CHAPTER 9

Retrieving Rawls

for Racial Justice?

H

ow then— given the problems outlined in the previous chapter—
should political philosophers in the liberal tradition interested in
the issue of racial justice relate to Rawls’s work?^1 Some, such as Elizabeth
Anderson, have rejected a Rawlsian approach altogether, a repudiation all
the more stinging considering that Anderson is herself a former Rawls stu-
dent, and (to add to the irony) was the John Rawls Collegiate Professor of
Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.^2 Others
such as myself have argued that an approach in some sense Rawlsian can
be fruitfully employed to tackle racial injustice, but that a radical revision
of Rawls’s apparatus will be required.^3 Still others, such as Tommie Shelby,
have contended that no such radical revisions are necessary, and that a
Rawlsian apparatus, more or less unchanged, can indeed— contra Anderson
and myself— be successfully turned to this task.^4 Thus we get an interesting
spectrum of rival theoretical positions, from the simple abandonment of a
Rawlsian approach through more or less radical attempts to modify it.
In this chapter, I  critique Shelby’s position,^5 thereby strengthening by
elimination the case I have made elsewhere for a more radical approach.^6 If
in the previous chapter I documented the “whiteness” of Rawls’s own writ-
ings, here I begin by documenting (in greater detail than before) the “white-
ness” of the Rawlsian secondary literature.^7 I will then turn to a close analysis
of Shelby’s appropriation of Rawls and show why I think it does not work.

RAWLSIANISM AND RACE

The intellectual chasm between the worlds of the black American free-
dom struggle for justice and the white American academic philosophical