Oh How his father would have loved to see this tribute - Professor Charles Mills is dead

[malaise]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/charles-w-mills-dead.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces&block=trending_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=647734081&impression_id=f55934b7-1e6f-11ec-b50e-d393fab664b1&index=8&pgtype=Article&pool=pool%2F91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1®ion=footer&req_id=355980136&surface=eos-most-popular-story&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces-no-dedupe

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I knew the family well. He has one remaining brother.

[blm]

1. 🕯

[malaise]

3. Here's local coverage

https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20210923/noted-philosophy-professor-charles-mills-has-died

Noted Professor of Philosophy Charles Mills has died.

He passed away on September 20 at age 70 following his battle with cancer.

Mills, who was born in England, was the son of Jamaican public servant Gladstone Mills.

Mills obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of the West Indies and later his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

He later taught physics at what is now the University of Technology, Jamaica and later at Campion College.

Mills was known for his work on social and political philosophy, particularly on oppositional political theory centred on class, gender and race.

Beyond his influence in critical philosophy of race, Mills was widely known for his work in social and political philosophy, African American and Africana philosophy, ethics, and Marxist thought

His most well-known work is his book The Racial Contract for which he was recently awarded the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award.

Professor Mills joined the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY) in 2016.
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Charles was a freaking genius.
His dad was a distinguished Professor of Public Administration, a former Head of the Department of Government and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, UWI. His mother was an Administrator in Human Resources.

[blm]

6. Nice tribute.

Thanks for sharing. With all the crazy news this would have passed.

[Tom Rinaldo]

2. You mean of course how proud his father would have been to see this respect shown to Charles Mills

Right? Not being familiar with the professor before this, the OP subject line supported a somewhat different implication, that was, umm, less flattering! Thank you for providing us with this introduction to his important work.

[malaise]

5. added tribute

Thanks

Seriously Charles Snr. would have ensured that each of us saw this NYT tribute.
He was very proud of Charles.

[H2O Man]

7. Recommended.

While I can't access the NY Times, I remember Professor Mills creating a stir with his book "The Racial Contract" in the late 1990s. He was brilliant, and told the truth.

[malaise]

9. That's why I posted the local tribute

The Racial Contract is a classic. It opened many eyes long before BLM.
Here's a great interview

https://harvardpolitics.com/interview-with-charles-w-mills/

Charles W. Mills: I would say that they have had a major effect, one that I’ve actually written about in autobiographical essays, for example, in my 2016 APA Central Division Dewey Lecture, “The Red and the Black.” Jamaica is a small country of less than 3 million people that has been fundamentally shaped by European imperialism. I’m from a Black-majority society, though as with many other Caribbean and Latin countries, the racial/color conventions are different from the United States. The “one-drop rule” doesn’t hold, and “browns” were originally clearly demarcated from “Blacks” in a three-tiered white/Brown/Black social pyramid. As a “brown” Jamaican, I was — and to a certain extent still am — relatively privileged vis-à-vis the Black majority. So in a sense, in coming to the U.S. to work after I got my PhD in Canada, I was changing race, becoming part of an unambiguously subordinated “Black” American racial group, while equipped with the inherited cultural capital and privilege of my “brown” Jamaican middle-class origins and education.

You’ll appreciate, then, the complexities of this evolving hybrid combination of privilege and disadvantage, insider and outsider status, and its resulting weird epistemic amalgam of insight and obtuseness. I’m not Black American in the sense of having U.S. family origins that go back to slavery. But I’m Black and an American citizen, and I certainly identify with and have tried to support in my work, the long Black American struggle for racial equality and justice.

The U.S. and Jamaica are vastly different in innumerable ways. But what they have in common is that they’re both former slave societies, built on the racial exploitation of African persons. Yet whereas this historical reality is very much part of everyday consciousness in Black-majority Jamaica, it has been suppressed in white-majority America. Hence the hostility to the “1619 Project” and the truths it’s telling, truths that many white Americans still refuse to hear.

In political philosophy specifically, my main research area, it has produced such absurdities as John Rawls’s recommendation in the opening pages of “A Theory of Justice” that we should think of society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” whose rules are “designed to advance the good of those taking part in it.” You can imagine my astonishment when I originally encountered this bizarre stipulation in my very first graduate course in political philosophy at the University of Toronto, especially since Jamaica at that time was fiercely caught up in a national debate about the colonial past and its legacy. Slavery? Colonialism? Racism? Indigenous genocide? A tad socially coercive, perhaps? How could these possibly be reconciled with such a theoretical prescription?

[H2O Man]

11. !!!!

Much appreciated!

[malaise]

12. I posted one of his lectures on DU a while back

I have read The Racial Contract several times

[Hassin Bin Sober]

8. .