( 204 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsorigins, so that— nearly a century after the founding of the Frankfurt
Institute— people of color are still today experiencing frustration with its
“whiteness.”^7 The virtue of critical race theory, then, is that it corrects both
Western liberalism’s and Western Marxism’s failure to recognize and theo-
rize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern
world and the implications for normative theory and an expanded vision of
what needs to be subjected to liberatory critique to achieve social justice.
While liberalism’s ideals (the flourishing of the individual and the repudia-
tion of ascriptive hierarchy) are very attractive, they are necessarily under-
mined by racial/ white- supremacist capitalism. The traditional mistake of
the white left has been to focus just on capitalism and class exploitation in
the shaping of the modern world and not give sufficient attention to race,
white supremacy, and racial exploitation. Any serious theorization of social
justice needs to correct this omission.
In black radical circles, these claims are, of course, not new but decades
(or a century) old. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery dates all the way
back to 1944; Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction even further back, to 1935.^8
But the point is that mainstream scholarship is now beginning to catch up
with them, as a growing body of work at the most respectable of academic
institutions looks at the relationship between African slavery and capital-
ism.^9 Harvard historian Sven Beckert provides a useful overview of this
recent body of work. As he writes:
The world we live in cannot be understood without coming to terms with the long
history of capitalism.... And no issue [among US historians of capitalism] currently
attracts more attention than the relationship between capitalism and slavery.... No
other national story raises [the] question with quite the same urgency as the history of
the United States. The quintessential capitalist society of our time, it also looks back on
long complicity with slavery. But the topic goes well beyond one nation. The relation-
ship of slavery and capitalism is, in fact, one of the keys to understanding the origins of
the modern world.... And a global perspective allows us to comprehend in new ways
how slavery became central to the Industrial Revolution.... Europe’s ability to industri-
alize rested at first entirely on the control of expropriated lands and enslaved labor in the
Americas.... We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible way into the
modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to global capitalism....
[W] e need to remember that the world Westerners forged was ... characterized by ...
vast confiscation of land and labor, huge state intervention in the form of colonialism,
and the rule of violence and coercion.... The next time we walk the streets of Lower
Manhattan or the grounds of Harvard University, we should think at least in passing of
the millions of enslaved workers who helped make some of that grandeur possible, and
to the ways that slavery’s legacy persists today.^10http://www.ebook3000.com