Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is widely credited with having revived post–World War II Anglo American political philosophy. This book together with his later writings are routinely judged to constitute the most important body of work in that field. Indeed, with the collapse of Second World and Third World socialist ideologico-political alternatives, liberalism in one form or another has become globally hegemonic, so that for many commentators, the qualifiers “postwar” and “Anglo American” should just be dropped. Thus the blurb on the jacket of The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Freeman 2003a) simply asserts without qualification: “John Rawls is the most significant and influential political and moral philosopher of the 20th century.” Translated (as of 2003) into twenty-seven languages (Freeman 2003b, 1), the subject of a vast body of secondary literature numbering literally thousands of articles, A Theory of Justice has long since become a canonical text. Yet for those interested in issues of racial justice, philosophers of color in particular, it has also long been a very frustrating text.1 We face a paradox: Rawls, the celebrated American philosopher of justice, had next to nothing to say in his work about what has arguably historically been the most blatant American variety of injustice, racial oppression. The postwar struggle for racial justice in practice and in theory and the Rawlsian corpus on justice are almost completely separate and nonintersecting universes. The remediation of the legacy of white supremacy is apparently not of the slightest interest or concern for Rawls and most of his commentators and critics, as manifested in the marginality of this subject in his own work, and its virtual nonappearance in the secondary literature. Samuel Freeman’s edited Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2003a), for example, which provides a synoptic overview of key themes in the literature, has not a single subsection of any chapter, let alone any chapter, on race, while the 2006 Perspectives on Politics special symposium on Rawls barely has two paragraphs on the subject (Ackerley et al. 2006). So, particularly for people of color in the United States, but also for those elsewhere, for example in the former colonizing powers and in the former colonial world, a weird feeling of inconRawls on Race/Race in Rawls