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January 12, 2012

CRSP lecturer: Racial justice requires integration

An integrated society is necessary to achieve racial justice, despite popular social justice theories to the contrary, said a prominent scholar.

Elizabeth Anderson

Elizabeth Anderson

“Racial justice, we are told, can be achieved through multiculturalist celebrations of racial diversity; or equal economic investments in de facto segregated schools and neighborhoods; or a focus on eliminating poverty; or a more rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination law; or color-blindness, or a determined effort to change dysfunctional social norms,” said Elizabeth Anderson, John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan.

But all of those purported remedies for racial injustice are illusory without incorporating racial integration, said Anderson, who spoke here Dec. 9 on “The Imperative of Integration: Race and Education,” part of a lecture series sponsored by Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems.

She cited as an example of a misguided approach a quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in 1995 said: “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume anything predominantly black must be inferior.”

“Indeed, Justice Thomas has been consistent on this point, as a strong supporter of historically black colleges, for example,” Anderson noted. “So he doesn’t see anything wrong in de facto segregated schools whose explicit mission is the advancement of blacks. If the case of school integration rests solely on what blacks can learn from whites, the success, notable and important, of historically black colleges in the U.S. would present counter evidence that integration matters.”

But, Anderson maintained, Thomas is making a fundamentally incorrect assumption: That there is nothing whites can learn from blacks.

“Maybe the reason for integration is that whites have something to learn from an integrated experience. Perhaps there is something inferior about segregated schools generally, whether they are predominantly black or predominantly white, in the sense that there are certain kinds of education, certain kinds of learning that necessarily can only be acquired in integrated settings,” she said.

She noted that a fundamental tenet of democracy is serving all the people, not just the elite. “That means its institutions have to be responsive to people from all walks of life. That requires that citizens have to be responsive to other people’s claims,” Anderson said.

But in today’s largely segregated America, the ruling elites — defined as anyone holding a position of significant power and the responsibility for making decisions that have an impact on other people — instead are governed by self-interest, uneducated about other cultures, burdened by stereotyping myths and unable to identify with the struggles of the disadvantaged, Anderson said.

“Elite citizens at large need to be educated together. Why? Because a segregated elite is an ignorant elite, an incompetent elite. To be competent in a democracy means to be able to effectively serve people from all walks of life,” she said.

“Look at corporate CEOs, at Congress, at state legislatures — overwhelmingly white. We think of segregation as isolating blacks or Hispanics, but actually, it’s the other way around: Whites are the most racially isolated group in the United States.”

Anderson emphasized that the problem of an incompetent elite class is due to segregation, not race as such. “My argument is completely general: Segregation along any dimension — nationality, ethnicity, immigrant status, gender, disability, class, sexual orientation — they all have the same negative cognitive effects. And the segregation of elites from disadvantaged groups, however those groups are defined, perpetuates the disadvantage of the latter group through cognitive deficits among the elites,” a vicious cycle, she maintained.

“A lot of what keeps disadvantaged groups down is that privileged groups are not competent. They’re not competent because they’re ignorant and they’re ignorant because they’re isolated,” she added.

Isolation due to segregation also leads people to create stereotypes about the disadvantaged. “If you don’t know people personally, what do you think about them? You generally rely on stereotypes  which usually reflect rationalized group inequalities,” Anderson said. “People try to explain inequalities existing in education, income, wealth as if they are deserved.”

Stereotypes also cause discrimination. “We have excellent data that even the most conscientious whites who really want not to discriminate and avow norms of color-blindness — even they have been observed to engage in systematic racial discrimination in contexts where they can rationalize differential treatment on some other basis. They’re not even aware of what they’re doing,” Anderson said.

That means that conscientiousness alone is not sufficient to overcome racial discrimination, she noted.

Different types of knowledge

How can these cognitive deficits among elites be corrected? By emphasizing different kinds of knowledge as important in establishing elites’ competency and qualifications to serve others, Anderson said.

Academic knowledge, or book knowledge, is what most people think should be taught in schools, she noted. “I’m going to call this third-person knowledge, because it’s knowledge you receive from a third person: a teacher, a lecturer, an author. It’s measured in test scores, grade point averages, degrees earned. It’s important, but it’s not the only thing going on. There also is first-person knowledge, autobiographical knowledge — the knowledge you got from personal experience, knowledge of what your life is like. You get it from yourself, not a third person,” Anderson explained.

There also is second-person knowledge that derives from active engagement in face-to-face interaction, she noted. “The academy thinks of itself as being in the business of purveying third-person knowledge. But in fact a lot of the knowledge people acquire in schools is first- and second-person knowledge,” Anderson said.

Second-person knowledge requires interpersonal cultural capital, she said, that is, the ability to engage with others productively and cooperatively. It requires the ability to strike a rapport with people who are different.

“Awareness of the problems of the disadvantaged requires first-person knowledge, because the problems aren’t purely objectively measurable. It’s not just: I’m only earning $16,000 a year, how can I make ends meet?” Anderson said. “There’s also the first-person knowledge of what’s it’s like not to know where your next meal is coming from, personal knowledge of what it’s like if you’re not sure whether the landlord is about to evict you.”

The only way to learn that type of knowledge is through interpersonal contact, which requires integration, she maintained.

The value of integration

Anderson defined integration as full participation in all the institutions of civil society of people from all social sectors and walks of life.

“It’s not the same as assimilation. Integration has to do with creating settings in which people interact as equals, not where one group gets to dictate to another group how to behave,” she said.

“Because we live in a profoundly racially segregated society, in order to create integration through which we can acquire the qualifications of competent citizens, we have to take special affirmative steps to do so. We have to make special efforts to include disadvantaged groups,” Anderson said.

In general, integration produces competence by incorporating relevant first-person knowledge and awareness from the perspective of people from all walks of life. Additionally, it promotes second-person knowledge, where one learns to see oneself through others’ eyes, she said. “That requires integration. How else are we going to see oneself through others’ eyes?” she maintained.

“And finally, integration reduces the influence of stigmatizing stereotypes or prejudice, because of what is well-known and established in social psychology as the conduct hypothesis: Intergroup cooperation in terms of equality and personal acquaintance with others, combined with institutional support, does reduce prejudice,” Anderson said.

Examples of this in data-based case studies abound, she said.

Studies comparing the behavior of all-white versus integrated juries, for instance, show that integrated juries on average deliberate longer; consider more diverse information; question fellow jurors more often; pay more attention to potential “missing evidence” that wasn’t introduced by prosecutors; are more open to the extenuating factors of the accused’s race and the potential racism of witnesses and the police, and incorporate fewer factual errors in their decisions.

Another study shows that integrated police forces perform more interactively, encounter less violence and are more cooperative with, and receive more cooperation from, their community. In short, they benefit from the face-to-face second-hand knowledge they acquire to break down the “us-against-them” culture that permeates many non-integrated police forces, Anderson noted.

“Competence and responsiveness of people, including elites, is mediated by first- and second-person knowledge, and accountability mechanisms are triggered by face-to-face interaction among equals,” she said. “It requires integration for this to happen and thereby to induce decision-making groups to be competent and more responsive.”

For too long there has been a philosophy of meritocracy in connection with education, where it is assumed that merit is an individual possession measured by degrees earned, tests scores, GPA and the like, she said.

“What I’m suggesting here is that merit is not solely an individual possession. Groups can have merits that transcend the sum of the merits in their individual members. They can have competencies that arise from the fact that the groups are diverse and inclusive of members of all walks of life in society,” Anderson said.

What does that mean for education?

“Most of the time when we’re thinking about integration, we’re looking at the positive effects of integration on disadvantaged groups, whether by class or race. That’s an important perspective, but it’s not the only perspective to take on the value of integration to education. Justice requires not just that each individual or group gets its fair share of educational goods, it also requires that we educate our children together, because some qualifications can only be generated by integrated groups working together,” she said.

Her argument also supports affirmative action principles and means that society should no longer measure qualifications to enter the academy solely on book knowledge.

“You can’t measure qualifications on a purely individualistic level, and certainly not by just looking at their command of third-person, academic knowledge. Individualistic achievements are important but they’re not the whole story,” Anderson said.

“We know that racial integration generates some forms of merit, some forms of qualification. Hence to admit students from historically underrepresented groups is not in any sense a compromise of meritocratic criteria. To produce the best output, you need diverse input. That leads to a fundamental argument for race-based affirmative action in education,” she maintained.

Instead of focusing the argument for affirmative action in education selectivity based on the benefits to be conferred on the target group of affirmative action, “we have to heighten awareness of how poor education is of [segregated] elites, how we’re having incompetent whites come out when they lack exposure,” Anderson said.

“There’s so much complacency and self-satisfaction that is based on third-person academic knowledge — test scores, grades and so forth — that somehow you have a meritocratic system. Far from it. To produce a true meritocratic system, people have to be educated together.”

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 44 Issue 9

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