Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism by Armour Jody David

Author:Armour, Jody David.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1997-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

What is so disturbing about this gerrymandering dynamic at the heart of the law is not so much that it happens at all (because line drawing lies at the heart of any body of rules, any legal system is liable to definitional gerrymandering), but that it is so insistently denied. If mainstream commentators admitted that our blaming and excusing practices turn not on objective moral truth, but rather on political, ideological, and even social psychological grounds, we could honestly reevaluate the fairness of our current approaches to crime and punishment. Central to this reevaluation would be recognition of our tendency systematically to ignore or undervalue the interests of socially marginalized groups in framing laws and meting out punishment. I have confidence, born of empirical research, that once we admit our discriminatory tendencies, we can combat them. But we cannot combat what we deny or ignore.

It is striking and revealing to note the parallels between the rhetoric employed by the mainstream critics who attacked Bazelon’s social deprivation excuse and the rhetoric employed by many critics of affirmative action. Recall the first critic’s admonition that in not condemning the “unhappy deviant” from a disadvantaged background, we imply that he is not expected to live up to the same high standards by which we judge ourselves. And recall the other critic’s contention that those who propose that we make allowances for a person’s disadvantaged social background “are plainly moved by compassion for the downtrodden, to whom, however, it is nonetheless an insult.” This same rhetoric is often employed by opponents of affirmative action who argue that public policy intervention to rectify Black mobility difficulties deviates from the pure-merit or just-deserts approach to allocating opportunities and thereby demeans its beneficiaries.

These rhetorical similarities are more than coincidental. They reflect a common ideological anxiety by the dominant group about the coherence of “just deserts” justifications for the prevailing social distribution of rewards as well as punishments. For once we admit that our ordinary conventions for attributing blame to others are biased and logically incoherent, we start to suffer nagging doubts about whether the ones we use for attributing merit are just as biased and self-serving. Put differently, one implication of a decision to excuse wrongdoing on the ground that our misconduct may be determined (at least partially) by environmental factors is that our achievements also may be attributed (again, at least partially) to those same factors rather than simply to personal choice and hard work. This relation between popular conceptions of blame and self-congratulatory conceptions of merit is aptly described in the following passage by Nathan Caplan and Stephen Nelson:

Person-blame interpretations reinforce social myths about one’s degree of control over his own fate, thus rewarding the members of the great middle class by flattering their self-esteem for having “made it on their own.” This in turn increases public complacency about the plight of those who have not “made it on their own.”44

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