Revisiting the cruel optimism of racial justice – A response to Fadil, Favell and St Louis

Abstract

The  Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) adopts neither an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. It maintains instead that the accumulated struggle for racial justice invites us to recognise certain starting points, including our organising categories, before tracing seeming success and failure empirically through case studies. In their rigorous and wide-ranging appraisals, Fadil, Favell and St Louis identify a number of possible weaknesses as well as strengths in this approach, and I take the opportunity of this reply to respond to the former.