ePILogue (as PRoLogue) ( 203 )contribution. Kant is crucial— obviously a Kant purged of the racism I ear-
lier discussed in chapter 6— as the most important theorist of the dominant
variety of contemporary liberalism, “deontological” liberalism. Du Bois is
obviously the most important theorist of race and blackness. And the “radi-
cal” reconstructive dynamic by which I hope to transform liberalism will
be supplied by both Du Bois and Marx, in simultaneous cooperation and
contention with each other. Hence each member of the trio provides input
into a proposed combined synthesis: black radical liberalism.
So how does black radical liberalism differ from black mainstream lib-
eralism? By definition they are both “liberal” in endorsing liberalism as a
political philosophy. But black radical liberalism seeks to transform liberal-
ism to make it responsive to the realities of the black diasporic experience in
modernity and the correspondingly necessary reordering of liberal norma-
tive priorities. Black radical liberalism both (a) recognizes white supremacy
as central to the making of the United States and (more sweepingly) the
modern world, and (b) seeks to rethink the categories, crucial assumptions,
and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism in the light of that
recognition. Black mainstream liberalism either (a) refuses to recognize
white supremacy (for example, by endorsing the “anomaly” view of US rac-
ism^6 ), or (b) even if it does give lip service to its reality, assumes nonethe-
less that the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative
frameworks of liberalism can be adopted with little change to the task of
getting rid of it.
All three components are therefore crucial. The importance of liberal-
ism is that it is the most successful political philosophy of modernity and
is now globally hegemonic. Liberalism provides the most developed body
of normative theory for understanding the rights of persons and the con-
ceptualization of social justice. Marxism, on the other hand, is the most
developed Western oppositional critique of liberalism and the analysis of
the materialist undermining of liberalism’s ideals by the workings of capi-
talism. It is also, of course, the main ancestor of contemporary “critical
theory.” Critical theory should, given its emancipatory pretensions, have
been able on its own to diagnose the importance of race for its “critique”
of modernity. But in fact it was never able to purge itself of its Eurocentric
Figure E.2 Revisionist contrast in black political theory