Racial Integration, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and Philosophical Humility

Abstract D. C. Matthew offers an original and important critique of racial integration. His claim that integration will aggravate phenotypic devaluation of blackness, threatening black self-worth, is persuasive. However, his stronger normative argument that blacks should reject integration as a consequence because the potential harms to black self-worth outweigh its purported benefits is less convincing, as it rests on a dubious cost-benefit analysis. Ultimately, I argue that we should resist the impulse to offer a definitive cost-benefit analysis of racial integration in any case, given the uncertainty of such a complex process unfolding in a speculative future.