Is Racial Discrimination Arbitrary?
by
Peter Singer

Philosophia, Vol. 8, No.1, October 1978.

When the Major League Baseball season ended in 1973, Atlanta Braves slugger Hank Aaron was just one swing away from the greatest prize in baseball: Babe Ruth's record of 714 career home runs.  History was in the making; the Bambino was about to get hammered.  Aaron's first at-bat of the '74 season saw number 714.  Number 715 came on April 8, 1974, before a sellout crowd in Atlanta.  Today, outside the Braves' stadium, there is a statue of Hank Aaron, and though the stadium has moved, a sign in the outfield still commemorates the spot where home run 715 cleared the fence.

There is, however, an unpleasant side to this story.  Aaron now recalls those "glory" days as being the worst days of his life.  Why?  Because Aaron is African-American, and for daring to break Babe Ruth's record, he had to endure a torrent of hatred.  In 1973, he received 930,000 pieces of mail, most of it filled with racial slurs.  As he got near Ruth's record, Aaron holed up in his apartment, afraid to go outside.  The FBI uncovered a plot to kill his daughter, who lived in Nashville.  And when he actually hit number 715, Aaron's mother Estella jumped out of the stands and rushed onto the field, not out of joy, but because she believed that her son was about to be murdered.

Racial discrimination violates one of our most deeply held moral beliefs: that people should not be treated badly for arbitrary reasons like the color of their skin.  The hatred Hank Aaron had to endure was clearly vile.  However, other cases of differential treatment are less clear. 

1. Introduction

There is nowadays wide agreement that racism is wrong.  To describe a policy, law, movement, or nation as "racist" is to condemn it.  It may be thought that since we all agree that racism is wrong, it is unnecessary to speculate on exactly what it is and why it is wrong.  This indifference to moral fundamentals could, however, prove dangerous.  For one thing, the fact that most people agree today that racism is wrong does not mean that this attitude will always be so widely shared.  Even if we had no fears for the future, though, we need to have some understanding of what it is about racism that is wrong if we are to handle satisfactorily all the problems we face today.  For instance, there is the contentious issue of "reverse discrimination" or discrimination in favor of members of oppressed minority groups.  It must be granted that a university which admits members of minority groups who do not achieve the minimum standard that others must reach in order to be admitted is discriminating on racial lines.  Is such discrimination therefore wrong?

Or, to take another issue, the efforts of Arab nations to have the United Nations declare Zionism a form of racism provoked an extremely hostile reaction in nations friendly to Israel, particularly the United States, but it led to virtually no discussion of whether Zionism is a form of racism.  Yet the charge is not altogether without plausibility, for if Jews are a race, then Zionism promotes the idea of a state dominated by one race, and this has practical consequences in, for instance, Israel's immigration laws.  Again, to consider whether this makes Zionism a form of racism we need to understand what it is that makes a policy racist and wrong. . . .

If we ask those who regard racial discrimination as wrong to say why it is wrong, it is commonly said that it is wrong to pick on race as a reason for treating one person differently from others, because race is irrelevant to whether a person should be given a job, the vote, higher education, or any benefits or burdens of this sort.  The irrelevance of race, it is said, makes it quite arbitrary to give these things to people of one race while withholding them from those of another race . I shall refer to this account of what is wrong with racial discrimination as the "standard objection" to racial discrimination.

A sophisticated theory of justice can be invoked in support of this standard objection to racial discrimination.  Justice requires, as Aristotle so plausibly said, that equals be treated equally and unequals be treated unequally.  To this we must add the obvious proviso that the equalities or inequalities should be relevant to the treatment in question.  Now when we consider things like employment, it becomes clear that the relevant inequalities between candidates for a vacant position are inequalities in their ability to carry out the duties of the position and, perhaps, inequalities in the extent to which they will benefit through being offered the position.  Race does not seem to be relevant at all.  Similarly with the vote, capacity for rational choice between candidates or policies might be held a relevant characteristic, but race should not be; and so on for other goods.  It is hard to think of anything for which race in itself is a relevant characteristic, and hence to use race as a basis for discrimination is arbitrarily to single out an irrelevant factor, no doubt because of a bias or prejudice against those of a different race.

As we shall see, this account of why racial discrimination is wrong is inadequate because there are many situations in which, from at least one point of view, the racial factor is by no means irrelevant, and therefore it can be denied that racial discrimination in these situations is arbitrary.

One type of situation in which race must be admitted to be relevant to the purposes of the person discriminating need not delay us at this stage; this is the situation in which those purposes themselves favor a particular race.  Thus if the purpose of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders was, among other things, to produce a world in which there were no Jews, it was certainly not irrelevant to their purposes that those rounded up and murdered by the SS were Jews rather than so-called "Aryans."  But the fundamental wrongness of the aims of the Nazis makes the "relevance" of race to those aims totally inefficacious so far as justifying Nazi racial discrimination is concerned.  While their type of racial discrimination may not have been arbitrary discrimination in the usual sense, it was no less wrong for that.  Why it was wrong is something that I hope will become clearer later in this article.  Meanwhile I shall look at some less cataclysmic forms of racial discrimination, for too much contemporary discussion of racial discrimination has focused on the most blatant instances: Nazi Germany, [the former situation in] South Africa, and the American "Deep South" during the period of legally enforced racial segregation.  These forms of racism are not the type that face us now in our own societies. . . and to discuss racial discrimination in terms of these examples today is to present an oversimplified picture of the problem of racial discrimination.  By looking at some of the reasons for racial discrimination that might actually be offered today in countries all over the world I hope to show that the real situation is usually much more complex than consideration of the more blatant instances of racial discrimination would lead us to believe.

2. Examples

I shall start by describing an example of racial discrimination which may at first glance seem to be an allowable exception to a general rule that racial discrimination is arbitrary and therefore wrong; and I shall then suggest that this case has parallels with other cases we may not be so willing to allow as exceptions.

Case 1. A film director is making a film about the lives of blacks living in New York's Harlem.  He advertises for black actors.   A white actor turns up, but the director refuses to allow him to audition, saying that the film is about blacks and there are no roles for whites.  The actor replies that, with the appropriate wig and make-up, he can look just like a black; moreover he can imitate the mannerisms, gestures, and speech of Harlem blacks.  Nevertheless the director refuses to consider him for the role, because it is essential to the director's conception of the film that the black experience be authentically portrayed, and however good a white actor might be, the director would not be satisfied with the authenticity of the portrayal.

The film director is discriminating along racial lines, yet he cannot be said to be discriminating arbitrarily.  His discrimination is apt for his purpose.  Moreover his purpose is a legitimate one.   So the standard objection to racial discrimination cannot be made in this instance.

Racial discrimination may be acceptable in an area like casting for films or the theater, when the race of a character in the film or play is important, because this is one of the seemingly few areas in which a person's race is directly relevant to his capacity to perform a given task.  As such, it may be thought, these areas can easily be distinguished from other areas of employment, as well as from areas like housing, education, the right to vote, and so on, where race has no relevance at all.  Unfortunately there are many other situations in which race is not as totally irrelevant as this view assumes.

Case 2. The owner of a cake shop with a largely white and racially prejudiced clientele wishes to hire an assistant.  The owner has no prejudice against blacks himself, but is reluctant to employ one, for fear that his customers will go elsewhere.  If his fears are well-founded (and this is not impossible) then the race of a candidate for the position is, again, relevant to the purpose of the employer, which in this case is to maintain the profitability of his business.

What can we say about this case?  We cannot deny the connection between race and the owner's purposes, and so we must recognize that the owner's discrimination is not arbitrary, and does not necessarily indicate a bias or prejudice on his part.  Nor can we say that the owner's purpose is an illegitimate one, for making a profit from the sale of cakes is not generally regarded as wrong, at least if the amount of profit made is modest.

We can, of course, look at other aspects of the matter.  We can object to the racial discrimination shown by customers who will search out shops staffed by whites only--such people do discriminate arbitrarily, for race is irrelevant to the quality of the goods and the proficiency of service in a shop--but is this not simply a fact that the shop-owner must live with, however much he may wish he could change it?  We might argue that by pandering to the prejudices of his customers, the owner is allowing those prejudices to continue unchallenged; whereas if he and other shopkeepers took no notice of them, people would eventually become used to mixing with those of another race, and prejudices would be eroded.  Yet it is surely too much to ask an individual shop-owner to risk his livelihood in a lone and probably vain effort to break down prejudice.  Few of the most dedicated opponents of racism do as much.  If there were national legislation which distributed the burden more evenly, by a general prohibition of discrimination on racial grounds (with some recognized exceptions for cases like casting for a film or play) the situation would be different. Then we could reasonably ask every shop-owner to play his part. Whether there should be such legislation is a different question from whether the shop-owner may be blamed for discriminating in the absence of legislation.  I shall discuss the issue of legislation shortly, after we consider a different kind of racial discrimination that, again, is not arbitrary.

Case 3. A landlord discriminates against blacks in letting the accommodation he owns.  Let us say that he is not so rigid as never to let an apartment to a black, but if a black person and a white person appear to be equally suitable as tenants, with equally good references and so on, the landlord invariably prefers the white.  He defends his policy along the following lines:

  
Now the landlord's impression of a higher rate of default among blacks than among comparable whites may itself be the result of prejudice on his part.  Perhaps in most cases when landlords say this kind of thing, there is no real factual basis to their allegations.  People have grown up with racial stereotypes, and these stereotypes are reinforced by a tendency to notice occurrences which conform to the stereotype and to disregard those which conflict with it.  So if unreliability is part of the stereotype of blacks held by many whites, they may take more notice of blacks who abscond without paying the rent than of blacks who are reliable tenants; and conversely they will take less notice of absconding whites and more of those whites who conform to their ideas of normal white behaviour.

If it is prejudice that is responsible for the landlord's views about black and white tenants, and there is no factual basis for his claims, then the problem becomes one of eliminating this prejudice and getting the landlord to see his mistake.  This is by no means an easy task, but it is not a task for philosophers, and it does not concern us here, for we are interested in attempts to justify racial discrimination, and an attempted justification based on an inaccurate description of a situation can be rejected without raising the deeper issue of justification.

On the other hand, the landlord's impression of a higher rate of default among black tenants could be entirely accurate.  (It might be explicable in terms of the different cultural and economic circumstances in which blacks are brought up.)  Whether or not we think this likely, we need to ask what its implications would be for the justifiability of the racial discrimination exercised by the landlord.  To refuse even to consider this question would be to rest all one's objections to the landlord's practice on the falsity of his claims, and thereby to fail to examine the possibility that the landlord's practice could be open to objection even if his impressions on tenant reliability are accurate.

If the landlord's impressions were accurate, we would have to concede, once again, that racial discrimination in this situation is not arbitrary; that it is, instead, relevant to the purposes of the landlord.  We must also admit that these purposes--making a living from letting property that one owns--are not themselves objectionable, provided the rents are reasonable, and so on.  Nor can we, this time, locate the origin of the problem in the prejudices of others, except insofar as the problem has its origin in the prejudices of those responsible for the conditions of deprivation in which many of the present generation of blacks grew up--but it is too late to do anything to alter those prejudices anyway, since they belong to previous generations.

We have now looked at three examples of racial discrimination, and can begin to examine the parallels and differences between them.  Many people, as I have already said, would make no objection to the discriminatory hiring practice of the film director in the first of these cases.  But we can now see that if we try to justify the actions of the film director in this case on the grounds that his purpose is a legitimate one and the discrimination he uses is relevant for his purpose, we will have to accept the actions of the cake-shop owner and the landlord as well.  I suspect that many of those ready to accept the discriminatory practice in the first case will be much more reluctant about the other two cases.  But what morally significant difference is there between them?

It might be suggested that the difference between them lies in the nature of what blacks are being deprived of, and their title to it.  The argument would run like this: No one has a right to be selected to act in a film; the director must have absolute discretion to hire whomsoever he wishes to hire.  After all, no one can force the director to make the film at all, and if he didn't make it, no one would be hired to play in it; if he does decide to make it, therefore, he must be allowed to make it on his own terms.  Moreover, since so few people ever get the chance to appear in a film, it would be absurd to hold that the director violates someone's rights by not giving him something which most people will never have anyway. On the other hand, people do have a right to employment, and to housing.  To discriminate against blacks in an ordinary employment situation, or in the letting of accommodation, threatens their basic rights and therefore should not be tolerated.

Plausible as it appears, this way of distinguishing the first case from the other two will not do.  Consider the first and second cases: almost everything that we have said about the film director applies to the cake-shop owner as well.  No one can force the cake-shop owner to keep his shop open, and if he didn't, no one would be hired to work in it.  If in the film director's case this was a reason for allowing him to make the film on his own terms, it must be a reason for allowing the shop-owner to run his shop on his own terms.  In fact, such reasoning, which would allow unlimited discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and shops, is invalid.  There are plenty of examples where we would not agree that the fact that someone did not have to make an offer or provide an opportunity at all means that if he does do it he must be allowed to make the offer or provide the opportunity on his own terms. The United States Civil Rights Act of 1965 certainly does not recognize this line of argument, for it prohibits those offering food and lodgings to the public from excluding customers on racial grounds.  We may, as a society, decide that we shall not allow people to make certain offers, if the way in which the offers are made will cause hardship or offense to others.  In so doing we are balancing people's freedom to do as they please against the harm this may do to others, and coming down on the side of preventing harm rather than enlarging freedom.  This is a perfectly defensible position, if the harm is sufficiently serious and the restriction of freedom not grave.

Nor does it seem possible to distinguish the first and second cases by the claim that since so few people ever get the chance to appear in a film, no one's rights are violated if they are not given something that most people will never have anyway.  For if the number of jobs in cake-shops was small, and the demand for such jobs high, it would also be true that few people would ever have the chance to work in a cake-shop.  It would be odd if such an increase in competition for the job justified an otherwise unjustifiable policy of hiring whites only.  Moreover, this argument would allow a film director to discriminate on racial lines even if race was irrelevant to the roles he was casting; and that is quite a different situation from the one we have been discussing.

The best way to distinguish the situations of the film director and the shop-owner is by reference to the nature of the employment offered, and to the reasons why racial discrimination in these cases is not arbitrary.  In casting for a film about blacks, the race of the actor auditioning is intrinsically significant, independently of the attitudes of those connected with the film.  In the case of hiring a shop assistant, race is relevant only because of the attitudes of those connected (as customers) with the shop; it has nothing to do with the selling of cakes in itself, but only with the selling of cakes to racially prejudiced customers.

This means that in the case of the shop assistant we could eliminate the relevance of race if we could eliminate the prejudices of the customers; by contrast there is no way in which we could eliminate the relevance of the race of an actor auditioning for a role in a film about blacks, without altering the nature of the film.  Moreover, in the case of the shop-owner racial discrimination probably serves to perpetuate the very prejudices that make such discrimination relevant and (from the point of view of the owner seeking to maintain his profits) necessary.  Thus people who can buy all their cakes and other necessities in shops staffed only by whites will never come into the kind of contact with comparable blacks which might break down their aversion to being served by blacks; whereas if shop-owners were to hire more blacks, their customers would no doubt become used to it and in time might wonder why they ever opposed the idea.  (Compare the change of attitudes toward racial integration in the American South since the 1956 United States Supreme Court decision against segregated schools and subsequent measures against segregation were put into effect.)

Hence if we are opposed to arbitrary discrimination we have reason to take steps against racial discrimination in situations like Case 2, because such discrimination, while not itself arbitrary, both feeds on and gives support to discrimination by others which is arbitrary.  In prohibiting it we would, admittedly, be preventing the employer from discriminating in a way that is relevant to his purposes; but if the causal hypothesis suggested in the previous paragraph is correct, this situation would only be temporary, and after some time the circumstances inducing the employer to discriminate racially would have been eliminated.

The case of the landlord presents a more difficult problem.  If the facts he alleges are true his nonarbitrary reasons for discrimination against blacks are real enough.  They do not depend on present arbitrary discrimination by others, and they may persist beyond an interval in which there is no discrimination.  Whatever the roots of hypothetical racial differences in reliability as tenants might be, they would probably go too deep to be eradicated solely by a short period in which there was no racial discrimination.

We should recognize, then, that if the facts are as alleged, to legislate against the landlord's racially discriminatory practice is to impose a long-term disadvantage upon him.  At the very least, he will have to take greater care in ascertaining the suitability of prospective tenants.  Perhaps he will turn to data-collecting agencies for assistance, thus contributing to the growth of institutions that are threats, potential or actual, to our privacy.  Perhaps, if these methods are unavailable or unavailing, the landlord will have to take greater losses than he otherwise would have, and perhaps this will lead to increased rents or even to a reduction in the amount of rentable housing available.

None of this forces us to conclude that we should not legislate against the landlord's racial discrimination.  There are good reasons why we should seek to eliminate racial discrimination even when such discrimination is neither arbitrary in itself nor relevant only because of the arbitrary prejudices of others.  These reasons may be so important as to make the disadvantage imposed on the landlord comparatively insignificant.

An obvious point that can be made against the landlord is that he is judging people, at least in part, as members of a race rather than as individuals.  The landlord does not deny that some black prospective tenants he turns away would make better tenants than some white prospective tenants he accepts.  Some highly eligible black prospective tenants are refused accommodation simply because they are black.  If the landlord assessed every prospective tenant as an individual this would not happen. . . .

There are plenty of reasons why in situations like admitting people to higher education or providing them with employment or other benefits we should regard people as individuals and not as members of some larger group.  For one thing we will be able to make a selection better suited for our own purposes, for selecting or discarding whole groups of people will generally result in, at best, a crude approximation to the results we hope to achieve.  This is certainly true in an area like education.  On the other hand it must be admitted that in some situations a crude approximation is all that can be achieved anyway.  The landlord claims that his situation is one of these, and that as he cannot reliably tell which individuals will make suitable tenants, he is justified in resorting to so crude a means of selection as race.  Here we need to turn our attention from the landlord to the prospective black tenant.

To be judged merely as a member of a group when it is one's individual qualities on which the verdict should be given is to be treated as less than the unique individual that we see ourselves as.  Even where our individual qualities would merit less than we receive as a member of a group--if we are promoted over better-qualified people because we went to the "right" private school--the benefit is usually less welcome than it would be if it had been merited by our own attributes.  Of course in this case qualms are easily stilled by the fact that a benefit has been received, never mind how.  In the contrary case, however, when something of value has been lost, the sense of loss will be compounded by the feeling that one was not assessed on one's own merits, but merely as a member of a group.

To this general preference for individual as against group assessment must be added a consideration arising from the nature of the group.  To be denied a benefit because one was, say, a member of the Communist Party, would be unjust and a violation of basic principles of political liberty, but if one has chosen to join the Communist Party, then one is, after all, being assessed for what one has done, and one can choose between living with the consequences of continued party membership or leaving the party.  Race, of course, is not something that one chooses to adopt or that one can ever choose to give up.  The person who is denied advantages because of his race is totally unable to alter this particular circumstance of his existence and so may feel with added sharpness that his life is clouded, not merely because he is not being judged as an individual, but because of something over which he has no control at all.  This makes racial discrimination peculiarly invidious.

So we have the viewpoint of the victim of racial discrimination to offset against the landlord's argument in favor, and it seems that the victim has more at stake and hence should be given preference, even if the landlord's reason for discriminating is nonarbitrary and hence in a sense legitimate.  The case against racial discrimination becomes stronger still when we consider the long-term social effects of discrimination.

When members of a racial minority are overwhelmingly among the poorest members of a society, living in a deprived area, holding jobs low in pay and status, or no jobs at all, and less well educated than the average member of the community, racial discrimination serves to perpetuate a divided society in which race becomes a badge of a much broader inferiority.  It is the association of race with economic status and educational disadvantages which in turn gives rise to the situation in which there could be a coloring of truth to the claim that race is a relevant ground for discriminating between prospective tenants, applicants for employment, and so on.  Thus there is, in the end, a parallel between the situation of the landlord and the cake-shop owner, for both, by their discrimination, contribute to the maintenance of the grounds for claiming that this discrimination is nonarbitrary.  Hence prohibition of such discrimination can be justified as breaking this circle of deprivation and discrimination.  The difference between the situations, as I have already said, is that in the case of the cake-shop owner it is only a prejudice against contact with blacks that needs to be broken down, and experience has shown that such prejudices do evaporate in a relatively short period of time.  In the case of the landlord, however, it is the whole social and economic position of blacks that needs to be changed, and while overcoming discrimination would be an essential part of this process it may not be sufficient.  That is why, if the facts are as the landlord alleges them to be, prohibition of racial discrimination is likely to impose more of a long-term disadvantage on the landlord than on the shop-owner--a disadvantage which is, however, outweighed by the costs of continuing the circle of racial discrimination and deprivation for those discriminated against; and the costs of greater social inequality and racial divisiveness for the community as a whole. . . .