Abstract
Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform is a major contribution to black political thought and the theorization of racial justice more generally. In these brief comments, I begin by situating Shelby’s work both in the Anglo-American political tradition and the Afro-modern political tradition. While praising the accomplishment that Shelby’s book represents, I nonetheless go on to point out some obstacles to his project arising from the tensions between these traditions. Using the concept of “dark mores” (a racially differentiated ethic coming in both white and black versions), I argue that Shelby’s racially revisionist Rawlsianism is pre-empted by Rawls’s own restrictions on the scope of his theory, while Shelby’s invocation of “reciprocity” as a key norm is undermined by the structural asymmetries of a racist society.
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Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). The book won the annual North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) prize for best book of the year in the field.
Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, 2nd ed. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); orig. ed. 1965.
Shelby, Dark Ghettos, pp. 280–281.
Kenneth B. Clark, “Racial Progress and Retreat: A Personal Memoir,” in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., eds., Race in America: The Struggle for Equality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 18.
Shelby, Dark Ghettos, p. 6.
Richard Alba, “What Majority-minority Society? A Critical Analysis of the Census Bureau’s Projections of America’s Demographic Future,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 4 (2018): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118796932 (first published Aug. 30, 2018).
Shelby, Dark Ghettos, pp. 10−11.
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Shelby, Dark Ghettos.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in Paula Rothenberg, ed., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, 5th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2001).
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
See, classically, Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 1.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); orig. ed. 1971.
See Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Charles W. Mills, “Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? A Critique of Tommie Shelby” (2013), rpt. as chapter 9 in Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Tommie Shelby, “Racial Realities and Corrective Justice: A Reply to Charles Mills,” Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 2 (2013): 145–162.
See the massive forthcoming collection co-edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 66.
For documentation, see Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs.
Rawls, Theory, p. 4.
Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 14, 21.
Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs, p. 171.
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Rawls, Political Liberalism, exp. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Shelby, Dark Ghettos, chapter 1.
John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
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Mills, C.W. Dark Mores: Some Comments on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Criminal Law, Philosophy 16, 29–43 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-019-09512-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-019-09512-w