Beyond Redistribution: White Supremacy and Racial Justice [Paperback]

Since the publication of John Rawls'sA Theory of Justicein 1971, political philosophers in the English-speaking world have shared a broad consensus that social justice should be understood as a matter of fair distribution of social resources. Many contemporary political philosophers disagree sharply about what would count as a fair distribution of social resources, yet agree that if social resources were to be distributed fairly, then social justice would exist.

InBeyond Redistribution, Kevin M. Graham argues that political theories operating on a distributive understanding of social justice fail to address adequately certain forms of social injustice related to race. Graham argues that political philosophy could understand race-related injustice more fully by shifting its focus away from distributive inequities between whites and nonwhites and toward white supremacy, the unfair power relationships that allow whites to dominate and oppress nonwhites.Beyond Redistributionoffers a careful, detailed critique of the positions of leading contemporary liberal political philosophers on race-related issues of social justice. Graham's analysis of the racial politics of police violence and public education in Omaha, Nebraska, vividly illustrates why the search for racial justice in the United States must move beyond redistribution.

InBeyond Redistribution, Kevin Graham argues that the system of white supremacy still prevailing in the United States is characterized not only by an unfair distribution of economic resources, but also by derogatory controlling images of non-white persons. Graham contends that distributive liberalism is incapable of fully understanding the injustice of this white supremacist system; for instance, it can neither fully comprehend nor remedy the serious harms perpetrated by hate speech. In Graham's view, philosophers concernelÓ*