Theorizing White Racial Domination and Racial Justice: A Reply to Christopher Lebron.

Christopher Lebron's prizewinning 2013 book, I The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time i ,[1] is a welcome and valuable contribution to that growing but still very small body of books dealing with race and justice from a mainstream analytic perspective, building on the pioneering work of Bernard Boxill and Howard McGary.[2] Other entries in this tradition would include, most recently, honorary philosopher Andrew Valls's I Rethinking Racial Justice i , my own I Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism i , Tommie Shelby's I Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform i , Elizabeth Anderson's I The Imperative of Integration i , and Kevin Graham's I Beyond Redistribution: White Supremacy and Racial Justice i .[3] Valorizing such work does not mean deprecating the Continental tradition. 77 Lebron ([10]), 40. 78 Lebron ([10]), 167, n. 1. 79 "Rawls ... properly identifies society as a scheme of ongoing cooperation": Lebron ([10]), 9. 80 "[H]is recent embrace of reparations is a puzzling solution to a problem that is not fundamentally rooted in problems of distribution"; "Mills's failure to look beyond reparations is puzzling ... [I]n Mills's move to argue for a material solution to racial [in]equality ... he has lost sight of what a transformative theory of racial justice would entail" (Lebron [10], 19, 40-41). Compare Lebron's supposedly radically different account: "The idea of social value is meant to denote the way narratives, power, and values coalesce around racial identity, thereby serving to justify blacks' lower normative standing - they are not accorded equal concern, respect, or civic consideration" ([10]), 44. 54 Lebron ([10]), 60. 55 Lebron ([10]), 53-54. 56 Lebron ([10]), chap. 3. 57 Lebron ([10]), 71. 58 Lebron ([10]), 95, 105. [Extracted from the article]