What does racial justice require in the United States? Scholars and activists seeking to answer this daunting question have explored a variety of contentious subjects and proposals, including affirmative action, reparations, criminal justice reform, integration, and the modification of educational curricula. Sonu Bedi contributes to this discussion from a novel and intriguing standpoint. He advocates “enlarging the boundary of racial justice by recognizing and addressing private racism,” understood as “racial discrimination [that] happens outside the governmental or public sphere” (p. 1). Embracing a methodologically diverse approach, he further argues that private racism would be proscribed under either an “ideal society approach” or an “actual society approach” to justice, thus establishing an “overlapping moral consensus” (p. 4) against private racism and ostensibly appealing across ideological lines to liberals and conservatives. The book explores four examples of private racism that Bedi argues should be understood as violations of the requirements of racial justice under both theoretical approaches, as well as violations of existing civil rights law. These often provocative examples include casting racism at movie studios and television networks; digital or online racism facilitated or enabled by platforms such as Airbnb.com and Roomates.com; sexual racism that constrains the intimate lives of members of various racialized groups, particularly as facilitated by dating websites and platforms that allow users to identify themselves and search for others on the basis of race; and reproductive market racism perpetrated by reproductive banks that specify donors of a particular race or enable buyers to discriminate on the basis of race. A final, more speculative chapter seeks to “spur a conversation that goes beyond racism to talk about enlarging the boundary of justice for other inequalities” (p. 174). Specifically, this chapter briefly examines private homophobia and private economic injustice.

The book poses challenging, important, and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the many ways in which race still constrains and structures our daily lives and how we should collectively respond to this state of affairs. It provides yet another powerful refutation of triumphalist, post-racial stories of the end of formal, state-sponsored Jim Crow as the death knell of systemic racism in the United States. And Bedi’s simultaneous fluency in civil rights law and liberal political theory offers an illuminating, multi-pronged view of the problem of private racism that should appeal to a diverse range of academic audiences and provoke valuable interdisciplinary conversations.

Still, readers may wish for greater clarification of Bedi’s central theoretical contribution. On the one hand, he clearly states that his aim is to “enlarge” the boundary of racial justice beyond mere public or governmental discrimination. On the other hand, he also seeks to ground this enlargement in already existing civil rights law, such as Titles II and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, and Sections 1981 and 1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which already contemplate and proscribe racial discrimination in a variety of allegedly private domains, such as employment, housing, contracting, and public accommodations. Given these laws and their interpretations in the courts, have we not already expanded the boundary of racial justice beyond the strictly “governmental” sphere? If so, Bedi’s project appears more modest: it simply highlights additional examples within an already widely recognized and accepted domain of private racism. This difficulty speaks to a deeper underlying ambiguity throughout the book: Is Bedi redrawing the boundaries of public and private, dismantling the very idea of such a boundary, or accepting existing boundaries between public and private but rejecting this boundary as relevant to questions of racial justice? The book appears to waver between the three at different moments, and the book’s core argument would be strengthened and deepened by greater attention to how we theorize public and private to begin with.

There are also limitations to Bedi’s search for a non-ideological “overlapping consensus” against private racism. To establish the impermissibility of private racism under ideal theory, understood as the search for “what justice demands of us in situations of full compliance” (p. 12), he refers exclusively to John Rawls’s theory of justice. What Bedi therefore convincingly establishes is the impermissibility of private racism under Rawlsian theory, an argument that will be persuasive for readers already persuaded by Rawlsianism but may not provoke much interest from non-Rawlsian readers, despite Bedi’s hope that he can “show the value of drawing on Rawls” (p. 25). For those readers, Bedi also appeals to an actual society approach to justice, which he describes as “what justice demands in situations of partial compliance” (p. 12). Yet Bedi’s account of the actual society approach will strike some readers as disappointingly anodyne, precisely because he aims for an overlapping consensus that “focuses on what we agree on, not what we disagree about” (p. 26). Accordingly, questions such as affirmative action (which he mentions but then declines to address because he can find no overlapping consensus about it) and reparations (which he never mentions) are off the table from the very beginning. Instead, the actual society approach only “requires that we not further or perpetuate segregation” (p. 20). I do not mean to suggest that this is an easy or merely cosmetic requirement, but its emphasis on blameworthy individual or corporate actors, rather than on enduring structures of racial hierarchy, takes much of the critical bite out of actual society approaches.

A still more profound problem emerges from Bedi’s search for overlapping consensus. He repeatedly refers to the plural first-person “we” as the agent of the consensus. Consider again his desire to focus “on what we agree on, not what we disagree about.” Yet who precisely is the “we” who agree on the overlapping consensus between Rawlsian ideal theory and an actual society approach that seeks to prevent individual actors from furthering or perpetuating segregation? Clearly, avowed white racists are not part of this overlapping consensus, but that ought not trouble readers. Instead, the significant absence here is integration-skeptical people of color who are committed to seeking racial justice through other means, as well as their intellectual and political allies. Bedi does briefly note such positions in his discussion of the critical reaction to Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration (2010); however, he pays only limited and insufficient attention in later sections of the book to the compelling reasons why some people of color may want to maintain racial disclosure in dating or roommate searches or may have profound concerns about the ability of white parents to raise children of color. My point is not that the integration skeptics are necessarily right and Bedi is necessarily wrong, but rather that they do not seem to be included in his overlapping consensus at all. And this speaks to a general depoliticizing tendency throughout the book that claims a questionable non-ideological basis for its argument, as though colorblind liberalism were not itself an ideological position. Readers from more radical ideological and methodological orientations will likely find themselves frustrated by this approach, but Bedi nonetheless has much to teach us about the pernicious forms of private racism that structure our contemporary world.