Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 208 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

mutual advantage in the first place, let alone a well- ordered one. To assume
the cooperative- venture characterization would effectively be to rule racist
societies out of normative consideration from the start. So black radical lib-
eralism rejects such a stipulation. Instead, it works with a conception of soci-
ety broad enough to include ill- ordered societies. Ill- ordered societies are
coercive rather than cooperative ventures, characterized by exploitation and
systemic disrespect for subordinated groups rather than mutual advantage
and reciprocal respect. Ill- ordered societies are, in other words, the world.
Correspondingly, the social ontology of an ill- ordered oppressive soci-
ety is going to be very different from the social ontology of a well- ordered
society. Individuals will be members of dominant and subordinated groups
(sometimes at the same time) and this will shape them fundamentally. Races
as social constructs will be central social entities that must be theorized by a
socially informed metaphysics. Liberal individuals in this non- ideal- theory
liberalism will therefore not be atomistic isolates but raced humans inter-
acting with each other in racialized ways, with implications both for their
own psychology and for broader cognitive and affective societal patterns.
The main obstacles to veridical cognition will, accordingly, not be indi-
vidually originating bias but dominant- group ideologies (here “whiteness,”
“white ignorance,” etc.). The central liberal contractarian value of what
Rawls calls “publicity”— what we would now term “transparency”— will
thus need to be fundamentally reoriented by the challenge of overcoming
the structural opacities of an ill- ordered (here white-supremacist) society.
Racial liberalism— the theme of this book— will have to be exposed for
what it is, especially since contemporary versions (as in Rawlsianism itself )
will generally be able to fly under the radar through no longer having overt
racial identifiers even while continuing to normatively center whites. Black
radical liberalism will therefore need to be on the alert for putatively inclu-
sive abstractions that are really color- coded.

Corrective Justice

In more than one chapter, I have mentioned Samuel Fleischacker’s impor-
tant book A Short History of Distributive Justice, whose political implications
have not, in my opinion, been sufficiently appreciated in the profession.^18
Fleischacker points out that universal distributive justice as a norm in the
Western tradition is only slightly more than 200  years old (and of course
initially really just extends over the “universe” of white males). Not even
white women are included, and certainly not people of color in Western
societies.^19 “Corrective justice” as a concept is even more undeveloped and

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