Racism

The moral rejection of racism is one of the few claims in twenty-first-century public life on which the political tradition has reached genuine consensus. What that consensus does not settle, and what conservatives have insisted should not be settled by stipulation, is what racism is — whether it names a kind of moral failure in persons or a kind of statistical pattern in institutions, and which response the rejection requires.

What the conservative defends, in this domain, is the older formulation: racism is a moral wrong because it denies the equal dignity of persons under God, and the proper response is to extend that recognition consistently, not to reintroduce racial categories as instruments of social policy.

Key takeaways

• Racism, in the conservative tradition, is the doctrine that human beings are sorted into hierarchically ordered races whose members can be morally evaluated on the basis of ancestry rather than character or conduct, and the tradition has rejected the doctrine as incompatible with both natural law and the imago Dei.
• The conservative reading distinguishes the moral wrong of racism — the treatment of persons as instances of a category — from the contemporary academic theory that recasts the term to denote systemic outcomes irrespective of intention, a redefinition the tradition treats as both conceptually and politically destabilising.
• The dispute between conservatives and progressives over race in the United States and Britain is, beneath the policy questions, a dispute about whether the proper response to historical injustice is the steady extension of equal treatment to every person or the recalibration of treatment by group identity in pursuit of equal outcomes.

History and context

The Western moral tradition’s resources for opposing racism long predate the modern term. The Stoic doctrine of universal humanity, transmitted through Cicero’s De Officiis (44 BC), held that the rational nature shared by all human beings created moral obligations that crossed the boundaries of city and tribe. The Christian doctrine that every person bears the image of God grounded the same conclusion in revelation: Paul’s claim in Galatians 3:28 that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” in Christ became a recurring touchstone for arguments against the natural-slavery doctrines that the classical inheritance had also contained.¹

The early-modern controversy over the conquest and evangelisation of the Americas produced the first systematic critique of racial subordination. The Valladolid debate of 1550–1551 set Bartolomé de Las Casas, defending the rational and spiritual equality of the indigenous peoples, against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who had argued from Aristotelian premises that they were natural slaves. The Spanish Crown, ruling against Sepúlveda, established that the indigenous peoples were full subjects deserving the protections of natural and divine law.² The argument was not always honoured in practice, but the theoretical settlement was clear, and it shaped the subsequent missionary critique of the encomienda system.

The Anglo-American debate over chattel slavery produced the most consequential racial doctrines of the modern period. The defence of slavery developed by John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh in the antebellum American South departed sharply from the older paternalist position by treating racial difference as itself the warrant for permanent subordination. Abraham Lincoln’s reply, in the debates with Stephen Douglas (1858) and the speeches of the war years, rested on the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” and treated this claim as a moral standard against which the practice of slavery and the doctrines that defended it must be judged.³ The post-Civil-War amendments — the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — incorporated the Lincolnian reading into the constitutional text, though Reconstruction’s failure delayed its enforcement by a century.

The twentieth-century civil-rights movement in the United States and the parallel anti-colonial movements abroad presented racism as the central moral question of the period, and the response from the older liberal-conservative tradition was unambiguous. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, had been pushed through the Senate with conservative Republican votes essential to overcoming a Southern Democratic filibuster. Martin Luther King Jr.’s argument in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) rested on the natural-law tradition: “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”⁴

The 1970s and 1980s saw the gradual reconstruction of “racism” from a doctrine to a structure. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967) introduced the distinction between “individual racism” and “institutional racism”; subsequent academic developments, culminating in the critical race theory of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others, extended this reconstruction by treating racial outcomes rather than racial intentions as the central object of analysis. Robert P. George and others have argued that this reconstruction, whatever its analytical merits, severs the term from the moral content that made its rejection a matter of conscience.⁵

The conservative position

Three claims structure the tradition.

First, persons are not their categories. The wrong of racism, on the conservative account, is that it ranks human beings by ancestry rather than by what they are and what they do. To restore racial categorisation as a method of social organisation, even in pursuit of remedy, is to reproduce in mirror image the error one purports to oppose. Justice Antonin Scalia’s claim that “in the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American” stated the position succinctly.

Second, the older language identified a moral wrong. The redefinition of racism as a statistical pattern abstracted from intention severs the term from the wrongness that made its denunciation morally serious. A person who has held no racist beliefs, voted for no racist policy, and treated every person he has met without regard to race is now said, under the newer usage, to participate in racism by virtue of his demographic position. The conservative treats this redefinition as a category error: it confuses outcomes with wrongs and produces a vocabulary in which guilt is assigned without conduct.

Third, the remedy is the steady extension of equal treatment. The conservative reading of the American constitutional tradition holds that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection is honoured by colour-blind law and breached by racial classification, even when the classification is offered in the language of remedy. The position is not that every preference for one group over another is the moral equivalent of every other; the claim is that the constitutional standard, once departed from, becomes vulnerable to capture by whichever coalition has the present majority.

Differing positions

The critical race theory position, in its strongest academic form, holds that the colour-blind framework is itself a means by which racial hierarchy is preserved, because formal equality leaves intact the cumulative effects of historical injustice. Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) drew the practical conclusion: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”⁶ The conservative reply concedes the historical record but resists the conclusion: a doctrine that authorises racial discrimination in pursuit of racial equality has restored the principle whose rejection was the moral achievement of the civil-rights tradition.

The reparations position holds that the United States and other states that profited from racial slavery and its successor regimes owe specific compensatory transfers to the descendants of the wronged. The conservative engages this position primarily by pressing on its administrative and moral logistics — how the obligation is to be calculated, who is to bear it, how it relates to other historical injustices, and whether the political coalition required to enact it could survive the contestation of every detail. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (2014) put the strongest version of the affirmative case; Glenn Loury’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002) developed a Black conservative response that accepts the historical claim while rejecting the proposed remedy.⁷

The liberal-procedural position, associated with figures such as John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, accepts the conservative critique of racial categorisation as constitutional doctrine while pressing harder than most conservatives on the residual responsibilities of universities, employers, and public institutions to ensure that their procedures are in fact applied without racial bias. The disagreement here is real but narrower: it concerns the diagnostic question — how much of present disparity tracks present discrimination — rather than the constitutional question of whether the law may sort persons by race in the name of remedy.

References

1. Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913), Book I.
2. Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
3. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989).
4. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
5. Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2013), chs. 1–2.
6. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 19.
7. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014); Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).