Black RightsWhite Wrongs (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities) by Charles W. Mills

Author:Charles W. Mills [Mills, Charles W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-02-28T18:30:00+00:00

Collected Papers

In 1999, Samuel Freeman edited a collection of twenty-six of Rawls’s published papers, spanning almost half a century (1951 to 1997) and including a 1998 interview of Rawls with the magazine Commonweal. According to Freeman’s preface (ix–x), the collection is almost comprehensive, the excluded essays being variously earlier versions of more polished articles, minor occasional pieces, or essays later incorporated into the paperback edition of Political Liberalism.

Rawls’s first published paper, in 1951, characterizes “ideologies” negatively as claiming “a monopoly of the knowledge of truth and justice for some particular race, or social class, or institutional group, and competence is defined in terms of racial and/or sociological characteristics” (5). Appearing only a few years after the end of World War II, with the defeat of the Third Reich still a powerfully overshadowing memory in the West, this comment is pretty clearly a reference to National Socialism. A 1969 essay, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience,” discusses civil disobedience in the context of oppressed “minorities,” though race is not mentioned. Apart from the implicit and brief 1951 Nazi reference, then, race does not appear in any of the essays leading up to the 1971 publication of Theory. Subsequent to its publication there are a few appearances of the topic, or at least the term. A 1975 essay lists “sex and race” among the data about themselves to which parties behind the veil should not have access (268) and cites as examples of unjust conceptions of the good those “that require the repression or degradation of certain groups on, say, racial or ethnic … grounds” (280). A 1988 essay says it is permissible for “a constitutional regime” to discourage “various kinds of religious and racial discrimination (in ways consistent with liberty of conscience and freedom of speech)” (461) and repeats that any conceptions of the good requiring racial repression, “for example, slavery in ancient Athens or in the antebellum South,” are ruled out (462). There is a footnote in a 1989 essay to another author’s discussion of the Dred Scott and Brown decisions (496n51). Finally, the last essay (1997), “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” which also appears in The Law of Peoples, has some brief discussion in connection with “public reason” of the abolitionists, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement (593, 610), as well as the Lincoln-Douglas debates (609–10). As before, race is cited on a list of the factors giving rise to “three main kinds of conflicts” (612). That is all that I can find in the collection’s 600+ pages.

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