Preface

Several years ago, a student suggested that our department introduce a course focusing on applied ethics issues that involve race. This struck me as a good idea. I wondered how much work would be involved if I wanted to put such a course together myself, and so I started to make a list of all of the issues I had covered, in well over a decade of teaching a variety of applied ethics courses, that were strongly connected to race. It didn’t take long for me to realize that there weren’t any. That’s when I decided to write this book.

I decided to write this book because I wanted to be able to teach a course on applied ethics and race and because I knew that committing myself to a new book project on the subject would motivate me to do the research necessary to get such a course up and running. I began by looking into the popular and the academic literature on a number of issues that my teaching had previously ignored and ended up deciding to focus on five controversies that struck me as particularly important: the debates over slave reparations, affirmative action, hate speech restrictions, hate crime laws, and racial profiling. With the help of a teaching reduction that was funded by a course development grant from the Institute for Ethical and Civic Engagement at the University of Colorado, I then began to put together a series of documents that would serve both as tentative lecture notes and as preliminary chapter drafts. Although the grant was awarded to help me develop the course and not the book, I would like to express my gratitude here for the support that the grant indirectly provided as my various ideas for the book began to take shape through the process of creating the course.