The Racialized Self: Empowerment, Self-Respect, and Personal Autonomy

368 Pages·2006·1.29 MB·English

THE RACIALIZED SELF: EMPOWERMENT, SELF-RESPECT,
AND PERSONAL AUTONOMY

Brian Thomas

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Philosophy.

Chapel Hill
2006

Approved By:
Bernard Boxill
Jeanette Boxill
Thomas E. Hill, Jr.
Rebecca Walker
Susan E. Babbitt
Abstract

BRIAN THOMAS: The Racialized Self: Empowerment, Self-Respect,
and Personal Autonomy
(Under the direction of Bernard and Jeanette Boxill)

Much of the popular literature sees the inequality of African-Americans as a problem
of differential legal standing that is solved through introducing complete legal formal
equality with laws that are administered impartially and neutrally. Any further difficulties in
the distribution of benefits and burdens are seen mainly as the problem of the group itself, as
failures at being self-determining. But recently, social scientists have become increasingly
wary of the claim that the blacks are simply failing at becoming self-determining, as even a
cursory glance at the major indices of welfare reveal that the barriers to equality for blacks
are systemic.
The current view is that the best way to determine policies is to eliminate, or at least
to seriously mitigate, the effects of race and racial identity on policies that distribute the
benefits and burdens of society. The skepticism about race and racial identity is driven by the
concern that racial identity is troublesome from the moral point of view because it is thought
that racial identities, especially the racial identities of blacks, are predicated on self-defeating
conceptions of race and racial identity. I argue that these views are predicated on a shallow
and faulty understanding of racial identity and that with a more nuanced understanding of
racial identity we can avoid these problems and we can understand how policies that promote
racial identity might empower blacks.
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Acknowledgements

There are too many people to thank for the completion of this project, so I will
highlight but a few. The persons I thank have helped me to cultivate the appropriate attitudes
towards scholarship, service, and learning: Laurie Jean Goldsmith, Cheryl Thomas, and
Bernard Boxill.

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Table of Contents

Chapter
I. THE NATURE OF RACIAL INEQUALITY .........................................................1
The Function of Race...............................................................................................7
A Formal Account Of Oppression .........................................................................19
The Mechanisms of Oppression.............................................................................29
Liberalism and Racial Inequality ...........................................................................43
Turning the Corner.................................................................................................55
II. THE NATURE OF EMPOWERMENT ................................................................57
Review of Empirical Literature .............................................................................59
A Brief Recap ........................................................................................................86
The Nature of Power..............................................................................................93
Wartenberg’s Theory of Social Power and My Account of Empowerment ........106
A Political Conception of Empowerment ............................................................112
III. RACE AND RACIAL IDENTITY......................................................................122
The Existence of Races........................................................................................123
Race As a Social Construct..................................................................................140
Racial Identity and Essentialism..........................................................................159
The Nature of Racial Identity ..............................................................................173
IV. A RACIALIZED DIMENSION OF SELF-RESPECT .......................................189
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Internalized Racism .191
Mainstream Accounts of Self-Respect.................................................................204
Cases Showing Problems with Mainstream Accounts of Self-Respect...............212
The Nature of the Racialized Dimension of Self-Respect ...................................224
V. GROUP AUTONOMY AND PERSONAL AUTONOMY................................237
Personal Autonomy.241
How Does Oppression Undermine Autonomy? A First Pass ..................241
An Account of Personal Autonomy.........................................................248
Objections to Christman’s Account .........................................................251
Autonomy and Oppressive Socialization.............................................................258
Feminine Socialization.258
Race and Socialization.............................................................................261
Group Autonomy: Some Conceptual Considerations..........................................264
An Account of Group Autonomy ........................................................................270
A Basic Account ......................................................................................270
Some Objections To Thomas’s View ......................................................274
Clarifying the Nature of Group Autonomy..........................................................279
Moving Away From Identity ...................................................................282
Some Objections to the Account of Group Autonomy I Offer................286
Implications For Personal Autonomy ..................................................................290
VI. THE IDEAL SOCIETY, RACIAL IDENTITY,
AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE........................................................................293
Colorblindness: Some Initial Remarks ................................................................297
Wasserstrom and the Assimilationist Ideal..........................................................302
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Clarifying the Specific Nature of the Ideals ............................................304
For Race: The Assimilationist Ideal ............................................304
For Sex: The Assimilationist Ideal ..............................................304
The Pluralistic Ideal .308
The Relevance and Force of Arguments from Nature and Naturally
Occurring Differences Regarding Sex for the Pluralistic Ideal ...............311
The Relevance and Force of Arguments from Nature and Naturally
Occurring Differences Regarding Race for the Pluralistic Ideal .............318
Moral Considerations for the Justification of Ideals............................................325
Colorblindness as a Means to the Ideal Society...................................................336
Recognition and Distributive Justice ...................................................................339
Recognition.340
Equality .343
Group Autonomy and Empowerment Revisited..................................................347
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................354

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CHAPTER 1
THE NATURE OF RACIAL INEQUALITY

If the measuring stick of a country’s commitment in word and deed to its principles of
equality, fraternity, and freedom lie in the welfare of the worse off then the continuing
disparities in the major outcomes lead to the suspicion that the “American Dream” is
something to which only certain groups can reasonably hope to obtain. Indeed, when we look
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to the history of African-Americans in the U.S. we have great cause to doubt that the
country has ever been seriously committed to universally applying the principles of equality,
fraternity, and freedom.
The great lesson that we learn from the experiences of African-Americans is that
since the inception of U.S. culture, race and sex have been and are extremely important
characteristics of and for all the people living in the culture because they closely correlate, if
not cause, the distributive shares of such persons. This is surprisingly true even in an age of
unprecedented economic growth. While the growth itself has been quite profound, we still
see that the advances in society continue to be unequally distributed to blacks. The
distributions present considerable challenges to those trying to explain their causes, the
factors that reinforce them, and the policies that should correct them.

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Throughout this dissertation I plan to use the terms “black” and “African-American” interchangeably for a
variety of reasons. One reason is that neither term is used exclusively for self-identification by the persons the
terms are meant to pick out. Another reason is that they seem to mean different things, at least they do so in
virtue of the different ways the terms are used. Though I will not articulate and explicate what I think these
meanings are, there will be times when one term seems more appropriate than another, suggesting a more
technical usage of one term over the other. Something like this is already the case given the institutional
contexts in which these terms appear (e.g. in various legal forms and the like).
The current popular thinking among conservatives and liberals is that the series of
laws and policies put in place during the civil rights era cleared the path to racial equality by
dismantling the legal and institutional barriers to full equality. Subsequently, the only
remaining barriers to full equality experienced by African-Americans are the result of
individual racist attitudes, or quite simply, the failures of African-Americans to become
sufficiently self-reliant. But the current popular view has come under fire. When we look at
the recent work by Social scientists, we see that the welfare of African-Americans per the
major outcomes: mortality, education, income, and wealth, is quite bleak. Reflecting on such
outcomes, and in a particularly somber tone, Derrick Bell predicts the unequal distributions
that blacks experience will continue:
We must see this country’s history of slavery, not as an
insuperable racial barrier to blacks, but as a legacy of
enlightenment from our enslaved forebears reminding us that
if they survived the ultimate form of racism, we and those
whites who stand with us can at least view racial oppression
in its many contemporary forms without underestimating
its critical importance and likely permanent status in this country.
To initiate the reconsideration, I want to set forth this
proposition, which will be easier to reject than refute:
Black people will never gain full equality in this country.
Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce
no more than the temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived
victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt
in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept
fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not
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as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.
(emphasis his)
While Bell’s comments reflect a flair for the theatrical, the prospect of lingering racial
inequality invites us to ask several general questions: What is the most plausible theory that
explains racial inequality? If civil rights legislation has not made African-Americans equal to
other groups what is the best explanation for this? Is racial inequality a permanent fixture of

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Derrick Bell, Face at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992.
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U.S. culture and institutions? If there is racial inequality is it reinforced by sexual
inequality? If we cannot end racial inequality, should we be concerned to redress the effects
of permanent racial inequality or should we be concerned to alleviate the effects of
permanent racial inequality? How should we determine the best policies to end racial
inequality within a liberal democracy?
Consider the question concerning the supposed permanence of racial inequality.
Derrick Bell claims that it is easier to reject thinking that racial inequality is a permanent
fixture of contemporary U.S. society, than to show that such a claim is false. We cannot
simply ignore Bell’s claim by treating it as if it were obviously false because he is not alone
in thinking that racial inequality is a permanent fixture of our landscape. For instance,
Jennifer Hochschild claims that racism is “part of what shapes and energizes the [liberal
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democratic] body.” But, to better understand Bell’s and Hochschild’s charges we will have
to consider whether principles of liberal democracy are implicated in their content or in their
recommendations concerning racial inequality.
The truth of the claim that racial inequality is a permanent fixture of U.S. society is an
empirical claim. If racial inequality is a permanent feature of U.S. society, then our inquiry
changes: instead of considering policies that might end racial inequality, we would have to
consider policies that would best mitigate the effects of racial inequality.
Though we cannot simply dismiss the claim that racial inequality is a permanent
feature of U.S. society, we need not assume its truth either. But perhaps, for our purposes we

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Jennifer Hockschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Hockschild offers several formulations of this view, the most plausible is
the Marxist reading according to which a liberal society relies on a capitalist system to create and to distribute
wealth (to coordinate cooperative behavior among transactions) and capitalism is essentially tied to the
exploitation of workers. In the case of the antebellum south, the country prospered while exploiting African
Slaves. I will not consider the merits of this view or of any of the other formulations of the claim since they do
not look plausible to me, and the ones that do, particularly the Marxist critique, require substantive discussion,
discussion that will take me far from my project.
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need not consider very seriously whether racial inequality is permanent and consider the
rather different claim that racial inequality is entrenched. To claim that racial inequality is
permanent is not to claim that it is entrenched. Perhaps the only way in which we can
understand the claim that racial inequality is permanent is to consider the features that in fact
entrench it. Thus perhaps the entrenchment of racial inequality is causally necessary for the
permanence of racial inequality, but it is not sufficient. I think this is the more plausible
avenue of inquiry as we attempt to better understand what it means when we claim that there
is a specific form of inequality that is racial in its essence.
Next, consider the last question about how we should determine the best policies to
end racial inequality. There have been a growing number of theorists who have taken this
last question seriously and some have claimed that in order to eliminate antiblack oppression,
for instance, that we have to transcend racial identities, including black identity. To be more
specific, some theorists claim that if we are to alleviate racial inequality that we must
eliminate, or at least seriously mitigate the effects of race and racial identity on policies that
distribute the benefits and burdens of society. The reasons for such a view are twofold. On
the one hand, there are theorists who claim that racial identity fails as a means to an end, that
is, that it only exacerbates the problem of racial inequality, rather than aiding in its
dissolution. Here the main concern is that race and racial identity perpetuate the negative
meanings associated with race or that these notions are neither helpful in understanding
collective agency in the face of oppression nor efficacious in actually instantiating collective
action. On the other hand, there are theorists who claim that we have reasons for rejecting
racial identity and these reasons derive from moral principles. The main claims here involve
rejecting racial identity because we think it would not be a feature of the ideal society or
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