This chapter focuses on two main points: early Africana public philosophy critiques of anti‐Black propaganda and how contemporary anti‐Black propaganda has legitimized violence against Africana public thinkers. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the propaganda that informed Western perceptions and expeditions to Africa was that Africa was a land full of cannibals and lawless kingdoms. Beginning with slavery, Africana public thinkers were the first to formulate slavery and its associated violence as crimes against humanity and construct more egalitarian notions of (...) human rights, citizenship, economic restitution, and respect for Black people to have self‐governance. The propaganda about the inability of Africans to self‐rule, be ethical, and be law‐abiding influenced the moral sentiments and policies that justified the enslavement of Africans. Lessons from Africana public philosophy warrant serious consideration of how anti‐Black propaganda impacts the future of Black people. (shrink)

While essential work in Africana philosophy that illuminates the perils of Western constructs of race and racism has been laid out, scholarship is yet to excavate genealogies of Africana critiques of Western slavery as distinct philosophical themes that can contribute to the understanding of slavery from the vantage of the subjugated. This article is a call for more theorizations of such genealogies.

This commentary challenges Michael Scliefczyk’s proposal for a realistically utopian welfare state (RUWS). As it stands, RUWS says too little about the concrete measures it will offer to avoid political domination and harmful inequalities. Moreover, RUWS follows Rawlsian Property-Owning Democracy (POD) by being silent on crucial issues such as banking regulation, the governance of investments and the issue of actual control over capital. Ultimately, it therefore seems that RUWS does not present an attractive alternative to POD since it suffers from (...) very similar problems and shortcomings as POD. (shrink)

In Justice as Fairness, Rawls presents a case for property-owning democracy (POD) which heavily depends on a favourable comparison with welfare state capitalism (WSC). He argues that WSC, but not POD, fails to realise ‘all the main political values expressed by the two principles of justice’. This article argues that Rawls’s case for POD is incomplete. He does not show that POD is superior to other conceivable forms of WSC. In order to present a serious contender, I sketch what I (...) call a realistically utopian welfare state (RUWS) that (a) guarantees the fair equality of political liberties and opportunity and that (b) maximises the situation of the worst.-off via a kind of participation income. The main aim of the article is to give credibility to the claim that RUWS is not obviously worse than POD by Rawlsian standards and therefore deserves a fair hearing in further research. (shrink)