ePILogue (as PRoLogue) ( 209 )untheorized, especially where groups are concerned. (“Rectificatory jus-
tice” in Aristotle presupposes status membership and does not extend to
property rights; “reparations” in Locke are really for individuals.)
The unavoidable implication, it seems to me (even if it has been avoided
in the profession), is that Western normative theory in general historically
for most of 2,500 years, and liberalism for most of modernity, has been
complicit with rather than condemnatory of group subordination. The under-
theorization in the tradition of corrective justice for subordinated groups,
despite the subordination of most of the population nominally in the theo-
ry’s ambit, is itself a manifestation of this complicity.^20 Contemporary polit-
ical philosophy’s post- Rawlsian focus on “ideal theory” is thus not aberrant
but completely continuous with this long history of moral evasion.
Black radical liberalism reverses these normative priorities and makes
corrective justice its central concern. Marxism is accurate in seeing exploi-
tation as central to the polity but weak on normative theorization (Marx’s
original dismissal of “rights” and “justice” as bourgeois concepts). Hence
the need for a synthesis with liberalism. Also, Marxism’s class- reductionism
obscures the reality of racial exploitation (as discussed in chapter 7).
Key Normative Tool: Black Radical “Kantianism”I propose as the key normative tool for achieving this theorization “black
radical ‘Kantianism.’ ” Obviously, given the seemingly oxymoronic charac-
ter of such a concept, we need once again to go through a list of possible
objections, and my replies.
OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES
(1) But don’t mainstream Kantians already (whether aware of Kant’s racist
texts or not) use Kantianism in a racially inclusive way? So how would
this be any different?
We need to differentiate nominal racial inclusion from substantive racial
inclusion. (Cf. Susan Moller Okin’s famous discussion, in the introduction
to Justice, Gender, and the Family, of the difference between false and sub-
stantive gender neutrality in the writings of the male justice theorists of her
time.)^21 Substantive theoretical racial inclusion would require that the radi-
cally different history and structural positioning of blacks in the polity and
in the normative ontology of the society be taken into account and suitably
incorporated through the appropriate modifications of the apparatus.