RetRIevINg RaWLs foR RacIaL justIce? ( 163 )A five- volume 1999 collection of eighty- eight articles on Rawls cover-
ing more than a quarter- century has exactly one essay on race, by the
African American ethicist Laurence Thomas.^15 Samuel Freeman’s edited
Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2003) has fourteen chapter overviews
of different themes in the literature on Rawls, not one of which is on
race, or even contains any sub- section on race.^16 Freeman’s own mas-
sive 500- plus- page Rawls (2007), cited above, has only sporadic one- or
two- sentence references to racial discrimination and a brief paragraph
on affirmative action.^17 Jon Mandle’s Rawls’s A Theory of Justice: An
Introduction (2009) has no index entries for race, racism, or affirmative
action, nor do Percy B. Lehning’s John Rawls: An Introduction (2009) or
Paul Voice’s Rawls Explained (2011).^18 Sebastiano Maffettone’s Rawls: An
Introduction (2010) has three index entries for “racial discrimination,”
the first two of which are brief discussions of what the principle of fair
equality of opportunity might allow and the third of which is just a quote
from Rawls.^19 Finally, Jon Mandle and David Reidy’s recent, nearly 600-
page edited Companion to Rawls (2014) has a grand total of one- and-
a- half pages on race and a single one- sentence endnote on affirmative
action.^20
If we look at essay- length overviews, we find the same pattern. In 2006,
Perspectives on Politics, one of the American Political Science Association’s
official journals, published a sixty- page symposium on Rawls’s legacy, with
essays by several authors, that has exactly two paragraphs on racial jus-
tice.^21 Leif Wenar’s entry on Rawls in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy lists race only as one of the things you do not know about your-
self behind the veil.^22 Henry Richardson’s entry in the Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy has nothing at all.^23 In sum, as I said, racial justice is a theme
virtually non- existent in the secondary literature.
The natural question then is: what attempts have been made by black
normative philosophers over the years to break this white silence? The
efforts that I know about— again, one has to be cautious in making defini-
tive pronouncements, given the size of the literature— are few and far
between. Moreover, for the most part they do not actually try to mobilize
the apparatus itself to tackle racial justice as a theme but rather select par-
ticular concepts in Rawls for more limited and local purposes. For example,
the Thomas essay cited above looks at Rawlsian self- respect and the black
consciousness movement, though it critiques Rawls for confusing self-
esteem with self- respect.^24 An essay by Michele Moody- Adams (herself a
former Rawls student) examines race, class, and the social construction
of self- respect.^25 However, neither of these philosophers has made race a
central concern of their writing, nor do they regard the “African American
philosopher” identity as particularly significant for their own work.^26 More