occuPy LIBeRaLIsm! ( 27 )of the past to the nominally color- blind liberalism of the present. From the
eighteenth- to nineteenth- century accommodation to racial slavery and
aboriginal expropriation to the twentieth- century tainting of welfare and
social democracy on this side of the Atlantic,^36 race has refracted crucial
terms, concepts, and values in liberal theory so as to remove any cognitive
dissonance between the privileging of whites and the subordination of peo-
ple of color. Correspondingly, the shaping of white moral psychology by
race and the distinctive patterns of uptake of abstract liberal values (“equal-
ity,” “individualism”) in such a psychology then become legitimate objects
of investigation for us.^37 One begins from the assumption that these norms
will be color- coded in their actual operationalization, so that any efficacious
framing of an interracial political project will need to anticipate and correct
for this differential understanding rather than being naively surprised by
it. But such racialization (as popular interpretation and reception) is going
to be a common problem for any American ideology with emancipatory
pretensions. Liberalism is certainly not unique in that respect, as the his-
tory of the white American left and socialist movements illustrates. As Jack
London famously put it at a meeting of the Socialist Party in San Francisco
“when challenged by various members concerning his emphasis on the yel-
low peril”: “What the devil! I am first of all a white man and only then a
Socialist!”^38 Herrenvolk socialism existed no less than Herrenvolk liberalism.