(Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Spring 04)

Department of Philosophy

California State University, Hayward

Hayward, CA 94542

tkelly@csuhayward.edu

From its very beginnings in Marx, critical theorists of various stripes have appealed to the idea of irrationality as a powerful component of social scientific explanations of unjust behavior. What exactly is meant by "irrational action" is often not very well defined, but it typically refers to those decisions by agents which are ultimately determined by broader social systems which have been internalized through an unconscious psychic process.

While it is certainly appealing to think of those who commit unjust actions as fundamentally irrational, such accounts of action are rarely satisfying as social scientific explanations. In this paper I use the case of residential segregation to demonstrate how the role of practical rationality cannot be discounted in social scientific explanation—even in practices that are widely acknowledged to be unjust.

Until the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s the phenomenon of residential segregation enjoyed broad public support. For instance, a 1942 National Opinion Research Center found that 84% of white respondents supported the principle that whites and African-Americans should live in separate parts of town. A 1958 Gallop poll showed that 44% of white Americans would leave their neighborhood if an African-American moved next door. This broad public support was intertwined with racist practices in institutions like banks, real estate offices, and the state. "Restrictive covenants" on deeds which would limit the resale of the property to whites, racist mortgaging practices by federal and local governments which favored the development of white-only suburban communities, "ethical" codes of real estate agents which forbid introducing blacks to white neighborhoods, unfair credit practices on the parts of banks, and white violence against blacks who dared to integrate, all played a role in the reproduction of residential segregation.

However, in the last thirty years the legitimacy of segregation has changed dramatically. Perhaps the most noticeable effect of the civil rights movement was its affect on the attitudes of whites regarding the legitimacy of segregation. Whereas in 1942, 84% of Americans surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center supported residential segregation, in 1964 that number had fallen to 60% and by 1990 to 20%. Likewise the percentage of white Americans who would move out with a single black neighbor dropped from 44% (1958) to 14% (1978) to 4% (1990). A recent survey in Los Angeles showed that most whites supported the principle of integration. Indeed, 75% of those surveyed had "no objection" to living in neighborhoods that were half African-American and 34% were actually "in favor" of such a living arrangement. This is, of course, ironic given that the levels of integration in Los Angeles are nowhere near these percentages.

Despite this sea change in white attitudes, the system of what Denton and Massey call the "American Apartheid" has been slow to change. According to analysis of the 2000 Census, the average rate of segregation decreased by approximately 12% between 1980-2000 (dissimilarity index average: .727 (1980) - .640 (2000) 1=complete segregation; 0= complete integration). However, much of this integration occurred in the west and southwest; areas that were not "hypersegregated" in the first place and have experienced a great deal of housing construction after the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Many of the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast remain particularly segregated . For instance, the 53 Midwest metropolitan areas analyzed by the Census Bureau reduced segregation by only 8% on average over the last twenty years. Moreover, many of these cities today are levels of segregation that are still higher than the national average of 1980. For instance, St. Louis’ dissimilarity index in the 2000 census was .731, while the national average in 1980 was .727.

How are we to explain this apparent contradiction between white attitudes regarding segregation and the continuation of de facto segregation? More specifically, how can we square white moral attitudes about segregation with the phenomena that seem most responsible for sustaining segregation: white flight (and the resulting re-segregation)?

One popular solution to this paradox is to view white flight and re-segregation as the results of racist ideology. The basic move of such explanations is to argue that the fact that housing decisions made by whites contradict their own sense of justice demonstrates an irrational motivation driven by a highly structured and persistent unconscious racism.

In White Racism, Feagin and Vera provide such an explanation. Feagin and Vera argue that the contradiction between white abstract attitudes and their concrete commitments can be explained by the fact that whites are still by and large motivated by negative stereotypes of African Americans. Because these stereotypes have no basis in reality, they can only be viewed as a kind of mythology that whites accept, often unknowingly. These mythological images are in a dialectical relationship with racist practices that, for Feagin and Vera, are so institutionalized and routinized, that they can be understood as ritual. As ritualistic, many whites are simply "following the script" of racism in their everyday practices. Such ritualistic racist practices are supported by and give support to, the mythological racist images harbored by whites.

In such an account of racism there is not much room for agency and indeed Feagin and Vera seem to accept this in their characterization of racism as a kind of irrational madness ritualistically practiced by whites who are often motivated by unconscious images. What’s more, in a classic move of ideology critique, the very white self is a construction of racist ideology. Whites cannot help but see themselves qua whites in opposition to an ideologically construed black "other."

Once racism is set up in this way, it is not hard to explain the tension between the moral views of whites and their concrete commitments when it comes to race. While the conscious, rational white self may achieve a certain level of moral insight into the issue of race, the ideological self continually undermines those insights, indeed undermines rationality itself. In terms of segregation, this means that whatever whites say in the abstract about integration, the fact is that the influx of blacks triggers irrational fear and hostility. Whites believe that blacks are threatening due to their racist mythology, they feel an increased anxiety due to their fears. Perhaps even more fundamental, the appearance of real, flesh and blood blacks in the intimate sphere of neighborhood challenges the mythological black as the other who forms the basis of the white self. The result is a turn to a series of ritualized practices aimed at reinforcing the white self and vanquishing the black other. Violent practices such as lynchings, cross burnings and murder and less violent practices, such as white flight, can all be explained in terms of the dynamics of ideological racism.

Despite the appeal of Feagin and Vera’s analysis of racism, a social scientific explanation of decisionmaking that ignores the rationality of agents suffers from at least three major problems: indeterminacy, an overburdened observer perspective, and social determinism.

As Jon Elster points out, because accounts of ideology often discount the rationality of the decision maker, their explanations must attempt to provide a coherent account of the decision or action in light of the prevailing social structures. But what actual evidence supports any particular explanation? Unconscious motivations cannot be observed, they can only be inferred from the irrational action of agents. Even if one could perhaps infer that unconscious motivations are at play, what evidence supports any particular account of those motivations? Such explanations rely on establishing a parallel between social structures and the action to be explained. However, any particular explanation will be underdetermined—the evidence does not fully support any particular account.

For instance, Feagin and Vera point to unconscious stereotypes of the black "other" as the foundation of white racism. However, other accounts have focused on the aesthetic metaphors used by white discourse, the logic of investigation in white scientific discourse, the discursive formation of white discourse and the psychosexual fear whites have of black sexuality. Each of these accounts muster impressive homologies that show the connection between social and psychic structures that function "behind the back" of the rational agent and create social practices. What evidence can we appeal to in determining which, if any, of these accounts is accurate? In other words, once we have discounted the participant’s perspective, a valuable source of evidence that we normally use to determine the motivation for action has evaporated. What the participants say about their actions no longer helps ground the explanation because their view of themselves is fundamentally distorted.

Discounting the participant’s perspective in a strong way places too great a burden on the perspective of the observer. The observer must be in a position vis a vis the participant such that the observer can not only determine that the beliefs of the participant are false, but that they are motivated by social and psychic systems over and against the participant’s rationality—systems that the observer can grasp, but remain beyond the cognitive reach of the participant. Of course, it is not problematic to believe that the observer can determine that the participant’s views are false. People make errors in judgement, often because they have insufficient data or an incorrect understanding of the phenomena at hand. It is also true that some actions are truly pathological in that the participant themselves cannot offer reasons for their own actions. However, when participants can offer reasons for their actions, explaining away the participant perspective as irrational leaves the observer the burden of not only showing that participant’s beliefs are false, but that they are supported by irrational motivations.

What one means by irrationality is obviously very important to such a project. If one means by rationality "holding beliefs that are true" then racist stereotypes, for instance, are irrational. This definition of irrationality is too strong, as it would make all false beliefs – even those based on careful study and the best available evidence -- irrational. Moreover, given the thoroughgoing fallibalism in science and epistemology, one could never be assured of the rationality of one’s views—at least not until the owl of Minerva takes flight.

Alternatively, one could define rationality as a consistency between beliefs and actions. This definition however is too lax, at least for critical theory, as unjust practices are often consistent with the views held by participants. Under such conditions, the critical theorists would have to accept such practices as rational.

For theories of ideology such as Feagin and Vera’s, it seems a third account of irrationality is at work. Irrationality consists of beliefs that are not only false, but are created by a non-rational psychic process that is strongly linked to determinate social structures. In other words, the participant not only holds false views (e.g. racist stereotypes), but holds them because of a social/psychic process of which they are unaware.

A well known difficulty with this approach is the observer’s ability to distinguish mistakes in judgement from non-rational psychic processes. Certainly in cases of psychological pathologies, participants cannot provide a rational account of their actions and the observer is justified in inferring that a non-rational process is working "behind the back" of the agent. However, in many of the cases that interest critical theorists, participants can provide an account of the reasons that motivated their actions. The burden on the critical theorist is to dismiss those participant accounts and demonstrate that the observer has a better insight into the motivations of the participant than the participant herself.

If one accepts that observers have such privilege over participants then a problem of reflexivity emerges. As Horkheimer once said of Mannheim’s theory of total ideology "Why is not the insight just as situated as the error." In other words, if participants can be cultural dopes guided by social and psychic processes, why are observers immune from the same forces? For instance, could not a Marxist critic contend that Feagin and Vera’s focus on race is itself an ideological commitment created by capitalism—one that falsely hides the real cause of residential segregation. Is every false belief held by a social critic a sign of a deeper ideology? And what evidence could one appeal to support such a claim other than the underdetermined homologies discussed above.

Of course the hermeneutics of suspicion answers this question in the affirmative and thus continually seeks to ferret out the ideological sources of belief—even amongst social critics. However, such totalizing critiques seem rather disabling to the aim of social criticism and certainly Feagin and Vera, like most social critics, do not espouse such suspicions of their own rationality.

A third problem with irrationality explanations is that once we bypass the rationality of the agents themselves in explaining social patterns of action such as racism, it is hard to see how social change is possible. For instance, if racism was simply due to false beliefs then social critics could point out such errors and hope to rationally persuade whites to adopt non-racist beliefs. However, if white racism, as Feagin and Vera suggest, is motivated by unconscious images and an innate sense of self that is constructed via the marginalization of the black "other", then rational persuasion seems dead on arrival. Attempts to persuade whites to adopt non-racist beliefs would surely be greeted with suspicion and would either be rejected or simply, and contradictorily, accepted alongside racist views. Racism itself would remain untouched as whites would be more or less determined to hold racist views of African Americans and of themselves.

Feagin and Vera not only accept this, they consider it a powerful element in their explanation of the persistence of racism in the face of the civil rights movement and the ongoing critique of racism. At the same time however, they reject pessimistic views that racism can never be overcome. They believe by increased cross-racial understanding and empathy, racist stereotypes and practices can be overcome. Still, one can easily understand the pessimism. If racism is an irrational system, then one cannot persuade whites to change as they may not even be aware they are racist. Indeed, many whites, on this account, falsely believe they are anti-racist and would meet charges of racism with indignation. Such insidious racism would surely be impossible to overcome through the use of critique and mutual understanding. Indeed, one sees this at work in Appiah’s suggestion that those with dispositional racism may simply have to be "locked up."

In short, irrationality explanations of practices work too well. While they may explain how "the system" (in this case residential segregation) maintains itself, it makes social transformation much more difficult to understand. This is important because while segregation is quite high, there have been trends towards integration and not all cases of integration lead to white flight and resegregation. An account of segregation must be able to explain both the resiliency of segregation and its transformability.

Certainly one response to the problems with ideology critique is to assume that agents are rational, even when they are racist, and explain their actions in light of their beliefs and preferences. This is the view taken by Rational Choice approaches. Theorists such as Thomas Schelling have provided insightful accounts that demonstrate that even slight racial preferences can create collective collective choices for segregation.

In my discussion of the tension between white attitudes about integration and the continued existence of segregation, I noted that 80% of whites polled responded that they agreed with the principle of integration. However, it should be noted that a number of studies have shown that the nearly 20% of whites who do not accept integration can still create social patterns such as "white flight."

Most whites (especially middle to upper middle class who are libel to flee urban areas) have a vested interest in protecting their largest and most expensive investment, their home. Maintaining this value requires that only a marginal number of homes in their neighborhood is for sale at once. This means that whites must, to some degree, hold their ranks and not sell all at once, lest they glut the market and devalue their homes. Usually this working assumption of trust holds a neighborhood together. Most residents, for different reasons, have enough commitment to the neighborhood that they are not planning to move. Now assume blacks begin moving into the neighborhood; a fact which makes many whites uncomfortable. Whites not only worry about the incoming blacks, they also worry that other whites will begin a to sell their homes. If taken off guard, each particular white faces the possibility that they will sell their home only after the market is glutted, thus losing on their investment. If the 20% of those in the neighborhood who do not even accept the principle of integration put their homes for sale, then the market will already be glutted and will only get worse as other whites react by putting their homes on the market as well . Whites are now caught in a "race to the bottom." Once the number of incoming blacks reaches a certain point, there is a rush to sell homes, the market plummets, homes are devalued, and many whites (those "lucky" enough to sell their home) lose a significant portion of the worth of their home.

Of course, the process is only beginning. As the property values go down, more and more lower income residents move in as small (and large) businesses move out. This puts increasing pressure on middle class whites to leave, forcing them to sell their homes for less and less. Property values continue to plummet, more businesses move out, more lower income residents move in. As more economic interests and higher class whites leave, the neighborhood becomes poorer. As the neighborhood becomes poorer, crime becomes more likely. As crime becomes more likely, more whites leave and so on and so on.

Rational Choice accounts seem to provide a way to account for the persistence of segregation in the face of changing white attitudes. By appealing to the economic rationality of agents, rational choice accounts show how the preference of a relatively small number of residents can create dramatic macro-behaviors.

For all of its insights, rational choice approaches still do not offer complete explanations for residential segregation. As Denton and Massey point out, Schelling’s explanation of white flight is possible only given the existence of preserved all white neighborhoods elsewhere. Why does not the movement of blacks follow whites to these neighborhoods as well? Denton and Massey suggest that one must also consider the direct racist actions of realtors and banks to understand the phenomena of white flight.

Moreover, while it is illuminating to see the mechanisms by which agents chose segregation through relatively slight housing preferences, rational choice accounts fail to explain how those preferences develop in the first place. Usually the preferences are taken as "given" in the analysis. While some preferences can be seen as derived from more significant preferences, rational choice theorists such as Schelling seem to avoid the inquiry into how racial housing preferences are formed in the first place. This is understandable. After all, ideology critique has been one of the more popular methods for determining the source of racist preferences, and it suffers from serious problems as a social scientific explanation.

Despite the well-founded concern with preference formation inquiry, the incompleteness of rational choice explanations creates serious limitations for policy analysis. For instance, because Schelling accepts racist preferences as given, he recommends creating incentives for whites to remain in integrated neighborhoods in the form of grants or low interest loans in "transition neighborhoods." While these are valuable recommendations, they leave intact the racist preferences of white homeowners. A more direct approach would be to transform those racist housing preferences in the first place. Policies aiming at doing so would benefit greatly from understanding how those preferences are developed.

The demands on an adequate account of residential segregation are great. It must absorb the insights of rational choice theory and yet explain the formation of racist preferences in way that depends on, rather than discounts, the rationality of agents. In other words, we must ask the questions posed by ideology critique and answer them in the spirit of rational choice theory.

This improbable combination can be carried off by re-examining the role of practical rationality in conventional behavior. Recall that for Feagin and Vera, conventional racist practices were understood at ritualistic and thus not requiring reflexive awareness on the part of agents. While certainly some practices are ritualistic and can be carried out "simply following the script," most conventional practices are much more complex and require more reflexive and rational deliberation on the part of agents than Feagin and Vera acknowledge.

For instance, Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies demonstrate that even mundane everyday behavior exhibits a high degree of rationality and reflexivity. Instead of being "cultural dopes" who "lack insight into the normative underpinnings of action,"agents hold one another rationally accountable for their actions-- demanding good reasons for behaviors that deviate from ordinary practices. Such reasons must show to the satisfaction of the other that the action in question can be understood as "ordinary." If these reasons are unsatisfactory, then agents begin sanctioning (sometimes quite violently) those whose actions cannot be normalized. Proactively, this accountability to ordinary life is cashed out in an agent’s project of "doing being ordinary." However, because of the complexities and indeterminacies of even mundane behaviors, doing being ordinary requires that agents gain practical mastery over the social skills and roles that they attempt to present to others. This means that, even in simple, conventional behavior, agents must be attentive to their social world and reflexively aware of how they are presenting themselves to others. From the reactionary standpoint, the project of doing being ordinary is reinforced by the rational accountability that is built into the structure of everyday interaction where agents demand good reasons from others. It is also reinforced by the sanctioning that agents give to others who cannot satisfactorily account for abnormal behaviors. The proactive and reactive sides of doing being ordinary demonstrate that the process of social reproduction, even in mundane activities, is the ongoing accomplishment of rational and reflexive agents who seek, through the practical mastery of social skills and attentiveness to their everyday world, to do being ordinary.

At stake in doing being ordinary is more than just "fitting in" with one’s lifeworld. For Garfinkel, "ordinariness" is the foundation for trusting, cooperative relationships. Garfinkel bases this conclusion on the morally outraged and volatile responses of agents when the basic expectations of even trivial practices had been violated. Garfinkel concludes from such responses, and the breakdown of cooperation that follows them, that breaching experiments subvert the ordinary world that agents share and dissolve the trust that agents have for one another. Thus, for Garfinkel, trust is the "unstated terms of the contract" in interaction. It is the implicit promise that agents make to one another that their interaction will follow the "constitutive expectancies" of normal interaction. This implicit promise-making is one of the basic antecedent conditions of cooperative interaction. Without such implicit promise-making between agents, cooperation (trust) is impossible. This is because cooperation assumes that agents will act within certain bounds that are ordinary.

I suggest that segregation is no longer supported by public principle and yet is reproduced because it creates ethical contexts in which cooperative practices between whites and blacks are "atypical." In other words, the familiar, day to day contact that is essential to trust building is lacking in the interaction between whites and black in large part due to residential segregation. Since racial interaction is not a part of the everyday lifeworld, especially for whites, there is a lacking resource for trust. Thus a "trust deficit" emerges between whites and African-Americans, especially from whites towards blacks. In such a "trust deficit," whites develop housing preferences that reproduce the kind of ethical life that they know and use to build relationships. Once those preferences are in place, rational choice mechanisms can be shown to lead to those final decisions that create white flight and re-segregation. In such cases, segregation becomes a form of what Franz Fannon calls cultural racism: "The object of racism is no longer the individual

man but a certain form of existing."

This explanation has a number of benefits. Like an ideology critique it attempts to determine the source of racial housing preferences, however, it does so by relying on, rather than discounting the practical rationality of agents themselves. This means that one should be able use the self reports of agents themselves to support the explanation. Indeed I believe this is the case. For instance, in one of the more extensive surveys of white flight, the majority of white residents in Detroit appealed to some sort of trust-building/community way of life reasoning in explaining the widespread white flight and re-segregation. This explanation also meshes nicely with rational choice accounts—indeed, I believe it enhances them by accounting for the absence of trust that motivates agents to think strategically about their neighbors and neighborhoods.

Finally, this explanation provides an insight into policy recommendations that do not appear from the light of rational choice explanations. Construed as a problem of trust, residential segregation can be mitigated by the aggressive action of local prestigious and trusted institutions such as universities, military facilities and state governments. There is much research that indicates that throughout the 1980s and 90s, such institutions in cities such Norfolk, VA, San Diego, CA, Tallahesse, FL and Lawrence KS were able to create and sustain integrated neighborhoods by recruiting, placing and "vouching" for African-Americans in previously all white neighborhoods. This research indicates that whites that lacked trust resources for interaction with minorities utilized their trust for the local institution. For instance, in San Diego, black professionals and service personal who were "with the Navy" received a higher than normal level of trust with white neighbors.

One does not need cultural dopes to do critical social theory. By taking seriously the everyday practical rationality of agents, social critics can better understand the persistence of forms of discrimination and oppression and better assess those policies and grass roots activities that will create a more just society. Of course, to think of discrimination and oppression as rational is only to claim that participants in those practices are aware of the motivations for their actions, and that those motivations are rooted in (at least implicit) reasons – reasons that agents can appeal to when asked to give an account of their actions. This account of rationality in no way implies that such actions are ultimately justified. On my account, agents almost always act on reasons, but those reasons could be poor ones, based on false beliefs, misunderstandings or even contradictory stances. The work of the social critic still remains an important part of the kind of critical social theory I have outlined here.