The Superficial Morality of Color Blindness: Why “Equal Opportunity” May Not Be Enough&quest
Glenn Loury
Eastern Economic Journal, 2013, vol. 39, issue 4, 425-438
Abstract:
Past racial subordination resulting in significant inequality creates a “transition problem” of determining how to deal fairly with the legacy of an unjust history. I show that – in the presence of continued social segregation and when human capital spillovers within social networks are important – the consequences of past discrimination may persist indefinitely, absent some racially egalitarian intervention. I conclude that under such conditions “color blindness” – that is, official indifference to race in the formulation of public policies – is NOT an adequate response to this problem, and that “affirmative action” (i.e., policies whose explicit objective is to create more equal social outcomes between racial groups) is ethically justified.
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v39/n4/pdf/eej201335a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v39/n4/full/eej201335a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:easeco:v:39:y:2013:i:4:p:425-438
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41302
Access Statistics for this article
Eastern Economic Journal is currently edited by Allan Zebedee and Cynthia Bansak
More articles in Eastern Economic Journal from Palgrave Macmillan, Eastern Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().