Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions

This is a most engaging, informed, and honest work. The third characterization perhaps reflects the subtitle of the book. Boonin is not concerned to be politically correct. Nor does he have a conservative agenda. There is no predicting where Boonin is going to stand. The second characterization of the book reflects the fact that he is quite informed about how the treatment of blacks has unfolded in the United States. From start to finish, Boonin has written a most rewarding book to read.On page 8, Boonin writes, “As far as we can tell, the first black people to settle in the English colonies that were later to become the United States...came neither as free nor slaves. Like many of the white people who lived in the New World at the time, the first black Americans came as servants.” The substance of Boonin's point is consistent with several works in which it is maintained that very early on in the English colonies there were whites who were slaves to whites (see, for example, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America [New York: New York University Press, 2007]); Richard Hildreth, The White Slave: Another Picture of Slave Life in America [George Routledge, 1852]).Boonin's remarks about the first black people in the English colonies should not surprise us all that much since we know that slavery did not begin with the United States. Moreover, slavery has been practiced by both whites and nonwhites alike throughout the history of humanity. It will be remembered that Aristotle thought it natural that there should be slaves (though he hardly thought that the slaves should be black). Then there is the remark by the Apostle Paul: “Servants be obedient to them that are your masters” (Ephesians 6:5); and the Qu'ran maintains that it is better to be a slave who believes than a free person who does not believe (see, for example, Surah 221). With neither religious tradition was the respective passage originally understood to mean that the slave owner is white and the slave is black.Boonin could have started with the assertion that the first blacks came to the United States as slaves, and few readers, if any, would have questioned the veracity of that claim. Instead, Boonin mightily brings out that however innocuous things might have begun, in terms of race differentials, with respect to blacks coming to the United States, it is incontrovertible that things unfolded for blacks in a most horrific way.Now, there is no better indication that Boonin is not animated by political correctness than the position that he takes on a most controversial topic, namely, racial profiling. Noting that most Americans are against racial profiling, Boonin rejects the view that, in principle, racial profiling is unacceptable. His official position is none other than that sometimes racial profiling is morally acceptable, and sometimes it is not.Boonin grasps all too well that it can turn out that legal officials may not be competent to engage in racial profiling. People who have a distorted or terribly uninformed view of a racial group are simply not competent to engage in racial profiling with respect to that group. So the question is whether the individuals who would be doing the profiling are or are not members of the racial group being profiled. However, Boonin correctly holds that it is not a conceptual truth that either form of incompetency must be present.The wrong of racial profiling is owing to what we may refer to as racial/ethnicity fixation, if you will, where the fixation alone precludes being sensitive to a number of quite relevant factors other than the person's race or ethnicity. For the record, it is arguable that just about every group has engaged in some measure of wrongful racial profiling. Indeed, there can be wrongful racial profiling by members of the same racial/ethnic group. A case in point would be that of blacks supposing that another black is an Uncle Tom merely because that person is married to a white person or has mostly white friends. In general, neither blacks nor whites are free of warped views about other ethnic groups. In particular, having been the object of systematic wrongdoing owing to race or ethnicity does not thereby render a people free of racial/ethnicity fixation. These observations nicely lend credence to Boonin's position. The elimination of racial/ethnicity fixation on the part of all the members of society, whether individuals are law enforcement officers or not, is a good thing precisely because the fixation mind-set invariably undermines social trust in society. Instead, we want the members of society, in general, and law enforcement officials, in particular, to have the requisite sensitivity. That state of affairs marvelously underwrites trust across the board and, in particular, between all citizens and law enforcement officers.Regarding the topic of hate crimes, to which two chapters are devoted, Boonin holds that a hate crime is worse than the same crime that is merely committed by someone whose commission of that crime is not motivated by racial animus. But consider the case of a group of black women in Arkansas who had a black man lynched for not acting toward them in the proper manner—presumably not showing them the respect that he would have shown a white woman (see Joël Michel, Le Lynchage aux États Unis [Paris: Le Table Ronde, 2008]). Arguably, we have on the part of these women a betrayal whose moral callousness far exceeded the callousness of whites who engaged in lynchings. An analogous point holds for people of Jewish descent who served in Hitler's army (see Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004]). Of course, the number of black lynchings by blacks and the number of people of Jewish descent who were part of Hitler's army were comparatively quite small. By contrast, black-on-black crime—murder, in particular, of late—accounts for at least 90 percent of the murders committed against blacks. Thus, the following quite searching question presents itself, given Boonin's argument. For any racial/ethnic group Gamma: Should a just society be more concerned with the (serious) crimes that non-Gamma individuals commit against Gamma persons than with the (serious) crimes that Gamma persons commit against one another? Is there something woefully incongruous, if not disingenuous, about the members of society getting all publicly worked up over hate crimes committed by whites all the while remaining comparatively silent about black-on-black crimes?Although Boonin accepts that there are hate crimes, he very convincingly and most illuminatingly argues against the idea of hate speech regulations, fully bearing in mind that rules against hate speech are commonplace on college campuses. Of course, the line between hate speech and a threat is not always clear. But lack of clarity is true of lots of ever so valuable distinctions, such as that between friendship and romantic love.I turn now to Boonin's discussion of affirmative action. He writes, “The positive consequences aren't enough to make affirmative action obligatory and the negative consequences are not enough to make it unjust” (198). Boonin interestingly discusses affirmative action (in general) and affirmative action practiced by universities with respect to blacks. However, he overlooks a significant difference between the two, namely, the stigma of intellectual inferiority. Typically, there is no visceral stigma of intellectual inferiority attached to being from a given geographical area; moreover, being from a given geographical area is not demonstrably announced by a person's physical features, and a person can hide or simply never develop the accent associated with that geographical area. By contrast, it is precisely the stigma of intellectual inferiority that is attached to blacks; furthermore, most blacks are readily recognizable as black. For these reasons, it is arguable that far from eviscerating the stigma of black intellectual inferiority, affirmative action has often lent credence to it, however unwittingly. What is more, unlike with geographical locations, significant self-deception can readily be a factor with race in a way that Boonin simply does not consider.On the one hand, there can be black students who too easily allow themselves to believe that criticisms of their work from a white professor are racially motivated. This could result in white professors who are deeply committed to racial equality nonetheless refraining from providing the constructive criticism that, by hypothesis, black students admitted by way of affirmative action typically need. On the other hand, there can be white professors who pay tremendous lip service to everyone being intellectually equal but who are quite viscerally animated by a lower set of intellectual expectations with respect to blacks. This latter observation is far from trivial given that, in terms of intellectual profundity, what we “hear” a person saying or asking is often inextricably tied to our antecedent intellectual “assessment” of that person. Merely being asked the question “Why?” by someone whom we regard as bereft often “reveals” to us how intellectually bereft the person is, whereas that same “Why?” from someone whom we regard as intellectually gifted is often a reason to rethink why or how we said what we said.Boonin's discussion of affirmative action is somewhat disappointing precisely because his preceding discussion of whether blacks are owed reparations is absolutely brilliant in its subtlety. Rightly noting that whether or not blacks are owed reparations is quite different from the question of what the reparations should be, Boonin ever so poignantly observes that surely an apology by the US government for its role in slavery and the mistreatment of blacks after slavery would be ever so appropriate. Slavery, like rape, may not be something for which there can actually be compensation. Yet, genuine contrition for, or acknowledgment of, the wrong committed can be a bridge like none other that leads to a path of mutual trust and respect. This is philosophical insight, on Boonin's part, that majestically touches base with reality

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