ALERT: This system is being upgraded on Tuesday December 12. It will not be available
for use for several hours that day while the upgrade is in progress. Deposits to DukeSpace
will be disabled on Monday December 11, so no new items are to be added to the repository
while the upgrade is in progress. Everything should be back to normal by the end of
day, December 12.
RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE GOOD”
Abstract
Copyright © 2017 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation. Our theoretical claim is
that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later
evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic
purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites,
preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners
to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own
slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human (and therefore requiring
care, as a positive duty of the slave owner, as a man cares for his children, who
cannot care for themselves), or else as being other than human (and therefore being
spiritually no different from cattle or horses, and therefore requiring only the same
considerations for maintenance and husbandry). The interest of the historical narrative
presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely
defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of
the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted
far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction,
Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems
of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated
and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior
ideologies can prove extremely persistent.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Social SciencesArts & Humanities
Ethics
Philosophy
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Social Sciences - Other Topics
Identity
ideology
moral intuition
political philosophy
slavery
SLAVERY
SOUTH
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17544Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1017/S0265052517000073Publication Info
Grynaviski, JD; & Munger, MC (2017). RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE
GOOD”. Social Philosophy and Policy, 34(01). pp. 144-163. 10.1017/S0265052517000073. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17544.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Michael C. Munger
Professor of Political Science
Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program. His primary
research focus is on the functioning of markets, regulation, and government institutions.
He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina
(where he was Director of the Master of Public Administration Program), as well as
working as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration.
Munger is a past President of the Public

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info