the WhIteNess of PoLItIcaL PhILosoPhy ( 193 )1999 Michigan State interdisciplinary conference on race.^29 Another sym-
posium appeared in Small Axe, the Caribbean post- colonial theory jour-
nal edited by David Scott.^30 And a retrospective symposium— “Revisiting
the ‘Racial Contract’ ”— organized at the 2013 American Political Science
Association (APSA) annual meeting by Anna Marie Smith has just been
published (two of the original panelists and two other contributors,
with my reply) in the new political science journal Politics, Groups, and
Identities.^31
Thus none of the symposia was organized by a mainstream philoso-
phy organization or journal, or even appeared in a philosophy venue.
(UPDATE: At the time of writing, a mini- symposium on my work based
on a 2014 SPEP [Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy]
Scholar Panel is scheduled to appear in Critical Philosophy of Race. But
SPEP is sharply segregated from the analytic mainstream, and Critical
Philosophy of Race is, of course, a specialty journal.) The most detailed
(published) critique is by Jorge Garcia, a black/ Latino philosopher, again
hardly a representative figure, and published in the Africana philosophy
journal, Philosophia Africana.^32 At least one philosophy dissertation has
been done on it, but as a “Marxist- Leninist” critique by another black
philosopher, Stephen Ferguson (so both red and black), it is doubly
minoritarian.^33
If we look instead at the response of the white political philosophy estab-
lishment, what do we find? Basically, nothing. Samuel Freeman’s 2003
edited Cambridge Companion to Rawls has, unsurprisingly, no chapter on
race (that would require there to have been a significant secondary literature
on Rawls and race at the time), but— with far less excuse— nor does Jon
Mandle and David A. Reidy’s 2014 edited Blackwell Companion to Rawls,
published more than a decade later.^34 Nor is The Racial Contract even listed
in the extensive bibliographies of either book. Brooke Ackerley does at least
mention it in a footnote to her introduction to a sixty- page symposium on
Rawls’s legacy in Perspectives on Politics, but none of the other contributors
cite it, or indeed talk about race and racial justice at any length.^35 So the
book is there as a standing challenge to mainstream contractarianism and
liberalism— a challenge I have sought to develop further in my chapters
in the follow- up book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination, but
so far it is not a challenge that shows any sign of being taken up, or even
noticed.^36 (Of course, an ironist might point out that given my claims in
the book, such an ignoring is precisely what I should have expected, and
that any other outcome, however academically satisfying, should actually
be dreaded by me as a disconfirmation of my thesis! In other words, the
failure of The Racial Contract to change anything is precisely a sign of the
success of the Racial Contract.)