Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 144 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

minor occasional pieces, or essays later incorporated into the paperback
edition of Political Liberalism.
Rawls’s first published paper, in 1951, characterizes “ideologies” nega-
tively as claiming “a monopoly of the knowledge of truth and justice for
some particular race, or social class, or institutional group, and compe-
tence is defined in terms of racial and/ or sociological characteristics” (5).
Appearing only a few years after the end of World War II, with the defeat
of the Third Reich still a powerfully overshadowing memory in the West,
this comment is pretty clearly a reference to National Socialism. A 1969
essay, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience,” discusses civil disobedi-
ence in the context of oppressed “minorities,” though race is not men-
tioned. Apart from the implicit and brief 1951 Nazi reference, then, race
does not appear in any of the essays leading up to the 1971 publication
of Theory. Subsequent to its publication there are a few appearances of
the topic, or at least the term. A  1975 essay lists “sex and race” among
the data about themselves to which parties behind the veil should not
have access (268) and cites as examples of unjust conceptions of the good
those “that require the repression or degradation of certain groups on,
say, racial or ethnic ... grounds” (280). A 1988 essay says it is permissible
for “a constitutional regime” to discourage “various kinds of religious and
racial discrimination (in ways consistent with liberty of conscience and
freedom of speech)” (461) and repeats that any conceptions of the good
requiring racial repression, “for example, slavery in ancient Athens or in
the antebellum South,” are ruled out (462). There is a footnote in a 1989
essay to another author’s discussion of the Dred Scott and Brown deci-
sions (496n51). Finally, the last essay (1997), “The Idea of Public Reason
Revisited,” which also appears in The Law of Peoples, has some brief dis-
cussion in connection with “public reason” of the abolitionists, Martin
Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement (593, 610), as well as the
Lincoln- Douglas debates (609– 10). As before, race is cited on a list of the
factors giving rise to “three main kinds of conflicts” (612). That is all that
I can find in the collection’s 600+ pages.

The Law of Peoples

In this book, Rawls is focused on international relations. He discusses
anti- Semitism and Nazism (19– 23, 99– 101), characterizes the Jewish
Holocaust as unique (19), and refers to “The fact of the Holocaust and our
now [my emphasis] knowing that human society admits this demonic pos-
sibility” (21). There is a footnote on the South and slavery (“This was as
severe a violation of human rights as any, and it extended to nearly half the

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