How Collusion Perpetuates Racial Discrimination in Societies that Ostensibly Promote Equal Opportunity

The author is indebted to Ward E. Jones for extensive criticism of earlier drafts of this paper and for his workshop ‘Race and Racism’ at Rhodes University which inspired it. For critical remarks and important suggestions in response to earlier attempts at addressing this subject, deep thanks are due to Guglielmo Feis, George Hull, S.H. Kumalo, Roberta De Monticelli, Francesca De Vecchi, Roberto Mordacci, Margaret Gilbert, Lorenzo Passerini Glazel, John Horton, Andrei Simionescu-Panait, Silvia Tossut, Leo Townsend, Stephen P. Turner, Timothy Williamson, and Jonathan Wolff.

Abstract

It is shown here that injustices due to racial discrimination are best identified in light of the deleterious effects they have upon their victims, rather than the beliefs and attitudes of their perpetrators. For among participants who cooperate clandestinely to bring about racial injustice there may be broad disagreement about what it is they are doing collectively, and why; or they may disagree in principle about whether what they are doing is morally right. I employ the notion of ‘nomotropic’ behaviour to replace the oversimplified notion of ‘rule-following’ in order to explain how duplicity and hypocrisy fall shy of being regarded as irrational in social climates where implicit norms reinforce racial privileging while explicit norms denounce it. Further, examining the ‘collective utility’ of dogmatic beliefs and norms comprising part of the social architecture that covertly reinforces racial injustice (while ostensibly deriding it) may help to explain why it often seems to make so little difference whether members of an unfairly advantaged elite, whose collaborative behaviour perpetuates a social injustice, individually approve of doing so or not.

Notes

The author is indebted to Ward E. Jones for extensive criticism of earlier drafts of this paper and for his workshop ‘Race and Racism’ at Rhodes University which inspired it. For critical remarks and important suggestions in response to earlier attempts at addressing this subject, deep thanks are due to Guglielmo Feis, George Hull, S.H. Kumalo, Roberta De Monticelli, Francesca De Vecchi, Roberto Mordacci, Margaret Gilbert, Lorenzo Passerini Glazel, John Horton, Andrei Simionescu-Panait, Silvia Tossut, Leo Townsend, Stephen P. Turner, Timothy Williamson, and Jonathan Wolff.