My thanks to Juliet Hooker for her very generous review. Her conclusion that I reject Audre Lorde’s famous claim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is completely accurate, and well summarizes my overall project: Liberalism and contractarianism have been historically racialized, but that does not mean that liberalism and contractarianism cannot be retrieved for an antiracist agenda once they are appropriately deracialized.
Hooker contends, though, that despite what one would naturally then expect to be my appeal to the work of subaltern thinkers of color to remedy “the blindnesses and evasions in liberal theory,” I have puzzlingly defaulted on this political commitment by producing a book in which, with the exception of Du Bois, “nonwhite, non-European thinkers are absent.” But this critique is itself puzzling because as a literal claim it is clearly untrue. An alphabetical list of thinkers of color cited in the text would include Linda Martín Alcoff, Antony Anghie, James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Anthony Bogues, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Bernard Boxill, Michael Dawson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Emmanuel Eze, Jorge Garcia, Robert Gooding-Williams, Lewis Gordon, Charles V. Hamilton, Cheryl Harris, Leonard Harris, Barnor Hesse, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., James Weldon Johnson, Joyce Ladner, Christopher Lebron, Howard McGary, Uday Singh Mehta, Michele Moody-Adams, Aldon Morris, Sankar Muthu, Melvin Oliver, Lucius Outlaw, Nell Irvin Painter, Rodney Roberts, Randall Robinson, Tommie Shelby, Laurence Thomas, Kwame Ture, Cornel West, Eric Williams, Linda Faye Williams, George Yancy, and others. It is, admittedly (re Hooker’s related black feminist reproof), a male-dominated list, but it does have members.
I should also point out, in at least partial (if not complete) defensive male self-exoneration, that—as Hooker mentions—the book is a collection of previously published essays, and all 10 of the chapters (excluding the epilogue) originally appeared before the 2013 founding of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the 2016 publication of Threadcraft’s book, Intimate Justice. Moreover, given the radical divergence in focus between BLM’s activism and philosophical essays on the history of liberalism, racialized epistemology, “ideal” normative theory, Kant, Rawls, and the “whiteness” of contemporary political philosophy, it might not have been possible to get much of a dialogue going anyway, even had the essays been published post-2013. So although I am certainly hoping for an interdisciplinary uptake and discussion of the book, the dialogue will more likely be with theorists in the correspondingly abstract research areas of the fields of political science, sociology, ethnic studies, and so on.
Finally, Hooker raises the question (as people in audiences across the country have repeatedly done in response to presentations I have given of this and related material) of whether the project of reconstructing a black radical liberalism is really a viable one, considering the rise of the “politics of refusal” among black activist communities and the shift she sees to “symbolic rather than material losses” in the “politics of white grievance.” I am myself far from optimistic about the political future. But the message of the book is more prescriptive than descriptive. I am not claiming that black radical liberalism is actually being embraced by these constituencies but that it should be. In other words, I am arguing that a reconstructed left and race-sensitive liberalism (combining a reenergized social democracy addressing class issues with a racial justice agenda) has a better chance than any competing alternatives of being able to guide a socially transformative interracial political coalition. It does not guarantee success, but we can be sure that the other choices guarantee failure. An aggressively resurgent white nationalism seeking racial scapegoats and driven by (of course unjustified) ressentiment will not be defeated by an Afro-pessimist withdrawal either into quietism or separatist fantasies. We should all know how that particular story ends.
