What is equality? How is it generally understood? What customs and norms produce its egalitarian features? What are its cultural and social markers?
Preoccupied with these questions I read A Theory of Justice. It was a brilliant book, very much like chess. It told me a lot about white men’s dreaming and nothing about the life I know. My reality in North America tells me that equality as “autonomous and the same” is a dream only privileged white men can have. Not only are they the ones with the luxury to dream this myth. Only they are “by nature free and equal” to do so. Moreover, only they construe themselves as “the natural proprietor of (their) own person(s) and capacities owing nothing to society for them.” As all-powerful patriarchs, they have imperiously universalized their myth to conceal their social, political, legal, economic, military, educational, and professional privileges.