I wish to thank Justin Rose for his fine review of Rethinking Racial Justice. It is gratifying to know that, in his judgment, some of the book’s ambitions have been realized, and it is no surprise to learn that it nevertheless has some loose ends, underexplored connections, and unfinished business. Rose is an astute reader, and he has no trouble picking out the latter. The book is ambitious in its scope, perhaps overly so, and seeks to integrate large literatures across a number of disciplines into an outline of a conception of racial justice. It was not feigned humility that led me to write in the introduction that the book is “a modest contribution to the (collective) endeavor of developing such a conception” (p. 15).

Rose focuses some of his critique on the conclusions of two chapters where I acknowledge issues germane to the chapters but do not explore them in detail. I do not disagree that my discussion of gentrification is “disappointingly truncated.” The issue deserves more attention than it has received from political theorists and philosophers, including me. And it is true that I do not engage the literature on prison abolition. Yet I wish that Rose had discussed the arguments that I make about race and mass incarceration, racial bias and racial profiling in the criminal justice system, excessive criminal sentences (and the racial disparities therein), and the role of the “collateral consequences” of a criminal record in perpetuating racial inequality.

Rose’s critique of my discussion of collective memory does engage arguments that I make. In that chapter I argue that liberal theory has a great deal to say about the requirements of collective memory in the wake of historic injustice. I argue that the state may not convey the message that some citizens have greater moral or civic worth than others, and in a context shaped by massive injustice based on such a claim, the state is under a positive obligation to affirm the equal status and dignity of all. The state ought to engage in the cultivation of collective memory—through truth commissions, apologies, civil rights memorials and museums, and the like—that conveys this message. And it may not express the opposite, as it does through the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag and many Confederate monuments.

Hence, in stating that “I have generally avoided drawing hard-and-fast conclusions” in the chapter, I do not mean to suggest that I draw no conclusions whatsoever. I do draw some, and they are not trivial, because I am arguing both against those who think that liberal theory has no resources to address these kinds of issues and against those who take a different view of what the state may and may not do. But on these issues theorizing about justice can only take us so far. Does justice require a truth commission of a particular kind? An apology with precise wording? A certain civil rights museum, with specific exhibits? I think that justice requires some such undertakings, but it is harder to see how justice can require “a particular monument, situated just so in a particular site, bearing specific words on its plaque” (p. 74).

In my subsequent work on Confederate monuments, I attempt to come to firmer conclusions than I do in my brief treatment of them in the book (see “What Should Become of Confederate Monuments? A Normative Framework,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 33, 2019). But even here I am limited by the nature of the subject matter. Confederate monuments are an extremely large and diverse set of objects. One can argue (as I hope I have successfully) that if a public monument conveys nostalgia for the era of de jure racial hierarchy, then it is incompatible with the duty of the state to affirm the equal dignity of all, and it must therefore be removed or at least augmented so that it no longer conveys that message. Many of the most prominent Confederate monuments, in my view, satisfy the antecedent of that conditional statement. But the difficulty is not only that there are limits to the level of specificity that a conception of justice can reach but also that some of the issues raised by Confederate monuments are as much hermeneutic as they are normative. What message does a particular monument express? While a conception of racial justice can provide some guidance on these matters, in any particular case much depends on interpretation and ultimately democratic politics.