CHAPTER 7

Racial Exploitation

W

hat philosophical framework should we use to theorize racial injus-
tice? Clearly, given the discussions of the last two chapters, it should
be located within non- ideal theory, rejecting Rawlsian conceptions of soci-
ety as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” among reciprocally
respecting “persons.”^1 Rather, the history of the racial subordination and
exploitation of those seen as sub- persons must be central to the norma-
tive framing of the issue. Reparations for African Americans, for example,
would be an obvious example of such a racial justice corrective policy,
which would presumably fall under what Rawls calls “compensatory jus-
t i c e .”^2 And for a brief period a decade and a half ago, stimulated by the 2000
publication of Randall Robinson’s The Debt,^3 this issue became sufficiently
provocative for city councils across the country to take a position on the
question, and for “white” universities to debate the matter.^4
Philosophy, however, was not a central player. Very little of the credit
for this development could go to the discipline, despite the fact that phi-
losophers are by their calling supposed to be the group professionally
concerned about justice as a concept and an ideal. Yet there is certainly
enough blame to go around— one would not want to pick just on one’s
own profession. The indictment for (relative) historic silence on the ques-
tion of racial justice can be extended to American social and political the-
ory in general, not merely social and political philosophy, but mainstream
“white” American sociology and political science. (Depending on how
one defines “mainstream”— and from the racial margins, pretty well every-
thing else looks mainstream— this judgment also holds true for a lot of
orthodox left theory in these fields, not just liberalism, since Marxists have
tended to dissolve the specificities of these racial problems into the general
oppression of capital, with socialism then being plugged as the universal
panacea.)