Review of 'White Privilege and Black Rights: The injustice of U.S,. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide' By Naomi Zack

This is a difficult book. It is written by a philosopher, but the questions with which it is centrally concerned are not obviously susceptible to philosophical answers: ‘how do the injustice of the police killing of innocent young African American men work? Why are such homicides not punished? What can be done about this?’ (xv). The lens through which these questions are approached is a critique of the concept of ‘white privilege’. So part of the difficulty of this book is understanding what the two parts of its title have to do with each other, when there are plenty of countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany or Denmark, where white people are advantaged compared to non-whites, but where police are not generally known to shoot unarmed black people. Indeed, even in the contemporary US, people who have long worried about the racism of their society, and about police violence against racial minorities, can still be deeply shocked, as was Zack, by the killings which motivate her book. So the connection between ‘white privilege’ and ‘black rights’ is not obvious, nor is it always easy to see why it might be helpful to use the former to think about the injustice of racial profiling and homicide. [First paragraph