Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism

Abstract

Liberalism’s promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism argues that rather than being irrelevant to the workings of self-conceived liberal polities today, this history of denial and its current legacy should be regarded as continuing to shape liberalism in fundamental ways. As feminists have conceptualized the dominant form of liberalism as a patriarchal liberalism, this book suggests seeing it as a racialized liberalism. Accordingly, the chapters look at racial liberalism, past and present: “white ignorance” as a guilty ignoring of reality that facilitates ongoing white racial domination; Immanuel Kant’s role as the most important liberal theorist of both personhood and sub-personhood; the centrality of racial exploitation to the economy of the United States; and the evasion of the realities of white supremacy and the need for corrective racial justice in John Rawls’s hugely influential “ideal theory” framing of the derivation of principles of social justice. Nonetheless, the book argues that a deracialized liberalism is both possible and desirable. But it will be necessary to reconstruct liberalism on a new foundation that self-consciously takes its unacknowledged racial history into account.