RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE GOOD”
Date
2017
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Repository Usage Stats
views
downloads
Citation Stats
Attention Stats
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
Department
Description
Provenance
Citation
Permalink
Published Version (Please cite this version)
Publication Info
Grynaviski, JD, and MC Munger (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
Scholars@Duke
![Munger](https://scholars.duke.edu/profile-images/thumbnail200/0200037.jpg)
Michael C. Munger
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 Choice Society, an international academic society of political scientists and economists with members in 16 countries. He was North American Editor of the journal Public Choice for five years, and is now a Co-Editor of The Independent Review. His recent books include Choosing in Groups (2015, Cambridge U Press) and Tomorrow 3.0 (2018, Cambridge U Press). Munger's most recent book, The Sharing Economy, was published in 2021 by the Institute for Economic Affairs.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.