The Imperative of Integration

Elizabeth Anderson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400836826
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A powerful new argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, but The Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings—in economics, sociology, and psychology—with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy.Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action.Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.

THE IMPERATIVE OF INTEGRATION

• ONE •

SEGREGATION AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

1.1 The Ideal of Integration

This book aims to resurrect the ideal of integration from the grave of the Civil Rights Movement. This may seem a long lost cause. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, white Americans, while claiming to agree in principle with its goals, in practice vigorously resisted policies that would achieve more than token integration of their neighborhoods and schools.¹ They got their wish. After little more than a decade of energetic federal enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education, overwhelming white opposition forced the courts to back down. Since the 1980s courts have largely suspended enforcement of Brown, while sharply constraining the freedom of schools to practice voluntary racial integration.² Schools have been quietly resegregating—in some regions to levels that exceed those that obtained before the courts began to seriously enforce Brown.³

One might have expected civil rights activists to press harder for integration. But by the late 1960s, left political movements were shifting priorities from “redistribution” to “recognition”—from socioeconomic equality to equality of respect and esteem for identities and cultures.⁴ This shift seemed to make sense in the face of the insult expressed in white opposition to integration: why demean yourself in begging to join a club whose members despise you for your race? Hence, advocates of the Black Power Movement, such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and Charles Hamilton rejected integration, calling instead for black self-reliance and pride in a distinctively black culture with African roots.⁵ Although shocked by blacks’ calls for “power,” many white ethnic groups responded to the allure of identity politics by calling for public recognition of their distinctive cultural heritage. The result, in the standard narrative, was American multiculturalism, reflected in today’s motley celebrations of diversity, multicultural sensitivity training, and American history textbooks featuring favorable depictions of the achievements of Americans from different shores. As one conservative commentator puts it, “we are all multiculturalists now.”⁶

Multicultural recognition is important; yet it cannot replace efforts to address the continuing reality of racial inequality. Celebrations of diversity cannot make up for the facts that blacks live several years less than whites,⁷ that 13 percent of black men are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction,⁸ and that more than one-third of black children live in poverty.⁹

The hope of black nationalists and left multiculturalists is that racial equality can be achieved through, or at least notwithstanding, substantial racial segregation. Conservatives have gladly accepted this agenda insofar as it reduces pressure on whites to integrate their social spaces.

This hope is an illusion. Segregation of social groups is a principal cause of group inequality. It isolates disadvantaged groups from access to public and private resources, from sources of human and cultural capital, and from the social networks that govern access to jobs, business connections, and political influence. It depresses their ability to accumulate wealth and gain access to credit. It reinforces stigmatizing stereotypes about the disadvantaged and thus causes discrimination.

Segregation also undermines democracy. The democratic ideal seeks a culture and political institutions that realize society as a system of equal citizens. Democratic political institutions should be equally responsive to the interests and concerns of, and equally accountable to, all citizens. Segregation impedes the realization of this ideal and these principles. It impedes the formation of intergroup political coalitions, facilitates divisive political appeals, and enables officeholders to make decisions that disadvantage segregated communities without being accountable to them. It undermines the competence of officeholders by limiting their knowledge of and responsiveness to the impacts of their decisions on the interests of all.

If segregation is a fundamental cause of social inequality and undemocratic practices, then integration promotes greater equality and democracy. Hence, it is an imperative of justice. It is also a positive good. It should appeal to us as well as command us to action. In our preoccupation with celebrating our particularistic ethno-racial identities, we have forgotten the value of identification with a larger, nationwide community.¹⁰ Integration in a diverse society expands our networks of cooperation and provides a stepping stone to a cosmopolitan identity, which offers the prospect of rewarding relations with people across the globe.

Recognition of the deep connections among integration, equality, and democracy lies at the core of the quiet revival of integrationist thought among American intellectuals.¹¹ It also grounds affirmative action in education. Alas, we stand at a critical turning point for the prospects of integration. Race-based affirmative action has been prohibited by popular referendum in several states, with more on the way. Integrative policies are in retreat. This book explains why this is a disaster, not just for African Americans, but for America as a whole. Against these trends, we need to restore integration to a central place on our political agenda.

1.2 A Note on Method in Political Philosophy

This is a work in nonideal theory. I do not advance principles and ideals for a perfectly just society, but ones that we need to cope with the injustices in our current world, and to move us to something better. Since this book is a response to current problems, it integrates research in the social sciences in ways not ordinarily found in works of political philosophy.

This method is unorthodox. Nonideal theory is usually regarded as derivative of ideal theory. Don’t we first need to know what an ideally just society would be, to identify the ways our current society falls short? Shouldn’t the principles for an ideal society be settled first, so that we can work out how to get there from here?

This challenge misunderstands how normative thinking works. Unreflective habits guide most of our activity. We are not jarred into critical thinking about our conduct until we confront a problem that stops us from carrying on unreflectively.¹² We recognize the existence of a problem before we have any idea of what would be best or most just.

Nor do we need to know what is ideal in order to improve. Knowledge of the better does not require knowledge of the best. Figuring out how to address a just claim on our conduct now does not require knowing what system of principles of conduct would settle all possible claims on our conduct in all possible worlds, or in the best of all possible worlds.

In our current world, the problem I propose to investigate is the persistence of large, systematic, and seemingly intractable disadvantages that track lines of group identity, along with troubling patterns of intergroup interaction that call into question our claim to be a fully democratic society of equal citizens. This admittedly inchoate starting point is akin to the complaints of fatigue, insomnia, and headache a patient might bring to her doctor: there seems to be something troubling here, but its precise contours require detailed empirical investigation and await a definitive diagnosis and evaluation.

There are three basic reasons to start political philosophy from nonideal theory—from a diagnosis of injustices in our actual world, rather than from a picture of an ideal world. First, we need to tailor our principles to the motivational and cognitive capacities of human beings. Rousseau famously sought legitimate principles of government, taking people “as they are and laws as they might be.”¹³ Rousseau’s starting point, people as they are, is apt. A system of principles that would produce a just world if they regulated the conduct of perfectly rational and just persons will not do so when we ask human beings, with all our limitations and flaws, to follow them. Just institutions must be designed to block, work around, or cancel out our motivational and cognitive deficiencies, to harness our nonmoral motives to moral ends, to make up for each other’s limitations by pooling our knowledge and wills. To craft such designs, we must analyze our motivational and cognitive biases, diagnose how they lead people to mistreat others, and how institutions may redirect them to better conduct.

Second, we risk leaping to the conclusion that any gaps we see between our ideal and reality must be the cause of the problems in our actual world, and that the solution must therefore be to adopt policies aimed at directly closing the gaps. Thus if (as some conservatives suppose) the ideal society would be a color-blind one in which everyone adhered to principles of individual responsibility, a work ethic, and traditional family values, the solution would appear to be to end race-conscious policies, preach the right values to individuals, and back them up with punitive measures against those who fail to measure up. Or if (as some on the multiculturalist left suppose) the ideal society would be a system of separate and distinct identity-based communities, each enjoying equal esteem and material resources, the solution would appear to be abundant diversity activities preaching tolerance and celebrating diverse cultures, along with distributions of goods proportional to identity group populations. Such recommendations are like a doctor who prescribes sleeping pills and aspirin to the patient who complains of fatigue, insomnia, and headaches. Without a detailed empirical investigation of the underlying causes of the complaints, we risk missing out on more fundamental and complex diagnoses—for example, that the patient suffers from depression, or a brain tumor—and hence risk missing out on genuine solutions. I believe we have made this mistake for our problems of group inequality. In

4.3 and

8.2–8.5 I explain why the conservative recommendations are misguided, and in

9.2, why the left multiculturalist recommendations are misguided.

My claim is not simply that those on the left and right adopt insufficient means to ends that remain untouched by empirical inquiry into the causes of our problems. Rather, in the course of investigating these causes, we will find that we need to draw distinctions—for instance, among racial stereotyping, racism, and racial injustice (

3.1), among different racial concepts (

8.2), and among different types of discrimination “on the basis of race” (

3.5,

8.3)—occluded by ideal theories that are founded on inadequate empirical assumptions. And once we draw these distinctions as needed to make sense of our problems, we must reconsider whether the evaluations we adopted toward phenomena falling under the incoherently lumpy concepts (e.g., “racism” and “racial discrimination”) make any sense as applied to the newly distinguished phenomena. In other cases, empirical inquiry may show us that certain distinctions—for instance, among civil, political, and social rights—that were thought to designate phenomena meriting distinct evaluations make little sense because empirically, these rights stand or fall together in a republic (

5.1). This recognition in turn forces us to enrich our understanding of the constitutive commitments of republicanism, and thereby to transform that ideal. When we alter our conceptual maps to gain a more empirically adequate understanding of our problems, we also open some and close other evaluative options. New conceptual terrain provides new perspectives from which to engage in evaluation and thereby prompts us to articulate new ideals.

Third, starting from ideal theory may prevent us from recognizing injustices in our nonideal world. Consider how ideal social contract theory works. Social contract theory assumes that the operative principles of society must be justifiable to all its members. A society counts as ideally just so long as the occupants of every representative social position in that society would approve of the way it operates, and prefer it to the alternatives. For example, in the ideally just world governed by Rawls’s principles of justice, some class inequality will exist.¹⁴ Hence, the principles of justice must be justified to members of each class position.

This orientation raises methodological difficulties when the contractualist ideal is used as a standard of assessment for nonideal societies. For when we assess whether a society is deviating from ideal justice, we still assess it from the standpoint of representative positions in the ideally just society. Since no racial positions exist in the ideal society, they do not define a standpoint from which to assess racially unjust societies. Hence, ideal theories that make race invisible fail to supply the conceptual framework needed to recognize and understand contemporary racial injustice. The principled color blindness of ideal theory is epistemologically disabling: it makes us blind to the existence of race-based injustice.¹⁵

Consider the dilemma of middle-class blacks choosing where to buy a house. Most blacks prefer to live in racially integrated neighborhoods. Most whites prefer to live in neighborhoods that contain no more than token numbers of blacks.¹⁶ Many resist the entry of blacks into their neighborhoods through unwelcoming and hostile behavior. Most of this behavior is legal and would, due to rights of free speech and association, be legal even in an ideal society. Such behavior constitutes a serious dignitary harm to blacks and deters them from seeking housing in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods. The resulting racial segregation of neighborhoods also has adverse material consequences. For example, it isolates blacks from the white-dominated referral networks that govern access to better jobs. Even if egalitarian policies compressed the variation between the most and least advantaged positions, African Americans would still have a just complaint that their segregation deprives them of equal access to better jobs.

Viewing this phenomenon through the color-blind lens of ideal theory, we would assess it not from a racial position, but from an individual or class position. We can recognize an assault on an individual’s dignity in the fact that she faces arbitrarily hostile treatment at the hands of others. But this individualistic perspective does not capture all of the expressive harms in the case. To be treated in a hostile way on account of one’s race injures not only the individual directly targeted, but everyone in her racial group. It brands her and her group with a racial stigma. These expressive injuries are visible from the position of a racially stigmatized group, but invisible from the position of a putatively raceless individual.

The material disadvantages imposed on the African American who, deterred by the prospect of a hostile reception in a white neighborhood, chooses to settle in a poorer black neighborhood are also hard to see from the perspective of a raceless class position. Her class position did not disadvantage her: she was financially able to buy a house in the white neighborhood. She chose not do so because of the costs it entailed for her as an African American. From the perspective of a raceless representative position, this is no violation of equality of opportunity, but a voluntary choice not to take advantage of an opportunity. The dignitary harms to her racial identity that she would suffer for taking up the opportunity are not represented.

To capture such ...