Recent scholarship in cultural studies and philosophy has exposed the whiteness that works through familiar conceptions of politics and democracy. Contemporary notions of the common, as they have been articulated in (post-)Marxist and radical-democratic idioms, need to be confronted by the same interrogations. Considering the epistemological standpoint from which theorizations of the common and radical democracy are articulated, I argue that they fail to adequately confront the colonial problematics toward which they gesture. In response, I propose a notion of the common grounded in an ethical and epistemological responsibility to the oppressed and excluded, and analytically centered on the ontologies of race that articulate capitalist modernity. A passageway into this decolonial common can be found in the context of pedagogy, since teaching opens up terrains of confrontation and dialogue that are the condition of solidarity.