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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: May the Use of Violent Civil Disobedience Be Justified as a Response to Institutional Racism?

This essay was the joint runner up in the graduate category of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.

Written by University of Oxford student Oshy Ray 

The summer of 2020 saw people across the world participating in racial justice protests, demanding the end of state violence against Black people, and calling for the eradication of institutional racism. While these protests were largely peaceful, the use of violence by some protestors was criticised. I argue that some forms of violent civil disobedience—henceforth, VCD— may be justified as responses to institutionalised racism. By “justified,” I mean that something can be made morally permissible—that its outcomes are good enough to warrant the “badness” of its means.

First, I argue that some forms of VCD may be justified as a response to institutional racism. Then, I consider the objection that instrumentally, violence is too uncontrollable to guarantee that desired ends (such as successful social change) may be brought about. In response, I distinguish between violence against persons and violence against objects. Acknowledging that violence against persons may rarely be justified, I claim that violence against objects is more easily justifiable. Finally, I conclude that VCD against objects may be justified as a response to institutional racism. I do not argue that violence can always be a justified response to institutional racism. Rather, my claim is more moderate; I claim that certain forms of VCD may be justified as a response to institutional racism.[1]Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: May the Use of Violent Civil Disobedience Be Justified as a Response to Institutional Racism?

PRESS RELEASE: Racial Justice Requires Ending Drug War, Say Leading Bioethicists

PRESS RELEASE: Free all non-violent criminals jailed on minor drug offences, say experts Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics. More than 60 international experts including world-leading bioethicists, psychologists and drug experts have… Read More »PRESS RELEASE: Racial Justice Requires Ending Drug War, Say Leading Bioethicists

A Second Response to Professor Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures.

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Written by Richard Ngo , an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures start from the admirable position of integrating psychological results and philosophical arguments, with the goal of answering two questions:

(1) are we (those of us with egalitarian explicit beliefs but conflicting implicit attitudes) racist?

(2) when those implicit attitudes cause actions which seem appropriately to be characterised as racist (sexist, homophobic…), are we morally responsible for these actions?Read More »A Second Response to Professor Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures.

Why it matters if people are racist: A Response to Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures

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Author: Fergus Peace, BPhil student, University of Oxford

Podcasts of Prof. Levy’s Leverhulme lectures are available here:

http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY1.mp3

and http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY2.mp3

It’s only a little more than forty years ago that George Wallace won the contest for Governor of Alabama by running ads with slogans like “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama” and “Do you want the black bloc electing your governor?” That year, 1970, 50% of people surveyed in the American South said they would never – under any circumstances – vote for a black President. By 2012, that number was down by 8%, and it’s hard to deny that open, avowed racism has been in steep decline for most of the last forty years. But even as people’s overt commitment to racism declines, experiments still show that black candidates are less likely to be given job interviews than equally qualified white candidates; African-Americans are still disproportionately likely to be imprisoned, or shot by police.

So what’s going on? That is the motivating puzzle of Professor Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures, and his answer centres on an increasingly well-known but still very disturbing psychological phenomenon: implicit bias. There are a range of tests which have uncovered evidence of implicit negative attitudes held – by a majority of white Americans, but a sizeable number of black Americans too – against black people. Harvard University’s ‘Project Implicit’ has a series of Implicit Association Tests (IATs); Keith Payne, among others, has developed tests of what he calls the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP). IATs ask us to sort faces and words according to their race and ‘valence’, and we find that task much easier when we have to associate black faces with negative words than we do otherwise. Tests of the AMP ask subjects to rate the pleasantness of an image which is entirely meaningless to them – a Chinese character, for people who don’t speak Chinese – and find that they rate it less pleasant if they’re shown an image of a black face immediately beforehand.

There’s no doubt these results are unsettling. (If you want to do an IAT online, as you should, you have to agree to receiving results you might disagree or be uncomfortable with before you proceed.) And they’re not just subconscious attitudes which are uncomfortable but insignificant; implicit bias as measured by these various tests is correlated with being less likely to vote for Barack Obama, and more likely to blame the black community for violence in protests against police brutality. Tests in virtual shooting ranges also reveal that it correlates with being more likely to shoot unarmed black men when given the task of shooting only those carrying weapons. Implicit biases certainly seem to cause, at least partly, racist actions and patterns of behaviour, like being quicker to shoot at unarmed black people and less likely to invite them for job interviews.

Professor Levy’s lectures grappled with two questions about these attitudes: first, do they make you a racist; and second, are you morally responsible for actions caused by your implicit biases? If you, like me, abhor racism and make that abhorrence at least some part of your political and social identity, but nonetheless come away with a “moderate automatic preference for European … compared to African” on the race IAT, then are you – protestations to the contrary – a racist? His answer to this question in the first lecture, based on the current state of conceptual investigation of what racism is and empirical evidence about the character of implicit biases, was a qualified no: they don’t clearly count as beliefs, or even as feelings, in a way that could let us confidently call people racist just because they possess them.

The second question is similarly complex. When interviewers prefer white applicants over equally qualified black ones, due to their implicit attitudes, are they responsible for the racist character of that action? Levy focused largely on the ‘control theory’ of moral responsibility, which says that you’re responsible for an action only if you exercise sufficient control over it. Levy’s answer to this question is a pretty clear no: implicit attitudes don’t have the right sort of attributes (in particular, reliable responsiveness to reasons and evidence) to count as giving you control over the actions they cause.

I find it very hard to disagree with the core of Professor Levy’s arguments on his two questions. The points I want to make in response come from a different direction, because after listening to the two lectures I’m not convinced that these are the important questions to be asking about implicit bias.

Read More »Why it matters if people are racist: A Response to Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures

In Defence of Avril Lavigne: Racism, Cultural Appropriation and the Meaning of ‘Hello Kitty’

By Kei Hiruta

The latest music video by the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne has been accused of racism and cultural appropriation.[i] Bearing the name of the world-famous Sanrio character, ‘Hello Kitty’ shows the pop star singing and dancing in what appears to be a girl’s room in Tokyo. She also explores the city, shopping at a candy store, eating sushi, drinking shochu, and waving at her fans as she strolls in the fashionable Shibuya area. Throughout, she is accompanied by four young Japanese women, acting as backup dancers inside the room and following her outside.Read More »In Defence of Avril Lavigne: Racism, Cultural Appropriation and the Meaning of ‘Hello Kitty’

Compromising with Racism

Over at Slate, Tanner Colby has a critique of liberal US school busing policies that’s well worth reading.  Some historical context: in the wake of Brown v. Board’s 1954 mandate to integrate school districts, a pattern of ‘white flight’ emerged – white parents moving from city centers to the suburbs to avoid having to send their children to racially integrated schools.  School busing was a court-enforced reaction to this movement, designed to force the children of those who had fled to the suburbs to integrate by busing students in the whiter suburbs to more minority-dominated schools and vice-versa.  Busing has more recently been rolled back by various courts and local governments, much to the chagrin of liberals – but Colby argues the policy was actually a massive failure to begin with.  He makes some important points concerning a central goal of integration (to get students of different races to truly socialize and interact, not merely sit in the same classrooms and cafeterias) that busing did not achieve, and towards the end offers a glimpse of an alternative Colby thinks is superior.  This alternative essentially involves compromising with racism by having blacks be bused to predominantly white schools, but (acceding to the racially-motivated demands of white parents) not vice-versa.  Yet despite the allegedly good consequences of the compromise, there are inherent problems with it.  These problems, I submit, give us strong reason to reject compromising with racism in this instance.Read More »Compromising with Racism

Sexy Indian Costumes on Sale!

Picture taken from California Costume Collection, Inc.

 

I’ve been to Cologne recently, one of Germany’s main Carnival cities. In the window of a shop I passed, I saw some residues of the just ended Carnival season for sale – amongst other things, a Native American costume. Like many others of the sort, it consisted of a brown faux suede suit, a colourful feather hair decoration, and a little fake axe. And – not to my surprise – it showed far more skin that it concealed. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture. However, “Indian” Carnival and Halloween costumes like that can be found all over the internet, may it be in the (sadly unavoidable) “sexy” women’s version like the one I saw, or in the male “warrior / chief” version.

Read More »Sexy Indian Costumes on Sale!

Ad usum Delphini: should we Bowdlerize children’s books?

The Ture Sventon books are a series of Swedish children’s detective stories written by Åke Holmberg 1948-1973. They are locally well-known and appreciated, but henceforth Ture Sventon i Paris (1953) will likely not be republished. The reason is that the publisher Rabén & Sjögren wanted to remove the word “neger” in the book, and the Swedish Writers’ Union (who owns the copyright to the books) refused this change, since it would change the character of the book. They acknowledged that it was a word with a racist resonance but also a part of cultural history, and hence it could not be removed or replaced with “colored” or “black”. They suggested adding an explanatory introduction instead. The publisher choose not to reissue the book.

In English-speaking countries another recent controversy is about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces use of the word “nigger” with “slave” and “injun” to “Indian”. Again, literature experts complains that this fundamentally changes the novel (which after all is an anti-racist book) and might have deeply upset the author, yet others think that this will allow it to be read more in schools or public. Are we seeing examples of well-intentioned acts of “cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind”, or just attempts to reduce impediments for the public to read the works?

Read More »Ad usum Delphini: should we Bowdlerize children’s books?