Abstract

For all the talk there has been lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations that are associated with having privilege. Those who have commented haven't gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege, should listen to those who don't have it. Here we want to go further, and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper we articulate an understanding of race privilege, say how a person can know when she has it, and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize.