Freedom and Failing to Treat Persons as Equals

Abstract This chapter examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s trenchant critique of stereotyping in Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil and develops an equality- and freedom-focused theory of wrongful stereotyping. What’s wrong with stereotyping, according to Du Bois? For one thing, it fails to treat Black people as equals. For another, it unjustly curtails Black freedom. His analysis, this chapter argues, anticipates by one hundred years a prominent, equality-focused theory of wrongful discrimination argued for by Sophia Moreau. Though Moreau’s theory targets discriminatory actions, policies, and laws, it generalizes to stereotyping. Both theories entail that stereotyping can wrong people intrinsically (i.e., by treating them as inferior and thus not as equals), independently of its consequences. At the same time, both emphasize the ethical importance of stereotyping’s social impacts and its role in perpetuating group inequality and subordination, including practices of economic exploitation, political domination, and group-based violence.