Getting Rid of Racism: Assessing Three Proposals in Light of Psychological Evidence

At the end of a chapter in his book Race, Racism and Reparations, Angelo Corlett notes that “[t]here remain other queries about racism [than those he addressed in his chapter], which need philosophical exploration . . . Perhaps most important, how might racism be unlearned?” (Corlett 2003, 93). We agree with Corlett’s assessment of its importance, but find that philosophers have devoted relatively little attention to the issue of how to best deal with, and ultimately do away with, racism. Discussion is often confined to cursory remarks at the end of articles mainly devoted to defining “racism” or attempting to capture the essence of racism itself. In this article, we put the issue of how to best deal with racism front and center. We need not start from scratch, however. Despite not being central to many philosophical discussions about race, a number of different strategies for dealing with racism have been suggested. We have identified three of the most concrete proposals made by philosophers and social theorists, each of which seeks to mitigate racism by inducing psychological changes in individuals. For each, we formulate the line of thought behind the strategy as clearly as we can, supply the psychological justification suggested by its respective advocates, and spell out how the strategy might be concretely applied in practice. Finally, we assess each proposal in light of current empirical work on racial cognition. We conclude that some proposals are likely to fare better than others. Furthermore, the empirical literature shows that even the most promising proposals can be refined in light of empirical findings, to help maximize their effectiveness or prevent them from backfiring. Something needs to be said about how we are conceiving of racism, and so what getting rid of it amounts to. Because our discussion will be rather wideranging, we assume an inclusive characterization: A mental state (an emotion, a belief, a motivation, and so on) or an action is racist if it is race-related and if it is morally problematic. We do not take any stance here about what makes racist mental states and actions morally problematic, but instead rely on an intuitive grasp of the notion. So understood, Smith’s belief that Asians are devious is racist because it is about Asians and because it is morally objectionable, while Jones’s judgment that Moses is probably unpleasant since he is Jewish is racist because Jones makes this judgment based merely on the fact that