Agnosticism on Racial Integration: Liberal-Democratic or Libertarian?

Abstract

Theorists of racial justice in the United States have long disagreed about the respective merits of integration versus separatism. In an attempt to reframe this debate, Andrew Valls has developed a liberal approach that purports to cut across the integration/separation divide. On this approach, the goal is to establish fair choice conditions for individuals choosing where to affiliate; when fair conditions obtain, the theory espouses a normative agnosticism toward whatever patterns of spatial distribution result. If successful, Valls’s choice-based framework represents a potentially transformative intervention in debates over racial justice. However, this article argues that the framework’s agnostic approach is in tension with its putative applicability to liberal-democratic societies. Specifically, it contends that the theory’s criteria for fair choice are excessively permissive, and that its conception of racial justice relies on an unwarranted assumption that under just conditions, individual choices will produce just aggregate outcomes. The maintenance of the theory’s agnosticism requires it to adopt positions that are better described as libertarian, rather than liberal-democratic. These problems suggest that the integration–separation debate cannot be circumvented via an agnostic appeal to individual choice, because that agnosticism obscures questions about the nature of democracy which are at the heart of the disagreement.