Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 150 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

foundations of the international society that is constituted by them is also called into

question.^22

Or as Mark Cocker writes more bluntly:

Europe’s encounter with and treatment of the world’s tribal peoples is ... in essence

... the story of how a handful of small ... nation- states at the western extremity of

Eurasia embarked on a mission of territorial conquest. And how in little more than

400  years they had brought within their political orbit most of the diverse peoples

across five continents. It is ... a tragedy of staggering proportions, involving the

deaths of many millions of victims and the complete extinction of numerous distinct

peoples. In fact, when viewed as a single process the European consumption of tribal

society could be said to represent the greatest, most persistent act of human destruc-

tiveness ever recorded.^23

Rawls’s failure to cite any of these facts and his corresponding deployment
of obfuscatory and apologist categories— all too typical of white politi-
cal theorists even today, let  alone of his generation— are thus an abdica-
tion of both moral and theoretical responsibility, producing a grotesquely
sanitized and Eurocentric picture of the history of the last few hundred
years, one from which race, racial conquest, and racial atrocity have been
whitewashed out.

Rawls’s Eurocentrism

Let me now turn specifically to Eurocentrism. That his political philosophy
is Eurocentric may seem so trivially and obviously true as to be not even
worth mentioning; after all, we are dealing with Western political philoso-
phy, and social contract theory is itself a Western invention. But my point
is a deeper one— that even granted these origins, there were conceptual
and theoretical moves open to him to extend the scope of the traditional
apparatus to address the issues cited above that he refused to make. The
Eurocentrism is not the (relatively) innocent one of genealogy (which does
not necessarily foreclose subversive creative development) but a systematic
ignoring of the experience of the nonwhite political subject, ubiquitously
manifest in the “whiteness” of Rawls’s perspectives on time and space, his
tacit conceptions of the populations he is speaking about and to, and his
assumptions about how best to frame their narrative. Rawls’s conception
is multiply Eurocentric. It is not merely that he focuses on Europe, but that
he also focuses on Europeans and the problems and issues that affect the
white population, and not— in his native United States— the problems

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