Whose Nuremberg Laws?

Jeremy Waldron

• Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race by Patricia Williams
  Virago, 72 pp, £5.99, April 1997, ISBN 1 86049 365 3
• Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race by Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann
  Princeton, 200 pp, £11.95, May 1998, ISBN 0 691 05909 8
• Race: The History of an Idea in the West by Ivan Hannaford
  Johns Hopkins, 464 pp, £49.50, June 1996, ISBN 0 8018 5222 6

Race is something which shouldn’t matter, but which has mattered and therefore has to matter. In a world uncontaminated by injustice, we could regard heritable differences in skin pigmentation, physiognomy, hair texture and body morphology as superficial traits. We could be, as they say, ‘colour blind’, treating those traits, as we treat the green in someone’s eyes, as features that point to nothing beyond themselves, above all nothing that would warrant different treatment or differences in respect. It is hard, however, to imagine such a world without seeming naive or disingenuous, for it would be a world in which it never occurs to anyone to discriminate on the basis of what we call ‘racial differences’, a world where that would be as unintelligible as one person discriminating against another because he was born on a Tuesday.