Research

Publications 

Whiteness, Fair Play, and Reparation: Toward A Political Inroad.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2025 

Focused on some of the most conspicuous forms of social, psychological, and ideological resistance to the very idea of reparations, Whiteness, Fair Play, and Reparation develops a new fairness-based argument designed to help sensitize opponents to the force of more familiar calls for racial redress. Drawing on a range of empirical literature on whites’ attitudes toward race-conscious policy, and related sociological analyses of the white moral imagination, the book argues that the lens of "fair play" can help provide socially and morally threatened whites with a psychologically viable route toward appreciating their personal enmeshment within structures of racial hierarchy.

From the back cover: 

“[…] a compelling defense of Black reparations that combines a new account of fair play with cross-disciplinary insights about whiteness. Frigault carefully carves into the discursive space a political inroad designed to negotiate white fragility by steering clear of identity- or complicity-based arguments for reparations, focusing instead on the basic obligation to relinquish structural advantages. A must-read for any political theorist and philosopher interested in reparations.”

—Candice Delmas, Northeastern University, USA

“Joseph Frigault has written an important and courageous book. Black reparations in the US have met the hostility not only of white people insensitive to racial justice, but also of those who would otherwise define themselves as progressive and in favour of racial equality. Frigault's argument about fair play offers a powerful way for all Americans to appreciate the necessity and feasibility of Black reparations.”

—Alasia Nuti, University of York, UK

“Built on cutting-edge scientific research, Joseph Frigault’s tremendous book makes a compelling case that opposition to race-conscious policies is grounded in an entrenched and entangled set of social, cognitive, and affective habits and ideologies. His defense of reparations through the principles of fair play offers a vital set of tools for engaging the American imagination. We must not just hope but fight for his approach to be explored in the labs of lived experience.”

—Alex Madva, Cal Poly Pomona, USA

"Fair Play Externalism and the Obligation to Relinquish." 

Journal of the American Philosophical Association. 2025 (Open Access) 

This essay defends a new account of wrongful benefiting based on the principle of fair play. In particular, I argue that certain structurally-conferred group-based benefits or privileges can ground obligations on the part of innocent beneficiaries to relinquish specific gains for purposes of redistribution regardless of whether their receipt is sourced in wrongdoing or involves the imposition of harm upon relevant others. I call this approach to fair play reasoning externalist insofar as it turns on a novel conception of free-riding that eschews necessary appeal to beneficiaries’ mental states or volition. After presenting an empirical example to help illustrate the sort of benefiting at issue and distinguishing my account from arguments rooted in the notion of structural injustice, I defend it via what I call the extension argument, respond to two salient objections, and close by suggesting its potential political utility in the American context specifically. 

“Putting Whiteness First? Why Reparations Discourse Needs a Critique of White Advantage,” in Into the Fire: The Intersection of Race and Communication, Leland Harper (Ed.), Vernon Press (Forthcoming 2025)

Apart from being one of the most controversial ideas in the contemporary American context, Black reparations, as a political proposal, faces a number of unique socio-argumentative challenges. In many discursive contexts, simply uttering the phrase is enough to send reasonable conversations flying off the rails. This is particularly true for American whites, whose enduring opposition to reparations and other forms of race-conscious policy is well-known, and whose difficulty talking openly about race and racial injustice is well-documented in the social sciences and beyond. What do these facts mean for how reparations advocates should approach reparations discourse? Should direct reparative justice arguments be withdrawn, or reformulated somehow? This essay considers prominent examples of each approach and argues that both fail to properly consider the potential political value of more active engagement with the white moral imagination on the issue of reparations. Against this backdrop, I suggest a tactical re-orientation of at least some reparations discourse around the notion of structural white advantage. Drawing on recent empirical work on how whites manage a privileged social identity, I show how we might strive to incrementally sensitize oppositional whites to the reality of structural white advantage in a way that enables them to retain a grip on their personal and collective esteem by taking up the task of dismantling the various systems that afford those advantages. The idea is to chart a realistic psychological route by which advantaged whites can come to see themselves as non-voluntary beneficiaries of long-standing racialized structures in ways that help minimize the risk of inflaming familiar kinds of defensiveness and reactivity while simultaneously laying the groundwork for more stable and effective public engagement with the issue of reparative justice in the longer term.