Anderson's case for integration is compelling. She begins with a couple chapters detailing both the empirical reality of segregation and the damages caused by it. Segregation includes both spatial segregation (keeping blacks in separate spaces from whites) and role segregation (allowing blacks in the same spaces as whites but restricting the social roles they may assume).
Segregation itself limits the options for blacks, but the harms of segregation cascade out into other domains. She doesn't use this term, but I found the idea of "corrosive disadvantage" (from Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit's book, "Disadvantage") to fit Anderson's description of segregation. The spatial segregation is accompanied by a disadvantage in public goods provision, where schools, police, financial services, and the like are generally poorer. Separation from whites excludes them from networking and human capital development opportunities. The material disadvantages accreting from spatial segregation then feed negative stereotypes and unconscious bias about blacks, giving whites (and even blacks, for that matter) justification for continuing anti-black discrimination. And so on.
Anderson argues that integration is the only thing that can disrupt this vicious cycle. Spatial integration (by, e.g, affirmative action policies) would begin to correct the economic disadvantages as well as erode conscious and unconscious bias against blacks (both by exercising whites' interactions with blacks and giving whites more examples of non-stereotypical blacks).
Anderson's discussion of affirmative action was especially clarifying. She argues that affirmative action is often thought to serve the purpose of compensating individuals for discrimination, but this isn't the only purpose for affirmative action, and it's not the best argument for it. Indeed, Anderson argues that affirmative action is ill-equipped to rectify past injustice. And it's poorly targeted (in rectificatory terms) because those who benefit from affirmative action are likely the most advantaged blacks. Instead, a better model for affirmative action is that of an integrationist policy. Affirmative action gets whites and blacks into the same spaces and institutions. This will over time lessen discrimination and bias against blacks (by mechanisms discussed above, predicted by the well-established "contact theory") and insert more black individuals in powerful social and economic networks.
Anderson offers similarly clarifying differentiation when discussing multiple concepts of race. She contrasts "character" or "biological" concepts of race, which hold that race groups have some essential moral characteristics, with "racialized groups" concept, which holds that race is sociologically real but not reflective of any essential moral characteristics. "Color-blindness" fails because it doesn't recognize the possibility of racialized groups.
The subject matter is inherently non-ideal. A world with a history of racialization is not a world in which social justice can be neat and tidy. Anderson recognizes that efforts to integrate society will have costs, and face various forms of backlash. But racial integration is the only way to achieve racial justice in the long term.
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William Jordan
Compelling work of 'non-ideal' political philosophy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2017