Offsetting Race Privilege

Dunham, J.; Lawford-Smith, H.

doi:10.26556/jesp.v11i2.109

Offsetting Race Privilege

Dunham, J.; Lawford-Smith, H.

Authors

Dr Jeremy Dunham jeremy.w.dunham@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

H. Lawford-Smith

Abstract

For all the talk lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations associated with having privilege. Those who have commented have not gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege and should listen to those who do not have it. Here we want to go further and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper, we articulate an understanding of race privilege, show how a person can know when she has it and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial-group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize.

Citation

Dunham, J., & Lawford-Smith, H. (2017). Offsetting Race Privilege. Journal of ethics & social philosophy, 11(2), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v11i2.109

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Jun 7, 2017
Publication Date	Jun 7, 2017
Deposit Date	Sep 27, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Aug 1, 2018
Journal	Journal of ethics & social philosophy
Publisher	University of Southern California
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	11
Issue	2
Pages	1-23
DOI	https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v11i2.109