Rawls and Racial Justice in the United States

Abstract

It has become increasingly common for students and scholars to criticize Rawls’s work as irrelevant, or worse, when it comes to issues of race and justice. Though he clearly judges both structural and systemic racial hierarchy and interpersonal racial disrespect to be non-controversially unjust, Rawls does not much explore, either in his ideal theory or in his non-ideal theory, issues at the intersection of race and justice. In this essay, drawing from both his texts and biography, I highlight some of Rawls’s thoughts on, and the seriousness with which he approached, these matters. Though I do not attempt to answer all the criticisms that have been raised regarding Rawls’s approach to issues of race and justice, I answer a few and to point the way toward resources that might prove fruitful in answering others. With respect to issues of race and justice, there are good reasons, better than critics typically acknowledge, to continue exploring the extent to which working from within a Rawlsian framework we can successfully think through our aspirational ideals and eliminate existing injustices.