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The American Journal of Bioethics 3.2 (2003) 24-25



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Identifying Racial Privilege:
Lessons from Critical Race Theory and the Law

Naomi Seiler
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Catherine Myser (2003) urges bioethicists to note and destabilize the whiteness of the central values in bioethics. For reasons discussed below, many bioethicists will likely resist a head-on critique of the field's "fundamental" values (e.g., Baker 2003). More significant change, however, may be brought about by identifying how white status and privilege function as "neutral" baselines in bioethics. Such a move will draw bioethicists' attention to problems that currently go too often underanalyzed and might even, in the end, stimulate the sort of ethical shifts that Myser advocates. In this commentary I draw on examples of Critical Race Theorists' legal scholarship and suggest how bioethicists can similarly identify previously transparent racial privilege to reframe key issues in medicine and health.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) arose in the 1980s partly as a response to Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which argued that the important feature of laws is their application to conditions in the real world (Crenshaw 2002). Though early Critical Race scholars built on this foundation and on other liberal thought, they criticized the traditional liberal scholarship on race as over-reliant on a model of individual rights. Early on, Bell argued that this model is not a useful tool for understanding systemic oppression of African Americans. To understand the other interests that are often "balanced" against individual rights, it is necessary to recognize that these pre-existing interests—federalism, the "free market," institutional stability, and so on—are themselves functions of racial exclusion and privilege (Bell 1980). In essence, the fundamental institutions of white privilege must be acknowledged as such in order for the rights and interests of nonwhites to be fully recognized.

Critical Race Theory has formed the foundation of a large body of scholarship (e.g., Crenshaw et al. 1995). Rather than simply assert the rights of oppressed groups in the United States, CRT scholars attempt to deconstruct the assumptions that, when posited as "universal," form the foundation for white privilege and power. As Myser notes, for example, Cheryl Harris has traced the ways in which whiteness' conferral of economic and social benefits has led to its recognition as a "property right"; that is, as a protected status that confers benefits through exclusion (Harris 1993). Though we no longer have laws that explicitly restrict voting rights or property ownership to whites, Harris notes that whiteness continues to serve the same basic function: "the legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white power and domination." Turning to the law, Harris notes that some courts have set aside affirmative action programs by focusing their analyses not on the redistributive effects of these programs for the targeted minority group but on what a white person might "lose." What is depicted as a neutral and fair starting point—white entitlement to the best educational opportunities—is actually rooted in years of disparate power and privilege.

CRT scholars have also noted the ways in which civil-rights law, through seemingly "race-neutral" principles, can reinforce patterns of white power and black subordination (Flagg 1993). Gotanda (1991) criticizes the process by which people are supposed to not "recognize" people's race in making decisions; he argues that such nonrecognition "fosters the systematic denial of racial subordination and the psychological repression of an individual's recognition of that subordination, thereby allowing such subordination to continue." In other words, nonrecognition permits the continued transparency of white privilege.

Similar insights would be highly beneficial to transforming bioethics, more so than an abstract discussion of values. Bioethics, like law, seeks much of its legitimacy from explicit or implicit claims of universality. An effort to directly destabilize some of the "core" values or principles of bioethics as artifacts of its culturally white roots would, in the eyes of many bioethicists, take away the moral authority of bioethics' pronouncements...

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