Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

RetRIevINg RaWLs foR RacIaL justIce? ( 167 )

FIVE POINTS AGAINST SHELBY

Rawls’s Non- Endorsement

To begin with the most obvious objection to Shelby’s proposed recon-
struction of a Rawlsian reply:  the most glaring problem is that Rawls
himself did not make use of it in contexts where it would have been natural
for him to do so. We are not dealing here with an obscure issue that under-
standably never surfaced within Rawls’s discursive universe in the thirty
years between the publication of A Theory of Justice and Rawls’s death, or
did so only as a minor, low- priority matter. As mentioned earlier, racial
injustice and the white- supremacist constitution of the actual “basic
structure” has been more salient in the United States than in any other
of the Western democracies. Moreover, race and racism were on Rawls’s
radar from the start in Theory in a way that gender and sexism were not.
Though neither racial nor gender identity are included as things you do
not know about yourself behind the veil in this first formulation of his
theory,^38 Rawls does explicitly condemn racism. Thus he states “we are
confident that religious intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust,”
says that no one behind the veil would “put forward the principle that
basic rights should depend on the color of one’s skin or the texture of
one’s hair,” and asserts

from the standpoint of persons similarly situated in an initial situation which is fair,

the principles of explicit racist doctrines are not only unjust. They are irrational. For

this reason we could say that they are not moral conceptions at all, but simply means of

suppression.^39

So the point is that Rawls is aware from the beginning that racism is an
important issue. In addition, in his introduction to the cloth edition of
Political Liberalism, more than twenty years later, he admits that Theory
does not deal with race, writing:  “Among our most basic problems are
those of race, ethnicity, and gender. These may seem of an altogether dif-
ferent character calling for different principles of justice, which Theory
does not discuss.”^40 So his first book condemns racism and his second
book concedes that, despite his condemnation, the remedying of racism
was not discussed in it.
The obvious question then is, how are we supposed to read this pas-
sage? I  suggest that there are three main possibilities. Rawls believed that
(a) despite appearances, the principles of justice formulated in Theory can
indeed be used to deal directly with race; or (b)  the “seeming” is correct,
and “altogether” different principles of justice are required to deal with race;