A THEORY OF JUSTICE FOR THE GHETTO

Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("This book offers a normative nonideal theory of ghettos that emphasizes basic concerns of justice and highlights the political ethics of the oppressed. It is a liberal-egalitarian theory that takes economic fairness as seriously as it does individual liberty and formal equality. While my focus is on the plight of black people in the United States, this is not a book about race alone. I'm just as concerned about gender, class, and place. I discuss social structure and individual responsibility, avoiding the all-too-common tendency to emphasize one or the other, and I do so without devaluing the political agency of the ghetto poor. To that end, I advance a political morality of dissent appropriate to the ghetto context. [] I offer the resulting theory in the firm belief that careful philosophical reflection can assist in moving the public debate over black urban poverty in a more productive direction, pointing the way toward solutions that are fair to all concerned and that treat the truly disadvantaged among us with the respect they deserve." Id. at 14-15.).