The Demand of Justice: Symposium on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, Harvard University Press, 2016

• Author: Tommie Shelby,Clarissa Rile Hayward,Shatema Threadcraft,Christopher Lebron
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718820822
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Subject Matter: Review Symposia

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718820822

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(4) 527 –558

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718820822

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Review Symposium

The Demand of Justice:

Symposium on Tommie

Shelby’s Dark Ghettos:

Injustice, Dissent, and

Reform, Harvard

University Press, 2016

Political Agency in the Face of Structural Injustice: Is “Impure Dissent”

Enough?

Clarissa Rile Hayward

Political Science, Washington University

What does justice demand in the context of deep and enduring structural

inequality? Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform

takes on this pressing political question: a question that is arguably the most

urgent one facing the contemporary United States, and yet one that political

philosophy too often ignores. Dark Ghettos makes three principal contribu-

tions. First, it critiques an approach to solving social problems that Shelby

calls the “medical model,” one that fails to tackle the unjust social structure

that is the root cause of the issues it purports to address. Second, it makes the

case for an alternative Rawlsian approach to dismantling structural injustice,

one that centers on what Rawls calls the basic structure. Third, it considers in

some depth the ethical duties of people whom Shelby calls the “ghetto poor”:

that is, denizens of American neighborhoods that have been subjected to sys-

tematic disinvestment under conditions of structural racism. In this short

essay, I consider Shelby’s critique of the medical model (section I) and the

alternative he proposes, focusing in particular on his arguments about a form

of political dissent that he calls “impure” (section II). I then suggest that

answering the question “What does justice demand in the context of deep and

enduring structural inequality?” requires particularly close attention to the

role of collective action in promoting change (section III).

820822PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718820822Political TheoryThe Demand of Justice

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528 Political Theory 47(4)

The Medical Model

On July 9, 2015, eleven months to the day since white police officer Darren

Wilson had fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri’s

then-governor Jay Nixon signed into law a bill known as Senate Bill 5 (SB 5).

SB 5 restricted the percentage of operating revenue that cities in the state

could raise through their municipal court systems, setting a maximum of 20%

for most municipalities, and 12.5% for those in St. Louis County.1 The bill

also capped the fines that cities could attach to minor traffic violations, and it

prohibited them from jailing people for such offenses or for failure to pay the

associated fines. The action was a response to the ignominy brought on

Missouri, and especially on St. Louis County, in the aftermath of Brown’s

shooting. It was also an instance of what Shelby calls “the medical model” of

addressing problems like those that plague Ferguson and other North St.

Louis County municipalities. The medical model, as Shelby characterizes it,

employs narrowly targeted state interventions in efforts to solve isolated

problems, while taking as given the structural context within which those

problems play out.

Republican state senator Eric Schmitt, who introduced the legislation for

SB 5, framed the bill’s passage as a matter of justice. “When you have a

system where it becomes about revenue generation,” he said, “and the

rights of individuals take a back seat, people are in jail for minor infrac-

tions, that’s an injustice.”2 Smith’s reference to “a system where it becomes

about revenue generation” echoed the US Department of Justice (DOJ)’s

widely circulated Ferguson Report, which detailed the ways that the city

had targeted its black citizens for years, extracting from them exorbitant

fees, which it relied upon for revenue.3 According to the DOJ, “The City

budgets for sizeable increases in municipal fines and fees each year, exhorts

police and court staff to deliver those revenue increases, and closely moni-

tors whether those increases are achieved.”4 SB 5 took aim at this practice.

Of course, Schmitt was right that racially biased, exploitative policing in

Ferguson and other municipalities in St. Louis County violates basic prin-

ciples of justice. But at the same time, as Shelby argues in Dark Ghettos,

predatory policing is only part of a larger system of structural injustice,

which involves multiple, intersecting institutions and practices. In St.

Louis, the structural context within which predatory policing occurs

involves a long history of racial discrimination in housing, schooling, and

employment; exclusionary zoning in affluent white suburbs; and the hyper-

fragmentation of local government. SB 5 was an instance of the medical

model because it did not touch – indeed, it did not even pretend to touch –

that background structure.

The Demand of Justice 529

Shelby identifies three main problems with the approach to dismantling

structural racial injustice exemplified by Missouri’s Senate Bill 5. First, it is

insufficiently radical in the most basic sense of that word; it does not iden-

tify, and it does not address, the root causes of the problems it claims to

target. In Shelby’s words, “[T]he system itself needs fundamental reform. …

[F]eatures of society that could and should be altered often get little scru-

tiny” (2). Second, because the medical model focuses exclusively on the

disadvantaged – people, like residents of Ferguson, whom the relevant prob-

lems harm – it draws attention away from those who “unfairly benefit from

[the] unjust social structure” that produces those problems (3). Think of

affluent white St. Louisianans, whose privilege is created and maintained by

the very institutions and practices that disadvantage black residents of North

County. Third and finally, Shelby argues that “the technocratic reasoning of

the medical model marginalizes the political agency of those it aims to help”

(2). In other words, the approach embodied in SB 5 is a “medical” model,

not only because it regards the problems that plague cities like Ferguson as

symptoms in need of treatment, but also because it regards the people those

problems affect as patients in need of expert care.

Perhaps it was, at least in part, concerns such as these that fueled the oppo-

sition to the bill by many black mayors in North St. Louis County, who argued

that, rather than ameliorate inter-urban inequalities, SB 5 would exacerbate

them. In November 2015, twelve mayors of majority-black cities near

Ferguson filed suit, alleging that the new law was “an extraordinary act of

overt discrimination,” as well as an unfunded mandate, in violation of the

Hancock Amendment to Missouri State’s Constitution.5 Patrick Green, the

mayor of Normandy, the city where Michael Brown had attended high school,

objected to what he characterized as Eric Schmitt’s suggestion that the

responsibility for racial injustice in St. Louis lay with elected officials in

poor, majority-black cities. Green told St. Louis’s black weekly newspaper,

The St. Louis American, that “Schmitt makes it sound like all of these major-

ity-black municipal governments don’t care about poor black people.” and

went on to question the motivations of the Republican state senator, asking

rhetorically: “Tell me, looking at his voting record, when did Eric Schmitt

start caring about poor black people?”6

Injustice and the Basic Structure

No doubt Green would agree with Shelby that a better response to the prob-

lems that plague Ferguson and other cities in North St. Louis County is one

that tackles structural injustice. In place of the medical model, Shelby adopts

a Rawlsian approach, focusing attention on the basic structure: that is, on “the