( 202 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsrace theory has emphasized the importance of rejecting the black- white
paradigm/ black- white binary as the all- purpose model of racial domina-
tion.^3 So while I expect there will be enough commonalities to render such
a liberalism more broadly illuminating for other nonwhite groups, it will
also need correction and supplementation from the alternate theorizations
by other people of color of their own distinctive experience of racial sub-
ordination. Ultimately, of course, what one wants is not an interest- group
politics but a principled integration of these various possible revisionist lib-
eralisms, guided by a norm of racial justice rather than determined by an
unsavory scrambling for competitive racial advantage.
Let me outline my proposed candidate. In taxonomies of African
American/ black political thought, the standard contrast would be as in
Figure E.1.
Black nationalism, as for example in Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)
and Charles V. Hamilton’s classic Black Power, sees blacks as oppressed by
a white power structure that relies on both individual and institutional
racism.^4 It locates white oppression in a history of European colonialism
and racial slavery and calls for blacks to organize around racial solidarity
to struggle for liberation from the legacy of these colonial structures. Black
Marxism, whose classic exegesis can be found in Cedric Robinson’s book
on the subject, agrees on the significance of European colonialism and racial
slavery but attempts to situate their dynamic within a modified Marxist
framework.^5 So “whites” as a group need to be disaggregated into classes,
and the imperative of capital accumulation and the role of different class
forces within “races” must be taken into account in explaining the overall
trajectory of the system. Thus a more complex political picture is involved,
for which struggle against both racial and class domination is required.
What I am arguing for is a synthesizing, reconstructed black liberalism
that draws upon the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and
black Marxist traditions and incorporates them into a dramatically trans-
formed liberalism. So this section of the taxonomies would now be drawn
differently (Figure E.2).
My three central theorists for this enterprise are Immanuel Kant (ide-
alist and racist liberal), Karl Marx (materialist but class- reductionist [and
racist] class theorist), and W. E. B. Du Bois (critical race theorist). This may
seem an unlikely combination until one considers their respective areas of
Figure E.1 Conventional contrast in black political theory
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