Stereotypes and the Shaping of Identity

Abstract

I have spent a good deal of time over the years thinking about how our racial identities should figure in our moral and political livesreflecting, that is, on the ethical significance of one dimension of difference.' I have thought about these questions as a moral philosopher and not as a legal theorist, and so I have not had to work within the constraints imposed by the law and the history of its interpretation. The advantage of this freedom is that one may reflect on how things should be, unconstrained by the necessity of deference to the confusions of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government. The disadvantage is that one can find oneself proposing norms or practices that have no chance at all of being implemented, and giving advice that seems, in the justly derogatory sense, merely theoretical. So it is cheering to find someone like Professor Post, who both recognizes an important moral truth about the ethical significance of difference and believes that it can be brought to bear in the practical business of interpreting actually existing American antidiscrimination law.