( 164 ) Black Rights/White Wrongspertinent for our purposes, then, are the two prominent black analytic nor-
mative philosophers who do, and who have worked on race throughout
their careers, Bernard Boxill and Howard McGary. Their similarly titled
books are Blacks and Social Justice and Race and Social Justice.^27 Boxill’s most
extensive discussion of Rawls centers on Rawls’s claims about the efficacy
of civil disobedience, though Boxill is also critical of Rawls’s treatment of
international justice.^28 So he is not adopting Rawls’s apparatus himself in
his prescriptions for racial justice. McGary has brief scattered discussions of
Rawlsian ideas and their relevance to racial injustice throughout his book—
for example on the relation between injustice and self- respect, on the black
underclass, on African American exclusion from social institutions, and in
a comparison of Cornel West’s and Rawls’s strategies for arriving at prin-
ciples of social justice.^29 The discussion most important for us concludes, in
a chapter on reparations, that “Rawls does not go far enough in his deonto-
logical thinking,” and that (what McGary sees as) Rawls’s unacknowledged
teleologism would rule out certain kinds of programs for rectificatory jus-
tice, thereby being an inadequate basis for remedying racial social oppres-
sion.^30 So neither author judges a Rawlsian framework to be helpful.
SHELBY ON RETRIEVING RAWLSI believe that it is in the writings of Tommie Shelby that we find one of the
most sustained attempts by any philosopher— and certainly by any black
philosopher— to use Rawls’s apparatus for pursuing the project of racial
justice. Hence the significance of Shelby’s work, underscored by his loca-
tion at Harvard, Rawls’s institutional base for more than thirty years. My
focus will be on Shelby’s 2004 article in the Fordham Law Review’s special
issue on Rawls.^31
But first a brief summary of the Rawls essentials.^32 Rawls revived social
contract theory in the form of a hypothetical thought- experiment, in which
you choose principles of justice not on moral but prudential grounds, with
crucial aspects of your identity and the society you will be entering being
hidden from you by a “veil of ignorance.” So this choice in the “original posi-
tion,” through the combination of self- interest and stipulated ignorance, is
supposed to produce an equivalent to a moral choice, as you may turn out,
once the veil lifts, to be a member of one of the sub- populations negatively
affected by unjust principles. Rawls emphasizes that we are choosing prin-
ciples for a “well- ordered,” that is, perfectly just, society, since in his view
ideal normative theory (dealing with perfect justice) is the only adequate
theoretical foundation for properly doing non- ideal normative theory
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