racial bias Archives - Prindle Institute

February 4, 2022July 26, 2023

Brian Flores, Equal Opportunity, and Affirmative Action

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We need to talk about Brian Flores’s lawsuit – the ex-Miami Dolphins head coach alleging racial discrimination and, once again, highlighting the lack of diversity in owners’ boxes and front offices around the league. But this isn’t a story about the NFL. It isn’t even about sports. Instead, this is a story about affirmative action; it’s a story about the relationship between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, between fairness and equity.

The NFL has a problem (okay, the NFL has a few problems). One of the most obvious ways to see this is in representation. African Americans make up 70% of the NFL’s player base, but there is only one Black head coach working in the league today. (And there are even fewer Black owners.) While any result that fails to produce absolute statistical proportionality need not suggest nefarious intent, the degree to which these figures diverge warrants at least a raised eyebrow. It’s difficult to explain why so few Black players make the transition from the field to the front office. You’d think that at least some of the skills that made for a stand-out player might also translate to their proficiency with X’s and O’s. More generally, you’d expect that the same interest and commitment that leads so many African Americans to play the game at a professional level would produce a corresponding number of others deeply invested in coaching or managing.

Enter: the Rooney Rule. In an attempt to shake up this monochrome landscape, league officials implemented a policy requiring teams to interview at least one (now two) minority candidates for any head coaching vacancy (now coordinator positions as well). The hope was that by guaranteeing that a more diverse pool of finalists gets the opportunity to make their pitch, diversity in the coaching ranks would soon follow. It was assumed that all these candidates needed was to be given the chance to change hearts and minds in person. At long last, progress might finally be made in erasing the vast differences in the way white and non-white coaches have historically been evaluated.

The details of Flores’ lawsuit confirm that no such revolution has come to pass. Owners and general managers treat the Rooney Rule as a mere formality – another hoop that must be jumped, another box that must be ticked. The organizations identified in Flores’s suit scheduled a sit-down as formally required, but apparently couldn’t bring themselves to take him or the interview seriously. The results of their deliberations had been decided long before Flores walked into the room. These executives were playacting, but couldn’t even be bothered to try to disguise it. That said, Flores’s allegations aren’t about a failure of etiquette or good manners, they concern a league that still refuses to acknowledge even the appearance of racial bias, let alone the existence of an actual, pervasive problem. It seems the Rooney Rule may have been doomed from the start; as it turns out, the problem runs much deeper than simply putting a face with a name.

So who – if anyone – might be to blame for the NFL’s present predicament?

A not insignificant number of folks will answer: no one. Brian Flores isn’t owed a head coaching gig. These organizations are free to hire whomever they so choose. Head coaches represent a significant investment of time and resources, and it would be absurd for anyone to dictate to NFL teams who is and is not the most qualified person for the job. Jim Trotter, for example, recently recounted his interchange with an owner who suggested that anybody griping about the lack of representation in the NFL “should go buy their own team and hire who they want to hire.”

Others, meanwhile, will be inclined to point to race-conscious policies (like the Rooney Rule) as the guilty party. To these voices, it seems completely wrong-headed to pick some number out of thin air and then complain when we fail to reach that arbitrary diversity benchmark. Looking at race is precisely what got us into this mess, so surely it’s absolute folly to think that intentionally putting our thumb on the scale could get us out of it.

What’s worse, mandating that teams do their due diligence – and, more specifically, demanding that due diligence take the particular form of race-conscious interviewing practices – reduces people of color to tokens. It’s no wonder Flores reports feeling embarrassed – these folks will say – the Rooney Rule set him up, time and time again, to be treated as nothing more than a courtesy invite. Flores was required to go on performing while everyone else in the room was in on the joke. And we should expect none of that behavior to change, they’ll say, if we continue to force hiring committees to go through the motions when they’ve already made up their minds.

This, critics will tell you, is precisely the trouble with initiatives so enamored with equality of outcome – or equity – where an attempt is made to jerry-rig some result built to suit our preferred optics (say, having management roles more accurately reflect teams’ composition). We shouldn’t focus all our attention on meticulously shaping some preferred result; we can’t elevate some and demote others all according to irrelevant and impersonal considerations based in appearances. Any such effort refuses to appreciate the role of individual choice – of freedom, responsibility, and merit. (Owners don’t want to be told how they have to go about picking a winner, they know exactly what winners look like.) As long as we can maintain the right conditions – a level playing field of equal opportunity where everyone receives a fair shake – then we have no cause to wring our hands over the (mis)perception of unequal outcomes. There’s no need to invoke the dreaded language of “quotas,” there’s no cause for infringing on the people in charge’s freedom to choose. You simply call the game, deal the cards, and let the chips fall where they may.

Brian Flores’s lawsuit, however, insists that the deck is stacked against him and others like him. Indeed, Flores’s claim is that equality of opportunity does not exist. He’s alleging that he’s been passed over in the coaching carousel specifically because he is Black. Flores supports these claims with his personal experience of sham interviews and by pointing to a double standard evidenced by the accelerated rise of white coaches in comparison to their more accomplished Black counterparts. In essence, Flores argues these experiences and findings (as well as the individual accounts of some 40 other Black coaches, coordinators, and managers) all indicate racial discrimination is an all-too-real force in the NFL. Without an intentional and forceful intervention, business as usual will continue.

Given this fresh round of accusations, the NFL can’t continue to take a hands-off approach to the problem of representation; it clearly isn’t going to work itself out. Even the meager measures the league put in place to support equal opportunity are not being followed. The Rooney Rule has no teeth and seems to have resulted in no tangible gains. In the end, the policy relies on honorable intentions, personal commitments, and good-faith efforts. As Stephen Holder of The Athletic writes,

We just have to come to terms with an undeniable and inconvenient truth: You can encourage and even incentivize people to do the right thing. But what you cannot do is make them want to do the right thing.

The only way things change is if the people in power take the policy seriously, and it’s not clear that the appropriate carrots or sticks exist for encouraging teams to comply with the letter of the law – let alone embrace its spirit. Achieving the desired result demands an alternative approach. At some point outcomes have to matter.

So, where does that leave us? What have we learned? Where do we go from here? It’s difficult to know how to go about balancing two competing convictions: 1) focusing solely on equality of outcomes disrespects individuality 2) relying solely on equality of opportunity assumes an unbiased system. Or, perhaps more pointedly: 1) it’s wrong to reduce people solely to their various group identities, but 2) it’s also wrong to fail to appreciate the way people, organizations, institutions reduce people solely to their various group identities.

There is no obvious way to bridge the chasm between these two commitments. But maybe we could start by acknowledging that it isn’t hopelessly reductive to think that it might be best if, for instance, the next Supreme Court Justice wasn’t another white man; to think that no single group identity is so inherently qualified as to explain an absolute stranglehold on the positions of power and privilege; to think that for only the eighth time in 230+ years it might be best to break with tradition. Because, if the Rooney Rule has taught us anything, it’s that if you don’t ever actually commit to change, it doesn’t ever actually happen.

September 29, 2020December 14, 2022

Cardi B, Ben Shapiro, and the Pop Culture vs. High Culture Debate

black-and-white photograph of two white men sharing opera glasses ina theater box

Recently, there has been a clash of rival philosophies in the public sphere. Popular rapper Cardi B not too long ago dropped a controversial single. Her song, titled “WAP,” is incredibly raunchy, and its impropriety prompted the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to accuse it of being demeaning to women. Nonetheless, as we will see, Shapiro’s problem with this song goes far beyond its explicit lyrics. In fact, Shapiro’s criticism of WAP fits into a long history of members of dominant groups criticizing and dismissing instances of “low” culture in favor of “high” culture.

But before that, let’s treat the man charitably and evaluate his critique of the song. In a tongue-in-cheek tweet, he wrote that “it’s misogynistic to question whether graphic descriptions of ‘wet-ass p****’ is [sic] empowering for women.” It is interesting that he focuses on the “graphic” nature of the song. Of course, sex has been a part of pop music since the beginning. And it has always been controversial. The Beatles sang “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?” and had their song “A Day in the Life” censored by the BBC. Ostensibly, this was for a drug reference. However the song only contained a reference to cigarettes. John Lennon said he thought the phrase “I want to turn you on” had gotten them censored. But of course, these songs could not today be called “explicit” or “graphic.” So then, maybe Shapiro has a point. Maybe these songs are acceptable but such graphic songs as WAP are not.

Alas, it is not so easy. Shapiro places rappers and The Beatles on the same level regarding “suckage.” How is this position consistent? Well, it seems Shapiro equally dismisses all pop music. We can see this from his tweets comparing rap negatively to Mozart and explicitly stating that he does not consider rap music at all. Combining this claim with his earlier one about The Beatles, we can conclude Shapiro doesn’t consider The Beatles to have produced music either. This is odd given how Rolling Stone Magazine has consistently ranked The Beatles at the top of their list of the “100 Greatest Artists.” To understand Shapiro, to see why he despises WAP so much, we must now consider how one could come to the conclusion that pop music isn’t music.

Much to Shapiro’s chagrin, I’m sure, Mozart is beloved but not as much as he used to be. The rise of popular or “pop” music starting in the 50s with Elvis Presley and solidifying with The Beatles in the 60s meant the end of classical works of Mozart and Beethoven being the standard of music. And these pop artists couldn’t have gotten a foothold without technological advancements like radio democratizing access to music. Before, you either had to go to a concert hall or play the music yourself. And you could really only do the former if you were well-to-do.

In fact, for a very long time there has existed a class distinction when it comes to music, and in fact to all of art. There is “high” art and there is “low” or “pop” art. These compose high and low culture respectively. People will argue a lot about what counts as “high” art but we can come to a decent understanding through some uncontroversial examples: the epics of Homer, the poems of Catullus, the sculptures of Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, and the symphonies of Beethoven. “Low” art (until recently) would not include any writing since only the upper class could write. Additionally, few commoners would be able to afford the marble, paints, and even just paper and ink that are requisite for much of high art. And who could write a symphony without ever having seen more than a few instruments in one place at a time? Again, until recently, all but the upper class had to spend a great deal of time laboring.

Which is better, high culture or low? And is the difference really so substantial as Shapiro makes it out to be? Aesthetics is the study of beauty. When talking about whether one piece or set of art is better than another, we are usually judging them by the standard of beauty. So what makes something beautiful? One camp says that beauty is completely subjective. An old Latin aphorism expresses this: “de gustibus non est disputandum” (“there cannot be arguments about taste”). If this were true, the distinction between high and low culture would be pointless. But of course people do argue about taste. Who has not gotten into an argument about whether this or that song, this or that movie, is superior to another?

One way of settling these arguments by appealing to authority. Let the movie critics at Rotten Tomatoes decide whether the movie was truly good. But those who study literature, sculpture, music, and art will usually judge the classics of high culture as superior to those of pop culture. Movie critics, as everyone knows, love art films more than summer blockbusters. The tastes of critics and the tastes of the public don’t always match. How do we justify ourselves in these cases? And how do the experts themselves decide?

There may be some ways to define beauty or “goodness” more clearly, if not completely rigorously. Good pieces of art are usually complex. They are often difficult to make. They frequently express a message. And of course, most subjectively, good art gives us pleasure, or at least an emotional reaction of some sort. Of course, all of these rules, except possibly the last one, have exceptions. John Cage’s song ‘4’33”,’ which is just silence, isn’t complex. Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedia” artwork isn’t difficult to make: it’s a banana duct-taped to a wall. Alas, it’s not as easy to ascend Plato’s ladder as we had hoped.

The main argument in favor of popular culture and art is that it’s far more pleasurable for more people. Most of us remember the classics of high culture as the books/plays/art/songs we were assigned in boring classes in high school. The argument is easy to make: If Mozart is so good, why don’t more people choose to listen to him?

Now is a good time to consider the other thing that makes art “high” rather than “low.” High art isn’t just good. And not all good art is high art. High art is partially defined by its exclusiveness. How few artistic works of women or people of color are counted as high culture? How many works not produced in Europe? “Rap music isn’t music” was not an uncommon position twenty years ago and even though rap continues to grow in popularity, a rap album hasn’t won the Grammy for Best Album of the Year in over 15 years. Until rap, via white male rapper Eminem, got popular with white men instead of black people, it was simply not accepted. In the same way, until The Beatles got popular with white, adult men instead of just teenage girls, pop music too was considered not to be a legitimate art form.

Cardi B, from the perspective of a high culture aesthete and according to the prejudices of our society, represents the lowest of the low. She is a woman and a person of color. She’s bisexual and a former sex worker. Regardless of whether her music is good or not by any measure we’ve discussed, it would never be counted as high culture and so is dismissed by some as worthless.

Obviously there is a great deal of value in the art which composes high culture. No one would seriously argue that Ode to Joy hurts their ears or that Shakespeare was a hack. And really, opinions like those of Shapiro where popular music and art is dismissed as worthless are vestigial; few hold them and those that do are old. Nonetheless, it is common for our biases regarding the origins of art to sway what would otherwise be legitimate discussions about beauty. Black teens making graffiti are a menace. But when Banksy does it, it’s okay and even counted as high culture. WAP may be a terrible work of art. That’s debatable. But the suggestion that it or any other instance of popular art isn’t art at all isn’t. Any such suggestion is an attempt at exclusion, an attempt to prop up the slowly dying concept of high culture.

September 10, 2020April 28, 2023

Under Discussion: Law and Order as Suppression and Oppression

photograph of police in riot gear in Portland

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Law and Order.

In the last four months, there have been protests every day in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite an estimated 93% of these protests being peaceful, there have been continual calls for “law and order.” Trump tweeted as much and emphasized the need for it during his speech in response to recent protests in Kenosha, and now both he and presidential candidate Joe Biden have campaign ads promoting law and order.

When leaders focus on public safety during nationwide protests, this shifts the attention from the cause, motivation, and aim of the protests. For instance, consider a case in Kenosha, WI. Protests began after police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back. Blake was an unarmed Black man returning to his family in his car. 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse travelled to Kenosha, allegedly to protect local businesses from the protesters and ended up killing two men.

But the Kenosha Sheriff, who was called to apologize for a racist rant in 2018, emphasized that the shootings would not have happened if Kenosha’s 7pm curfew had been respected. His words shifted attention from the shooter to the policies in place to ensure public safety. This spreads the blame for the murder of the protestors to include the victims as well as Rittenhouse, who had arrived from out of state with an AR-15-style rifle. (The ACLU is calling for the sheriff to be fired.)

When “law and order” is the story, the fact that “law” has never been meted out in any sort of even-handed fashion isn’t the story. When there have been months of Black Lives Matter protests, and the response is to call for “law and order,” this should give pause. The structure of law is saturated with practices that guarantee that its protections and penalties will not ensure the safety or dignity of Black members of our country. At every stage of its production and execution, “law and order” is something worth working to change.

Representatives making the law in Congress are disproportionately white. (Though the 116th congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse congress ever, it is only 22% non-white; 39.9% of people in the US are non-white according to the last census.) Further, voting for the representatives who make the law is easier, and designed to be easier, for white people. (After a 2013 Supreme Court decision struck down the Voting Rights Act, over half of the states have added policies that make it more difficult to vote, disproportionately affecting non-white voters. In the end, the system of law-making is bent towards white interests and white voices. And the justice system reflects this as well, both in the first contact it can make with individuals (the police), and the disparate consequences of this contact. Over-policing leads to the disproportionate arrests of Black and Latinx people living in the US. The use of forensic evidence that isn’t scientifically valid and biased for the prosecution, added to the practice of peremptory exemptions stack the deck against defendants in trials. When previously incarcerated people can’t vote, and incarcerated people are disproportionately Black due to these and other systemic problems, there are deep issues with the structure order of law.

But this summer, what are the protests around the country protesting? Not necessarily these legal institutions directly. Rather, the pattern of violence and brutality aimed at Black men and women by the police that has gone unchecked, that has only grown more and more blatantly obvious. The policies and practices of the police force have meant that the patterns of violence have continued. Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Jacob Blake, Daniel Prude, Mychael Johnson, Tony McDade and Wilbon Woodard are just some of the Black people murdered by police officers in 2020.

Appealing to “order” in the face of institutionalized oppression and a lack of indication that law or order will address the violence and lack of accountability is disingenuous, negligent, or hateful. The “order” that the leaders call for characterizes the protests as problematically “disorderly” instead of focusing on the cause for the protests disrupting the order. When paired with the value of “law,” these appeals ignore the failure of the legal system to serve rather than suppress members of our community.

This context might be different if the calls to law and order were redirected to law enforcement. The human rights violations during the protests brought the racism in the United states to the attention of the UN Human Rights Convention. Laws protecting the rights of journalists and medics were blatantly ignored, as police targeted them with the same tear gas and rubber bullets they assaulted other peaceful protesters with. Just in the time between May 26th and June 5th, Amnesty International documented 125 examples of police violence against protesters. The organization also found that the protesters’ human rights were repeatedly violated and documented acts of excessive force by police and law enforcement.

Ultimately, calls for “law and order” fail to acknowledge the grave injustices that got us here in the first place: the enforcers of law and order acting as tools of racism and violence. The response to the protests only highlights the need for the protests in the first place.

July 20, 2020December 14, 2022

To Requite, To Restore, or To Deter: Punishing Amy Cooper

photograph of empty courtroom from Judge's perspective with gavel in foreground

On May 25, Amy Cooper called the cops on Christian Cooper after he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Video of their interaction sparked further debate about racial bias and police brutality, and also led to the renewed pressure to pass a NY State bill banning race-based 911 calls. Amy Cooper was fired from her job, had her dog temporarily confiscated, personal history exposed, and became a household name as one of the many faces representing the white “Karen” complex. She released a subsequent apology in The New York Times, but also immediately hired a defense attorney when she was officially charged with filing a false police report. However, on July 14, Christian Cooper announced he would not be cooperating with Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Cooper concluded that he must “err on the side of compassion and choose not to be involved in this prosecution.” His announcement shocked many and raises further questions about the purpose of punishment and the criminal justice system at large.

Why should we punish “bad actors?” Is the purpose of criminal law to deter crime, to punish perpetrators, or something else? And should prosecutors listen to victims when deciding whether to pursue charges?

Within the theories law and punishment, there are two major answers to the question of the purpose of criminal law: retribution and deterrence. The retributive approach to punishment and criminal justice is the belief that people who do the crime, should serve time. Under retributive theory, perpetrators should be punished regardless of the future consequences. Retributivists believe that the goal of punishment is ultimately to give people what they deserve. Retributivism therefore is inherently backward looking in its justification of punishment. The utilitarian approach to punishment, however, purports that the purpose of punishment is to deter future crime, both by the perpetrator and potential future bad actors. The goal of deterrence-based punishment is positive outcomes for society as a whole, and it is inherently forward-looking in its justification and goals. Both of these approaches to punishment can be used to answer whether or not Amy Cooper should be prosecuted.

In his explanation, Christian Cooper concludes that neither the retributive nor the utilitarian approach to punishment logically justifies Amy Cooper’s prosecution. In terms of retribution, Christian believes that Cooper has already gotten what she deserves. He explains that he believes “in punishments that are commensurate with the wrongdoing.” Cooper sees Amy losing her job and reputation as sufficient punishment for her crime, and even suggests she has little more to lose. He also argues there is little to be gained by punishing Amy Cooper further since the issue of racial bias against black and brown folks is a “long-standing, deep-seated racial bias” which “permeates the United States” and cannot be solved through one symbolic prosecution. He believes that charging Amy Cooper not only does little to solve the racial bias but may in fact cause a different problem because it “lets white people off the hook” from more deeply examining the ways in which they engage with and perpetuate racism. As Cooper explains, “They can push for her prosecution and pat themselves on the back for having done something about racism, when they’ve actually done nothing.” Cooper also points out that the social consequences of her actions might serve as the ultimate deterrence to many. He contends that, “if her current setbacks aren’t deterrent enough to others seeking to weaponize race, it’s unlikely the threat of legal action would change that.” Prosecution is no guarantee of securing positive consequences; it will not deter others who fail to see themselves as holding racial bias. In fact, Cooper argues, there is the potential for her prosecution to backfire and contribute to the continued apathy and unprobed racial bias of white people.

While Christian Cooper believes prosecuting Amy Cooper isn’t justified on retributive or consequentialist grounds, his sister Melody Cooper has a different perspective. In a recent tweet she explains that she believes that the potential for deterrence is simply too beneficial to ignore. Melody agrees with her brother’s argument that policing must change, she also believes that because “People are getting hurt and killed in the meantime” that “if there’s a chance to send a message to other white women they can’t and shouldn’t put black people at risk in this way, it should be done.” To Melody, and those who agree with her, the potential deterrence generated by prosecuting Amy Cooper outweighs all else. She references the very real consequences of interactions between Black people and the police, and the phone calls that precede them. Melody clearly favors the traditional utilitarian approach to punishment in which deterrence and positive outcomes are the highest goal of the criminal justice system.

While Melody and Christian clearly disagree on Amy’s prosecution, another question still remains: should the prosecuting attorney take Christian Cooper’s perspective into account when deciding whether to pursue charges? Neither retributive nor utilitarian approaches to justice necessitate acknowledging the victim’s perspective in determining punishment. However, there is another theory of criminal justice which would center Christian’s perspective and cooperation as the victim of a crime: restorative justice. This approach aims neither to produce the best outcomes nor to give perpetrators what they deserve, but rather intends to repair the harm caused by crime. In a restorative justice system, Christian Cooper’s desire for Amy Cooper not to be sentenced would hold far greater weight than in a retributive or utilitarian system. An article in The Indypendent by Kiara Thomas argues that a restorative justice approach would be the best approach in this situation, since it is not only about harm caused between two people, but represents larger harms such as racism, police violence, and white privilege. This approach might also address the issue of deterrence, since restorative justice has been shown to decrease the likelihood of repeat offense on the part of perpetrators.

Amy Cooper’s first court date is October 14. Despite Christian Cooper’s lack of cooperation, experts predict Amy Cooper will still be successfully prosecuted due to the stark video evidence against her. Whether or not this is immoral depends on what one views the purpose of criminal law to be: to requite, to restore, or to deter.

July 6, 2020January 23, 2024

Dungeons, Dragons, and Du Bois’ Race Problem

On June 17th, Wizards of the Coast — the company that owns and manages the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons — released a statement about its plans to update the official rule sets and materials describing the fictional worlds of D&D. In addition to hiring new staff (including sensitivity readers) and altering the canonical depictions of some fictional people groups that “echoed some stereotypes” of real-world cultures, Wizards of the Coast is intentionally working to eliminate the role of racial attributes and cultural essentialism within the fantasy game. Specifically, this will mean shifting character-creation techniques to center individualized player choices about a character’s background (rather than making certain features dependent on the character’s race) and, most notably, recasting the two “evil” races within D&D as people groups that are “just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples.”

If you’re not already familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, much of that last paragraph probably sounds pretty odd. First published in the 1970s, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) that offers a basic set of rules for players to follow as they collectively tell a make-believe story about heroes and villains in a fantasy world. Perhaps most famously, these sorts of RPGs use dice rolls to randomize the outcomes of various in-game events, allowing players opportunities to cooperatively and creatively react to unexpected elements of the imaginary scene. Often, those dice rolls are modified by various attributes of your player-character and, to date, at least some of those modifications have been pre-set based on which of the several fictional races (like elves, tieflings, and dragonborn) your character represents. And, while the story of each game of D&D is unique to the group of people (or “party”) playing, Wizards of the Coast regularly publishes a wealth of materials to help parties create the worlds of their stories.

The announced changes to D&D amount to a shift away from an essentialistic approach to race or culture within the game — an approach long-criticized in both Dungeons and Dragons and the fantasy genre writ large. Such a story-telling technique treats a character’s biology or social origin as necessarily constraining their personality, worldview, or moral compass, such as when Rowling’s giants or Tolkien’s trolls are treated as hopelessly evil enemies for the heroes to simply eliminate. According to the most recent Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, the drow (or “dark elves”) are a “depraved” race of people who are “universally reviled” after their ancestors followed a path “to evil and corruption;” players who choose to role-play as a drow are encouraged to treat their characters as unusual individuals who have “develop[ed] a conscience.” Similarly, D&D presents the orc race as a monstrous, violent culture bent on waging “an endless war against humans, elves, dwarves, and other folk.” If players choose to create a half-orc character to role-play (full orcs are not officially valid options), the Handbook advises that evil impulses and desires will necessarily “lurk within them, whether they embrace it or rebel against it.” Although it remains to be seen how Wizards of the Coast exactly plans on presenting the orcs and drow “in a new light” going forward, the way they have presented these races to this point is plain.

While the response to Wizards of the Coast’s announcement seems to have been largely positive, it has not escaped criticism. Most detractors argue that these rule shifts are unnecessary, either because they will do little to prevent actual racism in the real world or because the classic presentation of orcs in D&D isn’t racist in the first place. Some have suggested that the publishers of D&D have actually been fooled by supposedly-disingenuous protestors interested more in social control than social justice. One need only look to the responses on Wizards of the Coast’s Twitter thread or the comments on, for example, Breitbart’s coverage of the story to see such attitudes.

But these critiques fall flat. Even if used simply to promote seemingly-innocent story-telling tropes or to simplify morality narratives for easier digestion, any reliance on cultural or racial essentialism — even just narratively — is ethically perilous (and, incidentally, aesthetically lazy). The point is not that “racists portrayal of these fictional peoples will promote racist treatment of non-fictional peoples,” but rather that employing racial essentialism of any stripe legitimates — even unconsciously — an unavoidably immoral way of viewing the world (regardless of whether that world is Abeir-Toril, Arda, or Earth).

It is a way of viewing the world which W.E.B. Du Bois describes as “a vast veil” that shuts people out from the worlds in which they belong. Speaking from his own experience as a Black man at the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois traces how his personal experiences of racism in post-Reconstruction America mirrored wider social policies designed to maintain the cultural homogeneity of the United States in the wake of Emancipation. Time and again, Du Bois recounts stories of how relatively mundane — and, perhaps, unintentional, in some cases — choices led to him being routinely set apart from the people around him. Consider this anecdote from when Du Bois was a college student looking for work as a teacher in Tennessee:

“I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on. ‘Come in,’ said the commissioner,—’come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?’ ‘Oh,’ thought I, ‘this is lucky’; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone.” (The Souls of Black Folk, ch. IV)

The Veil comes from the often-unspoken set of assumptions about what counts as “normal” in matters of race and culture against which everything, including even relatively small and otherwise-unimportant actions, is tacitly judged. The Veil is also a manifestation of one form of racial essentialism that judges (even implicitly) individuals in virtue of their biology, rather than their unique personalities and histories.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: my point is not that a fictional orc is necessarily wronged by a Dungeons and Dragons player treating it like a monster (nor is it that a player who doesn’t care about orcs will also not care about flesh-and-blood humans). Instead, my point is that carefully considering both the intentional and unintentional messages of our cultural artifacts (like D&D) is an important part of being responsible people who care about our fellow citizens; this is precisely what Wizards of the Coast has started to do. Suggesting that the kinds of racial and cultural essentialism long-incorporated into Dungeons and Dragons is valid somewhere, even just in a fictional context, requires us to say (or at least operate on the assumption) that it is not inherently unethical — that is a morally indefensible position.

Echoing Fredrick Douglas before him, Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” In this regard, the twenty-first century is no different: what Du Bois called the “race problem” remains, both in explicit, intentional acts of racist oppression and, far more frequently, in the unthinking assumptions that lead many to uphold the Veil, however accidentally. Defenses of racial essentialism, wherever they may appear, contribute to this in their own way by tacitly legitimating a fundamental component of the Veil’s operation.

(It’s also worth pointing out that the stereotypical depiction of orcs and “dark elves” likewise demonstrates Du Bois’ separate point about a curiously European theory of human culture wherein “Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is ‘white’; everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is ‘yellow’; a bad taste is ‘brown’; and the devil is ‘black.’” Considering the potential contributions of such imagery to the contemporary real-world Veil is an exercise left to the reader.)

Given both the inherent customizability of the game and its five-decade-long history, it is not possible for Wizards of the Coast to simply change by fiat how all parties will play D&D, but the company is taking visible steps to improve how racial diversity will be officially represented going forward. Given that the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons has skyrocketed in recent years (including being prominently featured in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things) and the lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have only spurred greater interest, it is good to see Wizards of the Coast clearly demonstrate that it wants “everyone to feel at home around the game table and to see positive reflections of themselves within our products.” Analyzing how the Veil might nevertheless affect both the worlds and the players of Dungeons and Dragons, even unintentionally, is an important part of engaging with this sliver of our culture’s much larger race problem.

February 11, 2020December 14, 2022

Prejudice in the NFL?

The NFL is over for the next six months. The Superbowl has been won, all the player and coach accolades have been handed out, and teams are busy looking to build on the 2020-2021 season in free agency and the upcoming draft. But in today’s contemporary media environment, the NFL can’t be just about football. Over the past few seasons, the NFL has endured a series of serious media crisis–player safety, television ratings, and scandalous players (mostly Antonio Brown). But an issue that continues to linger is about diversity and the impact of racial issues on the game. This is no surprise to anyone, as the diversity issues were the subject of host Steve Harvey’s monologue at this year’s NFL 100 Awards ceremony. Indeed, the small pool of minorities that sit in front offices and on coaching staffs, as well as recent decisions regarding players of color raise the question of who’s to blame for the NFL’s diversity issues as well as who’s responsible for finding solutions for them.

70% of NFL players are black–the lineman, the runningbacks, the defense, the receiving core. But if you look at one position in particular, it’s not reflective of the majority demographic–the quarterback. Per The New York Times, 12 black quarterbacks started for the NFL 2019-2020 season, but it’s one QB short for tying the record of most black quarterback starts in a single season. There’s even been a bit of controversy regarding black quarterbacks in the last few seasons. The most recent being about the NFL 2019 MVP Lamar Jackson. The Ravens quarterback was unanimously voted the league’s most valuable player, but his talents weren’t always recognized. Many sports analysts, league owners, and coaches considered Jackson a running back disguised as a quarterback. Some even suggested that he move to the wide receiver position. On one hand, comments about Jackson’s game could be purely based on what he demonstrated at the combine. But on the other hand, a black man being judged predominantly by white males hints at something deeper. Maybe it wasn’t just Jackson’s performance at the combine, it was that he didn’t fit the traditional image of a NFL quarterback–Joe Montana, Dan Marino, or Tom Brady (who Jackson happened to beat last season). However, in the same token, Superbowl champ Patrick Mahomes and Texans QB Deshaun Watson are also impacting the traditional image of a quarterback through their style of play.

Lamar Jackson isn’t the only black quarterback that has received pushback for what he does on the field. There’s Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers QB who exited the league after kneeling on the sidelines during the national anthem in protest of police brutality of African Americans. Team GM’s, owners, and even the President of the United States condemned Kaepernick for his actions. Now, are the comments from NFL GM’s and owners indicative of prejudice? Like Lamar Jackson, Kaepernick’s critics were mostly white men. The fact that they were against speaking out against police brutality, no matter how controversial the topic might be for the league, is questionable. But at the same time, once Kaepernick left the league and couldn’t sign with a team, the main reason he couldn’t get a job was because he was considered a PR nightmare. Regardless if teams agreed with Kaep’s kneeling or not, no team wanted the news stories that would come from signing him. If so, then the issue of prejudice would be about the fans’ bias if they condemned Kaepernick for kneeling. To complicate matters even further, Dak Prescott, QB of the Dallas Cowboys, said that Kaepernick’s protests had no place in the league despite being a black man himself. Either way, some sentiment surrounding Jackson and Kaepernick might go beyond what they do on the field.

Jackson and Kaep are only the most recent cases though. Since black men were allowed to play quarterback in the league, they were often considered not smart enough to run offenses or read defenses. Marlin Briscoe, the first ever black quarterback to start in the league, threw 14 touchdowns during his rookie season with the Denver Broncos. John Elway, a legend Broncos QB, only threw half as many touchdowns as Briscoe during his rookie season. Despite the performance, Briscoe never played quarterback again. Warren Moon, the only black quarterback in the NFL Hall of Fame made MVP for the 1977 Rose Bowl and still wasn’t invited to the NFL Combine. He didn’t play in the NFL for six seasons after he left college. Like Jackson, Moon was also told to switch to running back or wide receiver.

The same negative sentiment didn’t only apply to players either. Although 70% of the players in the NFL are black, only 9% of the managers in league’s front offices are and 0% are CEO’s or team presidents. There is only one black general manager and out of the 32 NFL teams, 3 of the league’s head coaches are black. Back in 2003, the league introduced the Rooney Rule, a policy aimed at addressing the lack of diversity at the head coaching level. Per the Rooney Rule, teams are required to interview at least one minority for head-coaching positions and front office jobs. But per a study by the Global Sport and Education Lab at Arizona State University, the Rooney Rule didn’t improve minorities’ chances of being hired. According to The Atlantic, in the past three years 19 head coaching positions were made available and only 2 black coaches filled the openings. Some black coaches are rarely given a chance to make an impact on a team either. Former Detroit Lions coach Jim Caldwell was fired after back to back 9-7 records for the 2017 and 2018 season. Bob Quinn, the Lions’ GM, said that Caldwell wasn’t meeting expectations. But Quinn then went on to hire former New England Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia, who went 9-22 in his first two seasons as head coach. Last season, the Lions record was 3-12-1.

It could be argued that rather than prejudice, the NFL’s diversity issues are purely “best man for the job” decisions. Teams look for the best quarterbacks that fit their offense and can lead a team. Team owners and GMs bring in coaches that can draw up plays accustomed to their team’s culture. But simultaneously, race is the driving force behind many if not all of the United States’ issues. Politics, advertising, music, fashion, literature, and every other medium that can be thought of is influenced by race is some form or fashion. Is it so farfetched to think that sports isn’t any different? Perhaps some personnel decisions are purely based on skill and compatibility. But at the same time, the league has been around for decades, and maybe some of the racist sentiment of the past century has seeped into the present.

October 25, 2019December 14, 2022

The Black Wall Street Massacre, Contributory Injustice, and HBO’s Watchmen

black and white aerial photograph of Tulsa Race Riot

On October 20th, the latest adaptation of Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s ground-breaking 1987 graphic novel Watchmen premiered on HBO; its opening scene featured the Tulsa Race Massacre, potentially “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” where thousands of buildings were burned and hundreds of black Oklahomans murdered in the Spring of 1921. Also known as the Black Wall Street Massacre, it was sparked when tensions escalated after a local black shoeshiner was accused of accosting a white elevator operator; because there was talk of an impending lynching, the black community protested, leading to an exchange of gunfire.

For many HBO viewers, the most surprising thing about the scene was not its graphic violence, but the later realization that the Massacre was, indeed, a historical event – an especially bloody episode in American history which, by and large, goes undiscussed in American schools.

Consider now the message that President Donald Trump, embroiled within an impeachment inquiry about multiple cases of corruption and misconduct, tweeted on October 22nd:

“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!”

Immediately, Trump was criticized for comparing the constitutionally-outlined impeachment process to the lawless brutality of lynching, a form of domestic terrorism almost exclusively used to reinforce racist oppression throughout the country by torturing and murdering black men. For anyone to draw (or defend) such an analogy requires, at best, an embarrassing level of ignorance or insensitivity about the actual history of racial abuse in the United States.

In different ways, both of these cases evidence what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “patriotism à la carte” – a selective awareness of our national history that highlights certain favorable elements (or, at least, elements favorable to a particular subset of Americans) while quietly ignoring others. To Coates, such an approach to history is dishonest and, when it prevents some groups of Americans from being able to fully understand and engage with their current social situation, oppressive. Rather than cherry-pick the stories which we collectively magnify into cultural icons, Coates argues that an honest treatment of history will include multiple perspectives – even, and especially, if some perspectives emphasize that the U.S.A. (and its heroes) has not always been heroic for everyone: “If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.”

Furthermore, both the general ignorance about Black Wall Street and the specific ignorance about the cruelty of lynching demonstrate various forms of what Kristie Dotson, professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has dubbed “third-order epistemic injustice” or, more simply, “contributory injustice.” In general, epistemic injustice relates to the ethical implications of how society mistreats knowledge claims from various parties. If a woman accuses a man of sexual assault, but her testimony is, as a matter of principle, treated with skepticism, then she may be the victim of first-order epistemic injustice, often called “testimonial injustice,” because her testimony is unjustly discredited. Cases of second-order injustice – also known as hermeneutical injustice – result when a person is not only unable to communicate their experiences, but is prevented from even privately conceptualizing their own experiences, such as in the case of harassment or assault victims prior to the coinage of terms like “sexual harassment,” “date rape,” or “marital rape.”

Contributory, or third-order, epistemic injustice comes about as a matter of what Dotson calls “situated ignorance” which prevents the voices of marginalized groups from contributing to the wider cultural conversation. By “maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources,” perpetrators of contributory injustice define what “counts” as “real” history; the fact that audience members of HBO’s Watchmen were surprised to learn about the violent mistreatment of the actual residents of Greenwood, Oklahoma may well stem from the systemic “à la carte” approach to America’s racial history that Coates decried. Importantly, those guilty of maintaining dominant perspectives may not consciously realize that they are silencing marginalized groups, but – whether such actions are intentional or not – such silencing remains and, therefore, remains a problem.

And when Donald Trump or others try to dilute the severity of America’s racist past by comparing professional accountability (and potential prosecution for legitimate crimes) to the painful history of the illegal and immoral lynching of innocent people, this also evidences Dotson’s concern to highlight the role that social power plays in maintaining the process of contributory injustice. As she points out, hermeneutical injustice entails that both a speaker and an audience are unable to understand the thing in question; in a case of contributory injustice, the marginalized group can fully conceptualize their own experience, but differential social positions prevent the confused people in power from attending to the less-powerful perspective – it is a lopsided confusion propped up by the ignorance of the powerful.

Interest in philosophical considerations of epistemic injustice, and the wider field of “social epistemology” as a whole, is growing; it remains to be seen just how long it might take for its insights to substantively contribute to the broader public conversation.

April 23, 2018December 14, 2022

Who is Welcome at Starbucks?

Most Starbucks customers have spent a good number of non-paying hours in Starbucks stores—waiting for a friend, writing a paper or grading one, staying warm, or just chilling. And most regular customers will admit to an occasional purchase-free visit to the store just for the purpose of using the bathroom. But when two black men in Philadelphia went to a store in Rittenhouse Square for a business meeting and asked for the bathroom key, having ordered nothing first, it was only two minutes before an employee called 911. The police showed up minutes later, handcuffed the two and put them in a squad car. Only after nine hours at police headquarters, with Starbucks declining to press trespassing charges, were they released.

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February 22, 2017January 23, 2024

The Complexities of Reforming Indiana’s Bail System

Every year, thousands of bills are written and proposed during Indiana’s legislative session. The Indiana General Assembly takes place during the first few months of the year, and is a chance for state representatives to advance their agenda. Many Americans pay more attention to what happens at the federal level, but state and local government also has a large influence on the lives of citizens. The 2017 session, Jan 3 through April 29, is taking place during a budget year, and in the wake of an extremely contentious and important state and national election. Legislation authored this session ranges from bills that deregulate environmental protection to resolutions aimed at honoring professional athletes. One bill that has not gained much attention, however, raises numerous ethical concerns in regards to criminal justice and the prison system.

Senate Bill 228, authored by Senator Michael Young, aims to reform Indiana’s approach to bail and release after arrest. This bill involves the rules regarding pretrial risk assessment system which assist courts in assessing an arrestee’s likelihood of: (1) committing a new criminal offense; or (2) failing to appear.

At first glance this bill doesn’t seem particularly unusual. After all, using risk assessment in the criminal justice system doesn’t sound particularly radical or unethical. However, a closer examination of the bill reveals a large ethical dilemma. According to S.B. 228, the Indiana Supreme Court will revolutionize the standards for bail and release. Instead of basing bail and release off of a standard punishment for crime, it will rely upon risk assessment “based on empirical data derived through validated criminal justice scientific research” regarding individuals and the groups to which they might belong.

Proponents of the bill would argue that this not only humanizes those arrested on bail but also saves taxpayers money. Ideally, fewer people would be stuck waiting for their bail to be posted or for their trial, and therefore less taxpayer money would be dedicated to detaining those arrested. It is estimated that at any given time, there are nearly half a million Americans detained in local jails awaiting their trial, which costs approximately $17 billion every year. Many also argue that the notion of bail is outdated, and inherently favors wealthy individuals over poorer ones, further reinforcing societal inequalities surrounding income. Evidence-based risk assessment has been implemented in Kentucky, and supporters point to the fact that the average arrest rate for released defendants has declined. Additionally, many legislators are aiming to improve the reputation of the United States, which has one of the highest prison populations in the world, based on the fact that this bill would most likely result in less pretrial prisoners.

But will abolishing bail and relying upon risk assessment truly improve the stark inequalities present in the criminal justice system? Risk assessment aims to allow those who are detained for non-violent crimes and are not repeat offenders out of jail before their trial. But what are the complications of individualizing criminal offenses? Though fewer people would ideally be sitting in jail awaiting pretrial, those who are detained may be treated differently than those who committed the same crimes, or even more serious ones. If two people are arrested for the same crime, shouldn’t they be treated the same regardless of differences in criminal record and history?

Factors such as race, criminal arrest record, or even gender could influence how risk assessment is measured and change how two people who commit the same crime are treated. A report on bail and pretrial risk assessment admits that “researchers have documented that racial bias can influence how juvenile offenses are described in post-arrest narrative reports, which could influence pretrial release decisions.” Though one could argue that educating law enforcement officials about implicit bias could eliminate this problem, S.B. 228 does not encourage or mandate doing so. Additionally, there has been increased debate about whether or not crime statistics can stand alone if they do not take into account racial and socioeconomic inequalities.

Though controversial, S.B. 228 passed its Senate Committee vote 8-1, passing an amendment on February 19. Though it is too early to tell if S.B. 228 will make it through the legislative process and become law, it should be considered seriously. The ethical implications of transforming pretrial requirements to individual considerations as opposed to a standard should not be taken lightly.

October 21, 2016December 14, 2022

Who is Getting a Fair Trial? A Problem with Ensuring the Impartiality of Juries

When you are accused of a crime, likely of chief concern will be that your jury will treat you fairly. Once the jury is presented with the facts and are briefed on how to understand the law, they go off to deliberate. How the jury deliberates from there is up to them, and you trust that they follow the judge’s instructions and don’t hold any biases they may have against you.

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