( 162 ) Black Rights/White Wrongscommunity’s discussions of justice is nowhere more clearly illustrated than
in the centrality of racial justice as a theme to the former and its virtually
complete absence from the latter. A Theory of Justice is generally credited
with the revival of Anglo- American political philosophy, taking it from its
postwar mid- twentieth- century deathbed to its present standing as one of
the healthiest and most vibrant branches of the discipline.^8 Translated (as of
2007) into more than thirty languages,^9 Theory shifted the traditional focus
of political philosophy from the question of our obligation to obey the state
to the question of the justice of a society’s “basic structure.” A vast literature
has been generated around Rawls’s work, his importance being recognized
even by those who sharply disagree with the design of his apparatus and its
prescriptions. For Samuel Freeman, Rawls is “a world- historical thinker,”
“the preeminent theorist of justice in the modern era,” “the foremost politi-
cal philosopher of the twentieth century, and ... one of the great political
philosophers of all time,” who “wrote more on the subject of justice than
any other major philosopher.”^10
But as I pointed out in the previous chapter, this body of work, extensive
and world historical as it may be, does not extend to the subject of racial
justice, despite the fact that Rawls was a citizen of the Western democ-
racy most centrally structured by racial injustice, a white- supremacist state
founded on Amerindian expropriation and genocide, and African slav-
ery and subsequent Jim Crow.^11 Nor has there been much attempt in the
secondary literature to develop a “Rawlsian” perspective on racial justice
comparable to what feminist political theorists have been doing for the past
quarter- century for gender justice.^12 (I should clarify that by racial justice
I mean primarily not pre- emptive measures to prevent racial injustice but
corrective measures to rectify injustices that have already occurred. That
is the important question: how could such policies as affirmative action,
preferential treatment, and, more radically, reparations, be articulated and
justified— if they can— within Rawls’s apparatus, had he chosen to make
this a central concern of his?) Inevitably one is handicapped in making such
generalizations by the huge size of this literature, which is moreover multi-
lingual. But anthologies, guidebooks, and companions can provide the nec-
essary evidence, since surveys of the literature are part of their mandate. So
here are my findings from ten of these works, drawn from a time span of
nearly forty years.
Norman Daniels’s well- known pioneering anthology, Reading Rawls
(1975), has nothing on race.^13 However, H. Gene Blocker and Elizabeth
H. Smith’s collection from five years later, John Rawls’s Theory of Social
Justice: An Introduction (1980), does have a chapter with a general discus-
sion of discrimination (sex, race, religion) and of whether Rawls’s theory
would permit “compensatory treatment” and “reverse discrimination.”^14
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