Critical of leftist intellectual invocations of liberal principles which produce notions of "radical democracy," I identifY radical democracy as a modernist concept. The alignment with modernity and Enlightenment beliefs-that is, its "ethnocentric liberal underpinnings"-are evidenced in radical democratic conceptualizations of identity, opposition, consciousness, and voice; in radical democracy's epistemological privileging of absolute categories; and in radical democracy's implicit theory of representation, its teleology of progress through modernization, and its ontological premises, including its individualism.4 Skepticism of the claims made on behalf of radical democracy are rooted not only in how this category is frequently conceptualized as an absolute (versus relational) one; the concern is with the constitutive erasures or exclusions consolidating this category. Of interest is also the racial history of democracy and the general relationships between discourses of race, rights, representation, and democracy.