( 172 ) Black Rights/White Wrongspedantic, not worth making a fuss over. After all, if some entity (money/
opportunities/ tax breaks/ free education) has been distributed or redis-
tributed, what does it matter what we call it? (Re)Distribution is (re)
distribution. But it is a general truth about all actions, including moral
actions, that they must be carried out under the appropriate description,
with the appropriate belief and motivational set on the part of the relevant
agents, for them to merit a certain characterization. As we watch, A takes
a twenty- dollar bill out of his pocket and gives it to B. Can we tell, given
only this information, what has just happened? No, we cannot. We could
have witnessed a loan, the repayment of a loan, a gift, a down- payment, an
investment, a blackmail payoff, a purchase, and so forth. When the trans-
action is over B will have twenty dollars more and A will have twenty dol-
lars less, but that tells us little about what the nature of the transaction
was, about what action took place. Insofar as rectification targets and seeks
to correct (“repair”) a wrong, it is not achieved by merely, say, giving the
black population money. The question is under what auspices and under
what characterization this transfer occurs. Advocates of reparations, for
example— the variety of rectificatory justice for black Americans most dis-
cussed over the past fifteen years— would contend that justice has not been
done unless the circumstances make a particular description appropriate.
(As an illustration: some conservative critics of the reparations move-
ment have argued that the expansion of the welfare state under Lyndon
Johnson’s “Great Society” could be thought of as reparations. In other
words, guys, you’ve already got them!)
Moreover, even apart from the material transfer, whatever form it might
take, many theorists have argued that other measures, including symbolic
ones, are crucial also. Truth and reconciliation commissions, acknowledg-
ments of wrongdoing, apologies, genuine repentance, community repair,
restoration of civic trust, have all been put forward as necessary elements
for outstanding wrongs to be corrected.^59 Thomas McCarthy has sug-
gested that a crucial component in the United States needs to be a national
debate about slavery and Jim Crow to reconstitute public memory.^60 None
of these issues is addressed by FEO redistribution, which is unsurprising,
since it is not a principle motivated by and constructed for dealing with
this kind of problem in the first place. I would suggest that Rawls’s reluc-
tance to follow the path Shelby reconstructs for him arises precisely out
of his recognition of this non- identity. If FEO, a principle of ideal theory,
could be turned into a principle of non- ideal theory simply by substituting
race and gender as the pertinent variables in place of the ones Rawls him-
self acknowledged, then Rawls would not have justified his non- treatment
of race and gender by the fact of their falling under non- ideal theory in the
first place.
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