ePILogue (as PRoLogue) ( 215 )Principles of corrective justice will thus have to target these historic viola-
tions of, respectively, the basic rights and liberties, the equal opportunities,
and the equal respect that people of color should have received, but did not,
and the illicit racial edge, ∆, whites have instead had in each sphere.
By contrast with the use of FEO, then, no category mistake or awkward
disruption of lexical ordering is involved in this modified Rawlsianism,
since in each case it is the actual wrong that is being addressed by the appro-
priate corrective principle. Obviously, I am not denying that the question
of what kind of public policy will in fact be justified by these principles will
be a hugely controversial topic. Recall, for example, the outrage generated
years ago by Lani Guinier’s recommendations to overcome a permanent
white majority through cumulative or supermajority voting, or the more
recent debate over the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme
Court’s 2013 Shelby decision.^26 Consider the effective defeat of affirma-
tive action policies and the pre- emptive white rejection of reparations to
African Americans.^27 Think of the recent heated disputes over the symbolic
significance of the redrafting of high school textbooks to highlight racial
oppression (e.g., “Raza Studies”), the flying of the Confederate flag, the use
of Native American images and epithets by sports teams, and the naming
of buildings and institutions at leading universities after racist white his-
torical figures.^28 But the point is that a Rawlsian apparatus that is explic-
itly modified to adjudicate matters of non- ideal theory and grounded in
the imperative of correcting for the legacy of white supremacy— racially
unequal citizenship, racial exploitation, and racial disrespect— could now
be an active and valuable contributor to these debates and to the undermin-
ing of racial liberalism, not simply a detached spectator or even an actual
accomplice to its perpetuation. Rawlsian political philosophy could at last
become a real player in the righting of the historic and current white wrongs
to black rights. In future work, I hope to develop in greater detail this proj-
ect of articulating a black radical liberalism that is true both to the (ideal-
ized) liberal tradition, the liberalism that should have been, and respectful of
the black diasporic experience in modernity, victims of the liberalism that
actually was and is.