Naming (and Transforming) Justice

Abstract

Chapter 2 presents and evaluates various theories of justice—and approaches to (doing) justice. The themes of quare, womanist, and religion are more tightly woven and threaded through the needle of justice. Acknowledging the vindicationist voices of Yosef Ben-Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, and Frances Cress Welsing—and tempering these voices with that of Cheikh Anta Diop—this chapter disrupts heteropatriarchal trends in traditional vindicationist approaches. Diop's appeal to “sovereign experience” and its complementarity with the womanist concern with Black women's experience as the primordial noetic source is explained. Through a reoriented vindicationist appeal to Maât, possibilities for justices are imagined and given new theoretical and practical life. Maât is reconsidered in terms of what she actively, presently does (personified and as a concept)—and what it means for those who pursue a righteous path to do maât and offer maât (or Maât) to others.