Introduction ( xxi )xxi
world by white supremacy. Black radical liberalism as an emancipatory ide-
ology will of course have to be supplemented and modified by the experi-
ence of other racially subordinated communities. But given the centrality
of African slavery and subsequent anti- black oppression to the making of
modernity, it represents a crucial step toward the comprehensive theoriza-
tion and reconstruction of the deracialized, color- conscious liberalism for
which I am calling.
The promise of liberalism was famously the granting of equal rights
to all individuals, destroying the old social hierarchies and establishing a
new social order where everybody, as an individual, could flourish, free
of “estate” membership. But the reality turned out to be the preservation,
albeit on a new theoretical foundation, of old hierarchies of gender and the
establishment of new hierarchies of race. Thus the struggle to realize the
liberal ideal for everybody and not just a privileged minority still continues
today, centuries later. If this struggle is ever to be successful, a prerequisite
must be the acknowledgment of the extent to which dominant varieties of
liberalism have developed so as to be complicit with rather than in opposi-
tion to social oppression. I hope that by formally identifying the ideologi-
cal phenomenon of “racial liberalism” as a subject for research and critique,
this book will contribute both to its analysis and its eventual dismantling,
as theory and as practice.