans think that college opportunities should be increased, but roughly half as many think the government should reduce the income disparity between high- and low-income citizens, or provide jobs or income support for the poor (J. Hochschild, 21-23). Hochschild argues that these tenets mask and therefore maintain the existence and effects of racism in the United States. First, the belief that the pursuit of the American dream is open to everyone masks the reality that black people continue to face obstacles to that pursuit. To the extent that Americans believe in the first tenet of the dream, they ignore or refuse to acknowledge the existence of glass ceilings in professional advancement and racial discrimination in commercial lending, housing, education, and health care. Second, the association of success with talent and effort while failure is correlated with lack of effort normalizes the conditions of poverty in which black Americans disproportionately live. Those who live in poverty, according to this version of the American dream, have only themselves to blame. Furthermore, the disproportionate number of black citizens living in poverty suggests that black people in general are lacking in the talent and effort to achieve success and that those who do are exceptions. Expectations of black Americans, by others and by themselves, tend to be shaped by perceptions of and stereotypes about poor black Americans, so that even black Americans who have never experienced poverty must cope with others assuming that success as defined by the American dream is beyond their reach. This is why black Americans who have succeeded by the standards of the dream nonetheless still experience stigmatization. In addition, the identifications of groups as virtuous or flawed depending on their perceived success or failure taken as a whole helps to reify notions of racial superiority and inferiority within American culture. It also encourages the notions that those who succeed have a right to dominate over those who fail, because they are clearly more virtuous (J. Hochschild, 30-34). People who stigmatize black people can consistently (albeit still erroneously) cling to the idea that white people are more virtuous as a group than black people even if they reject a biological basis for race or understand

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that being black does not in itself determine a lack of virtue. Powell suggests that in modern racism, beliefs about lack of "character" in blacks is not essentialist, in the sense of being determined by race, which would excuse failure and perhaps dictate helping people, but rather that failure is associated with race. In the modern racist view, as Powell defines it, a few black people might have good character and be successful, and no one is saying that race determines lack of character. It just so happens that most black people are not successful, so it is reasonable, at least at first glance, to write off all black people (Powell, 208). Moreover, Hochschild argues that many Americans perceive efforts to implement government programs or other large-scale collective efforts to end the legacy and continuing obstacles of anti-black oppression as contradicting the individualism that grounds the American dream. Powell argues: It has always been extremely difficult to work against racism without attacking individualism. . . . As long as the dominant pragmatic disposition is construed in terms of individualist expediency and competition, social and collective efforts to change treatment of others are reasonably regarded with suspicion and fear, as threats to individual liberty and interest. At the same time, our popular individualism reinforces racist attitudes and contributes to corresponding racist beliefs, because it is competitive and it is conductive [sic] to habits of invidious comparison. Individualism draws on the traditions of individual responsibility which constitute the innermost core of both religious and economic doctrines in America. It is immediately threatened by any claim that members of a group, as individuals, are not responsible for their own well-being or their own plight. (Powell, 138-139) Research on contemporary attitudes about race support Powell's claim. Although a large majority of white Americans express belief in racial integration in principle, they are significantly less willing to support government programs designed to promote integration. Their unwillingness is due to perceived conflicts with concerns about protecting individual liberty, such as protecting the preference to live in a

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mostly white neighborhood, and concerns about promoting individual interest and achievement, such as protecting job conditions that benefit them (e.g., maintaining existing seniority systems even if those systems make black employees disproportionately vulnerable to lay-offs) (Schuman et al., 205-209). Finally, legislative and institutional gains for black Americans, such as civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs, are always subject to being repealed or undermined by future administrations. For example, President Reagan supported federal tax exemptions for segregated Bob Jones University, opposed the extension of and ignored violations of the Voting Rights Act, almost abolished the Civil Rights Commission, opposed extant affirmative action plans for public employees, opposed a consent decree to desegregate the university system of Tennessee, opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King Day, cut the budgets and regulatory powers of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and urged the Supreme Court to allow institutions receiving federal funds to discriminate in areas not directly affected by the funding (J. Hochschild, 118; see also Guinier, 21-30). Even when obstacles to the pursuit of the American dream are removed, they may at any time be put back in place. If fundamental American values include the belief that everyone has an equal chance at success (measured in material terms) and the belief that failure to achieve that success is indicative of lack of individual talent and effort, and if, in American society, failure (and therefore lack of talent and effort) is associated with blackness, then stigmatization as an aspect of American culture cannot be fought by individuals demonstrating that they are materially successful. Their success is all too often rendered suspect in light of stigmatizers' beliefs ("he wouldn't have made it so far without affirmative action") and to the extent that it is accepted, it reinforces the stigmatization of the group as a whole ("a few black people can be successful, so there is no more racism, and black people who are not successful have no one to blame but themselves"). Individually challenging negative expectations will not reduce antiblack stigmatization. In order to effectively challenge anti-black stigmatization, concerned people of all races must first challenge the policies that disproportionately impoverish black people and create obstacles to

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their flourishing. They must spread the truth to the extent that no one can continue to shamelessly blame the poverty disproportionately experienced by black people on black people's supposed failures. This is really the responsibility of white people and "nearly white" people, who are all the beneficiaries of anti-black oppression. Although I hope this book encourages more white people to live up to their responsibility in this regard, black people in this country cannot afford to wait around for that to happen. They must, although they should not have to, continue to fight anti-black oppression, to keep the evils of discrimination and disparity and anti-black stigmatization before the eyes of the public and the government. To do so most effectively requires solidarity in the form of strong group identification by black people who support each other as a group. In the meantime, black people should stick together in order to support each other in the face of anti-black stigmatization. They should work together to divert at least some black talent and effort and resources from being drained into enterprises and institutions that are predominantly controlled by and predominantly benefit white people and instead build up enterprises and institutions that are controlled by and that benefit black people. Freedom from reliance on white people, freedom from having white people in positions of power over black people, means that black people do not have to face the obstacle of personal stigmatization quite so frequently, on quite so daily a basis. It frees black people to achieve and flourish both individually and as a group, and it means that black people are contributing less to bolstering white institutions that stigmatize. For black Americans to try as individuals to demonstrate to white people that (at least one) black person is more intelligent and hardworking than anti-black stereotypes suggest is a losing battle. It may bring financial gain for some individuals, but it precludes strongly combating white supremacy, because often part of what it takes for black individuals to succeed in white-controlled settings is that they not challenge racism or stigmatization within that setting. Ultimately, people who strive for achievement within the status quo will not be helping to change the world, because working for recognition within the status quo says, in effect, "The world is fine, just let me in," rather than "I don't like how things are in the world right now." Individual black people can prove

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over and over again, as they have so frequently, that they are smart and hardworking, but that will not reduce the stigmatization of black people by white people in the United States. Finally, black people (until enough white people take up their rightful responsibility) should continue to actively challenge the erroneous idea that Europeans and Euro-Americans and European and Euro-American culture are superior to all other peoples and cultures. The most constructive response to being stigmatized, to being perceived as different, is not to deny it, but to embrace it. Part of celebrating and affirming difference is to keep track of it, to record it, to remember it. This also requires a strong group: individuals can remember a heritage, but heritages must be shared and must continue to develop in order to be alive. If all a heritage amounts to is memories in the minds of isolated individuals, it will stagnate. Not all members of a group have to actively participate in sharing the group's heritage, but there is an issue of critical mass here—enough members of the group must be committed or the heritage will die. I echo Du Bois, because Du Bois was correct. He recognized the problems. First, black people disproportionately experience material oppression and as a group experience cultural oppression. Second, anti-black stigmatizers see black people as if through a veil. They do not see individual people, nor do they see the reality of black experiences; they see only what they want to see, only their own preconceived notions. Finally, experiencing anti-black stigmatization creates "double consciousness" in black people: "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (Du Bois 1997, 38). Understanding how stigmatizers think is crucial to survival in a white supremacist society (understanding, for example, that to many white police officers, a black man reaching for his wallet is likely to appear to be a black man reaching for a gun). If a black person's positive self-conception is not reinforced through support from other black people, however, the negative perception is apt to win out. The worst part about anti-black stigmatization is when young black people come to believe it: to believe that they are not capable, not virtuous, not beautiful. When black children from financially successful families nonetheless come to believe that they are not as good students as their white peers or that their parents have done something wrong to

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bring upon themselves racial harassment or discrimination in their places of work, that is one of the most terrible results of anti-black stigmatization. What is even worse is when black children who live in poverty, who attend schools that are not places of learning, who do not have health care or dental care, who do not have enough to eat, who live in unsafe and unsanitary housing, and whose families work hard without getting ahead, believe that this is what they deserve, that it is somehow their own fault. Black pride, black solidarity, and strong black identification are crucial to overcoming these results, until either black people force white people to end white supremacy or white people do the right thing and end it on their own.

Is There a Basis for Black Solidarity?

One might concede that black solidarity would be useful in combating white supremacy, but might nonetheless argue, as Appiah does, that there is no basis for strong black identification because there is simply nothing there with which to identify. It seems to be the case, as Appiah argues, that black people do not share a significant percentage of genetic material only with each other and not with members of other racial groups. There are no racial essences, characteristics that are shared by members of one race that are not shared by members of other races. People from the same racial group do not even necessarily look alike, and races are identified in different ways in different times and places. Those who make the argument that there is no basis for black identification are correct that if we are to talk about identifying with others on the basis of race, there must be something there with which to identify. We do need a conception of race that is meaningful. The question, therefore, is whether there is a basis for black identity in the absence of appeals to racial essence. I covered some of this ground in Chapter 2, where I discussed arguments for and against a biological basis for racial identification and for and against thinking of race in terms of culture. I argued that what appears on the surface to be a debate about how to define race is actually a debate about the morality of taking race into account. In Chapters 3

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and 4,1 examined a number of issues that are relevant to the question of the morality of taking race into account. If, as I argued earlier in this chapter, it is important to take race into account in order to combat the ongoing anti-black stigmatization that is a central feature of American society, we need a way of understanding race that not only allows for strong black identification, but that captures some of the ethical imperatives involved. We need a way of thinking about race that provides a basis for identification, that allows us to identify the harm that has been done by racial stigmatization, and that facilitates us in identifying the racial obligations that are required for liberatory struggle. As Outlaw argues, we need a creative way to think about race, a way that both captures the role that it has played and that leads to social emancipation (Outlaw 1995, 83-84). There are two ways of thinking of racial identity, other than thinking of races as families, that are non-essentialist (i.e., do not require a notion of racial essences) but that nonetheless provide a basis for racial identification. One is to think of racial identity in a very minimal way as a socially constructed "label/7 (Appiah suggests thinking of race in this way, as I discussed in Chapter 2.) This conception of racial identity is too thin to ground the sort of robust racial identification that is required for black libera tory action, however. It tells us what we might mean by "racial identification" in the absence of racial essences, but does not give us much to work with in terms of motivating racial identification in emancipatory ways. To suggest to someone that she should make decisions in her life revolving around certain people just because they share a "label" with her is not very motivating. She might plausibly respond, "Why should I care about someone just because he has the same label as me?" The concept of family builds in more motivation. Certainly someone might say, "Why should I care about that group of people just because they are my family?" But for most people, family are precisely those people about whom we do often care simply because they are our family and for no other reason. Thinking of races as families is a better model for strong black identification than simply thinking of race as a label. A second approach is to define black identity in terms of the experience of racial oppression. This is the approach that Du Bois adopted in his later work. In Dusk of Dawn, he revisits his claims about racial families from

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"The Conservation of Races/' He acknowledges that biological research has called into question the division of human beings into racial groups. Yet he still supports Pan-Africanism, this time on the basis of the oppression that people of European descent have inflicted upon black people since the fifteenth century: "The physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult. It is this unity that draws me to Africa" (Du Bois 1968,117). The problem with this approach is that a recognition of common oppression is not a particularly attractive basis for racial solidarity. Thinking of black identity solely in terms of the experiences of oppression shared by black people undermines the goal of creating solidarity in the first place, which is for black people to take pride in themselves and their heritage, to have self-respect, self-esteem, and self-determination. To say, in effect, that what it means to be black is to have experienced anti-black oppression is not a good way to foster black pride for liberatory purposes. Furthermore, while a recognition of common oppression might provide a basis for black identification, it does not work as a basis for racial identification in all cases. As I argue below, white people identifying strongly with other white people is as important for combating white supremacy as strong black identification by black people (although white identification must play out in different ways). Thus, the understanding of racial identity that we adopt must work for more than just black identity. Thinking of races as families meets this requirement.

Races as Families

I consider four possible objections to my argument in favor of thinking of races as families. First, strong black identification involves taking race into account. It means that in certain circumstances, I might treat a black person differently than a white person, even if that were the only relevant difference between them. This is wrong, according to Appiah, because it violates the moral principle of impartiality: the idea that I should treat people the same as long as they act the same and that I should not favor someone over anyone else just because I like him better or feel closer to him.

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There is a traditionally recognized exception to the impartiality requirement. Most philosophers in the Euro-American philosophy tradition have agreed that it is acceptable to grant moral priority to members of one's own family—to place somewhat greater importance on the needs of one's family in comparison with the needs of those outside one's family. This does not mean that it is morally acceptable to completely disregard the interests of people outside our families, but rather that it is acceptable to give members of one's family some extra concern in our moral reasoning. (This exception does not hold in some circumstances. For example, if I am a judge and my brother comes before me for sentencing, I may not give him a lighter sentence on the basis that he is my brother. But that is why a judge in this circumstance would be expected to recuse himself and hand the sentencing decision over to a different, impartial judge.) Appiah argues that people who say that we should think of races as families are trying to use that way of thinking to get around the impartiality requirement. According to Appiah, arguing that races are like families is a way to justify granting moral priority to members of one's race. He believes that the argument is not valid, however, because he does not think that races are sufficiently like families. I offer two responses to Appiah. First, while he interprets the argument that races are like families as a descriptive analogy aimed at justifying granting moral priority to members of one's race, I argue that it should be understood as a prescriptive claim about how people should think of their racial identity. Identifying with each other on the basis of race is morally acceptable and does not require justification, as long as it is done in socially responsible ways. Second, I argue that Appiah's definition of the family is too narrowly construed. If we define family correctly, thinking of races as families becomes less farfetched than Appiah makes it out to be. The second objection to the idea of races as families is also made by Appiah. He argues that when members of racial groups identify strongly with each other, as they do when they think of themselves as members of racial families, it interferes with their identifying as members of the larger human family. His third objection is that strong black identification, based on thinking of races as families, interferes with individual autonomy. He also worries that strong groups tend to pressure their members to behave in conformity with standards set by the group. In

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response to these objections, I argue that thinking of races as families, if based on an ideal model of the family that I delineate, allows us to take race into account while reinforcing, rather than contradicting, the idea of the common humanity of all people. It also provides a model for strengthening racial solidarity without interfering with individual autonomy. Finally, the fourth objection is that while black people thinking of themselves as family is useful for the purpose of combating anti-black oppression, white people thinking of themselves as family contributes to white supremacy. This would appear to create a double standard: it is morally acceptable for black people to think of themselves as family, but not for white people to do the same. Thus some people argue that it is not acceptable for members of any racial group to think of themselves as family. I argue, on the contrary, that understanding themselves as family is a crucial part of white people taking responsibility for and ending white supremacy.

Appiah'sView of the Family

Appiah takes the analogy of races to families to be the argument that (i) because we are justified in granting moral priority to family members and (2) because members of our race are like family members, therefore we are by analogy justified in granting moral priority to members of our race. He believes that this argument is not sound because it relies on two incorrect assumptions: (i) that it is the biological relationship of family members that justifies granting moral priority to them; and (2) that races are like families because members of races are biologically related. In Chapter 2, I discussed Appiah's reasons for believing that members of races are not biologically related. In regard to the first assumption, Appiah argues: The relations of parents and their biological children are of moral importance, of course, in part because children are standardly the product of behavior voluntarily undertaken by their biological parents. But the moral relations between biological siblings and halfsiblings cannot . . . be accounted for in such terms. A rational

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defense of the family ought to appeal to the causal responsibility of the biological parent and the common life of the domestic unit, and not to the brute fact of biological relatedness.... For brute biological relatedness bears no necessary connection to the sorts of human purposes that seem likely to be relevant at the most basic level of ethical thought. (Appiah 1990,14-15) Imagine a case in which two full siblings, Jane and John, are given up for adoption when they are infants and grow up in different adoptive families without any knowledge of each other. Suppose that Jane needs a kidney transplant and none of her adoptive family members have compatible kidneys. She tracks down her biological parents, who are now deceased, and learns about and locates John. On Appiah's view, Jane's biological parents, had they been alive, might have had an obligation to provide her with a kidney, if they could have done so, because they had a responsibility for helping the person they created. But John does not have any obligation to donate a kidney to Jane. He was not responsible for creating her, nor does he have a history of shared domestic life with her. The fact that they are biologically related does not create for him any more obligation to her than to a stranger who happened to be able to use his kidney. Suppose that he is willing to donate a kidney. If there were another person who was not biologically related to him who needed and could use his kidney, the fact that Jane is biologically related does not create a moral priority for giving the kidney to her rather than to the other person. Thus Appiah believes that biology is not sufficient justification for granting moral priority to family members. I agree with Appiah in this regard, and because I also agree that there is no biological basis for race, my defense of the analogy of races to families does not rely on the belief that what is similar about the two concepts is their biological nature. The difference between Appiah's understanding of the analogy of races to families and my use of the analogy is that Appiah understands it as a descriptive claim that has been employed to support the argument that people are justified in granting moral priority to members of their race. I am using the analogy prescriptively. My claim is that we should think of races as families. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that we should think of races as families because doing so provides

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justification for granting moral priority to members of one's race. I do not agree with Appiah that granting moral priority to member's of one's family or one's race requires justification in the way he believes. Appiah takes strict impartiality in moral reasoning to be the default, with any deviation from that default requiring justification. I take treating people with the sort of consideration we typically grant to family members to be prima facie morally acceptable: it is not a deviation from morality and does not require any special justification as long as we do not cause harm to others. The question then becomes not whether we are justified in treating others as we typically treat family members, but what corresponding responsibilities we have to ensure that doing so does not cause harm. I have already discussed why black people in the United States might find strong black identification—that is, thinking of each other as members of an extended family—beneficial. I have argued that the available evidence, particularly evidence of how anti-black stigmatization works, offers support for this claim. If it is the case that treating people of our race as family members is morally acceptable as long as it does not harm others, however, then this evidence is not required to justify the practice, only to suggest reasons for motivation. Thus, I undertake two tasks in the remainder of this chapter: to argue that treating people of one's race as family is morally acceptable as long as it does not cause harm to others and to show that people can, in fact, treat members of their racial groups as family in certain ways without causing harm. Appiah specifies that the unit he considers to be the family is the nuclear family—"that irreducible minimum: the parent or parents with the child or children" (Appiah 1990, 14). This is an overly narrow, counterintuitive conception of family. To assume that one is justified only in making moral distinctions between members of one's nuclear family and the rest of humanity, but not between members of one's extended family and the rest of humanity, flies in the face of the experience of most people. Many societies are organized into families that contain more than two married adults with their children. These include married couples sharing a household with one set of parents (where either the older couple is elderly or the younger couple is financially dependent), couples within the same generation sharing a household (two or more brothers with their wives and children, for example), and polygamous families (Pasternak et

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al., 235). Furthermore, even when families composed of multiple married couples do not occupy the same residence or even live in the same region, they may function as a family economically and in terms of property ownership by sharing economic resources communally and owning family businesses and property jointly (Pasternak et al., 243-246). Finally, in the majority of societies worldwide (585 out of 857 [68 percent] in a recent survey), members of those societies understand themselves as belonging to descent groups, groups of people descended either patrilineally or matrilineally from a common ancestor, which determines access to property, political allegiances, and marriage choices among other aspects of social life (Pasternak et al., 255-256). The majority of people in the world behave as if they believe they have special obligations to members of their extended families, whether they have frequent contact with them or not. It is ridiculous to say that I have no special obligation to my great-aunt and great-uncle and their children who lived 100 miles away from me when I was young and who live 500 miles away from me now, and whom I visited maybe six times a year when I was young and whom I visit once a year now, just because I never lived in intimate contact with them within a nuclear family setting or saw them frequently. These are people with whom I share memories of family holidays and gatherings. These are people who were tremendously important to my mother when she was growing up and lived near them. These are people who would go out of their way to help me, because I am the grandchild of their sister and the daughter of their niece. Appiah's narrow construal of the family makes a mockery of extended family relations. And if I extend family obligation to my greataunt and great-uncle, why not further? The connections continue: maybe I did not know my great-grandmother's cousin particularly well, but to my great-grandmother she was important, and my great-grandmother was important to me, so I honor that relationship by extending it to my greatgrandmother's cousin's great-granddaughter who just moved into my town. Furthermore, extended family need not be biologically related. I count among members of my extended family close friends of my grandparents whom my mother called aunts and uncles while she was growing up and whom I also learned to address this way as a child. These are not people whom I know particularly well, nor do they live near me. Nonetheless, I would help them if they needed it before I would help a stranger.

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The practices of creating families by taking care of children who are not related by biology or marriage and treating people with the same care and consideration as nuclear family members when they are not are also found worldwide. In "Black Women and Motherhood/' Patricia Hill Collins discusses the important role that "othermothers" have played in West African, Caribbean, and African American families (although Collins's article is about othermothers, she stresses that black men can and do play these roles, too). Othermothers are women who care for children who are not their biological offspring. They may be grandmothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, fictive kin (through informal adoption of biologically unrelated children), and neighbors. Civil rights leader Ella Baker describes her aunt's "othermothering": My aunt who had thirteen children of her own raised three more. She had become a midwife, and a child was born covered with sores. Nobody was particularly wanting the child, so she took the child and raised him . . . and another mother decided she didn't want to be bothered with two children. So my aunt took one and raised him.... They were part of the family. (Collins, 121) Collins argues that othermothers are key not only in supporting children, but in helping biological mothers who lack the preparation or desire for motherhood: In confronting racial oppression, maintaining community-based child care and respecting othermothers who assume child-care responsibilities serve a critical function in African-American communities. Children orphaned by sale or death of their parents under slavery, children conceived through rape, children of young mothers, children born into extreme poverty or to alcoholic or drugaddicted mothers, or children who for other reasons cannot remain with their bloodmothers have all been supported by othermothers. (Collins, 122) bell hooks suggests that the relationship among bloodmothers and othermothers has theoretical impact as well, calling into question the concept

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of the nuclear family (upon which Appiah so unquestioningly relies). According to hooks, "This form of parenting is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the idea that parents, especially mothers, should be the only childrearers" (hooks, 144). Furthermore, Collins argues that community othermothers—women who take responsibility in various ways for entire communities—have played a central role in political activism aimed at combating anti-black oppression. She describes how these women use family language to describe children in their communities—"our children"—and the ties that bind them to their responsibilities as members of African American communities. Black teachers, for example, have often functioned as othermothers to generations of children. Collins argues: Community othermothers' actions demonstrate a clear rejection of separateness and individual interest as the basis of either community organization or individual self-actualization. Instead, the connectedness with others and common interest expressed by community othermothers models a very different value system, one whereby Afrocentric feminist ethics of caring and personal accountability move communities forward. (Collins, 132) According to Collins, people who extend their caring outward, from extended family to geographically but also racially defined communities, have been crucial to the survival and empowerment of black people living in the United States. The practice of creating families through treating people as family members without the benefit of legal recognition of these roles was important among enslaved black people in the United States, because they were not permitted to form legally recognized marriage unions and because parent-child relationships were not respected by slave owners. Men and women who undertook marital obligations to each other were separated at the whim of slave owners. White men routinely raped black women and slave owners forced women they owned to breed with men the slave owners chose. Nonetheless, enslaved people continued to create their own marriages, in defiance of the disregard in which these commitments were held by white people. Parents could be sold away from their

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children and vice versa, and othermothers and otherfathers stepped in to fulfill parental roles. Peggy Cooper Davis argues that one of the most significant rights established by the Fourteenth Amendment, and one of the leading reasons behind the drive to ratify it, was the right of black people to create families that would be recognized under the law (P. Davis, chaps. 2-3). While these were marital and parental rights understood in Christian terms and within nuclear families, such restrictions reflect religious biases that have been called into question a century later. The present movement to legalize marriage between same-sex couples is based on the belief that creating families is a right and that the right to create family should not be narrowly construed in terms of only one, culturally specific notion of what constitutes a "family/' If we have a right to create families by undertaking certain kinds of obligations to people whom we consider to be our family members, then this is the important question: What limits are needed to ensure that this right does not cause harm or abridge other rights? If we allow that people are free to treat people of their choice as family members, what responsibilities accompany that freedom?

Races as Families and "Common Humanity"

Appiah worries that if we grant moral prioritization to members of our racial groups, this undermines respecting the common humanity of all people. What matters will be not that someone is a person, but that he is a person of a specific race. I argue that granting that we have special obligations to members of our own race does not entail denying that we share the fact of being human with all people. In order for thinking of races as families to reinforce, rather than undermine, respecting the common humanity of all people, however, we need to be specific about what we mean by family and what moral responsibilities family members have. The limitation of Du Bois's and Outlaw's discussions is that they presuppose that the concept of family entails certain obligations and behaviors, without discussing these in detail. If we are to advocate thinking of races as families, we need, as part of that project, to think about what we mean

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by families in the ideal. Not all families provide good models for how we should think about race. In this section, I present an ideal conception of family. Thinking of races in terms of families, if based on an ideal of the family, encourages respect for all people on the basis of shared common humanity, rather than contributing to racial parochialism. The ideal family also provides a model for how to emphasize one social group identity while simultaneously acknowledging and respecting intersecting social group identities. Finally, thinking of races in terms of families not only acknowledges the experiences of many black people, such as the othermothers described by Collins, but, as I argue in the last section, it is also important for understanding and addressing the behavior of white people. The ideal of a family that I have in mind has the following qualities. First, the relations of family members are caring relationships. Members of a family have obligations to take care of each other, both physically and emotionally. Second, these care obligations exist regardless of like or dislike between family members and come with no strings attached: family members do not have to earn care and do not lose care even when they behave in ways of which other members disapprove, although caring takes different forms for different people in different circumstances (e.g., caring for a family member who is suffering from alcoholism may require setting certain conditions for that person so that family members are helping her recover rather than enabling her to continue in her addiction). Third, caring means appreciating all members of the family for their differences, respecting ways in which each is different from other members of the family, respecting intersecting social identities (gender, sexual orientation, age, disabilities, and so on), never stigmatizing each other on the basis of particular social identities, and never stereotyping family members or forcing them into limiting roles based on their social identities. Finally, within the ideal family, members understand themselves as having obligations to care for others expanding outward from the family. They believe that as a family they have a social responsibility to provide care for each other in ways that do not cause harm to others and to balance their interests as a family with the interests of others. Furthermore, in appreciation of the care they receive as members of a caring family, they believe they have a responsibility as a family to help those who are in

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need of care and who are not part of their family, and they use the family as a base and a gathering point for resources. Thus, for example, parents and children (and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on) might stand together in protest against injustice, volunteer together at a local community center or shelter, and all contribute part of their income and allowances to a family fund to donate to social causes. How do these ideals translate into obligations of a racial family? First, members of a racial family have obligations to care for each other, particularly those who are more vulnerable. For example, wealthier members of the family have an obligation to assist rather than exploit or ignore less well-off members. Second, racial families must respect the intersecting social identities of all their members, not succumb to discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or disability, to name just a few. Third, racial families must not only look inward, but also outward as a group, to support all families and all social groups who are fighting against stigmatization and oppression. Appiah's concerns suggest that he believes that thinking of races as families encourages parochialism in ways that involve unfairness and/or harm to others. He believes that if we grant the sort of moral priority to members of our own race that we grant to members of our immediate family, this will lead to each racial family privileging itself while entirely neglecting the needs of other racial families: different racial families will not feel any responsibility to or for each other. My response is that this does not follow. Even if we restrict the notion of family to the nuclear family, as Appiah does, we still have to balance the needs of our families with social responsibility toward others. If we conceive of the family as a resource for helping others, however, then thinking of races as families promotes, rather than discourages, social responsibility. Rather than helping others being something that we do as individuals, with only our own resources, family members can pool their resources to help more effectively. This makes helping others a family project that strengthens and brings together the family rather than hurting it. A family can help itself as a family while helping others. These are not conflicting goals. Bill Lawson raises concerns about balancing the needs of family members and others from a different angle. He argues that thinking of races as

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families unfairly pressures people to put the interests of their racial families before the interests of their immediate families. He uses the example of a black person who can afford to live in an economically upscale neighborhood (whether it is demographically white or black or integrated), with the benefits that such a neighborhood often affords: low crime rate, safe play areas, good schools. He argues that thinking of races as families suggests that such a person would feel pressure to live instead in an economically impoverished, demographically black neighborhood, since flight by economically successful black people contributes to the decline of these neighborhoods and more difficult circumstances for those who stay. He argues that it is unfair to expect black people to put the interests of their racial family over the interests of their immediate families. He also argues that if other people perceive that black people are taking it upon themselves to help solve each other's problems, this will reduce pressure on the rest of society and the government to do their part (Lawson 1992). There are three problems with this argument. First, Lawson assumes an opposition between what is best for his immediate family and what is best for his racial family. While safe play areas and good schools are certainly in the best short-term interest of his children, is it in their best longterm interest to live in a world in which black people continue to be disproportionately poor because of anti-black oppression? How much good would be done by having more economically successful people living in presently impoverished neighborhoods? These are difficult decisions that only the people affected can make. It is worth noting, however, that the same dilemma is faced by all people in American society, even if we think of Americans as one large group rather than as members of racial families. Anyone who can afford to and chooses to live in an upscale neighborhood is failing to challenge how resources are distributed in the United States and is helping to continue the status quo of class divisions in American society. Everyone who takes social problems seriously must struggle to balance the interests of his or her immediate family with the interests of a larger family, whether it is a racial family or the family of humanity. Unless we understand impartial moral reasoning and moral obligation in the very minimalist sense advocated by John Locke and Adam Smith, where each person looks out for

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himself and is only obligated to refrain from directly causing harm to others, we are faced with responsibility for addressing the problems of poverty in our world. And if we accept Marx's arguments, practices that reflected Locke's and Smith's understanding of morality led to the creation of the class disparities existing today. Finally, Lawson worries that if black people help each other as family members, it will reduce pressure on the rest of American society and American government to take responsibility for the problems facing black people in the United States. Black solidarity is needed to create the political pressure necessary to move the government to do its part, however. Thinking of races as families is a way to create that solidarity. Lawson's worries reflect his concern that thinking of races as families interferes with individual autonomy. Black separatists have traditionally rejected the ideal of individualism, endorsing collectivism instead. Karenga, for example, states: 'There is no such thing as individualism, we're all black. The only thing that saved us from being lynched like Emmett Till or shot down like Medgar Evers was not our economic or social status, but our absence" (Karenga, 162). As Howard McGary observes, to suggest that strong black identification compromises individual autonomy or denies individual freedom is to oversimplify. To suggest that black people should not identify on the basis of race, treat each other as family members, or establish social institutions over which they have control and which have as goals economic and cultural independence from white people is also an attack on the personal autonomy of people who would make these choices (McGary, 209). As long as it can be demonstrated that such institutions do not cause harm to members of other racial groups (an issue I address below), they should be allowed. Appiah has a slightly different but related concern. He worries that thinking in terms of race leads to pressures within the group for people to conform to group expectations and leads to members of the group downplaying their other social identities (Appiah 1996, 99-100). I argue, however, that in the ideal family, the members do not expect each other to be exactly the same. Thinking of races as families based on the model of the ideal family accommodates intersecting social identities: members of all families have other social identities that they do not share with other

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members of their families. The acceptance of difference among family members is a hallmark of a healthy family. One can still have a strong sense of family (one would actually have an even stronger sense of family) while respecting differences among family members. In the ideal family, intersecting social identities do not compromise full acceptance into the family structure. Finally, Appiah also worries that thinking of people as members of different groups leads to stereotyping. Again, however, I argue that we do not typically stereotype members of other families. Most people realize that members of families do not necessarily share traits, interests, or values. In this way, too, families provide a model for how to think about members of other sorts of groups without stereotyping them. Furthermore, the experience of caring for other family members, despite their differences from us, can help us learn to care for people outside our family who are different from us. The ideal family environment, as described above, can help people learn to be more caring, not the other way around. Feeling strongly about your family does not necessarily mean neglecting the needs of people who are not part of your family. Within a family is the best place to learn to love and the best place to learn to take care of people one does not necessarily like. If we strengthen the concept of races as families based on the model of the ideal family offered above, it is likely to help people learn to be more caring and considerate of members of other groups, not less so.

Should White People Think of Themselves as a Family? When the topic of taking race into account comes up and someone advocates black people treating each other with any measure of partiality, the inevitable question is, "Doesn't that imply that it's okay for white people to do the same? But when white people do this, isn't it racism and isn't it wrong? So if it's wrong for white people to do it, why is it okay for black people to do it?" Jorge Garcia responds to these questions in his essay "The Heart of Racism," in which he defines racism as "a vicious kind of racially based disregard for the welfare of certain people" (Garcia, 6). He entertains the

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question of whether it is racist to choose to give money to a black beggar over a white beggar or to save a black person from a burning building rather than a white person. In the first case, he argues that he sees no problem with choosing to give money to the black beggar, because this is supererogatory: neither is entitled to a handout from him, so benefiting one is not harming the other. He argues that the opposite choice might be tainted by association with racism, in that most people would believe that giving only to the white beggar shows racist disfavoritism toward the black beggar rather than nonracist preference for the white beggar. But in the absence of racist disfavoritism, he does not find it immoral. Saving the person from burning is a bit different, he writes, because it is a matter of life and death. But again, he returns to whether the choice is motivated by viciousness against the person who is not selected for aid. If this is not the case, then he does not see the choice as problematic. My concern with the kind of test cases considered by Garcia is that nothing useful about more real-life, everyday situations of racial preference in the context of a white supremacist society can be extrapolated from them. If we argue, as Garcia does, that neither the black person assisting the black person nor the white person assisting the white person is a racist act (so long as the white person is not motivated by viciousness toward black people), this avoids condemning all acts that involve taking race into account, but it does not provide us with any clues about where differences between black preferences and white preferences lie in more real-life scenarios. In the cases of both the beggar and the fire victim, we are talking about one-time actions, abstracted away from broader repercussions. A better test case is the one considered by Randall Kennedy, who criticizes Yale law professor Steven Carter for hosting a yearly dinner at his home for his black students. Kennedy argues that this unfairly benefits the black students, creating a climate in which Carter gets to know his black students better and see them in a different light from his white students. According to Kennedy, the job of a professor is to treat all his students equitably, not to play favorites. By doing something extra for the black students, Kennedy charges that Carter is failing in the demands of his profession. And certainly we would consider it racist if a white professor invited only his white students to dinner (Kennedy, 60).

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This is where the usefulness of thinking in terms of stigmatization comes in. In a society in which black people are widely stigmatized, the support black professors provide by creating "black space" in a predominantly white law school away from the glare of stigmatization, and the encouragement they give black students in the face of the additional challenges they experience, is instrumental in helping them flourish and succeed. In reality, it is simply bringing the black students up to the level of confidence that white students experience simply by virtue of being white: a sense of belonging, a chance to be with other people like oneself. In a predominantly black school, it would not be ethical for a black professor to invite black students to his house and exclude the handful of white students at the school, but it would also not be necessary. It might be useful, however, for a white professor to invite the white students to his or her house to talk about how they can help overcome anti-black oppression. Context and history are everything in evaluating the moral acceptability of taking race into account in various situations. Test cases that abstract from context and history are not useful tests. Nonetheless, I am not arguing that it is only acceptable for black people to treat other black people as family. I argue, counterintuitively as it may seem, that it is not only acceptable but morally crucial for white people to treat each other as family. Earlier in this chapter, I stated that the important question is not whether it is morally acceptable to take race into account and to think of members of one's race as family, but rather to consider the limitations and responsibilities that must accompany the practice of treating races as families. The harm that white people have done to members of other races, while treating each other as family, illustrates the need for families to exercise responsibility by not harming members of other families while caring for members of their own. We must delineate how members of families can care for each other without hurting or exploiting others. This often depends upon context. In a small town, if one family owns most of the property and holds most of the public offices, then that family can easily harm other families by favoring family members. A responsible family in this circumstance would make room for others. White people have taken so much social power in the United States at the expense of members of other races that any prioritization of white people by other

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white people at this point harms members of other races. White people have misused family privileges for so long that they must give them up until a balance is restored. Although I believe that taking race into account is prima facie morally acceptable, it is not morally acceptable when actions based on taking race into account perpetuate or serve as a reminder of the domination of one family at the expense of others. We have to look at what is best for all people as human beings, and sometimes that means that some groups should be allowed to grant moral priority to their members in certain ways while others should not. For example, black student unions provide a forum in which black students in predominantly white university settings can feel less isolated and can act as groups to fight continuing racism within their universities. White student unions are reminders of how black students were once entirely excluded from white universities. There are further considerations, however. A black student union that organized activities to terrorize white students would not be acting responsibly as a group. A white student union created as a forum for white students to better understand and to combat white supremacy, if organized and administered appropriately, with input from and liaisons with people of color, would not only be acceptable, but desirable. Invoking the concept of racial family responsibility in the case of white people is a better approach to fighting white supremacy than abandoning the concept of races as families. Denying that white people are a family allows white people who do not want to contribute to anti-black oppression to distance themselves from white people whom they perceive as racist ("I'm not one of them"). This plays out in two ways. First, as Frankenberg and many others have argued, white people who do not want to contribute to the problem of anti-black oppression need to begin by being cognizant of their membership in the white family and of the ways their membership gives them protection and advantages even if they do not wish to have these advantages. As long as well-meaning white people refuse to see that they benefit from being white, they are continuing to contribute to the problem. Second, even when white people recognize their white advantage and genuinely begin to engage in antiwhite supremacist practice, they may still distance themselves from other white people. They may prefer to work alongside black people, rather

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than have to deal with racist white people. This, too, means that they are doing less to combat white supremacy than they might. As discussed in O'Brien (1996), Janet Helms (1990) proposes a six-stage theory of white racial identity development. The first three stages (contact, disintegration, reintegration) represent those who are ignorant about racism. The second three stages (pseudo-independence, immersionemersion, autonomy) represent a journey "toward a nonracist white identity" (Jones and Carter 1996, 7, quoted in O'Brien, 254). According to O'Brien: Beverly Tatum (1992, 1994) observes that for whites, pseudo-independence is often characterized by avoidance of other whites. That is, once they become aware of racism and accept that it exists, it may seem like their only option is associating with predominantly people of color since most whites do not share their newfound perspective. . . . Whites typically emerge out of this stage when they are able to discover white antiracist role models. . . . If they have reached autonomy, they should be more likely to extend empathy to other whites whether or not they are antiracist. They may even use those relationships with whites as opportunities to share an antiracist perspective. Hence, in moving towards empathy and autonomy, white antiracists create the greatest possibilities for successful interracial and intmracial relationships. (O'Brien, 254-255) Later, O'Brien argues: White antiracists face unique challenges in developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships with other whites. . . . Although white antiracists may find it easier to connect with people of color, the "hardest trip" but most necessary trip may be the one towards autonomy, in which they maintain their connections with other whites. (O'Brien, 264) Acknowledging the importance of white racial identity in combating white supremacy leads me to disagree with Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey's conception of white anti-racism. Ignatiev and Garvey define whiteness

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as a club "that enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules/7 They argue that ''treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" and describes their goal as "the abolition of the white race" (Ignatiev and Garvey, 10-16). Whiteness is not best described as a club, however. Clubs are voluntary associations. Families are what we are born into without our consent. In their club analogy, Ignatiev and Garvey state, "When individuals question the rules, the officers are quick to remind them of all they owe to the club, and warn them of the dangers they will face if they leave it" (Ignatiev and Garvey, 10-11). This suggests that one can in fact "leave the club." But race is not something one can leave. Race is like family: you can disagree with your family, you can become an outcast from your family, you can be disowned by your family, but it is still your family. Even to be disowned fixes you as disowned from a particular family. When you leave a club, on the other hand, you just leave. Ignatiev and Garvey define whiteness in such a way that there is no "good" or "positive" way to be white. According to Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness simply is the denigration of blackness. I agree with Ignatiev and Garvey that socialization to whiteness (the development of white identity) occurs in our society by learning to differentiate oneself from blackness. The problem with their analysis is that racial identity is not something that can be negative or positive. Identity is just a social location where norms converge. It is what you do at that site, in response to those norms, that determines what kind of person you are. If you conform to norms of whiteness that demand that you stigmatize black people, you uphold white supremacy. If you resist or respond creatively to norms of whiteness that demand that you stigmatize black people, you help to undermine white supremacy. Either way, you are still white. I read Ignatiev and Garvey as suggesting that white people should disavow whiteness. To disavow means to dissociate oneself from or to deny knowledge of or association with. It also means to deny responsibility for. I worry that urging white people to disavow their whiteness will amount to urging them to deny their responsibility for what is done to people in the name of whiteness, for what white people do in the name of whiteness (for a related critique of Ignatiev and Garvey, see Alcoff). And this will not help matters at all. White people need to take responsibility for

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the problems created by white people, not distance themselves from them. As Malcolm X observed, black people do not need assistance from white people in their struggle. They also do not need the responsibility of educating white people. White people should take responsibility for the behavior of other white people, as members of their racial family (Malcolm X, 221). They should take seriously the fact that the worst behavior of members of their family reflects poorly upon them.

Conclusion

As a Jewish person, I was raised to believe that I have the responsibility of tikkun olam: repairing the world. Our world is in shambles, the result of the violence and destruction that began around the fifteenth century when a handful of ruling Europeans, bent on the acquisition of gold as capital, as a means of consolidating their control over the masses and subjecting them to servitude, slaughtered millions of the world's people and destroyed their civilizations. The wealth of the United States was created through the murder and displacement of the people already living here by European invaders and by their exploitation of black and other non-white people. The high standard of living in the United States is not enjoyed equally by all its citizens. Furthermore, it is made possible by the past and continuing exploitation and destruction of the people and resources of the so-called Third World and at the expense of the wondrous and fragile environment of our planet. Modern technology ensnares us in a society in which we are so dependent on that technology that we can no longer fend for ourselves and lures us into investing our money back into the corporations that force so many of us into servitude at less than a living wage. White supremacy is central to this state of affairs, and we cannot repair the world without ending it. In "Racisms/7 Appiah states that taking race into account involves a denial of the basic claim, expressed so clearly by Kant, that from the perspective of morality, it is as rational agents simplidter that we are to assess and be assessed. For anyone who follows Kant in this,

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what matters, as we might say, is not who you are but how you try to live.... [Taking race into account] runs against the mainstream of the history of Western moral theory. (Appiah 1990,14) If Charles Mills is right, however, who you are does not matter only if you are the right kind of "who/7 According to Mills, the Kantian injunction as expressed by Appiah was made by and about and for white men only, was taken that way for many years, and continues to a great extent to be taken that way today (Mills 1997). "Who you are'7 does matter in the mainstream of the history of Western moral theory. Even if Appiah were correct, however, and in the mainstream of Western moral theory what mattered really was how you try to live and not who you are, then we would still need to consider Outlaw's challenge that the mainstream of Western moral theory is wrong: perhaps who you are is much more important in certain ways than Appiah allows. This is the heart of the debate between those who oppose and those who favor taking race into account, and I have argued in this book that the latter are right: in certain contexts, it is important to recognize and accept the ties that bind us to other members of our racial groups. In regard to issues of race, we need to take seriously the idea that progress requires taking race into account in certain ways. Thinking of races as families furthers this goal. The concept of race has been used to justify the most atrocious wrongs of modern European and American history. Yet abandoning the concept of race will not resolve the problems created by the original race concept. We must re-create our conception of race in a way that heals these wounds and helps to bring harmony and balance to the various peoples of the Earth.

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INDEX

"100 years later" cycle, 62 Abolitionists, 43 Academic disciplines, 19 Adams, Abigail, 35 Adams, John, 35 Aetna insurance company, 30 Affonso, King, 26 Africa: ancient civilizations, 23-24; enslavement of peoples, 28-32; medieval civilizations, 24-27 Africana philosophy, 13,18-20,144; Appiah/ Outlaw debate as central to, 70-71 African Communities League, 53 Agassiz, Louis, 51-52 Alexius, Emperor, 25 Allen, Theodore, 33-34 Allport, Gordon, 121 Altruistic behavior, 79 American dream, 148-51 American Indian peoples, 27-28, 32, 40-41 American Revolution, 36 American values, 146,148-55; equal chance at success, 141-42,152; individualism, 151-52; responsibility of white people to challenge, 152-53; virtue associated with success, 150-52 Analytic philosophy, 19 Anatomy of Racial Inequality, The (Loury), 123,126 Ancestry, 75 Angola, 26 Anti-abolitionists, 43 Anti-black oppression, 16; i8oos, 44-45; Appiah/Outlaw debate and, 92-94; assumptions about nature of, 11-12; causality question, 118-20; color-conscious racism, 137-40; color-evasive racism, 140-42; conditions of oppression,

132-34; current situation, 62-69; Du Bois's view, 99-100; in employment, 42-44; immigrants and, 41-46; naturalization, 41-42; norms of whiteness, 136-37; oppressive environments, 120-22,124; racism and white supremacy, 134-36; riots, 44-45; social group oppression, 116-18; social norms and, 112-16. See also Racism; Stigmatization; White supremacy Anti-objectivism, 85, 86 Antipathy, 134 Apostolic Letter of 1839 (Gregory XVI), 44 Appiah, K. Anthony, 10-11, 70, 90; black solidarity, view of, 155; common humanity, view of, 165; as consequentialist, 104-6; descriptive vs. prescriptive concerns, 87-88; ethical thought concept, 94-95; family, view of, 145,159-65; genetic variation, view of, 75-76; impartiality requirement and, 158,161; individual autonomy, view of, 158-59; as integrationist, 103-5;on Kantian injunction, 176-77; objection to races-as-families analogy, 92, 95; race as socially constructed, 71-72,156; racialism, view of, 74, 85-86; reality of race and, 71-72 —Works: Color Conscious, 82, 88; In My Father's House, 75; "Racisms," 176-77; "The Uncompleted Argument," 81 Appiah/Outlaw debate, 16,18; as central to Africana philosophy, 70-71; as consequentialist, 92-93; prescriptive concerns, 84-85,87-88; race and biology, 73-81; race as social construction, 71-72,156; racialism, 74, 76, 85-86. See also Appiah, K. Anthony; Outlaw, Lucius Apprentices for life, 37 Arawak people, 27

188

INDEX

Asante, Molefi, 100 Ashanti Kingdom, 29 Autonomy, 158-59,169,174; as desirable, 105-7; separatism as constraint on, 103-4. $ee a^so Individual Axum, 23 Aztecs, 27 Bacon, Nathaniel, Jr., 33-34 Bacon's Rebellion, 33-34 Baker, Ella, 163 Behavior, 79, 88, 90-91 Belgium, 31 Biology, race and, 73-81 Black-centered history, 14-15; ancient times, 23-24; current situation, 62-69; distinctions between black and white, 32-35; EuroAmerican enslavement of African people, 28-32; European conquest of the Americas, 27-28; immigrants and anti-black oppression, 41-46; medieval times, 24-27; Reconstruction era, 46-52; slavery in revolutionary era and early republic, 35-39; territorial expansion and slavery, 39-41 Black codes, 48, 50 Black identity, 9,144-45; defined in terms of experience, 156-57. See also Racial identity Black intellectual tradition, 18-19 Black liberation leaders, 7 Black Panther Party, 58-61 Black Power movement, 58-59 Black Star Steamship Line, 53 Black studies, 19 "Black Women and Motherhood" (Collins), 163,164 Blame, 5,108,119,150,153 Blum, Lawrence, 21,134-35 Blumenbach, Johann Fried rich, 51 Bob Jones University, 152 Bok, Derek, 146,147 Bowen, William, 146,147 Britain, slave trade, 29-30 Broca, Paul, 51 Brown, John, 39 Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas, 50,102 Bruce, Philip Alexander, 34 Bruno, Giordano, 33 Business enterprises, black, 53 Camper, Petrus, 51 Capitalism, 22, 27-28; slavery as central to, 30-31

Caribbean, 28 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 60, 121-22 Carmody, Edward, 61 Carter, Steven, 171 Categorization racetalk, 137,139 Catholic Church, 24 Catto, Octavius V., 49 Causality question, 118-20 Chain gangs, 51 Chattel slavery, 28-29 Children, 37,154-55 Chinese immigrants, 41-42 Citizenship, 41 Civil rights, in twentieth century, 52-61,152 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 47,49 Civil Rights Commission, 152 Civil rights movement, 57-58 Civil War, 45-46 "Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, The" (Douglass), 52 Clark, Kenneth, 102 Clark, Mamie, 102 Class oppression argument, 116-19,122 Club analogy, 174-75 Cluster concept, 83 Coal mining, 58 Code of honor, for white people, 136-37 COINTELPRO, 60-61 College-educated black workers, 63 College-educated veterans, 56 Colleges, black, 48 Collins, Patricia Hill, 163,164 Color Conscious (Appiah), 82, 88 Color-conscious racetalk, 137-40 Color-evasive racism, 107,140-42 Columbus, Christopher, 27, 28 Common culture, 82 Common descent, 81-82,84 Common humanity, 103,165-70 Conditions of oppression, 132-34 Congo, 26, 31 Congress, naturalization and, 41-42 Connecticut, 37-38 Consequentialism, 92-93 Consequentialist debate, 99-111 "Conservation of Races, The" (Du Bois), 73, 81-82,156-57 Constitution, 36, 38-39,41, 45 Constitutional Convention, 36 Constructivism, 85-86 Converses, 32 Cose, Ellis, 147

INDEX

Cotton gin, 38 Creole (slave ship), 39 Croly, D. G., 43 Crusades, 24-25, 27 Cultural imperialism, 116,118 Cultural separatism, 100-101 Culture: group vs. individual, 97-98; race and, 72-73,81-85, 96-98,109-11,155; subgroups, 76-77 Dark Ages, 24 Davidson, Basil, 29 Davis, Peggy Cooper, 165 Deindustrialization, 63 Democratic Party, 44 Descent groups, 162 Descriptive arguments, 8, 77, 87-88 Detroit, 45 Deviance, 117,122-24; deviating from, 123-24,128,130-31,133 Difference, celebration of, 154 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 23 Disproving negative expectations, 145-47 DiTomaso, Nancy, 140-41 Double consciousness, 154 Double standards, 2-3,94,107-8,110-11 Douglass, Frederick, 38,43, 52 Dred Scott v, Sandford, 29

Drug use, 67 D'Souza, Dinesh, 108-10 Du Bois, W. E. B., 26; anti-black oppression, view of, 99-100; black identity defined in terms of experience, 156-57; circularity attributed to, 81-83; on double consciousness, 154; family, idea of, 81-82; prescriptive project, 84, 97-98; race defined in terms of culture, 72-73; racesas-families analogy and, 95, 97; on riots, 44/45 —Works: "The Conservation of Races," 73, 81-82,156-57; Dusk of Dawn, 156-57 Eccentricity, 134-35 Economic development, 100,153 Educated black malaise, 147 Education, stigma tization and, 130-31 Egyptians, 23-24 Elites, white, 14,148-49; deliberate creation of racism, 34,43-44 Elizabethan drama, 33 Employment, 38, 56, 58,152; anti-black oppression, 42-44; current situation, 63, 64; institutional racism and, 121-22

189

Environment, 176 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 152 Equal opportunity concept, 140-42,152 Essentialism, 83 Ethical thought, 94-95 Ethiopians, 23,33 Eurocentric history, 14-15 Eurocentric philosophical framework, 9, 18-20 Europe, population, 29 Expectations of black Americans, 126-30, 145-47, *5o/152 Exploitation, 116,117 Fair Labor Standards Act, 55 Family, 8-9; common descent and, 81-82; descent groups, 162; effect of slavery on, 164-65; extended, 161-62; moral priority granted to, 158-61; nuclear, 161-64; responsibilities, 3,17. See also Races as families Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 53, 60 Federal funding, 152 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 54, 55/ 57-58 Finkelman, Paul, 30 First-order discrimination, 131 Flag, Pan-African, 53 Founding Fathers, 30, 148-49 Fourteenth Amendment, 41,49,165 Frankenberg, Ruth, 138,173 Free black people, 36-38,46-48 Freedmen's Bureau, 47 Freedom dues, 35 Freedom of Information Act, 60 Freedom Rides, 59 Freedom schools, 48 Garcia, J. L. A., 122,134,170-71 Garvey, John, 174-75 Garvey, Marcus, 53, 59,100,102 Genetic theory, 10, 71-72, 74-78 Ghana, 24 GI Bill, 55, 56 Glass ceilings, 150 Gliddon, George, 52 Goffman, Erving, 124-32 Gold trade, 27-28 Good judgment, concept of, 142 Gould, Stephen Jay, 52 Government programs, 151-52,168,169 Grandfather clauses, 50

190

INDEX

Grant, Ulysses, 48 Graves, Joseph L., Jr., 32, 33 Greece, ancient, 14, 23 Gregory XVI, 44 Gutmann, Amy, 107, no Haiti, 28 Haitian revolution, 39 Hamilton, Charles, 121-22 Hampton, Fred, 61 Haney-Lopez, Ian, 79 Hard work, as value, 141-42,146,149 Harpers Ferry, 39 Harris, Brenda J., 61 Hayes, Rutherford, 49 Health inequality, 65-66 "Heart of Racism, The" (Garcia), 170-71 Helms, Janet, 174 Henry, Patrick, 36 Henry the Navigator, 25 Heritage, importance of, 100-103,106,154 Hierarchies, 12-13 Higher-order discrimination, 131-33 Hochschild, Jennifer, 146,148-51 Hoffman, Paul, 74 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), 54 hooks, bell, 163-64 Hoover, J. Edgar, 53 Hospitals, decline of, 58 Housing policies, 109; current situation, 64, 142; restrictive covenants, 54-56; urban renewal programs, 53, 58 Hughes, John, 44, 45 Hutus, 78 Identity: collective vs. individual, 105-6; race as essential aspect of, 95-96. See also Black identity; Racial identity; Whiteness Ignatiev, Noel, 174-75 Immigrants, 41-46 I'm Not a Racist, But... (Blum), 21

Impartiality requirement, 16, 91-92; justice and, 95-96; justification for violations of, 106-7; in moral reasoning, 94-99; races as families and, 157-58,161,168-69 Income inequality, 56, 63-66 Indentured servitude, 4, 33, 37,148 Individual, 146; challenges by as ineffective, 151-54; group vs., 97-98; Kantian moral reasoning and, 95-96; taking race into account, 70-71. See also Autonomy Inferiorization, 134 In My Father's House (Appiah), 75

Institutional racism, 121-22 Integrationism, 16, 93, 99,101-3; Appiah and, 103-5; color blind perspective, 107; of D'Souza and Sowell, 108-10 Irish Catholic leadership, 44-45 Irish immigrants, 42-45 Jaffe, Hosea, 26-27 Jamaican Emancipation Day, 45 Jamestown, 28 Jefferson, Thomas, 39-40 Jews, 32 Jim Crow character, 50 Jim Crow laws, 50 Johnson, Andrew, 48 Johnson, Deborah (Akua Njeri), 61 Johnson, Heather, 142 Johnson administration, 63 Justice, 95-96,108, no Kantian moral reasoning, 94,106,176-77. See also Impartiality requirement; Moral reasoning Karenga, Maulana, 100,169 Kennedy, Randall, 171 Khoi-Khoin people, 26 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 59, 61 Ku Klux Klan, 49 Kush, 23 Labor, social division of, 116-17 Lawson, Bill, 167-69 Legal construction of race, 4-5, 22, 34-35 Leopold II, 31 Liberty Hall, 53 Libraries, of Moors, 14, 25 Lincoln, Abraham, 45 Linnaeus, Carolus, 51 Locke, John, 168,169 Louisiana territory, 39-40 Loury, Glen, 123,126 L'Ouverture, Toussaint, 39 Loving v. Virginia, 4 Lugones, Maria, 7 Lynching, 45,48-49,52-53 McGary, Howard, 18 Malcolm X, 58-59, 61,176 Mali, 24, 25-26 Marginalization, 116,117,133 Marketplace, 108-9 Marshall, Thurgood, 102 Martin Luther King Day, 152

INDEX

Marx, Karl, 169 Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, 43 Material conditions, 5,138 Material oppression, 154 Mbanza, 26 McGary, Howard, 101-2,107, 169 Meredith, James, 59 Mexican immigrants, 42 Mexican War of 1846-48,40 Middle- and upper-class black people, 117-19,123-24,133,146-47,171-72 Mills, Charles, 19, 72,103,177 Minstrel shows, 50 Miscegenation, as term, 43 Miscegenation laws, 79 Mismeasure of Man, The (Gould), 52 Missouri compromise, 40 Money analogy, 86-87,113,115 Moors, 14, 24, 25 Moral reasoning, 10-11,16,106; impartiality in, 94-99; taking race into account, 80-81 Moral theory, Western, 176-77 Morgan, Edmund S., 34 Morrison, Toni, 137 Morton, Samuel, 52 Mosely, Albert, 75-76, 78 Motivation, 134 Muhammad, Elijah, 59 Myers, Kristin, 137 Natchez nation, 27 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 55,57 National Housing Act, 54 Nationality Act of 1940, 41 National Origin Act, 42 Nation of Islam, 59,100 Naturalization, 4-5,41-42, 79 Negro World, 53 Nei, Masatoshi, 75, 78 Nepotism, 79 New Jersey, 37 Newton, Huey P., 60 Newton, John, 29 New York, 38, 44-46 Nixon administration, 63 Njeri, Akua (Deborah Johnson), 61 Non-essentialist approach, 114-15 Nonprofessional workers, 117-18 Normality, 126-30; whiteness as standard of, 6-7,17,136-37. See also Social norms North: disenfranchisement of free blacks, 37-38; gradual ending of slavery, 36-37;

191

slaveries beneficial to, 30-31; slavery in, 36-37 Nott, Josiah, 52 Nubia, 23 Nzinga, Queen, 26 Objectivism, 85-86 Objectivity, reality and, 72, 73, 85-88 Obligation, 94,104 O'Brien, Eileen, 174 O'Connell, Daniel, 43 O'Neal, William, 61 On Race and Philosophy (Outlaw), 85 Ontology of race, 10-11,16 Oppression: causality question, 118-20; class argument, 116,119,122; conditions of, 132-34; forms of, 12-13; hierarchies as central to, 12-13; material, 154; social group, 116-18 Oppressive environments, 120-22,124 Organization of A fro-American Unity, 59 Othello (Shakespeare), 33 Othermothers, 163-65 Ottomans, 24 Outlaw, Lucius, 10-11, 70; anti-black oppression, view of, 99-100; on biological differences, 76-77; common site of origin thesis, 84; definition of race, 85; impact of racial classification, 79-81; impartiality requirement, view of, 95-96; On Race and Philosophy, 85; race as real, 72, 76; racial culture concept, 96-98 Page, Sarah, 53 Palestine, 24-25 Pan-Africanism, 157 Paracelcus, 33 Passing, 114 Pennsylvania, 38 Peonage system, 50-51 Pequot people, 27 Philadelphia riot of 1842,44-45 Philosophy: Africana, 13,18-20, 70-71,144; of whiteness, 19-20 Physical appearance, 4-5, 75, 78-79 Pilgrims, 27 Piper, Adrian, 131-32 Plessy v. Ferguson, 49-50 Politicians, pro-slavery, 43 Politics, free black people in, 47-48 Population, 29, 75, 77-78 Portugal, slave trade, 25, 26

192

INDEX

Poverty, 64,138,155; of American Indians, 40-41; poor people blamed for, 5,150, 153 Powell, Thomas, 148,151 Powerlessness, 116,117-18,133 Pragmatic approach, 12 Prescriptive arguments, 8, 77, 84-85, 92, 97-98,160 Prison-industrial complex, 66-69 Professionals, black, 133,146-47 Professional workers, 117-18 Professors, black, 171-72 Property ownership, 46-47 Public housing, 58 Public life, 94 Puerto Rico, 3-4 "Purity of Blood" status, 32 Race: behavior and, 79, 88, 90-91; biology and, 73-81; culture and, 72-73, 81-85, 96-98,109-11,155; genetic variation, 71-72, 75-76; legal construction of, 4-5, 22, 34-35; as not real, 10, 71-72; ontology of, 10-11,16; as real, 3-4,10, 71-72, 76, 113; as social construction, 3-4,16, 71-73, 81-85,112-13. See also Races as families; Racial identity; Taking race into account Races as families, 1-2; as analogy, 8, 91-92; Appiah's view of family, 145,159-65; basis for black solidarity, 155-57; biological relatedness, 159-60; black identification, 144-45; common humanity and, 165-70; culture and, 96-98; descriptive analogy, 8; descriptive arguments, 8; disproving negative expectations, 145-47; ideal conception of family, 166-67, 169-70; impartiality requirement and, 157-58,161,168-69; individual autonomy and, 158-59,169; objections to, 92, 95,157-59; prescriptive analogy, 8, 97-99; responsibilities, 3,17,166-67,172; stigmatization and American values, 148-55; white people as family, 17, 170-76. See also Family; Taking race into account Racetalk, 137-40 Racial culture, 96-98; integrationist view, 109-11 Racial essences, 74,155-56 Racial identity, 88,156; as crucial for liberatory struggle, 144-45; material conditions and, 138; non-white as monolithic,

5-6; polarization of, 105-6; as social location, 16, 112,113-14,136,138-39,175; as socially constructed, 156; in terms of social norms, 112-15. See also Black identity; Race; Whiteness Racialism, 74 Racial realism, 85-86 Racial stereotypes, 129-30 Racism: color-conscious, 137-40; color-evasive, 107,140-42; deliberately created by elites, 34,43-44; effects of, 134-35. See also Anti-black oppression; Stigmatization Racist people vs. racist acts, 134-35 Radical Republicans, 47 Rational discrimination, 108-9 Reagan, Ronald, 152 Reagan administration, 63 Reality: objectivity and, 72, 73, 85-88; of race, 3-4,10, 71-72, 76,113; social constructions as, 72 Rebellions, 39; Bacon's Rebellion, 33-34; black, twentieth century, 52-53; black and white coalitions, 148-49. See also Riots Reconstruction era, 46-52 "Red Summer" of 1919, 53 Relativism, 86 Remond, Charles Lenox, 43 Republicans, Radical, 47 Respectability, 118,127-28 Responsibilities of families, 3,17,166-67, a72 Reverse discrimination, belief in, 140-41 Revolutionary era, 35-39 Rhode Island, 38 Rice, Thomas "Daddy," 50 Riots: iSoos, 44-45; New York, 45-46; Philadelphia riot 1842,44-45. See also Rebellions Robinson, Randall, 26 Roman Empire, fall of, 24 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 54 Rowland, Dick, 53 Roychoudhury, A. K., 75, 78 Rushton, J. Philippe, 52 Rwanda, 78 Sankore, University of, 25-26 Schuman, Howard, 147 Science, 51, 71, 74 "Science of Race, The" (Hoffman), 74 Second-order discrimination, 131,137 Segregation: black resistance to, 56-57; housing policies, 54-56, 58, 64,142; legis-

INDEX

lation promoting, 54-55; Plessy v. Ferguson, 49-50; residential, 54, 55-56 Self-determination, 101-3,557 Self-esteem, 101-2,157 Self-respect, 100-102,106,157 Seminoles, 40 Separatism, 16,93,99; as constraint on autonomy, 103-4; cultural, 100-101; economic development, 100,153; self-respect and, 100-102 Service sector jobs, 63 Shakespeare, William, 33 Shapiro, Thomas, 142 Sharecropping, 50 Sherman, W. T., 47 Sierra Leone, 29 Slavery, 41; Africa and, 28-32; as central to capitalism, 30-31; effect on family, 164-65; escapees, 39; legacy of, 31-32; legal alternatives to, 50-51; marriage as illegal, 164-65; of motivation for war, 40; price of slaves, 8; in revolutionary era and early republic, 35-39; territorial expansion and, 39-41; triangular trade, 29-30; types, 28-29 Slave trade: 1778-1807, 38; Britain and, 29-30; constitutional protection of, 38-39; European conquest of the Americas, 27-28; medieval times, 25; official banning of, 38-39 Slums, 58 Smith, Adam, 168,169 Social construction of race, 3-4,16, 71-73, 112-13; culture and race, 81-85; as real, 72-73 Social identity, 125 Social norms, 125; as common knowledge, 129-30; racial identity in terms of, 112-15; stigma, and anti-black oppression, 115-16. See also Normality Social oppression, 116-18; causality question, 118-20 Social power, stigmatization and, 124-27, 130-31,133,136 Social Security Act, 54-55 Sociobiology, 79,109 Solidarity, black, 17,153; basis for, 155-57; black assistance to black people, 171-72; threat of reduced government funding, 168,169 Sommering, Samuel Thomas, 51 Songhai, 24 South, Reconstruction era, 46-52 South America, 28

193

South Carolina Legislature, 48 Southern Homestead Law, 47 Sowell, Thomas, 108-10 Spain, 24 Stereotypes, 127,129-30 Stevens, Thaddeus, 47 Stigma, as term, 124-25 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Goffman), 124-32 Stigmatization, 16-17; American values and, 148-55; of black professionals, 133, 146-47; deviance, 122-24; deviating from deviance, 123-24,128,130-31,133; disproving negative expectations and, 145-47; expectations of black Americans, 126-30; higher-order discrimination, 131-33; pressure on white people to comply with, 136-37,139; social norms and, 115-16; social power and, 124-27, 130-31,133,136; violence and, 133-34; as widespread practice, 125-26. See also Anti-black oppression; Normality; Racism; Stereotypes Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 59-60 Student unions, black, 173 Subjectivism, 86 Sumner, Charles, 46-47 Supreme Court cases: Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas, 50,102; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 29; Loving v. Virginia, 4; Plessy v. Ferguson, 49-50; U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 41 Surveillance racetalk, 137-39 Taking race into account, 2-3, 7-9,16; in beneficial ways, 87-88; black professors, 171-72; consequentialist debate, 99-111; double standard, 2-3,107-8,110-11; impartiality requirement, 91-92; individuals and, 70-71; morality of, 70, 80-81, 111,155-56; not dependent on "reality" of race, 80-81; universalizability requirement, 91. See also Races as families Tammany Hall, 44 Teachers, black, 164 Tenochtitlan, 27 Territorial expansion, 39-41 Texas, 40 Texas War of 1835-36,40 Third World, 176 Thirteenth Amendment, 46, 51 Three-fifths clause, 36

194

INDEX

Tikkun olam, 176 Tilden, Samuel, 49 Timbuktu, 25-26 Triangular trade, 29-30 Ture, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), 60, 121-22 Turks, 24 Turner, Nat, 39 Tutsis, 78 Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon), 52 Underground Railroad, 39 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 53 , 59 United States Employment Service (USES),

56

Universalizability requirement, 91 Urban renewal, 53, 58 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 41 Values. See American values Vanini, Lucilio, 33 Vermont, 37 Vesey, Denmark, 39 Veterans, black, 52, 55-57 Veterans' Employment Service, 56 Violence, 118,133-34 Virginia assembly, 34 Virginia code, 34-35 Virtue, success equated with, 150-52 Voting, Northern disenfranchisement, 37-38 Voting Rights Act, 152 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act), 55 Wakeman, George, 43 Wall Street, 30 War of 1812, 40 Wars, slavery as motivation for, 40 Wasserstrom, Richard, no West, Cornel, 144

Western moral theory, 176-77 West Indies, 27, 39 White, Walter, 55 White antiracists, 173-74 Whiteness: invisibility of, 5-6; legal construction of, 4-5, 22, 34-35; norms of, 6-7,17,136-37; philosophy of, 19-20; white identity, 9,174-75. See also White people Whiteness studies, 137 White people, 2; elites, 14, 34,43-44,148-49; as families, 17,170-76; Founding Fathers, 30,148-49; poor, 34, 43,149; pressure to stigmatize black people, 136-37,138-39; responsibilities of, 9,17, 20,152-53; in stigmatized groups, 139-40. See also Whiteness White-skin privilege laws, 34 White supremacy, 134-35; c°de of honor, 136-37; definition, 6-7,16-17; Founding Fathers' role in, 148-49; legal reinforcement of, 34-35; punishment of challenges to, 6,17; white virtue associated with success, 150-52 Whitney, Eli, 38 Williams, Bernard, 94 Women: incarceration of, 68-69; othermothers, 163-65 Workers, powerlessness and, 117-18,133 Working-class people, 148-49 World War I, 52 World War II, 55 Young, Iris Marion, 12,103; causality question, 118-20; conditions of oppression, 132-34; respectability concept, 118, 127-28; theory of social group oppression, 116-18 Zimbabwe, 24 Zinn, Howard, 148