( 116 ) Black Rights/White WrongsJohn Rawls’s work. (UPDATE: Since the original version of this chap-
ter appeared in 2003, Elizabeth Anderson’s major work, The Imperative of
Integration, has been published, constituting a welcome exception to this
pattern.^9 However, it is noteworthy that Anderson begins her book with
an explicit repudiation of the usefulness of Rawlsian ideal theory for her
project.)^10
How are such evasions possible in a country built on Native American
expropriation and hundreds of years of African slavery, followed by
150 years of first de jure, and now de facto, segregation? An interesting
essay, or even a whole book, in the sociology of knowledge (or here, more
accurately, the sociology of ignorance) could certainly be written on this
question. But briefly, one would need to highlight the role of historical
amnesia (the suppression, or the downplaying of the significance, of certain
facts), the group interests and non- representative experience of the privi-
leged race (what cognitive psychologists would identify respectively as hot
and cold factors of cognitive distortion), and, crucially, a conceptual appa-
ratus inherited, as I said, from European socio- political theory, for which
race is marginal. So the problem is by no means confined to philosophy
but is much broader, though in philosophy it is worst of all, because of the
much greater possibilities for abstracting away from reality provided by the
non- empirical nature of the subject.
Thus there has been a debilitating “whiteness” to mainstream political
philosophy in terms of the crucial assumptions, the issues typically taken
up, and the mapping of what is deemed to be the appropriate and important
subject matter. And my claim is that the trans- disciplinary framing of the
United States as an if- not- quite- ideal- then- pretty- damn- close- to- it liberal
democracy, particularly in the exacerbatedly idealistic and abstract form
typical of philosophy, has facilitated and underwritten these massive eva-
sions on the issue of racial injustice. Accordingly, I have suggested in my
own work that to counter this framing we need to revive “white supremacy”
(which is already being used by many people in critical race theory and
critical white studies) as a descriptive concept.^11 Normative questions, as
pointed out above, hinge not merely on clashes of values but also on rival
factual claims, both with respect to specific incidents and events and with
respect to determining and constraining social structures. And particularly
when challenges are coming from the perspective of radical political theory
(for example, Marxism, feminism, critical race theory), it may well be the
case that most or all of the work in claims about injustice is being done by
the divergent factual picture put forward rather than different values. So
the point is that one can utilize mainstream values to advance quite radical
demands: the key strategy is to contest the factual assumptions with which
mainstream theorists are operating. With the feminist concept of patriarchy
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