University of Michigan

Graduate Student, Philosophy

Thesis Title: The duty to miscegenate: From sexual racism to cross-caste companionship

About

My dissertation is tripartite.

In the first part of my dissertation, I ask why, in the USA, at least, women racialised as black marry men racialised as white saliently infrequently. I home in on one of the many possible causal factors of this social phenomenon: white men's rejection of black women for marriage. I develop a theory of 'sexual racism', so as to understand this causal factor. I argue that sexual racism fuels social stigmatisation. I argue that social stigmatisation is a serious injustice. For this reason, I conclude that sexual racism is a serious injustice.

However, in the second part of my dissertation, I argue that social stigmatisation is an avoidable injustice. I argue that social stigmatisation may be avoided by our achieving and by our practising, across the lines of social caste, an intimate, but not essentially sexual, relationship, which I call 'companionship'. Furthermore, I argue that regular and frequent meal-sharing is a morally permissible and readily available activity, which can be relied upon to foster companionship. I call cross-caste companionship, and the cross-caste commensality that reliably leads to it, 'encounters-that-count'. I argue that, since persons have a duty to avoid causing serious and avoidable harm to other persons, whites have a duty to take the readily available action that will enable them to avoid socially stigmatising blacks. That is to say, whites have a duty to engage in encounters-that-count with blacks.

Finally, in the third part of my dissertation, I reply to liberal critics who would argue that, in a society founded on the value of social freedom, there is a right of whites to avoid encounters-that-count with blacks. I understand this liberal argument in two distinct ways. On the one hand, the liberal might argue that there is a ‘white right’ that is a ‘white liberty’ to avoid encounters-that-count with blacks. This liberal asserts the absence of a requirement (on the free agent) and the absence of any right held by agents other than the free agent. On the other hand, the liberal might argue that there is a ‘white right’ that is a ‘white claim’ to avoid encounters-that-count with blacks. This liberal asserts the presence of a right (of the claimant) and the presence of a requirement, on agents other than the claimant, not to interfere with this right. I argue that, in a 'post'-colonial liberal society, there is no general white liberty or general white claim to avoid encounters-that-count with blacks.

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