Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 214 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

What principles would you choose, in sum, to dismantle a racialized
basic structure and a racialized social ontology founded on a racial contract?
Racial injustice and its correction would thus be center stage rather than
offstage altogether, as it is in the Rawlsian literature.
What might these principles look like? Since we are using Rawlsian/
Kantian categories (liberties, socio- economic opportunities, respect)
as guides, one obvious move would be to assume the same fundamental
demarcation Rawls draws between one’s identity as a citizen and one’s
position in the economy. However, we also have to include here the crucial
addendum that— unlike with ideal theory— “respect” as a primary social
good cannot be just left to the workings of the regulatory principles for
these two areas, since social “disrespect” for blacks and other subordinated
races is an explicit part of the original “contract” and, correspondingly, of the
basic structure. Dismantling that structure, voiding the contract, requires
a separate principle of justice formally targeting the “expressive harms” of
sub- personhood. Thus the critical role of a deracialized Kantianism now
grounded in the black experience of the denial of equal humanity: Du Bois’s
reports from behind the color line. I propose the following three principles
(Figure E.5).
I suggest that the plausibility of these three principles is confirmed not
merely by their correspondence with Rawls’s listing (suitably transmuted
for non- ideal conditions) but their resonance with our own everyday
moral sense of the major different dimensions of racial injustice. Blacks and
other people of color have historically suffered from (a) unequal (zero or
second- class) citizenship, without equal status in the civic sphere or pro-
portional political input into the governing process, (b) racial exploitation
and economic marginalization,^25 and (c) the “ontological” stigmatization
of the group as inferior lesser beings because of their “racial” membership.

Figure E.5 Distributive justice versus corrective racial justice

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