Justice beyond 'Just Us'

Book excerpt: Notions of justice and community in the United States are increasingly challenged by trends like immigration, multiculturalism, and economic inequality as well as historical legacies like Jim Crow-era racial segregation. These dynamics continually re-shape the communities in which people live, whether by generating new forms of interdependency and inequality, creating new social cleavages or exacerbating existing ones, or generating new spaces in which cross-boundary contact, conflict, or cooperation is possible. Revealing the ways in which notions of justice and community overlap in American politics and public discourse through concrete political questions which emerge when considering dimensions of time, place, and difference, Gregory W. Streich offers a fresh re-examination of the normative ideas of justice and community. He encourages Americans to move from a view of justice that applies only to people who are "like us" to a view of justice that applies to people beyond "just us."