1. Transitional Justice and Racialized Moral Psychology

In legal theory, transitional justice, which is sometimes referred to as “transitional jurisprudence,” focuses on the public administration of justice in the aftermath of societal destabilization, such as war and genocide (Teitel, Reference Teitel2000, p. 215). It theorizes legal procedures that rectify recent and historical wrongdoings (Murphy, Reference Murphy2017). In a nonideal theory of justice, the aim of transitional theory is broader than jurisprudence about crises. It plots how to overcome the obstacles to the realization of the requirements of justice, whatever they may be, in a long-term project of social transformation (Rawls, Reference Rawls1999, p. 89; Valentini, Reference Valentini2012, p. 8). Transitional justice stresses that normative political inquiry should offer more than cliches that denounce “injustice everywhere” (Mills, Reference Mills1998, p. xiv). Nor is it sufficient to propound universalizable normative principles to guide reform efforts. This is only half the battle. Normative principles are necessary but insufficient to orient transitional praxis. The challenge is for philosophers to show how prospective agents ought to see the world and each other as interdependent agents ensnared in historically developing relations of asymmetrical power (Basevich, Reference Basevich2024). Descriptions of the circumstances of injustice prime prospective agents’ moral perception. Fact-sensitivity is thus critical for a nonideal theory to have a practical function as a justice-promoting tool. A nonideal theory of transitional justice should help agents find their orientation in situ to empower them to undertake moral actions and apply principles to a messy reality that they cannot easily understand without empirically informed, philosophical instruction.Footnote ¹

Developing Onora O’Neill’s critique of idealizations, Mills argues that abstraction in moral ideals and descriptive models is indispensable for empowering agents to resist (Reference Mills2017, p. 73; see O’Neill, Reference O’Neill1987, pp. 64–66). He agrees with O’Neill that Kantian normative principles should comprise the normative foundation of anti-racist political critique.Footnote ² Mills asserts that “the key principles and ideals of Kant’s ethico-political thought are, once deracialized, very attractive: the respect for the rights of individual persons, the ideal of the Rechtsstaat, and the vision of a global cosmopolitan order of equals” (Reference Mills2018, p. 3). Mills does not reject ideal theory wholesale, so long as it can integrate transitional justice in a complete theory of justice. “Mills is not,” David Estlund observes, “criticizing the very enterprise of seeking philosophical understanding of the criteria for a fully or ideally just society” (Reference Estlund2020, p. 16). Rather, Mills worries that “the field of political philosophy has, for no good reason, fixated on trying to understand full justice” (Estlund, Reference Estlund2020, p. 18; Shelby, Reference Shelby2013, p. 152). Transitional justice efforts suffer when untested assumptions about so-called shared or public knowledge of empirical reality infect deliberation with unfounded and false ideas about people’s virtues, for “even well-established descriptions may be evasive, self-serving or ideologically contentious” (O’Neill, Reference O’Neill1987, p. 66). Idealizations that misdescribe reality can make it harder for agents to determine their judgment about what they ought to do when they are trying to do the right thing (Mills, Reference Mills2017, p. 75). An agent might be genuinely invested in, say, a cosmopolitan ideal of equal global citizenship but remain stubbornly unresponsive to the morally valid claims of others because they have a misleading empirical understanding of their place in the world and relation to other people.

To help orient prospective agents of change, Mills offers a critical social theory of race to enhance their empirical understanding and public moral perception. He aims to make prospective agents more attuned to how racial realities mediate habits of judgment among racialized groups and to disclose the general structure of modern racial realities. People can take responsibility for their misorientation, but to do so they need an account of how they have veered off course. Stressing that philosophers should not overlook that “people will typically be cognitively affected by their social location,” an account of white racialized moral psychology is among Mills’s pioneering contributions to theorizing the epistemic effects of racial embodiment, one that attacks the commonplace idealization that a latent hypothetical capacity for autonomous judgment is easily and uniformly cultivated among racial groups in nonideal circumstances (Reference Mills2017, p. 83). On the contrary, white moral cognitive dysfunction (hereon referred to as WMCD for short) includes a learned “white ignorance” about racial realities and patterned behaviors that express deficient good will toward black and nonwhite people (Alcoff, Reference Alcoff, Sullivan and Tuana2007, Reference Alcoff2024; Mills, 1999, p. 95, Reference Mills2017, Chapter 4). White-ignorant agents fail to contribute to reform efforts, struggle to acknowledge the emancipatory, justice-promoting value of such efforts, and are generally unmoved by the unmet demands of racial justice.Footnote ³

Mills’s treatment of racialized moral psychology first appears in The Racial Contract. There he underlines the psychological distress that whites tend to feel when they scrutinize modern racial realities with open eyes. The knowledge that one benefits from injustice is typically deeply uncomfortable. Call this psychological phenomenon “Disunity-as-Friction”:

Mills’s original treatment of racialized moral psychology in terms of “Disunity-as-Friction” is now widespread in contemporary philosophy. Scholars writing on the topic accept that whites often feel upset if they have to view objective racial realities and confront that they benefit from racial injustice. White moral psychology is taken to be a premier obstacle to the advance of moral progress and the institutionalization of the requirements of justice. Broadly speaking, there are two ways that contemporary philosophers hash out “Disunity-as-Friction” for the purpose of theorizing transitional praxis. One camp stresses the fixity of white unreason and seeks to work around it as if white unreason should be regarded as an unchangeable facet of practical reality, as propounded by Afropessimists and racial realists. In line with Mills himself, another camp posits that the goal of transitional praxis is to induce white moral transformation to create a multiracial democracy that emerges from white people's honest reckoning with racial realities.

For instance, For instance, Derrick Darby falls into the first “pessimistic” or “realist” camp. Darby argues that white racism creates such intense psychological discomfort that the call to rectify racial injustice “will not arouse a sense of justice in whites en masse and a corresponding desire to act […] in our actual nonideal world” (Reference Darby2019, p. 394). Given the imprint of “Disunity-as-Friction” among the self-consciousness of white Americans, Darby advocates avoiding public discussions about race and racism. Such conversations are bound to make whites uncomfortable. Instead, he advocates building consensus about people’s shared economic and social interests with people of color without invoking race-conscious analysis or condemning past racial injustices. He drops the seemingly hopeless task of trying to convince whites that their moral sensibilities reflect WMCD. He stresses that if transitional justice efforts are colorblind, they are more likely to make successful economic and redistributive interventions that would benefit black and brown communities anyway. To be clear, Darby agrees that white racism is an obstacle to progress. A theory of transitional justice should overcome WMCD, but it should do so covertly because it is unrealistic to expect moral growth among the American public on this issue. Working around WMCD reappears as a covert metaphilosophical standard for theorizing transitional justice. Philosophers need not publicize their concerns about the effects of WMCD to the wider public, yet they should figure out how to mitigate the destructive effects of white racism by proposing initiatives that would benefit communities of color anyway.

The second camp diagnoses the social phenomenon of WMCD in order to map how best to overcome it. This camp seeks to get whites to confront their misorientation and thereby cultivate collective self-awareness. This camp includes Mills himself, who argues that the unwitting beneficiaries of the racial contract are blameworthy and culpable for their actions (1999, p. 107). I agree that transitional justice efforts should seek to empower all people, including oppressors, by tapping their unrealized potential for moral growth and transitional praxis. I reject that transitional justice should view any group’s habits of judgment as being somehow impervious to reform or as fixed feasibility constraints on white moral responsiveness. I submit that a philosophical account of racialized moral psychology is supposed to be morally educative for prospective political agents. It is meant to expose neglected and unseemly social facts about their habits of judgment. Transitional justice should thus facilitate critical self-awareness to reveal how and why people are prone to tolerate an unjust status quo and sabotage transitional praxis. I now turn to Allais’s Kantian account of WMCD. It offers a careful illustration of the ideological entrenchment of white moral psychology that remains true to the Kantian spirit of agents overcoming their self-imposed immaturity through self-reflection (Reference Mills1997, pp. 107–8).

2. An Incomplete Account of Racialized Self-Love

Allais gives a rich description of the bad habits that are common among white majorities in the U.S. and South Africa. While she rejects Mills’s claim that Kant is a consistent racist inegalitarian, she agrees with Mills that Kant’s practical philosophy has helpful resources for theorizing the requirements of racial justice and for promoting transitional praxis that can spur white moral growth.Footnote ⁴ She posits that Kant’s moral psychology illustrates that whites are incentivized to deceive themselves out of self-love to condone racial realities. Her picture of white self-love focuses on the patterns of poor judgment that capture the influence of racist norms and social practices on individuals’ self-perception as members of a favored group (2016, p. 30). Whites are disinclined to become stewards of racial justice because it is too psychologically taxing to accept that they enjoy illicit racial privileges as a function of their superior position in an ascriptive racial hierarchy. Rather than undergo critical self-appraisal, they choose to self-soothe, cocooning themselves in a distorted self-perception offered by conventional social scripts about white innocence and nobility. They thus convince themselves that the claims of the racially oppressed are much ado about nothing and tend to be “massively” self-deceived (Allais, Reference Allais2016, p. 28). Whites acquire “patterns of interpretation, psychological and somatic habits that are a function of coming to agency in a position of wrongful domination, that involve seeing the world incorrect, and that deeply stain moral selves, as it were” (Allais, Reference Allais, Lyssy and Yeomans2021, p. 60).

In an innovative move, Allais locates the unavoidable temptation toward self-deception in Kant’s depiction of the inextirpable “propensity” to evil (Religion 6: 32). The tolerance of racist laws and public policies among US and South- African publics showcases an “internal pressure” that all embodied practical agents experience, as they struggle to achieve an ordered sense of self, that is, to become whole, unified, and coherent (Allais, Reference Allais2016, pp. 29–30, Reference Allais, Lyssy and Yeomans2021, p. 53; Varden, Reference Varden2020, pp. 33–66). For Kant, a propensity is “a subjective ground of the possibility of an inclination” (Religion 6: 29). It does not reveal an inborn defect in human capacity for moral agency. Evil does not belong to “the concept of a human being” (Religion 6: 32). Psychological proclivities do not tarnish the subjective ground of choice that supports the morality of autonomy. In other words, an embodied moral psychology is compatible with the morality of autonomy. Still, a permanent feature of the structure of moral agency involves a practical need for positive self-appraisal; the latter is a condition for the ongoing exercise of practical reason. “Part of what it is to make sense of yourself as a rational agent,” Allais writes, “is to interpret yourself as basically good,” that is, whole, ordered, and coherent (Reference Allais2016, p. 29). Ideally, the self-knowledge that comes with experience disciplines the will to avoid temptations. One learns to remain steadfast to respect the moral law, despite the “inextirpable” temptation to subordinate the moral law to self-love. A moralized self-knowledge earned through withering trials should amplify one’s agential powers to face future challenges. One thus “earns” a sense of self as a whole, ordered, and coherent practical agent. In the circumstances of injustice, however, dominant norms and social practices feed the temptation to indulge in unearned self-praise and fans white self-deception. Racialized self-love thereby makes oppressors feel that they are absolved of the moral responsibility of social reform by stifling feelings of guilt and shame. In fact, white majorities tend to perceive dissent as illegitimate from the standpoint of the rule of law and to regard themselves as guardians of liberal values and democratic ideals.

An advantage of the Kantian picture of self-deception is that it clarifies, first, why the experience of agential disunity is psychologically distressing. It forces oppressors to confront their incoherence and hypocrisy, since their actions do not satisfy normative requirements. The phenomenon of Disunity-as-Friction is the unfortunate but predictable outcome of the irremovable drive for unity that colors the subjective experience of the process of moral decision-making. Seldom do evildoers openly embrace their moral dissipation or indifference to the moral law. Rather, oppressors tend to maintain a subjective sense of internal unity by fleeing from unjust realities to pad a social self. The upshot is that “subjective incoherence, disunity and instability” are “potential sources of moral growth” that encourage agents to give up a deceptive unity (Allais, Reference Allais, Lyssy and Yeomans2021, p. 61). Disunity is a promising mechanism of moral growth for oppressors who must work through their psychological distress to reconcile the contradiction between their social comportment and moralized self-perception (Allais, Reference Allais, Lyssy and Yeomans2021, p. 57). WMCD is thus a core feature of transitional praxis in that it is meant to prompt white moral transformation by making whites reckon with the social construction of the white self.

Second, a Kantian picture of self-deception shows that a person can do bad things but still feel like a good person who believes they have done nothing wrong (Varden, Reference Varden2024, p. 78). On the Kantian story, white racialized self-love is a distinctly psychological phenomenon. It is not a mere instrument for persons to acquire material benefits, such as wealth, social standing, and economic opportunities. White racialized self-love is its own reward, so to speak. It consists in inflated self-esteem that succumbs to the “internal pressure” to feel virtuous, even when one’s actions do not actually merit positive self-appraisal from the objective standpoint of morality. The feeling of unearned moral pride might also bring material advantages down the line; but, in the first instance, it simply makes one feel virtuous apart from material or social advantages or even improved social status.Footnote ⁵ A white racialized moral psychology is thus bound up with an unearned subjective estimation of one’s own moral goodness.

It is easy to see that a Kantian reconstruction of moral psychology enriches Mills’s original formulation of WMCD as an instance of the psychological phenomenon of “Disunity-as-Friction.” For whites, unity promises a distinctive kind of pleasure that is uniquely alluring for rational practical agents; disunity invites friction that can make one feel like a moral failure and kill a sense of moral competence that should underlie moral judgment and action. Honest confrontation with one’s unacknowledged social location causes internal friction. It makes one uncomfortable in one’s own skin because one intuits that one is complicit in evil. One discerns that the de facto conditions of one’s social existence are illicit and unjustifiable. So, one refuses to take responsibility for the actions of one’s group and, by extension, to take responsibility for oneself as a member of a powerful group. In order to enjoy a deceptive unity, whites tend to stand as stubborn obstacles to progress by way of a sincere belief in their moral goodness. On the Kantian story, they cling to an unearned subjective sense of moral integrity, for all people put a premium on achieving agential integrity, even if it means telling themselves self-soothing lies about themselves. Still, this racialized moral psychology is incomplete, for it leaves out everyone else. While anyone might be tempted to rationalize racial realities for personal gain, convenience, and self-interest, on the whole, white people—not people of color—are inclined to deceive themselves out of racialized self-love. For nonwhites, the pursuit of legitimate aspirations typically comes at the cost of social recognition and affirmation of the socially constructed and racialized self. What, if anything, incentivizes racially oppressed agents to comply with an unjust status quo?

3. Double Consciousness, Double Binds, and the Unity-as-Fracture Model

In Section 2, I argued that oppressors have a psychological incentive to rationalize the status quo and foster a misplaced confidence in their moral goodness. Unfortunately, Mills and interpreters of his work have comparatively less to say about why oppressed agents participate in oppressive systems and how to support transitional justice efforts from a nonwhite perspective. Mills grants that WMCD is not exclusively a problem for white people: “The ‘white’ in ‘white ignorance’ does not mean that it has to be confined to white people” (Reference Mills2017, p. 57; Martín, Reference Martín2021). However, he does not detail the distinctive way that the phenomenon of WMCD factors into the moral deliberation of racially oppressed groups and serves to undermine, rather than reinforce, the agential unity of nonwhite groups.

To begin, the oppressed and oppressors do not have the same incentive structure for complying with unjust racial realities.Footnote ⁶ The notion of white self-love does not capture the incentive structure of moral decision-making among the racially oppressed. The oppressed are not incentivized to participate in the system that oppresses them because they believe in the moral goodness of white people. It is not quite right to suppose that the racially oppressed primarily comply out of a delusional love for white people, exhibiting a full-blown ideological indoctrination into white supremacy. One can grant that oppressive norm-compliance is a mistake that the oppressed make and sometimes even internalize WMCD to their own detriment (Hay, Reference Hay2013). However, Du Bois rejects that oppressive norm-compliance among the oppressed mainly reflects a groveling “love” for white people rooted in the moral mistake of racialized self-loathing or self-deception about one’s equal moral worth as a person of color. The Duboisian story about oppressive-norm compliance by the oppressed is more subtle and complex.

For the racially oppressed, oppressive norm-compliance does not boost racial self-regard. In an unjust world, norms are, by definition, racially disrespectful and socially denigrating. It never feels “good”—in the sense of boosting self-esteem by way of social recognition of one’s racial identity—for a nonwhite agent to accept the racialized, social self projected by the white world. Whereas oppressors experience “Disunity-as-Friction” in that they have a psychological incentive to maintain agential unity by rationalizing an unjust world that pads their social self, in contrast, the oppressed face “Unity-as-Fracture.” They must develop a moral practice that rejects the hateful “messages” of “the other [i.e., white] world” to maintain self-worth, as they navigate the color line (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois2007a, p. 8). A commitment to the ideal of racial equality prevents the oppressed from feeling at home in an unjust world, from which they are alienated as a result. According to Du Bois, the psychological distress of “double consciousness” stems from black strivers trying to assert their equal worth in the context of an unjust world that predictably rejects or ignores their self-assertions. Were the moral demand to respect black humanity in oneself and others not binding on the will, perhaps in an inchoate and pre-reflective form, reconciliation with an unjust world would not be disorienting. It would be easy. The self would not split as a result of striving against the color line. That it does split indicates the theoretical power of Du Bois’s account of double consciousness. It depicts an internal, psychical drama, in which an oppressed agent feels that their righteous moral aims pit them against an unjust world that flouts those aims unfairly. A commitment to self-assertion can erode with time; repeated failures to achieve one’s moral aims can make one prone to a baseless and destructive self-doubt.Footnote ⁷ As I explain below, however, it is noteworthy that, on Du Bois’s telling, the onset of the subjective experience of double consciousness presumes that black strivers value the ideal of racial equality and seek to express it in their practical activities through self-respecting actions. Du Bois takes for granted that maintaining self-respect and expressing it through one’s actions is a difficult, but preoccupying, task for black strivers.

What is more, in a hostile social environment, the oppressed are punished for acts of self-assertion. Direct resistance is a ground for social sanction, frustrating the legitimate aspirations of the oppressed. In other words, black strivers must navigate an oppressive double-bind. Pioneered by the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye, a double bind is “a choice situation where an agent is ‘immobilized’ because, although they have choices available to them, every choice exposes them to ‘penalty, censure or deprivation’” (Reference Frye1983; Hirji, Reference Hirji2025, p. 590). Though Du Bois never uses this language, he too stresses the steep costs of the available options for action for black strivers. On the one hand, the oppressed can engage in acts of strategic compliance to avoid the steep costs of direct resistance. One learns to pursue one’s legitimate aspirations by biting one’s tongue. This approach makes a virtue of “resignation and submission” (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois2007a, p. 135, Reference Du Bois2007b, pp. 94–96). On the other hand, some strivers are inspired to enter a fierce “strife,” even though direct resistance inadvertently expedites self-destruction and can come across as a form of self-sabotage (Du Bois, 2007, p. 8). Despite direct protests, the public stays “deaf to righteous appeal, and […] the reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies” (2007, p. 137). Thus, whatever a striver chooses to do, they are often unable to establish mutually respectful social relations with white people across the color line.

The racially oppressed thus experience “unity-as-fracture” in that they must subjectively cling to their self-worth despite being made a public object of racist disrespect. Maintaining a sense of agential unity that impresses on an agent an internal sense of coherence, order, and moral competence requires them to break with the white world and to navigate a permanent fracture between self and world. Whereas members of powerful groups can rely on social scripts that shore up a powerful, even intoxicating agential unity, for the oppressed this is not the case. Their agential unity is threatened by social misrecognition that devalues them. Their moral faith in themselves must be cultivatedand asserted in the faceof thedisrespect and mistreatment by others. They can thus come to feel estranged from themselves by way of the vicious and condescending judgments of “the other world” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 8). Maintaining agential unity, then, requires breaking with the white world. The oppressed learn to navigate the yawning gap between their justifiable moralized self-perception and the unjustifiable social misrecognition.

Why does this difference in perspective between the oppressor and the oppressed matter for theorizing transitional justice? Any account of oppressive norm-compliance that draws on a philosophical anthropology that supposedly captures universal tendencies among embodied practical agents must delineate the scope of its analysis. Otherwise, a theory cannot hope to empower prospective agents to resist if it misrepresents the reasons why different groups comply with injustice. If the viewpoint of oppressors does not reflect those of the oppressed, then this suggests that the Kantian sketch of evil—and relatedly, the phenomenon of the internalization of WMCD—does not fully capture oppressive-norm compliance among the oppressed. I make my case below for why neither collective self-deception nor a defective quality of will that shows blank indifference to normative requirements is a satisfactory gloss on the motivations of the racially oppressed to comply with the social system that oppresses them. A critical way that unjust social systems retain stability is by exploiting oppressed agents’ drive to exercise rational practical agency when they have no morally good options. I argue that, paradoxically, sometimes participation in oppressive social systems is clear-eyed and morality-driven. In Section 4, I argue that the oppressed have a moral incentive to comply as a misguided attempt at self-respecting action.

4. Why Participate? Double Consciousness and Self-Respect

Du Bois observes that double consciousness is a “peculiar sensation” that reflects the “strange meaning” of being black in Jim Crow America (2007, p. 3). Double consciousness first infects his self-awareness in a “schoolyard” game, in which a white playmate rejects him. It then “dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (2007, p. 8). He describes himself becoming distorted under the white gaze of his playmates. Double consciousness, he explains, is “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of the other, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (2007, p. 8). The “tape of the world” creates a gulf between how he sees himself and how the world sees him. He sees himself as a complete thinking, feeling, and sensing being with moral entitlements and legitimate aspirations for self-realization and the good life. Initially, he takes for granted that his body is an instrument of his will, not a morally arbitrary basis for crushing his legitimate aspirations. However, the white gaze interprets him through the prism of racial prejudice. It imposes a racial ranking system that ascribes to him an inferior rank, one that he refuses to accept.

Unlike the experience of “Disunity-as-Friction,” in which members of powerful groups cling to a false self-conception to avoid unsettling truths about themselves and the world, “Unity-as-Fracture” illuminates that the oppressed strive to sustain their self-worth and long-term life-projects, despite external imputations of racial inferiority from without. After his first traumatic encounter with the veil, Du Bois describes his resolve to defy the normative expectations of the “other world”:

Du Bois strives to maintain agentialunity by opposing the external ascriptions of racial inferiority. He remarks that for “other black boys” the “strife” was not so “fiercely sunny” in that they struggled to engage in actions that matched their subjective moral perception of their equal worth. He acknowledges that he shares the same racialized social location that makes both him and the “other boys” vulnerable to agential disunity: they are all “prisoners” in a “prison-house” (2007, p. 8). To wit, the “other” world is designed to crush their legitimate aspirations as free and equal American citizens. The color line thus renders black civic standing inconsequential by denying black strivers their just due as equal citizens in American public life. From the point-of-view of the oppressed, it is psychologically distressing to reconcile oneself to the normative expectations of an unjust world because the world fails to respect oneself as “black” and as “American.” One suffers in righteous indignation. For one “simply wishes to make it possible to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by one’s fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in one’s face” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 9).

Du Bois’s insight into the incentive structure of the oppressed highlights the resolve of ambitious strivers like him to defy standing normative expectations shaped by an ascriptive racial hierarchy. He refuses to conform to “the tape of the world” (2007, p. 8). He asserts his equal worth by according his life projects due regard and is resolved to pursue higher education and professional opportunities. Yet, to obtain these social goods, he must interact with white people and compete with them on unfair terms.Footnote ⁸ His defiance of the “tape” of the world draws him into the white world. Black strivers’ attempts to find success across the color line convey the determination to affirm oneself as an equal citizen when the polity does not. The oppressed have unvindicated moral entitlements that drive them to seize limited rights, resources, and opportunities, which are their just due as equal citizens. And engagement in ambitious pursuits is itself a moral accomplishment, demonstrating that one does not accept the debased picture of oneself projected by the “tape” of the “other” world.

Yet, pursuing ambitious life projects involves palliating hostile white people (Khader, Reference Khader, Dean and Sensen2021). In circumstances that severely restrict the effective capacity to act, strivers learn to negotiate oppressive double-binds. Otherwise, they cannot act at all. They would simply have to give up their claim to the “white” world and engage in dogged and unrelenting direct protest, since most social encounters across the color line would involve white people rudely and unfairly rebuffing the ideal of racial equality. Because the available range of options is so restricted, for the oppressed, self-respecting actions that indicate that one rejects the normative expectations of an unjust world, paradoxically, can elicit strategic conformity with the very same inegalitarian norms one disavows. Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness thus conveys the unavoidable challenge of pursuing legitimate life projects when one stands as the public object of racist disrespect and embraces ambitious, long-term goals.

Oppressed agents thus have a peculiar moral incentive as self-respecting agents to participate in the system that oppresses them.Footnote ⁹ Such participation is often the only way for the oppressed to advance their legitimate aspirations, such as obtaining education and employment, and thereby win small and isolated acts of resistance that attest to their self-worth in an unwelcoming world. Notably, Michelle Moody-Adams argues that a properly self-respecting agent develops and employs their agential capacities and talents to promote survival (Reference Moody-Adams1993, pp. 252–253). However, strategic compliance does not involve mere survival, as if moral considerations do not inform moral decision-making in nonideal circumstances. Admittedly, oppressed agents must participate in oppressive systems as an elemental practical necessity. But the point is that nonideal circumstances are the ineliminable condition for the exercise of moral agency; and one cannot act without entering social relations whose de facto inegalitarian terms one does not control in any direct or immediate fashion. Typically, philosophers parse out self-respecting action in binary terms that expect oppressed agents either to accept or reject the bad terms on offer. This misses a third option that many oppressed agents take to express their self-respect in nonideal conditions: oppressed agents learn to navigate oppressive social relations in a fashion that they believe defies standing normative expectations over the long run and is therefore in keeping with the preservation of their agential unity, despite externally abiding by inegalitarian social norms. Defiance does not always take the form of outright and contentious rejection (Hay, Reference Hay2013). It can also involve a long, slow “siege” (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois2007b, pp. 2–3).

The flip side of the question of why oppressed agents participate in the systems that oppress them underscores the costs of refusal. It is unreasonable to expect anyone, much less those who already possess limited rights and opportunities, to self-sacrifice. Routine self-sacrifice cannot be a fixed feature of resisting nonideal circumstances over a complete lifetime. Serene Khader thus argues that a desideratum of anti-oppressive theorizing should be avoiding counseling routine self-sacrifice for the oppressed, as if asking generations of people to give up their long-term life projects is the unfortunate but inevitable cost of moral progress (Reference Khader, Dean and Sensen2021, p. 245). In fine, for Du Bois, it is imperative for a racial-justice movement to nurture black talents and ambitions. Self-development cannot be dismissed as the moral mistake of the self-indulgent and overly ambitious.

That one can affirm one’s equal worth and still cooperate with racially inegalitarian practices forces philosophers to confront the tragic nature of moral decision-making in the circumstances of entrenched injustice. People often make tradeoffs to preserve their agential unity that they would not make in better circumstances. Notably, Lisa Tessman objects that philosophers’ insistence that moral goodness is always possible in any circumstance whatsoever through sheer self-determination is an illusion. The conceit blinds philosophers to the unfair tradeoffs that often leave considerable moral damage on an oppressed agent in the aftermath of tragic choices (Reference Tessman2015, p. 167). Unfortunately, no matter how hard a moral agent might try, sometimes “there are no morally good ways out” because one only has bad options (Varden, Reference Varden2024, p. 62). As I argue elsewhere, Du Bois underlines that strategic compliance over the long term can distort moral self-perception and undermine the agential integrity of the oppressed. Despite their initial defiance and drive for self-assertion, they can begin to lose their sense of self-worth over time (Basevich, Reference BasevichForthcoming). In any case, Du Bois’s treatment of double consciousness undermines the way philosophers sometimes set up a simplistic choice situation between “morality” and “presumably non-moral rational self-interest” that obscures the complexity of moral decision-making in nonideal situations (Tessman, Reference Tessman2015, p. 166). People can find themselves choosing between oppressive-norm compliance or outright self-sacrifice, neither of which actualizes their moral aims. And oppressive-norm compliance cannot be dismissed as mere non-moral self-interest, as if outright self-sacrifice is not itself an unjustifiable, and often unendurable, moral loss for the agent concerned. On the contrary, from the point of view of the oppressed, oppressive norm compliance is a species of moral practice that showcases subjective defiance Reference Hay2013. And it reveals that oppressive social systems can grow stronger precisely by restricting the options for oppressed agents to pursue legitimate life projects. Oppressive social systems thus exploit the drive for self-assertion among tenacious strivers.

5. Self-Respect Gone Awry?

One might grant that oppressive norm-compliance is a species of self-respecting action in the circumstances of entrenched injustice and yet object that here too there are moral boundaries that one should not cross. It does not follow that anything goes. The oppressed do not have moral license to focus on their legitimate aspirations alone because it falls within the strictures of self-respect. But how does one demarcate when the righteous pursuit of legitimate aspirations veers off course to betray a callous indifference, rather than support for, the ideal of racial equality? Mere conformity with unjust racial realities among the oppressed is a serious concern for Du Bois. In other words, he does not assume that oppressive norm-compliance that secures prudential interests automatically signifies black self-respect. Even under conditions of violent bondage, he stresses that more or less defiant pathways of self-assertion were open for enslaved persons. He celebrates the historical moment when informal political bonds on slave plantations burst into direct resistance with the invasion of the Union army during the American Civil War (Reference Du Bois1998, Chapter 4). For oppressive norm-compliance to maintain a defiant edge, one must affirm and, when feasible, advance the moral entitlements of fellow oppressed people. Du Bois counsels ambitious strivers not to lose sight of themselves as members of a disadvantaged social whole. His conception of self-respect thus requires agents to declaim the rights and privileges of citizenship that are denied to fellow oppressed people. His picture of self-respect is bound up with a defense of black intragroup political solidarity and democratic citizenship.

In Dusk of Dawn, for example, he argues that members of an emergent black middle class prefer to obtain primary social goods, such as wealth and social status, in lieu of building political ties with the black working class (Reference Du Bois2007b, pp. 88–97; Shelby, Reference Shelby2016, Reference Shelby, Sangiovanni and Viehoff2024). As early as Souls, he remarks that the focus on personal ambition and accumulating resources for oneself alone sacrifices black strivers' self-respect as “Black” (2007, p. 39). He instructs black strivers to assert their moral entitlements as members of a racially oppressed group. In other words, to enjoy “true” agential unity, as “Black” and as “American,” one must pay the way forward for other, less advantaged members of one’s social group.Footnote ¹⁰ He thus couples assertions of black self-respect with nurturing ties of intragroup civic fellowship within the segregated black community, especially with the working class and the poor. And so, while one need not risk everything to assert one’s self-respect, one has to be prepared to make some sacrifices and keep in view the unmet claims of fellow oppressed people (Reference Du Bois1948).

Du Bois is of two minds here. On the one hand, he counsels that there are limits on the sacrifices one can expect anyone to make for a just cause. It is not unreasonable for oppressed people in particular to wish to avoid losses, since their lives are already replete with unfair obstacles. In fact, for the mature Du Bois of the mid-1930s, political strategies are an “affront” to “self-respect” if they dramatically damage or worsen an agent’s life (Reference Du Bois and Lewis1995, p. 560). It is perverse to present black protestors’ willingness to bear losses, time and again, as a requirement of morality, justice, virtue, or a species of the moral good at all (Hooker, Reference Hooker2023). In nonideal circumstances, avoiding self-sacrifice and excessive losses as far as possible is an assertion of self-respect (Basevich, Reference Basevich2022). On the other hand, he also cautions that there are limits to how far agents should advance their personal flourishing without running the risk of their actions appearing to become wholly divorced from the ideal of racial equality. An oppressed agent is liable to deceive themselves that they have a moral license that permits the unbounded pursuit of narrow self-interest and personal life projects, given their difficult social position. They can mistakenly feel entitled to ignore the claims of others as a rationalization for focusing on themselves alone because they have so little power and resources, and what they do have is insecure. He redirects agents—especially better positioned, in-group members—to balance the competing constraints between self-regarding and other-regarding motives. This balancing act illustrates that for Du Bois “true” agential unity should develop ties of intragroup political solidarity.Footnote ¹¹ Even if one strategically complies with racially inegalitarian norms in “the other world,” one must still commit to subjecting the color line to critically scrutiny with fellow oppressed people and strategize the long-term advance of the moral aim of group advancement in the universal interest of justice for all. Du Bois thus links “true” agential unity for oppressed agents with their pushing for the moral entitlements of equal citizenship. In sum, his complete picture of self-respect rests on two contrasting models of agential unity: a “false unity” that disavows the moral salience of racial group membership and foregoes cultivating political bonds with fellow oppressed people and a “true unity” that integrates a positive orientation toward one’s racial group and welcomes racial-justice efforts, so long as those efforts do not wholly compromise one’s legitimate personal projects.

Although the oppressed who cooperate with unjust racial realities are not rewarded with an inflated social self and do not benefit from an external boost of racialized self-love, they might gain prudential benefits for cooperating with injustice, such as currying the favor of oppressors and other social and material advantages. As we have seen, however, an oppressed agent can acquiesce to injustice for personal gain without rationalizing unjust racial realities. Conformity does not necessarily mean that one assumes the values, beliefs, and practices characteristic of what Mills calls “white moral cognitive dysfunction.” One might try to secure scarce resources and opportunities that are otherwise unavailable to members of an oppressed group and which one rightly perceives to be one’s just due. And so, one need not lie to oneself that nothing can be done or that things are not that bad. On the contrary, because one clearly understands racial realities and that change is glacially slow, one is doing something to set one’s affairs in order. One methodically plots one’s personal advancement. Otherwise, one will miss the chance for a flourishing life. In seeking one’s just due, one has reasonable cause to think that the pursuit of personal projects is a species of self-respecting action.

However, Du Bois notes that oppressive norm-compliance can encourage successful strivers to abandon the cause of racial justice altogether as a political project. Successful strivers can lose sight of why their personal ambitions had a distinctive moral character in the first place. Namely, their membership in an oppressed group renders it difficult for them to access educational and professional opportunities. They tend to focus on personal projects alone to cultivate a new personal identity as “pure individuals” to borrow Jean Paul Sartre’s term (Reference Sartre1978, p. 77). They might lie to themselves that their status as a racially oppressed person warrants ignoring the unmet interests of fellow oppressed people. There is thus a tendency to regard a position in an ascriptive racial hierarchy as a moral license to ignore the claims of fellow oppressed people. Additionally, one might come to mistakenly believe that personal success indicates one’s transcendence of race and social identity and others could likewise achieve transcendence—and float above the structural conditions of racial injustice—if they just try hard enough.

In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois elaborates that even progressive members of the emergent black middle class can sometimes avoid associating with the black working poor and judge them rather harshly. They harbor a sentiment that they seldom express: the diminished life prospects of the black community are exacerbated by black irresolution, indifference, and lack of talent. Among the black middle class, the social ills in the segregated black community might induce feelings of frustration, shame, contempt, or embarrassment for the intemperate character of those who are worse off (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois and Lewis1986, Reference Du Bois2007b, pp. 94–95). One resents being identified as a member of an oppressed group that appears to “passively” endure structural racism and (unlike oneself) lack sufficient willpower to overcome the unfair obstacles that obstruct their path to personal success. One thus rationalizes severing ties of intragroup political solidarity and relishes seeing others “pay their dues” as one has in an unfair world. The withdrawal of solidarity can even betray a sadistic impulse. For one nurses a deep, concealed hurt and unexpressed anger at the needless suffering to which one was subjected. One thereby loses compassion for those enduring the deleterious effects of the color line (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois2007b, pp. 96–97). Harsh judgment of those worse off can also betray a deep-seated fear that one can lose the life one has built by arbitrary acts of racist destruction. It preserves the illusion of control of one's life prospects.

My remarks above are sketchy. They aim to illuminate the need for a more comprehensive conceptual tapestry that captures the complicated psychological roots of complicity in injustice among the oppressed that does not privilege WMCD. Philosophers should not assume that moral failure, self-deception, and even negative self-perception amount to the acceptance of a white worldview or the desire to win white social esteem among the oppressed. None of the forms of moral failure that I outline above fail to notice that the color line is unjust. Instead, they respond to that moral fact in anti-social and uncooperative ways. Note, too, that these defective moral responses hardly boost self-esteem qua one’s racialized social self. Instead, they tend to bring with them a tangle of negative emotions and self-perceptions, such as shame, contempt, and embarrassment. And these negative emotions and self-perceptions are not always a direct byproduct of white racist misrecognition.

Consider again the key Kantian insight into the moral psychology of embodied practical agents. People find it difficult to forego positive self-appraisal as being morally good, coherent, and ordered and search for a unified self-conception, which would allow them to affirm their racialized embodiment and place in the social world as an enriching and even joyful shared social experience. The subjective phenomenon of white self-love takes for granted that all people would rather feel agential integrity than not feel it; and they would rather avoid a persistent, destabilizing disunity between their normative commitments and their place in the world as the indefinite, practical condition of moral action. Appealing to this very same existential impulse, Du Bois flips the script. He intimates that the oppressed also have a psycho-social incentive to achieve a unified self-conception as embodied practical agents. One can achieve a unified self-conception by either emphasizing one’s just due as an “abstract individual” and severing one’s social relation with fellow oppressed people and stifling feelings of shame or contempt. Or, one can emphasize one’s just due as a member of a disadvantaged social whole for whom moral entitlements are inaccessible or insecure. A novel implication of Du Bois’s appeal to “true” agential unity is that racialized self-love among the racially oppressed can support emancipatory transitional praxis among group members. Black self-love can discourage the narrow and exclusive pursuit of personal interests by compelling one to affirm the black collective as the relevant subject for moral action. The cultivation of intragroup black political solidarity is not a superficial or destructive self-love but for the pursuit of justice itself. Du Bois thus hopes to open a path for maintaining an agential unity that existentially uplifts the racial identity of the oppressed and affirms their still unrealized moral entitlements as equal citizens.

Notice that the existential affirmation of one’s equal worth as a person and the positive affirmation of one’s racial identity can dovetail and mutually reinforce one another to provide a stable and integrated foundation for sustaining agential integrity and the ongoing political actions of an oppressed group.Footnote ¹² Black self-love acquires a moral character aimed at joint political action that should protect participants' equal worth as Black and provide a pathway for being “at home” in their socially situated, physical body and political community.Footnote ¹³ Du Bois highlights that black existential self-affirmation is not only compatible with “true” agential unity that allows a person to embrace fully their contingent racial embodiment, provided that it is pursued within the “parameters of morality,” but it can also steady moral motivation in a protracted struggle for racial justice (Varden, Reference Varden2024, p. 63). Black existential self-affirmationcan ward off a “false” unity of abstract individualism that hampers transitional praxis. Du Bois writes, “the child of Emancipation” becomes “a youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect”; he discerns his “mission” and “power” as a member of a racially oppressed group: “He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (2007, p. 11).