Eddie Murphy and the Dangers of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination

The model of discrimination animating some of the most common approaches to detecting discrimination in both law and social science-the counterfactual causal model-is wrong. In that model, racial discrimination is detected by measuring the "treatment effect of race," where the treatment is conceptualized as manipulating the raced status of otherwise identical units (e.g., a person, a neighborhood, a school). Most objections to talking about race as a cause in the counterfactual model have been raised in terms of manipulability. If we cannot manipulate a person's race at the moment of a police stop, traffic encounter, or prosecutorial charging decision, then it is impossible to detect if the person's race was…