The Currency of Racial Justice

Abstract Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a distinctive aim for the economic domain—rather than a mere implication of more general egalitarian or progressive principles—rests on minimal state, right-libertarian foundations. As such, racial equality is a strange focus for the left.