RaWLs oN Race/Race IN RaWLs ( 155 )African American political thought, whether in terms of black national-
ism and Pan- Africanism, or black liberalism and black Marxism, needs
to be seen as an oppositional element within this tradition, both shaped
by and reacting against it.^33 In the work of David Walker, Martin Delany,
Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King
Jr., Malcolm X, and many others, we have a political tradition for which
race and the battle for racial justice have been crucial, whether in terms
of abolitionism, anti- Jim Crow, anti- imperialism, or anti- segregation. But
apart from some ritualistic genuflection at King’s name, Rawls ignores all
of this work. In effect, Rawls defines the West so that the West is white
and the political problems of the West are limited to the political prob-
lems of its white members.
Rawls’s Argument for Not Dealing with Race, II: The
Focus on Ideal TheorySo one cannot just appeal to the intrinsic nature of the “classical” tradition
to explain one’s omission of race. The burden of the argument really has to
rest heavily on the “ideal theory” component. Accordingly, let us now turn
to that aspect.
First, a simple reminder. Ideal theory is not supposed to be an end
in itself but is instrumental to the goal of more adequately dealing with
injustice. Recall that Rawls himself said that the point of starting with
ideal theory was to provide a foundation for the more “urgent” matters
of non- ideal theory. “The problems of [non- ideal] partial compliance
theory are the pressing and urgent matters. These are the things that we
are faced with in everyday life.” But ideal theory “provides, I believe, the
only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems.”^34
Yet thirty years after Theory, he had still not moved on to race— surely
one of the most pressing, if not the most pressing, issues of justice in the
American polity. What was keeping him? It could not be a principled
refusal (and what would such a principle be anyway?) to deal with non-
ideal theory, given both his own earlier contrary declaration and the fact
that in The Law of Peoples he does broach such matters to a limited extent.
So if he could shift to the non- ideal for international issues, over which
the American polity has limited influence, why could he not do the same
for domestic issues of race? These are in our power to affect and they raise
with acute urgency those questions of the “especially deep inequalities”
in “men’s initial chances in life”^35 about which a theory of justice is sup-
posed to be particularly concerned. Why at the end of his life had he still
not even begun to tackle this non- ideal issue?