Racism: the harm reduction approach

Debates over racial justice on the left are dominated by two factions. The one that has been attracting the most attention lately is the woke/DEI/anti-racism faction, which is advancing a form of identity politics as the best strategy for achieving racial justice. The other major faction, which one can think of as vaguely Marxist in inspiration, thinks that the focus on identity and race is both divisive and distracting from the more important questions of justice, which are ultimately economic.

Both of these views are, in their own way, rather extreme, as a result of which many people have reservations about both of them. People worry about the woke position because it is, on the one hand, extremely polarizing, but on the other hand, entirely reliant on moral motivation to effect change. In other words, its strategy for achieving social change seems to involve making those who enjoy various forms of majority privilege feel guilty enough to renounce those privileges. That may work on a small scale, and in left-wing institutions, but it manifestly fails in electoral politics. The economistic view, on the other hand, has greater appeal to the majority, and yet seems to offer minorities little more than a promissory note, one that never seems to get redeemed. Forget about racism, it says, focus on economic justice, and all of those other problems will go away. (This became a bit of a running joke after 2016, when Trump was elected U.S. President, and Democrats kept insisting that “economic anxiety” in red states was to blame.)

That leaves a lot of people, like myself, somewhat stranded in the middle. On the one hand, I think that racism is a self-standing phenomenon and independent source of inequality. So that puts me a lot closer to the woke than to the economic justice crowd. At the same time, I think that the dominant strategy that has been adopted by the woke for combating racism is counterproductive. As a result, I have found it extremely discouraging to see the Canadian left going all-in on this strategy, despite the fact that it seems to be more effective at generating conflict than at promoting justice.

The problem, however, is that you can’t beat something with nothing. You need to come up with a better theory, and a better approach to these issues. In the past, I have taken the somewhat reactionary stance, vis-a-vis the woke anti-racism trend, that Canadians should just stick to the old multiculturalism framework as a way of thinking about these issues. This is partly because multiculturalism is more appropriate to the Canadian context, partly because it offers a less accusatory way of framing the issues. I still think there is a lot to be said for this position. (For example, I consider it astonishingly reckless for the current Liberal government, after having essentially lost control of the immigration system, to announce with great fanfare over $100 million in spending on “anti-racism” initiatives. What is the point of using the divisive American term “anti-racism” to characterize what is actually a set of programs aimed at the immigrant integration? Why not call it what we used to call it, which is “promoting multiculturalism”? It’s like they want to insult the median voter.)

My reactionary stance, however, does not address the challenges posed by actual racism (as opposed to immigrant integration). On that subject, I have a number of long-standing policy preferences, but have until recently lacked a coherent philosophical framework for expressing them. This began to change last year, when I came across an article with a strange title by Daniel Weinstock: “Multiculturalism as Harm Reduction.” I’d known for a while that Daniel had been thinking about “harm reduction,” but I had sort of pigeon-holed it as part of his professional engagement with public health ethics. It wasn’t until reading the multiculturalism article that I realized he was thinking about it as a general framework for addressing difficult policy questions.

Weinstock’s basic observation is that many people, when they think about the implementation of their political values, derive a set of prohibitions on behaviour, but then get hung up on the idea that the prohibited behaviour “shouldn’t be happening,” and so fail to respond reasonably when it does wind up happening, in defiance of the prohibition. Their normative reasoning gets stuck at a “first-best” level, leading them to double down on the prohibition, often with increased punitiveness. Safe injection sites for drug users are an interesting exception to this (and the canonical example of harm reduction), because they pursue their objectives despite the general prohibition on the drugs in question. The rationale is something like: “even though it would be best if no one did this, some people are going to do it, and we cannot stop them, so we might as well do what we can to mitigate the damage.”

Put this way, I realized that for a long time this had basically been my attitude toward racists, authoritarians, and the far right. Naturally we should do what we can to reduce the prevalence of these attitudes, but we should also recognize that we are unlikely to be successful at total elimination, and so should do what we can to minimize the power and impact of those who are unlikely to be reformed. I had previously thought of this, privately, as a “quarantine” strategy, but I realized that it could be broadened and defended as a form of harm reduction.

The details of all this are tricky though. Most importantly, there is no generally accepted philosophical account of the harm reduction approach. I realized as I went along that I actually disagreed with Weinstock’s view of the matter, and agreed more with Shannon Dea, who has been working on the same issues for a while. So I wound up writing two papers. The first is a general account of the harm reduction approach (“Consequentialism for Deontologists”), in which I criticize Weinstock and elaborate my own view. (These details are important, because the way that Weinstock interprets the harm reduction approach, one would not want to apply it in the case of racism. So it matters a great deal how the philosophical reconstruction goes.) The second is a longer piece making the case that we should adopt a harm reduction approach to attitudinal racism (“A Harm Reduction Approach to Attitudinal Racism”) and outlining some of the policy implications of the approach.

I posted drafts of both papers because I’m going to be giving the second one as a talk this coming week in Montreal. The Canadian Journal of Philosophy kindly invited me to give their Distinguished Lecture this year, and this seemed like an appropriate topic for the occasion, given that it builds on one of the more interesting discussions that has been going on in Canadian political philosophy over the past decade. I literally have no idea how the argument will be received, and so am looking forward to the session. My sense is that there is some appetite for an alternative to the woke approach to the issue, but at the same time a great deal of trepidation about abandoning a zero-tolerance stance.