Why do reparations arguments fail? 

This post is based on material that was presented at a colloquium session on Reparations at the 2022 APA Central. Frigault’s talk was entitled “White Privilege and Extrinsic Reparation.”

Looking back some years now, this question manages to capture a key part of what first sparked my philosophical interest in the issue of Black reparations in the United States. 

The question is vexing on a number of levels, but primarily because, in my own case at least, it calls forth two quite distinct kinds of responses. On the one hand, the moral theorist in me insists that the question rests on a false presupposition: They don’t fail! The moral and political case for reparations is clear and persuasive. Black people in America have suffered innumerable group-based injustices, none of which have ever been adequately addressed, and whose lingering effects continue to be felt by many in the present. On the other hand is common sense, reminding that: As a matter of social reality, racial reparations remains among the most despised and volatile political ideas of the current moment. So, unless argumentative success is artificially confined to the level of moral theory, it seems altogether reasonable to conclude that, on the whole, reparations arguments have failed in an important sense. Failed, that is, to win the hearts and minds—or at least the concession—of those toward whom they have repeatedly been directed down the decades (indeed centuries) in this country. 

Let us linger on this second reading of the question then, and ask why, for all their normative power, reparations arguments have so often failed in this respect. Here my experience has been that, before we can so much as begin to investigate the matter, many moral theorists (at least among those who, like me, recognize the overwhelming force of reparations arguments) will insist that it leads us beyond the purview of “philosophy proper.” The trouble, it is claimed, lies not with the arguments, but with the interlocutors: speaking broadly, opponents of racial reparations are either ignorant of the relevant historical details, caught in the grip of some ideological delusion, or just plain racist. Either way, working to diagnose and uproot those kinds of obstacles (never mind to shift the material conditions that often serve to hold the relevant attitudes in place) is simply above the philosopher’s paygrade. That kind of thing is best left to educators, activists, politicians, public relations people, and the like. 

While there is obviously some truth in each of those proffered explanations, it has long been my sense that this attempt to exclude their study and resolution from the domain of philosophy is unsatisfying. Not simply from the point of view of justice, but also because it seems to me to let the discipline off the hook rather too quickly. What if philosophers took it to be part of their business to develop new kinds of auxiliary arguments designed specifically to help move people beyond certain conspicuous forms of socio-argumentative resistance, and into a cognitive position from which the normative force of reparations arguments (or whatever) stands a better chance of registering? I explored this kind of move in my doctoral work, with a specific focus on American whites, whose demographic opposition to racial reparations and other forms of race-conscious policy is well-known, and whose difficulty engaging in various kinds of discourse around race, racism, and racial injustice is well documented in the empirical social sciences.

For example, it’s been shown that whites exhibit a range of aversive psychological responses in relation to such topics, including: competitive victimhood, stigma reversal, and various forms of moral- and social-identity threat. Competitive victimhood behavior occurs when socially dominant groups confronted with facts about disadvantaged outgroups respond by foregrounding ways in which they too have suffered, in an attempt to balance the moral scales. Stigma reversal names a set of resentful responses to the perception that formerly oppressed groups are viewed as morally superior to their former oppressors, who are now relegated to subordinate moral status. Lastly, moral– and social–identity threat capture a range of aversive experiences in response to the idea that racial whiteness has come to be associated with negative traits or behaviors, such as past or present wrongdoing or harmdoing.

It’s not hard to appreciate how the triggering of one or more of these responses can drastically impede some whites’ sensitivity to the force of reparations arguments, and slow political progress around the issue. One of the central aims of my research in this area is to try and find ways to mitigate this kind of socio-argumentative failure through the tactical deployment of auxiliary arguments, which begin from psychologically “safer” (if more idealized) premises, and appeal to more familiar kinds of norms and values. 

Specifically, I focus on arguments rooted in the widely held norm of fairness, or fair play, and which make use of a normatively softened conception of free-riding to ground a class of blameless corrective obligations on the part of white people to respond to certain kinds of minimally-threatening structural advantages which I capture under the notion of white privilege. By design, the conclusions generated by these auxiliary arguments are relatively modest. They are also relatively hard to avoid if one accepts the elementary principle that, in many cases, there is something normatively inappropriate about benefiting in excess of one’s due, or beyond one’s entitlements—a moral idea which, crucially, does not turn on anyone else’s being harmed or wrongfully deprived. 

Just as crucial however, is the fact that this alternative moral framework is fully consistent with the moral logic of reparative justice and so well-suited to various kinds of normative ratcheting-up, later on. For example, if it is morally inappropriate to harmlessly benefit in excess of one’s due, then it is hard to see how this could fail to be so in cases where that kind of excessive benefiting comes at another’s expense. Such cases, note, need not yet involve blame; they may, for instance, be purely a matter of structural maldistribution. The point is that they are still plainly unfair, if in a more morally serious way. From here, a further kind of normative ratcheting-up is possible whereby the notion of reparation is introduced, but in a sense which downplays the common legalistic focus on discrete acts of deliberate racial wrongdoing, and emphasizes instead the broader causal continuity between historic racial injustice generally and contemporary structures of unfair racial hierarchy. This more rarified conception of reparation, which I call extrinsic, is deliberately designed to add minimal normative force to the fairness-based arguments already in place, instead serving a kind of classificatory function which locks the auxiliary discourse on track for yet deeper moral waters. 

Empirical social science has shown that members of dominant groups tend to manage their privileged social identity in several basic ways, for example: by denying the reality of in-group advantage; distancing themselves from association with the relevant group; or conversely, by actively working to dismantle the systems which confer the relevant forms of in-group advantage. The socio-argumentative proposal sketched here seeks to move morally-threatened whites in the direction of the third management strategy by working to provide them with a clear and psychologically viable route toward considering their own enmeshment within structures of racial hierarchy, while retaining—at least initially—their sense of themselves as morally decent people.

To be clear, the idea here is not to shelter whites’ treasured self-image indefinitely, or at all costs. As suggested earlier, it is primarily to avoid the kind of discursive distractions which often function to derail reparations discourse before it can really begin. The hope is that this kind of tactical graduated privilege-first approach stands a better chance of helping ground and sustain difficult political conversations about reparative justice than (say) approaches that frame contemporary whites as personally complicit in the nation’s racial wrongs. At the same time, it also promises to help sensitize advantaged whites to the force of more familiar reparations arguments grounded in white racial and/or American national culpability in the longer term. 

To those concerned that this kind of argumentative maneuvering represents an unacceptable dilution of the moral force of standard reparations arguments, or too great a concession to white fragility and ignorance, I offer two closing thoughts. First, it should go without saying that the foregoing forms of auxiliary argument are not meant to replace or even to compete with other kinds of reparations argumentation, but rather as a kind of helpful supplement—another tool in the movement toolkit—that is especially mindful of the various ways that structures of white advantage maintain racial inequality in the American context. Second, note that the adoption of this kind of approach is perfectly consistent with calling out bad faith responses among whites when and wherever they emerge. While such phenomena are regrettably common, as are other forms of active racialized ignorance, my own experience as an educator—and a white person working in critical philosophy of race—has led me to believe that not all forms of white resistance to reparations arguments are equally malignant. Some, it seems to me, are ripe to be overcome via the kind of strategy described here. Given the stakes, it is my view that serious commitment to reparative justice requires us—particularly white philosophers like myself—to see to it that they are.

Joseph Frigault

Joseph Frigault is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches moral and political issues and works in critical philosophy of race. He received his PhD from Boston University in 2020, and has taught previously at Coker University in South Carolina, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.