Book Review: The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time, by Christopher J. Lebron

• Published date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606888
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: David Lyons
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time, by Christopher J. Lebron. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Reviewed by: David Lyons, Boston University MA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606888
Ideal theory seeks to identify the basic conditions of social justice but does not
tell us how to achieve them. Christopher Lebron’s important new book The
Color of Our Shame is a philosophically enterprising venture in non-ideal
theory, suggesting how we might bring about racial equality in America. A
reader who is passingly familiar with civil rights developments of the 1950s
and 1960s might imagine that racial inequality is a disappearing vestige of
past discrimination; so an essential step in Christopher Lebron’s argument is
to establish that racial inequality remains a grave issue half a century later.
That task is taken up in chapter 3, which focuses on criminal law and welfare
policy as illustrations. If the reader ventures beyond that chapter’s brief dis-
cussion and examines the wider literature cited in the endnotes, she can begin
to understand why one writer dubs the current system “the new Jim Crow.”
To explain another task of chapter 3, one must see it in the context of
Lebron’s overall strategy. He argues that racial inequality, though substantial
and systemic, is not necessarily intended, indeed clashes with the democratic
principles that most Americans and their institutions affirm. That is possible
because most Americans and their institutions, emerging from four centuries
of deliberate racial stratification and its ideological support, are burdened by
beliefs and attitudes that demean African Americans—beliefs such as that
blacks are more criminally dangerous than whites and are lazy, undeserving...