( 124 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsdo not apply to them at all or do not apply fully. In both liberal and many
Marxist theories of racism, this has usually been represented as a return to
the pre- modern. But as various theorists, including myself, have argued, it
is better thought of in terms of the modern, but within the framework of a
revised narrative and conceptual framework that denies that egalitarianism
is in fact the universal norm of modernity. In other words, to represent rac-
ism as a throwback to previous class systems accepts the mystificatory rep-
resentation of the modern as the epoch when equality becomes the globally
hegemonic norm, when in fact we need to reject this characterization and
see the modern as bringing about white (male) equality while establishing
nonwhite inequality as an accompanying norm. What justifies African slav-
ery and colonial forced labor, for example, is the lesser moral status of the
people involved— they are not seen as fully equal humans in the first place.
If in the colonies blacks and browns are coerced by the colonial state to
work, while in the metropole, according to Marxist theory, white workers
are compelled by the market to work, this is not a minor but a major and
qualitative difference.
Now, one of the straightforward implications of this distinction is that in
comparison with class exploitation, racial exploitation in its paradigm form
is straightforwardly unjust by deracialized liberal democratic standards, a
source of “unjust enrichment.” By contrast, in the Marxist tradition, as is
well known, there has been a general leeriness about appealing to morality
and a specific leeriness about appealing to justice, because of the dominant
meta- ethical interpretation of Marx as a theorist disdainful of ethical norms
in general and hostile to justice in particular as a transhistorical value.^22 So
some Marxists have repudiated moral argument in principle as a return to
a supposedly discredited “ethical” (as against “scientific”) socialism. But
if one does want to make a moral case for socialism, some theorists have
argued, one has to appeal to freedom rather than justice, or to social wel-
fare, or to Aristotelian self- realization. A discourse of rights is not amenable
to advancing the proletarian cause insofar as proletarian rights are being
respected under capitalism. (One can, of course, appeal to positive “wel-
fare” rights, but these are far more controversial in the liberal tradition.)
And such an argument would have to rely on factual and conceptual claims
that were obviously highly controversial even then— and far more so now in
a post- Marxist world— about capitalist economic constraint undermining
substantive freedoms, or people as a whole doing better under socialism.
By contrast, the striking feature of demands for racial justice in the para-
digm cases of racial injustice is that they can be straightforwardly made in
terms of the dominant discourse, since the whole point of racial exploita-
tion is that (at least in its paradigm form) it trades on the differential sta-
tus of the R2s to legitimate its relations. For example, contrast the (white)
http://www.ebook3000.com