Tommie Shelby’s book is a bold intervention of political philosophy into an issue—the persistence of ghetto poverty in the post-Civil Rights era—that has been largely dominated by social scientists and policy analysts. Shelby defines ghettos as “metropolitan neighborhoods visibly marked by racial segregation and multiple forms of disadvantage” (p. 38), and it is specifically the correlation between black segregation and concentrated disadvantage that defines the issue of ghetto poverty in the United States (p. 41). Like many scholars who have written about the urban poor (e.g., see Cathy J. Cohen “Deviance As Resistance,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 1(1), 2004; and Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, 2009), Shelby finds the long-standing and contentious debate that flip-flops between explanations highlighting either “the dysfunctional behavior of the black poor or the structural obstacles to upward mobility” (p. 2) limiting.
The central argument of Dark Ghettos, that we should get outside of this conundrum by reframing the discussion about ghetto poverty in terms of justice, has the potential to completely reorient the scholarship on the truly disadvantaged in a positive direction. In the book, Shelby sets out to do three things: to show that the existence of ghettos is a reliable sign of systemic injustice (p. 4); to identify the moral limits of the policies that may be implemented under these unjust conditions (p. 5); and to articulate an ethics of the oppressed that identifies what the oppressed are morally required to do in response to injustice (p. 5).
Although I think that Shelby is right that we should approach the issue of (black) ghetto poverty from the framework of justice, I wonder if the Rawlsian notion of justice he relies upon is sufficient to do this work. On John Rawls’s view, justice obtains when the major political, social, and economic institutions that constitute a society, its basic structure, facilitate fair social cooperation among all its members (p. 20). Through the prism of justice, the author argues that the persistence of ghettos in the United States is a clear indication that the American basic structure is unjust to its core; the ghetto poor are not receiving their fair share. They suffer the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow (structural racism), housing and employment, and unjust distribution of income and wealth in the United States (pp. 45–6). And due to this injustice, he argues, the ghetto poor’s duty of justice does not reside in their civic obligations (which are only owed to those with whom one is cooperating in order to maintain a fair basic structure) as citizens, but in their natural duties (which hold among all people) as moral persons (pp. 213–14). Shelby’s intellectual project of articulating an ethics of the oppressed is thus grounded in his attempt to discern the natural duties that undergird the ghetto poor’s duty of justice as moral persons, not as citizens.
This project is particularly on display when the author broaches the provocative question in Chapter 7 (p. 204): “Do the ghetto poor have an obligation to respect and abide by the law?” Since the ghetto poor are not bound by civic obligations, Shelby concludes, there is good reason to believe that crimes like off-the-books transactions in the underground economy (such as prostitution, tax and welfare fraud, or illegal drug sales) are not considered wrong. However, their natural duties to bring about justice would make it clear that “reckless and gratuitous violence . . . selfish indifference to others’ suffering, and . . . disregard for the humanity of one’s fellow human beings” are wrong (p. 220). This conclusion is also the result of the injustice of America’s basic structure, which compromises the state’s legitimate authority. In Chapter 8, Shelby argues that though an unjust state can retain the right to penalize crime that is seriously wrong in itself (enforcement legitimacy), such a state loses the right to have its laws obeyed simply because the state has laid them down (p. 232). Though the retention of enforcement legitimacy requires the “existence of positive law and a functioning and fair judicial system” (p. 237). It is unclear, however, whether the picture Shelby offers of how the ghetto poor are treated is reconcilable with his judgment that the U.S. judicial system is fair and can even retain enforcement legitimacy.
This tension is clear when Shelby discusses the shape that resistance should take to address the injustice that the ghetto poor suffer. He says that some aspects of the basic structure in post-Civil Rights America are regulated by a corrupt ideology (like its educational, law enforcement, and economic institutions), while other parts (say, its Constitution or basic political organizations) may be just or diverge moderately from reasonable and widely recognized standards of justice (p. 225). Yet, if he is right that law enforcement is a problematic element of the basic structure in the United States, is not America’s enforcement legitimacy fully eroded?
In keeping with his project of articulating an ethics of the oppressed, Shelby warns “ghetto residents” that they “should think carefully about how they respond to the injustices of the social order and consider whether the forms of crime they sometimes engage in are ultimately obstacles to effecting positive social change” (p. 223). After all, he argues that there are reasonable aspects of the social scheme, “including shared ideas of justice,” and established “just components” to the basic structure that even militant social movements will need as they push for just change. The author seems to believe that an ethics of the oppressed will make clear a principled course of action that makes solidarity possible among the ghetto poor and other citizens who want to restore a just political structure, while also imbuing them with appreciation for the just components of the system that exist.
Yet it seems to me that Shelby has demonstrated that a vast majority of citizens are failing to meet their civic obligation to the ghetto poor, not that the ghetto poor are absolved of their civic obligations. I worry that an ethics of the oppressed is not strong enough to protect the most vulnerable among the ghetto poor against those within and without their ranks who commit unethical abuse. And it seems wrongheaded to unseat the ghetto poor’s duty of justice from their civic obligation as citizens, because it is as a citizen armed with the equal rights and protections that (at least supposed to) flow from this position that they can name wrongs, demand remedies, and in so doing, build solidarity as citizens to restore just institutions. I find the account of politics and citizenly duty that follows from a Rawlsian notion of justice, with the focus on distribution, insufficiently robust to guide the political action of the ghetto poor or their fellow justice-seeking allies.
Interlaced with his articulation of the ethics of the oppressed and his account of justice, Shelby critically engages key mainstream explanations for why ghettos persists. In Chapter 2, he offers a damning critique of new integrationists, who argue that only integrated neighborhoods (racially and economically) can remedy ghetto poverty on the grounds that they promote instrumentalist views about the value of social relationships and bolster, rather than undermine, the symbolic power that whites hold over blacks under unjust conditions (pp. 68–70). Shelby’s conclusion, however—that the new culture of poverty arguments (which he calls “the suboptimal cultural divergence hypothesis”) should be taken seriously because they suggest that ghetto culture can be singled out as a significant cause of political cynicism (and not, say, witnessing injustice after injustice with no one being held to account)—is misguided (Chapter 3). So, too, is his suggestion that one of the most egregious wrongs occurring in ghetto families is the inadequately protected reproductive freedom of black men whose sperm is involved in the conception of life (Chapter 5).
Ultimately, however, I agree with the broad claim of Dark Ghettos that any strategy for addressing ghetto poverty must first and foremost aim to restore justice in solidarity with the ghetto poor as equals. For putting this issue firmly and forcefully on the agenda, he is to be commended.
