Does Race Best Explain Racial Discrimination?

IV.I Is Misperception Discrimination Really Discrimination?

The first possibility aligns with the court’s decision in Burrage: there is no discrimination in Misperceived, because in this case Jamal is not Black. More generally, on this view the phenomenon called ‘misperception discrimination’ turns out not to be a kind of discrimination at all.

Why take this view? The main motivation seems to be that Jamal cannot be a victim of racial discrimination in Misperceived, as only members of protected classes can be victims of discrimination and white Americans are not marginalized.¹⁸ This fits with a common position in moral philosophy. Scanlon holds that the only cases of discrimination are “actions that disadvantage members of a group that has been subject to widespread denigrations and exclusion” (2008: 73–74). Relatedly, many prefer anti-subordination theories of anti-discrimination law, wherein the wrong of discrimination lies in enforcing “the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups” (Siegel 2004: 1472–1473). If the rejection in Misperceived only disadvantages Jamal, who is not a member of a historically oppressed group, it is not a case of discrimination.

There are three problems with this view. First, it has objectionable moral implications, as it often requires us to deny that people have been seriously wronged. Plausibly, there are contexts where we have significant moral latitude to engage in certain conduct unless what we do is discriminatory: it would be permissible for you to hire the white candidate or the Black candidate, but not permissible to hire the former because of their race. (If you disagree with this example, switch to another, like selecting a tenant.) So what if you hire the white candidate because you mistakenly think the other is Black? If this is a context where you have moral latitude and what you do is not discrimination, how can this be impermissible, and how has anyone been seriously wronged? Some legal commentators have echoed this concern: an implication of the position underlying decisions like Burrage is that employees may be subject to differential treatment “based on an assumed protected characteristic, like race, religion, or national origin, so long as the harassers or the employer are wrong about these assumptions” (Maril & Gill 2018: 2). Even if the courts could legally justify that position as a matter of statutory interpretation, we don’t think it’s a plausible moral view. But unless one denies that in the relevant contexts we have a lot of moral latitude to engage in certain conduct unless what we do is discriminatory, it is hard to see how one can capture the verdict that Jamal is seriously wronged in Misperceived.

More can be said on this point, as there are several possible ways of maintaining that Jamal is not discriminated against in Misperceived but is wronged nonetheless; we just do not think they turn out to be plausible. To illustrate, some may hold that Jamal is wronged in Misperceived because Jamal’s application was rejected on an irrational or irrelevant basis. While this response is tempting, its problems are instructive. For one, to hold that the rejection is immoral for this reason requires giving up on the idea that we have the relevant kind of moral latitude; it requires positing a general moral duty to make decisions only on rational or relevant bases, which is implausible and subject to serious counterexamples.¹⁹ For another, even if the rejection in Misperceived is somewhat immoral because it is irrational, this cannot explain why Jamal is seriously wronged.²⁰ Similar problems will arise for other responses to this first argument.²¹ But we will not dwell on the issue any further. If you are unconvinced, the two arguments that follow provide independent reasons to reject the view that there is no discrimination in Misperceived.

The second problem for this view is that it does not follow from its main motivation (that only members of marginalized groups can be victims of discrimination and white Americans are not marginalized). Someone who is a member of one protected class may be misperceived by bigots to be a member of a different protected class. Burrage illustrates this well. Burrage was Black, but was not subject to anti-Black harassment:

At best, the references to Burrage as “the Mexican” and “cheap labor,” and the use of the Spanish terms “andale” and “ariba,” represent the very unfortunate employment of offensive stereotypes of Hispanics, and can be said to arise out of a misperception that Burrage was of Hispanic descent; or at worst, they amount to incomprehensible name calling. They cannot reasonably be considered to have referred to the fact that Burrage’s race was African-American.²²

Similarly, if Jamal were Native American but misperceived to be Black and rejected on that basis, we would have a misperception case despite the victim being a member of a group that is marginalized in the United States. So, if only actual members of protected classes (i.e., marginalized groups) can be victims of discrimination, it does not follow that misperception discrimination is not really discrimination.

Finally, misperception cases provide interesting ways to challenge the premise that only members of marginalized groups can be victims of discrimination. The reason Scanlon takes this to be true is that “the prejudicial judgments it [wrongful discrimination] involves are not just the idiosyncratic attitudes of a particular agent but are widely shared in the society in question and commonly expressed and acted on in ways that have serious consequences” (2008: 73–74). This would explain why an employer who rejected a white applicant because of idiosyncratic anti-white prejudice is not engaged in discrimination. But it does not explain why there is no discrimination in Misperceived. In Misperceived and Veridical, the employer’s prejudicial attitudes are identical and so equally systematic. (We will return to systematicity in §V and §VII.)

This last point speaks to a general difficulty for the view that misperception cases are never instances of discrimination. Put simply, cases like Misperceived and Veridical have far too much in common. This makes it hard to deny that misperception cases are at least sometimes instances of discrimination, which is sufficient for our purposes, as it allows us to raise the crucial question: what explains the discriminatory act in cases like Misperceived?

IV.II Is Misperception Discrimination Explained by Race?

This leads us to the second possibility. On this view, there is discrimination in both Veridical and in Misperceived, and it is explained the same way in both cases. Because it is (ex hypothesi) explained by Jamal’s actual race in Veridical, the same must be true in Misperceived.

The first way one might aim to vindicate this view would be to argue that Jamal’s being white explains the discriminatory act in Misperceived. But what causal chain plausibly links the two? Aside from this obvious issue, there is a more general, philosophically important reason why no position like this is tenable, which turns on the significance of needing an action explanation of discrimination — an explanation of the discriminatory act in terms of the agent’s motivating reasons.

To tease out this issue, imagine a case where Mary is a Black Mormon, and Mary’s being Black somehow caused Mary to be a Mormon. (Insofar as realists ascribe races causal powers, this is surely possible.) Now imagine an employer rejects Mary’s application after learning Mary’s religion but is ignorant of Mary’s race and is driven by anti-Mormon prejudice but not by any form of anti-Black prejudice. The following two claims are plausible: Mary’s being Black is a cause of Mary’s application being rejected, but the employer does not reject Mary’s application on the basis of or for the reason that Mary is Black. This is a case of religious discrimination. It is not a case of racial discrimination.

This case illustrates the importance of the fact that when explaining discrimination, we are explaining an action, not an outcome. We are asking whether the agent acted because of someone’s race, in the sense of acting on the grounds or basis of their race.²³ As Eidelson states, “the grounds on which a person discriminates are marked by the links on a chain of explanation that go through her mind” (2015: 19).²⁴ Mary’s being Black may have caused Mary to be fired, but that is insufficient to show that the employer fired Mary because Mary is Black (as an action explanation), as this link on the causal chain did not go through the discriminator’s mind.²⁵ (This does not mean that the link in the causal chain must be explicit or conscious in the discriminator’s mind.²⁶)

Why does this matter? Consider Misperceived once more. Even if Jamal’s being white is somehow a link on the causal chain of Jamal’s application being rejected, it cannot be a link that goes through the employer’s mind, because Jamal’s race is misperceived. So, misperception cases cannot be cases where discrimination is explained by the victim’s actual race.

However, there is a second way in which one might aim to vindicate the claim that Jamal’s race explains the discriminatory act in Misperceived. One might claim that Jamal is Black in Veridical and in Misperceived. There may be ways of supporting such a stance on some social constructionist accounts of the metaphysics of race. We will discuss this more in §V and note that there are general reasons why such accounts cannot offer better explanations of racial discrimination than their error-theoretic rivals. But for now we will restrict ourselves to a simpler point. It is a datum that Jamal’s race is misperceived in Misperceived. To deny this datum has a cost. And it is a cost with consequences. Say we take the same view across the board. There are many cases of religious misperception discrimination. When Sikhs are systematically perceived to be Muslims and subject to Islamophobic discrimination, this does not mean they are Muslims (or “function as” Muslims). There are similar costs to denying the existence of racial misperception discrimination. For instance, if on one single occasion Rachel Dolezal or Jessica Krug passed as Black and were subject to anti-Black discrimination, we doubt it would follow from this alone that they were or “functioned as” Black in that context.

IV.III Is Misperception Discrimination Explained by Something Else?

We have assumed for the sake of argument that, in Veridical, Jamal’s actual race partly explains the discriminatory act. And we have argued that Jamal is a victim of discrimination in Misperceived, but this cannot be explained in terms of Jamal’s actual race. This leaves a final possibility: the discrimination must be explained in terms of something else. Despite their similarities, Veridical and Misperceived must be explained differently.

Anyone who takes this stance must identify what explains the discrimination in Misperceived. The obvious answer is that it is the discriminator’s perception that Jamal is Black. This suggests a disjunctive view: to be a victim of discrimination is to be differentially treated because of your actual race (in veridical cases) or because of your perceived race (in misperception cases). Notably, when definitions of discrimination can include misperception cases, they often involve disjunctive formulations (e.g., actual or perceived race).²⁷ We will call this view disjunctivism about racial discrimination.

Adverting to disjunctivism raises two challenges for the argument from racial discrimination to racial realism. First, if the target’s perceived race is sufficient to explain why they were discriminated against, then the target’s actual race is redundant in explanations of discriminatory acts. Disjunctivism violates a general superfluity constraint on explanations.²⁸

One way to cash out that constraint is that explanations must be potential difference-makers: if A explains B, then A must be capable of making a difference to whether B is the case. Many have endorsed a “necessary condition for explanatory relevance” of this form (Strevens 2004: 159).²⁹ The constraint can also be cashed out in terms of minimality: for a set of factors, {P}, to explain Q, nothing could be subtracted from {P} without thereby losing the ability to explain Q (Audi 2012: 699). If when we subtract A from {P} the remaining set would still be able to explain Q, A is superfluous; in that sense, A is no part of the explanation of Q.³⁰

Why does disjunctivism violate this superfluity constraint? Because all the facts that are explanatorily sufficient in the misperception case are also present in the veridical case. In Misperceived, Jamal’s being perceived as Black is sufficient to explain the discriminatory act. In Veridical, everything — including this racial perception — is held fixed, except we add that Jamal is actually Black. Because the facts of Misperceived are sufficient to explain the discriminatory act, the fact that Jamal is actually Black in Veridical is not a potential difference-maker. Put otherwise, if we start with the facts of Veridical and subtract the fact that Jamal is Black, the remaining set of facts about how the discriminator perceived Jamal does no worse at explaining the discriminator’s action. So, Jamal’s actual race is explanatorily superfluous, and therefore is no part of the explanation of the rejection in Veridical.³¹

This brings us to our second challenge to disjunctivism. As mentioned before, explanations of discrimination are action explanations. These are not just any explanations where the explanandum is an action, but specifically explanations of actions in terms of the agent’s motivating reasons — the reasons for which an action was done. And the discriminator’s state of mind is the same across pairs of cases like Veridical and Misperceived. So why should the action explanation differ? To hold that it does violates a constraint on action explanations in particular: that the motivating reasons that explain an agent’s actions supervene on internal facts about their mental states. Call this the supervenience constraint.³²

Why accept the supervenience constraint? Here is the abstract argument. Someone’s motivating reasons for acting explain their actions by playing a certain motivational role in their psychology — that is why philosophers call them motivating reasons. Whether some reason plays a motivational role in one’s psychology depends on facts that are internal to one’s psychology. So differences in facts external to one’s psychology cannot by themselves make any difference to one’s motivating reasons.

To make things more concrete, we can consider cases where the relevant external features of the world change unbeknownst to us:

Airport: Rodrigo’s Auntie is flying into town. The flight is scheduled to arrive at 5pm. For this reason, at 4pm Rodrigo begins preparing to drive to pick Auntie up from the airport. At 4:05, Rodrigo is preoccupied and does not see a notification that Auntie’s flight has just been delayed by an hour.

At 4pm, what is the reason for which Rodrigo is preparing to drive to the airport? Suppose we say it is the fact that Auntie’s flight is scheduled to arrive at 5 pm. Here is the problem. At 4:10, this is no longer a fact, even though Rodrigo is still in the process of performing the same action. So what is Rodrigo’s motivating reason at 4:10? If we want to hold onto the first answer, we must hold that Rodrigo’s motivating reason changes (it becomes, e.g., Rodrigo’s belief that the flight is scheduled to arrive at 5) as a result of a change in the external world that makes no contact with Rodrigo’s psychology. This seems bizarre. Surely Rodrigo is acting on the basis of the same reason throughout the process of preparing to leave for the airport. Thus, cases like Airport support the supervenience constraint.

Notice that the flight delay in Airport plays a similar role to the two versions of Jamal’s case, Veridical and Misperceived: it introduces a difference in the external facts with no corresponding difference in the internal facts about agents’ mental states. In Veridical and Misperceived, the employers have the same motivating thought: that Jamal is Black. Their motivating reasons are psychologically indistinguishable. But disjunctivism says that in Veridical the fact that Jamal is Black explains the rejection, whereas in Misperceived something else (e.g., the perception that Jamal is Black) explains the same action. These disjunctivist verdicts violate the supervenience constraint in the same way as in Airport.

Of course, the Jamal cases may not be analogous to Airport in every respect. Perhaps facts about a flight arrival are mutable in a way that facts about one’s race are not. But we do not think that this undermines our point. As Boxill (1992: 16) has argued, even if race were mutable,³³ this would not change the moral landscape with respect to discrimination. Regardless, we can construct more closely analogous cases of discrimination on the basis of an identity that can easily change, like religion. Compare this pair of cases:

Mary 1: Mary applies for a job and does not get an interview. Mary later learns this is because the employer assumed they were Mormon, since their CV says they went to Brigham Young University, which is operated by the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-day Saints. Mary is Catholic.³⁴

Mary 2: As above, except that after submitting the application and while it is being considered, Mary converts to Mormonism.

In Mary 2, as in Airport, the relevant external fact (Mary’s religion) changes over the course of the agent’s action. But this change cannot make a difference to the relevant agent’s motivating reasons. If so, then in Mary 1 and Mary 2, the discriminator acts for the same reason. Thus, the discriminatory act should be explained in the same way. Whether across time or across minimal case pairs, providing two different explanations of the discriminatory act violates the supervenience constraint.

At this point, some might ask: Did we not just raise a general problem with disjunctive explanations of corresponding ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cases in philosophy of action more generally? And if it were this easy to argue against such explanations, would our arguments not also refute other similar forms of disjunctivism, such as disjunctivism about perception?

Our response is threefold. First, it is true that we have connected the problems with disjunctive explanations of veridical and misperception discrimination to more general issues with disjunctive explanations in the philosophy of action. But we think drawing this connection is both fruitful and independently motivated. Consider what Eidelson calls the “basic ‘internalist’ intuition” about discrimination: “If we know everything about how X treats Y and Z and why he treats them each as he does, we should know whether he is discriminating on any given basis in so doing” (2015: 28). Why is this an internalist intuition? Because the kind of ‘why’ question Eidelson references is an explanation of X’s actions in terms of their motivating reasons, which are internal to their psychology. Thus, Eidelson’s internalist intuition dovetails strikingly with the supervenience constraint. We think this connection between general action-theoretic considerations and specific considerations about discrimination is grist for our mill and renders disjunctivism about discrimination even more difficult to defend than its more general action-theoretic counterpart.

However, we do not think our arguments imply that all forms of disjunctivism should be rejected on the same grounds. This is our second response, and it points to a difference between disjunctivism about discrimination and disjunctivism about phenomena like perception: the former is distinctively undermotivated. A primary motivation for disjunctive explanations of perception is that there is some positive status present in the ‘good’ case that is absent in the ‘bad’ case. With perception, the idea is that you can gain knowledge of the world when you see a dog, but not when you have a vivid hallucination of a dog. By contrast, with discrimination there is no positive status to be explained in the veridical case — that is why we called it the veridical case, not the good case. So, disjunctivism about discrimination comes with similar costs to disjunctivism about perception and the like, but without similar benefits.

Finally, this response at most has traction against the argument from supervenience. It does not clearly affect the argument from superfluity. That is, it is not clear that disjunctivists about other phenomena are similarly committed to explanations of perceptions (etc.) in terms of facts about the external world that are always superfluous to the explanation. (And if they are, surely that is a serious cost for their view!)

IV.IV The Argument So Far

We have assumed for the sake of argument that Jamal’s being Black partly explains the rejection in Veridical. As we have shown, this assumption leaves no good options for explaining the rejection in Misperceived. So we should reject the starting assumption. That has been the argument so far. But we can also recast this argument to better emphasize its important upshot. We have seen that Misperceived is a case of discrimination (IV. I), that we should not explain it in terms of the victim’s actual race (IV. II), and that we should explain it the same way as we explain Veridical (IV. III). It follows that we should not explain the discriminatory action in Veridical in terms of the victim’s actual race.

Crucially, this argument does not show that realism about race is false. Neither the premises nor the conclusion concern whether race exists; they concern whether it plays a certain explanatory role. Our goal is to show why we should prefer explanations of racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes (which are the same in veridical and misperception cases) to explanations in terms of the victim’s actual race. So, responding to this argument by citing other theoretical advantages of realism would miss the point. The issue realists need to face in light of our argument is different: what is the theoretical advantage of positing that race plays this explanatory role? To answer this question, realists would need to engage in precisely what has been missing from this debate so far: a comparative analysis of the virtues of explaining discrimination in terms of race rather than racial attitudes.

VII.I The Three Options

We will begin, as before, by assuming for the sake of argument that, in Veridical, Jamal’s being Black partly explains the wrongfulness of the discriminatory act. This leaves three main possibilities for Misperceived:

1. 1. Misperceived is not a case of wrongful discrimination at all.

2. 2. Misperceived is a case of wrongful discrimination and the wrongfulness is explained in terms of Jamal’s actual race.

3. 3. Misperceived is a case of wrongful discrimination but the wrongfulness is not explained in terms of Jamal’s actual race.

As before, we will show that all three options fail. The upshot is that we should reject the assumption that Jamal’s actual race is part of the explanation of the wrongfulness of the discriminatory act in cases like Veridical.

On the first option, when Jamal is discriminated against because he is misperceived as Black, this action is not (seriously) wrong. We’ve already noted that this view is implausible. As we discussed in §IV.I, one of the reasons it is implausible to deny that Misperceived is a case of discrimination in the first place is that it would imply, counterintuitively, that Jamal was not seriously wronged. But there is a more important point here, which starts from an observation we made in §IV.I: Misperceived and Veridical are identical but for the victim’s actual race. This implies that they share commonly posited wrong-making features of discrimination.

For one, in both cases the employer is motivated by the same objectionable attitudes: anti-Black prejudices. More generally, on agent-centered views of the wrongfulness of discrimination (those which focus on the discriminator, rather than the discriminatee), Misperceived and Veridical should be regarded as wrong for exactly the same reasons.

For another, it is plausible that in both cases the employer’s act expresses the same wrongful objective meaning.⁴⁶ The expressive significance of rejecting job applications because the applicant’s name is racially coded is similar in both cases — it demeans the individual and Black people. More generally, insofar as such expressive views focus on the relation between the discriminator and discriminatee, we think they should also regard at least many cases of misperception discrimination as wrong.⁴⁷ To return to an earlier example, Sikhs who are systematically subject to Islamophobic harassment and abuse are thereby demeaned. Part of why this is the case is that the features that discriminators conceive of Muslims having are features that Sikhs have. So insofar as discriminatory acts demean people with those features, they demean Sikhs. (We do not think this is the full explanation — as we will note below.) Both misperception and veridical discrimination, then, involve wrongful, unjust relations.⁴⁸

Finally, in both cases, the act of discrimination is harmful. The harms of discrimination can be material, experiential, or consist in the deprivation of certain liberties.⁴⁹ Appealing to such harms gives us patient-centered accounts of the wrongfulness of discrimination. But misperception discrimination can still be harmful in all of these ways, and hence be wrong on patient-centered views. When people who are perceived to be Muslim are subjected to harassment, it does not cease to be harmful if they happen to be Sikh. Likewise, when Burrage suffered humiliation and lost employment, this did not cease to be harmful because Burrage happened not to be Mexican. Again, veridical and misperception discrimination share this commonly posited wrong-making feature of discrimination.

Say the realist grants that misperception discrimination is also wrongful. They could now take the second option, insisting that in Veridical and in Misperceived the victim’s actual race explains the wrongfulness of the discrimination. It is not clear how one should defend this idea. In Misperceived, Jamal’s being white does nothing to explain why the discriminatory act is wrong. And for the reasons we discussed (§IV.II and §V), we do not think Jamal is Black in Misperceived or that Jamal’s being Black in this case could help explain why the racial discrimination that Jamal suffered was wrong. So this second option looks like a dead end.

This leaves the final option, which is to hold that misperception discrimination is wrongful, but its wrongfulness is explained by something other than the victim’s race. Call this view moral disjunctivism: the wrongfulness of discrimination is explained either by actual race (in cases like Veridical) or by something else (in cases like Misperceived). As before, we are owed an account of what, other than race, plays the explanatory role in cases like Misperceived, and the obvious answer will be perceived race. But whatever the answer, this view faces an identical challenge to the disjunctivist view we considered in §IV.III.

Recall the superfluity constraint. If actual race is part of the explanation, it must be capable of making a difference. If we can always subtract actual race from a set of factors and the remaining set would just as well explain the wrongfulness of discrimination just as well, then actual race is superfluous and not part of the explanation of wrongfulness. The fact that Jamal is perceived to be Black, along with the background moral facts, is sufficient to explain why Misperceived is a case of wrongful discrimination. All of these facts are present in Veridical. So they are sufficient to explain why Veridical is a case of wrongful discrimination. Jamal’s actual race is superfluous to any explanation of why veridical is a case of wrongful discrimination. The superfluity constraint is a fully general constraint on explanation, but moral disjunctivism violates it.

VII.II Systematicity and Gradeability

At this point, the moral disjunctivist may respond that we are being too quick. When it came to disjunctivism previously, the superfluity constraint applied because the explanandum was exactly the same in Veridical and Misperception: the discriminatory act. But when we explain the wrongfulness of the acts in Veridical and Misperception, we’re explaining something gradable. It could be that the victim’s actual race makes no difference to whether racial discrimination is wrong but does make a difference to how wrong it is. Plausibly, anti-Black discrimination against someone who is Black is more seriously wrong than anti-Black discrimination against someone who is white.

The most plausible explanation for this is patient-centered. Cases like Veridical involve harms to the victim that are far more systematic. A white person named Jamal may face adverse treatment here and there because of their name, but a Black person named Jamal faces a much more widespread and far-reaching constellation of anti-Black prejudice across the course of their life. As this differential treatment aggregates over a lifetime, it may bring a host of additional harms. These include internalization, a heightened sense of insecurity, and adaptation to oppressive social scripts.⁵⁰

This is an important point. And while we think Veridical and Misperception both involve wrongful discrimination, we agree that the discrimination in Veridical is morally worse. However, we still do not think this tells in favor of the view that race is part of the best explanation of the wrongfulness of racial discrimination. Here is why.

We grant that systematicity matters for the seriousness of discrimination. But the systematicity and veridicality of discrimination can come apart. Sikhs are systematically subject to anti-Muslim harassment and violence. In fact, Sikhs may even be subject to higher rates of some forms of Islamophobic violence than actual Muslims, because the visible features that make them targets (turbans and beards) are features that Sikhs, not Muslims, tend to have. Systematicity and veridicality can also come apart in the other direction: sometimes actual members of marginalized groups can conceal a group identity and thereby be less systematically targeted.⁵¹ Of course, comparing how systematically real-world groups are discriminated against is messy. Our point is just that it is theoretically possible (and indeed easy to imagine) that systematicity and veridicality come far apart. One lesson from this is that if discrimination is more seriously wrong when it is systematic, it does not follow that veridical discrimination is more seriously wrong than misperception discrimination. In some cases, misperception discrimination may be no less systematic. Another lesson is that systematicity itself is better explained in terms of patterns of racial attitudes (independent of actual race membership), which illustrates another way that the complex wrong-making features of discrimination may be best explained in terms of racial attitudes (rather than actual race).

As we alluded to in §V, this point is especially important if we grant that entire groups can be subject to systematic racial misperception. For in such cases, as with Sikhs in the United States, there is an additional harm that comes with systematic misperception discrimination: a kind of erasure. This kind of erasure is felt by many non-Chinese East and Southeast Asian Americans who have been systematically subject to Sinophobic abuse. When one is systematically abused for being an X when one is actually a Y, part of what can be internalized is the social insignificance of what makes one’s actual group distinct in the first place. To be clear, we are not claiming that this makes misperception discrimination generally more seriously wrong than veridical discrimination. Like Moreau, we think that “practices that wrongfully discriminate vary enormously,” in terms of “the severity of their impact on the discriminatee,” “the motivation of the discriminator,” and “the discriminator’s awareness of the impact on the discriminatee and others who share the relevant [perceived] protected trait” (2020: 161). Our point is that, in the face of this variegation, the realist has an uphill battle to find a persuasive argument that veridical discrimination is more seriously wrong just in virtue of being veridical, such that the victim’s actual race is part of the best explanation of the gradable wrongness of discrimination.

Overall, then, the move to moral explanations does not save explanatory arguments for racial realism. We can provide better explanations of the wrongfulness of discrimination in terms of racial attitudes than in terms of actual races. This remains true even when we turn to more complex moral factors, such as the systematicity of discrimination.