( 94 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsracially normed, they become transparent. Mainstream political phi-
losophy textbooks sanitize and mystify the actual record of the past few
hundred years by constructing the West as if white racial domination had
not been central to the history of the West. We go from Plato to Rawls
without a word being uttered about the racist views of the leading mod-
ern Western political theorists and the role of these views in justifying
Western political domination over the rest of the world. Acknowledging
the racial exclusions in these thinkers’ ideologies provides a far more hon-
est and illuminating political framework, since it unites the anti- feudal
(white) politics of the standard narrative of modernity with the “other”
(nonwhite) politics of the alternative narrative of modernity: the anti-
colonial, anti- slavery, anti- imperialist, and anti- segregationist struggles
of people of color against racialized liberalism and for the recognition of
equal nonwhite personhood. They can then be discussed together rather
than in separate Jim- Crowed conceptual spaces.
KANT’S RACIAL VIEWS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONSLet us now turn specifically to Kant. Kant is, of course, the famous theo-
rist of personhood whose deontological (duty- based/ rights- respecting)
version of liberalism now dominates moral and political discourse, having
triumphed over the previously dominant consequentialist (welfare- based/
utilitarian) version of liberalism originally associated with Jeremy Bentham
and the two Mills, James and John Stuart. Utilitarian liberalism was the
orthodoxy for about a century and a half, but by the mid- twentieth century
it was increasingly perceived to have deep problems of both an operational
and, more important, moral kind. John Rawls’s classic A Theory of Justice
was one of the most powerful weapons in the attack on utilitarian theory,
and Rawls explicitly drew on Kant for his famous judgment, “Utilitarianism
does not take seriously the distinction between persons.”^2 The weakness
of utilitarianism is that it seems, prima facie (utilitarians, of course, have
their comeback counterarguments), to permit infringements on the rights
of some, say an unpopular minority, if social welfare for the majority could
thereby be increased. As a consequentialist theory, it defines the right in
terms of good consequences and as such, it could generate a “right” action
or social policy that clearly seems wrong. By contrast, Kantianism defines
the right separately from the good, in terms of the categorical imperative to
respect other persons. So human rights seem to be set on a far firmer and
more trustworthy normative foundation. All persons are morally equal and
may not have their basic rights violated.
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