CHAPTER 8

Rawls on Race/ Race in Rawls

L

et us now turn to the work of John Rawls, which has been mentioned
repeatedly and critically throughout the book but has not yet been
engaged with in detail. As pointed out earlier, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is
widely credited with having revived post– World War II Anglo- American
political philosophy, and, with his other four books, is routinely judged to
constitute the most important body of work in that field.^1 Indeed, with the
collapse of Second World and Third World socialist ideologico- political
alternatives, liberalism in one form or another has become globally hege-
monic, so that for many commentators, the qualifiers “postwar” and “Anglo-
American” should just be dropped. Thus the blurb on the jacket of The
Cambridge Companion to Rawls simply asserts without qualification: “John
Rawls is the most significant and influential political and moral philosopher
of the 20th century.”^2
Yet for those interested in issues of racial justice, philosophers of color
in particular, Rawls’s work and the secondary literature it has generated has
long been deeply frustrating, producing a weird feeling of incongruity and
dissonance.^3 Here is a huge body of work focused on questions of social
justice— seemingly the natural place to look for guidance on normative
issues related to race— which has nothing to say about racial injustice, the
distinctive injustice of the modern world.^4
What explains this systematic omission? Any elementary sociology of
belief would tell us that the demography of the profession (overwhelmingly
white) will itself be an obvious major causal factor, group membership in
the privileged race tendentially producing certain distinctive interests
(uninterests), priorities (marginalities), and concerns (indifferences). But
apart from this major extra- ideational factor, I suggest, as indicated in previ-
ous chapters, that there is a key internal conceptual factor as well: Rawls’s