Racism

Question 1

Racial Skepticism

Answer 1

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s argument based on logical incoherence: The constituent conditions of the term ‘race’ cannot apply to to those groups typically deemed races.

Aims to move beyond racial identity.

Race isn’t real, but racial identification is real. Endorses racial eliminativism

Question 2

Racial eliminativism

Answer 2

Idea that ideal outcome would be to discard concept of race in the long term

Question 3

Political Constructivism

Answer 3

Race inherently a result of power inequalities
-endorsement of normative ‘racial eliminativism”

Question 4

Cultural Constructivism

Answer 4

Race also constructed by the agency, creativity, and culture of those persons who occupy such a classification

• endorsement of normative ‘racial conservation’
  -Racial justice = elimination of racism, not the elimination of race.

Question 5

Ideological Racism (shelby)

Answer 5

Ideological:
-A set of beliefs/judgements that misrepresent social realities and function to perpetuate unjust social relations.

(the attitudes or beliefs you hold about a group or person)

Question 6

Institutional Racism (Shelby)

Answer 6

Institutional:
-based not on attitudes, but effects of institutions on disadvantaged racial groups

-can exist even when individual actors have no racist attitudes

-The basic idea is that because some groups in society are already disadvantaged by racism, even if an institution is ostensibly race neutral it might be playing a role in keeping these groups in an disadvantaged position. (Racial profiling in policing is an example)

Question 7

Structural Racism (Shelby)

Answer 7

Structural:
-When institutional racism is combined across multiple domains.

• a black child who grows up in a disadvantaged area in America who faces institutional racism not only in the school system but also in employment and in the provision of health services and in policing = hard shitty life.

Question 8

Young’s Structural Injustice

Answer 8

Structural injustice exists when the combined operation of actions in institutions put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as they enable others to dominate or give them access to an abundance of resources.

Question 9

Affirmative Action

Answer 9

Goes beyond special steps to ensure disadvantaged groups not subject to formal discrimination (this is uncontroversial), but requires preferential treatment

Question 10

Objection to Affirmative Action

Answer 10

Jobs and educational opportunities ought to go to those who are most qualified. And as race is irrelevant to one’s qualifications, then discriminating according to race (through affirmative action) is wrong.

Question 11

Anderson’s Case for Integration

Answer 11

Segregation as the linchpin of racial inequality. Results in “social closure” between racial groups

Question 12

Shelby’s Case Against Integration

Answer 12

Self-segregation (by disadvantaged) can be a legitimate choice to:
Avoid negative treatment and discrimination
Positively preference segregated neighbourhood

Skepticism about social capital claim
Loss of positive social capital
Diverse neighbourhoods don’t automatically lead to > social capital
Other avenues for interracial contact
Expected cultural norms = white norms

“Egalitarian pluralism”
Should work to improve the residential environment of the unjustly advantaged, without aiming to rearrange neighbourhood demographics by race