( 178 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsright- liberalism (such as Robert Nozick’s)^79 hinges on what kind of rights
are recognized and what kind of equality can licitly be promoted as a norm.
Left- liberals want “positive” rights, “social” rights, “welfare” rights as well as
the traditional ones (which will need to be suitably qualified to make possi-
ble general Hohfeldian rights- consistency across this expanded schedule).
Right- liberals will only admit “negative” rights of non- interference with life,
liberty, and property and will see the additional rights argued for by the
left as not truly liberal but as alien incursions from the socialist tradition.
Correspondingly, we can distinguish a “strong” or “substantive” egalitarian-
ism that judges material equality, whether in full or as a default mode (a
presumptive if defeasible starting point), to be a moral desideratum, from
a “weak” or “formal” egalitarianism that recognizes only moral, legal, and
political equality as legitimate norms.
Now racial discrimination is a violation of negative rights and weak
egalitarianism, in that the “inferior” race in a racist society, the R2s, will
have a moral status lowered beneath the level of the equal socially recog-
nized personhood of the R1s, that as a result typically deprives the R2s of
equal legal protection of their interests, political standing, and access to
economic opportunities. As such, racial discrimination can be condemned
across the liberal spectrum since it breaches the norm of equal personhood
and respect upon which liberalism qua liberalism is supposed to rest—
the “equal rights” of all “men” trumpeted by the American and French
Revolutions against the pre- modern world, the ancien régime of ascriptive
hierarchy and differentiated status. Robert Nozick no less than John Rawls
would, and in fact does, condemn racial discrimination— indeed formally
making the remedy of such violations part of his theory in a way that Rawls
does not.^80 Racial injustice is, most fundamentally, a refusal to respect equal
personhood, whether in the original rights- violations or in the legacy of
such violations. Racial injustice is anti- liberal.^81
Contrast that with class disadvantage arising out of market workings.
In a modern class society, as against a pre- modern caste society, the white
(male) working class is not being kept down by anti- liberal laws and dis-
criminatory social practices. Rather, people compete on the market, some
do worse than others, and the children of the latter grow up in homes and
neighborhoods where family resources are thinner and the schools are
worse. Presuming the competition was fair by capitalist norms, children
will be disadvantaged in escaping their parents’ status, but not barred. But
a racist society where through discrimination, segregation, and other barri-
ers poor black kids do not get an equal chance does violate capitalist market
norms. To be on a lower rung of the social ladder because of bad luck in
the social lottery is different from being on a lower rung because of social
oppression that denies equal personhood. Class injustice is anti- left- liberal.
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