ABSTRACT
DISCUSSIONS in the academy in general, and in philosophy in particular, of racial injustice have come a long way over the past decade or two.1 African-American philosophers such as Bernard Boxill and Howard McGary can testify far better than I concerning how little interest there was in these matters only a few years ago, and how the torch was kept burning by a few figures, mostly blacks such as themselves, but with a scattering of white progressives.2 From being a strictly fringe concern, the issue of reparations has become sufficiently mainstream for city councils across the country to take a position on the question, and for “white” universities to debate the matter. Unfortunately, very little of the credit for this development can go to mainstream white philosophy, despite the fact that philosophers are by their calling supposed to be the group professionally concerned about justice as a concept and an ideal; indeed, the book regarded by many as the fountainhead of the Western tradition, Plato’s Republic, is focused singlemindedly on that very subject. Instead, it is black intellectuals, black activists such as Randall Robinson, and community groups such as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) who deserve the credit. Yet there is certainly enough blame to go around-one would not want to pick just on one’s own profession. The indictment for (relative) historic silence on the question of racial justice can be extended to American social and political theory in general, not merely social and political philosophy, but mainstream
American sociology and mainstream American political science. (Depending on how one defines “mainstream”—and from the racial margins, pretty much everything else looks mainstream-this judgment also holds true for a lot of orthodox left theory in these fields, not just liberalism, since Marxists have tended to dissolve the specificities of these racial problems into the general oppression of capital, with socialism then being plugged as the universal panacea.)
How do we correct this situation? In this chapter, extrapolating the line of argument I have articulated elsewhere in my work,3 I want to make some suggestions toward the development of a possible longterm theoretical strategy for remedying this deficiency. My recommendation is that we (1) retrieve and elaborate, as an alternative, a more accurate global sociopolitical paradigm, the concept of white supremacy; (2) develop an analysis of a specifically racial form of exploitation, in its manifold dimensions; (3) uncover and follow the trail of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the “wages of whiteness”; and then (4) locate normative demands for racial justice within this improved descriptive conceptual framework.
