Pure Institutional Racism
Let’s restrict our attention to the idealized case in which no officer of an established E-like racist institution harbors a racist attitude and in which, owing to ideology, none of its officers recognize that institutions they serve have racist goals or contribute materially to racial inequality.
Call this pure institutional racism. In this special case, it does seem fair to say that no individual is blameworthy. It should be clear why this is so. The individual officers’ racial attitudes do not deserve blame, since, by hypothesis, their attitudes are non-racist. Their ignorance of the goals and material effects of their institutions is due to ideology rather than negligence and hence, plausibly, non-culpable. Non-culpable ignorance is excusing. Since the officers do not aim at the institution’s goal, they are not to blame for its material effects. So, in the case of pure institutional racism, it appears that the individual office holders are off the hook with respect to blame. But the story does not end here.For one thing, it is not clear that ideology completely exonerates. Even when agents are subject to ideology, they may still be able to see, for example, the harmful effects of their institution’s operation. Agents have a responsibility to reflect even when an ideology makes that difficult. And so individual office holders who are subject to ideology may be partly on the hook with respect to blame.
Another point. As Tommie Shelby notes “[t]o say that a person’s conduct, an institution, or whole society is shaped by ideology is certainly a type of criticism. It is not however ordinary moral criticism like calling someone a liar, coward, or murderer” (Shelby 2014: 68). The claim that individuals are subject to ideology does not amount to the claim that they are morally at fault. It instead comes to the assertion that they suffer from “false consciousness.”11 False consciousness is a type of (aretaic) impairment.
The assertion that individuals are subject to ideology is a type of criticism. To be subject to false consciousness is to be ideologically tainted.Moreover, individuals who, owing to ideology, support E-like institutions are on the hook with respect to wrongdoing. Such individuals enable the institutions in which they participate to actualize their malefic goals. Their participation makes the operation of these institutions possible. Enabling institutions to actualize malefic goals is wrong. More precisely, it is pro tanto wrong. That is to say its badness might in principle be outweighed by other good things the officers do, working within their institution. (We are supposing that the institutions have benign as well as malefic goals.) But it is also to say that the wrong they do in participating in these institutions counts as wrong even in circumstances in which its badness is outweighed. Exculpation is not justification. The fact that they are exculpated (wholly or partially) by ideology for participating in E-like institutions does not mean that they are justified in participating in such institutions. Because individuals who carry out their roles within E-like institutions enable these institutions to actualize their malefic goals, they are implicated in racial oppression. That is, they are involved by their own agency in the malefic activity of the institutions in which they take part.
The fact that individuals who participate in E-like institutions are implicated in the wrongdoing of their institutions is illustrated by the fact that, should they come to understand their involvement in the furtherance of racial oppression, various “reactive” responses on their part may become appropriate.12 One such response is regret. Guilt would not be appropriate because, for reasons given above, the officers are not morally at fault. The officers might of course “feel” guilty, but just as it would be inappropriate for us to blame them, so it would inappropriate for them to blame themselves.
On the other hand, the subjective first-person thought that it would have been much better had she done otherwise, the “constitutive thought” of so-called “agentregret,” is fully appropriate for individuals in this position (Williams 1981). Think of it this way: people who together act in such a way as to enable racist institutions’ subordination of particular racial groups are not bystanders to oppression. They are, quite literally, agents of oppression.12. That is, they are the individual agents who carry out the oppression of the institutions of which they are a part. Note that one can say this without going so far as to characterize them as oppressors (Haslanger 2004: 102—103, Calhoun 1989). That epithet might be warranted if they acted in such a way as to compound the wrongdoing of intrinsically racist institutions, but we are supposing this is not the case. Other reactive responses might be appropriate, too. One would be to offer a sincere apology, to acknowledge the harm that they had done and the fact that they had wronged others. Still another response would be to atone for their wrongdoing. They might do so by engaging in antiracist activism.The reflections in this section make clear that the fact that “the structures are the problem,” does not entail that we cannot or ought not to ask about the responsibilities of individuals. Even after it has been determined that the structures are the problem, urgent questions remain about the responsibilities of the individuals who occupy them. Pace Haslanger (or how she might be read) the moral-political question concerning the responsibilities of individual participants within racist institutions is not nullified by the political question about the oppression wrought by E-like institutions. Nonetheless, Haslangers claim that in the special case of pure institutional racism, the individuals occupying institutional roles are not to blame is basically right.14
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