Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 210 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

(2) But insofar as Kantianism is predicated on our duties to a moral com-
munity of “persons,” and blacks are persons, why do we need any such
modification?

Because the history of modernity is one in which most persons, and
certainly black persons, have not had their personhood recognized. The
moral community has been divided between persons- recognized- as- per-
sons (that is, “persons” as “white men”) and persons- not- recognized- as-
persons (sub- persons). In particular, white-supremacist societies (such
as, but not limited to, the United States) have been founded on a “basic
structure” (Rawls) predicated on the racial denial of equal personhood
to people of color. So the implications of the categorical imperative in
such a society both for individual person- to- person interactions and for
our collective duty to transform the Rassenstaat into the Rechtsstaat, and
correct for this past history and its ongoing legacy, are very dramatic
indeed.

(3) But then why aren’t contemporary Kantian and Rawlsian theory ring-
ing with this revolutionary imperative?

Because of (a) the overwhelmingly white demographic base of the profes-
sion, which (b) insulates them experientially from these realities, as well as
(c) giving them a vested group interest in ignoring said realities and main-
taining the status quo, thereby (d)  fostering a preference (“elective affini-
ties”) for normative approaches— pre- eminently “ideal theory”— which
evade and sidestep all these questions, and which is in keeping with (e) the
long history in philosophy earlier mentioned (Cudd, Fleischacker) of con-
ceptual complicity with structural injustice.

Adapting Rawls for Corrective Justice

Let me turn now to corrective justice.^22 In chapter 9, I suggested the follow-
ing simple way of formulating Rawls’s two principles of justice, where the
arrows indicate lexical ordering:

BL→→()FEODP

(The basic liberties principle is lexically dominant over the second prin-
ciple, in which fair equality of opportunity is lexically dominant over the
difference principle.)

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