RaWLs oN Race/Race IN RaWLs ( 151 )of blacks and Native Americans. (The former, as we have seen, eventually
make a belated appearance, but the latter remain invisible in his writing till
his death.) Moreover, he does so within a (sanitized) European concep-
tual apparatus, ethnically cleansed of its actual discursive history of ethnic
cleansing. (And this, to repeat, is why though Rawls’s contract is hypotheti-
cal and normative rather than descriptive, the factual critique is still rele-
vant, since the factual picture presupposed shapes the orientation of the
normative inquiry and the concepts deemed appropriate for it.)
For Rawls, the pivotal political periodization is determined by the origin
of political liberalism in “the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long
controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.”^24 Internationally, the crucial date for him is the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia that supposedly established the beginnings of the international
system. It does not occur to him that 1492 might have more resonance for
the non- European world, the date eventually leading to the joint European
domination of the planet— the international racial system, or global white
supremacy— and the complementary development of a racialized liberal-
ism with one set of rules for whites and another for nonwhites.^25 Within
the United States itself, of course, it is the European population that is his
focus, albeit in the displaced, abstract, and (ostensibly) general form typi-
cal of philosophy in general and social contract theory in particular. One
need only ask for whom the contractarian founding as a consensual event
is supposed to be an illuminating normative starting point to see that the
audience Rawls is tacitly presupposing for his work is really white settler-
dom and their descendants. Only for this population could it not be ludi-
crously inapposite to represent society as actually (not merely ideally)
being “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” as Rawls suggests we
do in Theory. Native Americans did not “agree” to be killed and to end up
losing 98 percent of their land through “conquest by law”^26 any more than
captured Africans “agreed” to be enslaved. Domination and coercion of the
nonwhite population are the founding moments for the American (and not
just the American) polity, not democratic inclusion and consent.
To ignore this basic, framework- establishing, political agenda- setting
reality means that from the very beginning, whether overtly acknowledged
or not, one is really addressing oneself to the white population. Nor, as
I have tried to demonstrate, is it an adequate reply to say that we are deal-
ing with normative matters and with ideal theory, so that these admitted
(though they are not usually admitted) and unhappy truths, deplorable as
they may be, need not detain us. Insofar as the overarching metaphor of
the contract paradigmatically models consent (rather than coercion), inso-
far as the normative agenda is the mapping of an ideal ideal (rather than
how ideally to rectify the non- ideal), it means that we are already located on